No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [37]
Asso arranged for her to return by herself to the château in September. The political situation had been tense since Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March. When it became clear that he planned to do the same in the Sudetenland, two and a half million Frenchmen, all those under the age of sixty, were mobilized. Meanwhile, the Popular Front government had collapsed. The new government, under Edmond Daladier, temporized, while Neville Chamberlain sought peace at any price with Germany.
Since Asso controlled all aspects of Edith’s career, including the purse strings, she wrote to ask him for funds to buy fabric for a dress, adding that the seamstress would charge very little to make it. In another letter, she expressed her lack of ease with her hostess, who treated her like a child, and her concern for the future, her own and that of France. “What news of the war?” she asked. “If things go badly, I won’t have a penny, no one to take me in. I’d be in bad shape. I spoke a lot about this at dinner yesterday. No one said a word. I’m really disgusted with the people here.”
She had only her faith to rely on, the simple spirituality to which she turned when in crisis. One day at church she prayed to the figure of Jesus on the cross: “I cried a lot and then I talked. I said to him, ‘Don’t let this war happen.’ Then I looked at his feet, his hands, his face full of suffering. Finally, I thought about everything he had endured without holding it against anyone.” Still, she was afraid—of the poison gas the Germans were said to be stocking, “afraid of Paris, of everything … a huge anxiety in my heart.” She blamed herself for her misery and that of the world. “God gave me everything and I’m destroying my own happiness.… The earth is full of filth like me. That’s why there are wars.”
Asso’s letters did not always bring the comfort she sought. Edith’s vulnerability is evident in her reply to one that denounced her faults. “My dear love,” she wrote, “how much it must have cost you to write such awful things. But you’re right, I’m stupid. I always told you I was, and you tried to convince me that I was intelligent. Besides, the fact that I did all those dumb things before I met you only proves my lack of intelligence. It’s time I made amends to all the people I hurt through the years.… But you’re going too far to say all the things you said in your letter. I hate myself, I have no confidence in myself whatsoever.” (She nonetheless found the strength to say that she disliked Max d’Yresnes’s music for Asso’s latest song. “I told him so,” she wrote, “and he didn’t like it at all.”)
Edith returned to Paris on September 30, the day that Daladier signed the Munich Pact, which appeared to have purchased peace by ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. The French gave Daladier a hero’s welcome and went back to work under the illusion that war had been prevented. For the next few months, the Germans mobilized to occupy Czechoslovakia while the French censors kept worrisome news out of the papers.
Edith began preparing for two important engagements—top billing at the Européen from October 21 to 27, and, the following week, at the Bobino Theater in Montparnasse. Asso hired a young woman named Suzanne Flon (soon to be a well-known actress) as her secretary, though Piaf later joked that Suzanne’s real job was to keep an eye on her.
The actress appreciated her charge’s gaiety. Each day, when she arrived to find Edith doing her exercises, the singer dictated several lines of the songs she had begun composing, and Suzanne typed them with two fingers. Edith was also writing a novel about a working-class woman’s life, which did not go beyond the first few pages. When her new friend left to pursue her acting career, Edith gave her an autographed photo of herself that read, “For Suzanne, who doesn’t type very well, who isn’t a very good secretary, but whom I love very much just the same.”
Even though Edith’s schedule of recording sessions, radio programs, and singing engagements left little