No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [35]
For the next two years, Edith recorded only her lover’s compositions, showing the gratitude she felt toward the man who had “saved” her, though she was already chafing under his discipline. In 1937, she recorded three of Asso’s songs from her A.B.C. debut along with his latest ballad, “Paris-Méditerranée”—inspired by her tale of the man in the train on whose shoulder she had slept until the police took him away. Asso imagined their brief encounter from her perspective: “Dans une gare ensoleillée / L’inconnu sautait sur le quai. / Alors des hommes l’entourèrent / Et, tête basse, ils l’emmenèrent / Tandis que le train repartait.” (“In the sunlit station / The stranger jumped onto the platform. / Then some men surrounded him / And took him away, head hanging, / As the train took off.”) When the man raises his hands to bid her adieu, she sees the sun glinting off his handcuffs and hears the train’s piercing whistle in the background.
That autumn, Edith took charge of details when she could, changing the words of a refrain when recording Asso’s songs or, in performance, finding the gestures for each of her numbers. By November, it must have been clear to him that his Didou had grown up. She was ready for her return engagement at the A.B.C., an event that would mark another turning point. At Asso’s insistence, Edith would no longer be billed as La Môme. On opening night the orchestra played “Les Mômes de la cloche”; then the mistress of ceremonies made an announcement: “La Môme is dead! You are about to hear Edith Piaf!” Wearing her beguiling black dress and white lace collar, Edith demonstrated her range by performing songs as different from each other as a saucy java in working-class slang, “Correqu’ et réguyer” (“Correct and Regular”), and the intense, patriotic “Fanion de la légion.”
The critics were quick to applaud her name change and her repertoire. “The ‘môme’ was charming,” Le Journal wrote. “But Edith Piaf—and the general public’s triumphant welcome for every one of her songs—that’s something else. She’s an artist, a great artist.” Though rebaptized Mademoiselle, Edith had lost none of her fieriness onstage, another critic observed: “She seemed to be standing on a barricade, the better to hurl invectives against social injustice.” Carried away by his rhetoric, he continued, “She is, by turns, poverty-mistreated, a low whore rebelling against her condition, a convulsive kid clawing the police who grabbed hold of her.”
After her final appearance at O’Dett’s in December, Edith celebrated Christmas 1937 by singing at the circus in Rouen. One wonders whether she found time to visit the Gassion household in nearby Bernay, or to tell her father about her circus gig after returning to Paris for a New Year’s Day radio broadcast. From then on, she kept busy with an almost uninterrupted round of radio programs, recordings, cinema appearances, and casino tours until her third engagement at the A.B.C., from April 15 to May 4, 1938.
Now that Edith was a rising star, Goldin gave her second billing on the program, before his new attraction, the jazzy, lighthearted Charles Trenet. Surprised that the La Môme had turned into an artist, Comoedia’s critic praised “her perfect diction and air of knowing a great deal for her age.” He hoped she would stay true to herself as one “who belongs to the race of Fréhel.”
Two days after her A.B.C. booking ended, Edith began an eight-week engagement at the Lune Rousse cabaret, which earned more enthusiastic praise. “Edith Piaf has worked very hard since her debut,” Roger Feral