No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [40]
In private, Edith showed a great deal more joie de vivre than onstage, Meurisse noted. Social opposites, they were astonished to find themselves together but shared the same desire to laugh. An occasion presented itself during their first week at the Alsina, when Piaf heard a familiar knock at the door. Asso was in Paris on leave; Meurisse just managed to slip into Momone’s room. His memoirs restage this scene as French farce, giving Edith the classic line “Ciel! Mon mari!” (“Heavens! My husband!”), and crediting Asso with the last laugh—the next day, the jilted composer came to his rival’s club to say that he should not leave telltale cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Asso “withdrew without any fuss,” Meurisse wrote, underestimating his predecessor’s hard feelings.
Meurisse also recalled Edith’s delight as she toured their new apartment. She had seen bourgeois dwellings before, but never had one to herself, with a dining room, a large bathroom, guest rooms, and a grand piano in the salon. “I won’t have to go to the composers’ any more,” she exulted; “they can come to me!”
The couple made efforts to adapt to each other. Although Edith liked to ridicule middle-class propriety, she accepted customs like letting the man pull out her chair or help her into her coat. Meurisse exercised tact when teaching her not to mistake a finger bowl for a palate cleanser. Her more outrageous gaffes made them laugh, especially when she repeated them deliberately, to thumb her nose at stuffy guests. “It wasn’t so much that le savoir-vivre was imposed on her,” Meurisse wrote; “rather, that she imposed herself on le savoir-vivre.”
Meurisse was awed by Piaf’s professionalism. She rehearsed all night without complaint. “She would laugh and begin again,” he recalled; songwriters had to keep up with her. If a novice had a glimmer of an idea, she refused to let him go until it came to fruition. “Over and over, she interrupted meals to force the writer back to the piano.… I never saw Piaf in a bad mood because hours and hours of work hadn’t produced anything.” But she was pitiless when a song was not quite right: “In her work, as in her life, her ability to put the past behind her went beyond anything a dictator might have attempted.” The one exception to her dictatorial ways was her friendship with Marguerite Monnot, whom she admired “as one admires perfection.”
Meurisse was pleased when Piaf broke her contract at Le Night Club to join him at his cabaret. She also took on the role of artistic mentor, doing so as mercilessly as Asso had done with her. Her lover’s routine was “shit,” she told him. Given Meurisse’s character—aloof and patronizing—he should try for a comic effect by underscoring the contrast between his silly songs and his natural hauteur with grandiose orchestral settings. “Idiotic words supported by orchestrations meant to be played in cathedrals” broke the rules, but it worked. Meurisse credited his success to Piaf’s musical intelligence.
By the new year, Edith was contemplating changes in her own routine. She already knew the Russian-born composer Michel Emer, whose songs for Lucienne Boyer and Maurice Chevalier had been well received, although Edith thought them too sentimental. Emer turned up late one night in February 1940 with a tune that he had composed for her: having just been mobilized, he had to join his unit the next day. Piaf listened to the first stanza—“La fille de joie est belle / Au coin d’la rue là-bas / Elle a une clientèle / Qui lui remplit son bas.” (“The lady of the night is belle / Over there on the street corner / She has a clientele / Who keep her pockets full.”) She knew right away that she wanted the song (which would become “L’Accordéoniste”) for her next engagement at the Bobino Theater.
Emer’s tale of the prostitute whose dream