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By Root 1197 0

her? But how? I thought of all those songs to which the star gave her own tears, her immense heart, the admirable strength she can find in herself.” Half jest, half confession, Contet’s article impressed its subject. After reading his poems, she gave him a nickname, Riri, and asked him to write a song for her—the start of yet another complicated, difficult relationship. Montmartre-sur-Seine opened in Paris in November 1941. By then Piaf had begun another tour of the Unoccupied Zone, where life was freer despite the Vichy government’s attempts to enforce its credo, “Travail, Famille, Patrie.” The pro-Nazi newspaper Je suis partout declared that even though the film was untainted by the presence of Jewish artists, it nevertheless inflicted on audiences “that little person with cavernous eyes, a macabre big head tucked into her hunched shoulders.” Other pro-German mouthpieces described her in similarly anti-Semitic language. “Piaf should have stayed a working-class singer peddling songs on street corners,” Révolution nationale ranted. “Miraculously, she avoided such a fate thanks to the snobs who took her up.” But, having had the effrontery to show herself onscreen, she was now “the perfect incarnation of our decadent epoch.”

If Edith had learned that she had become the personification of non-Aryan-ness, she would, no doubt, have burst out laughing—“that laugh that never left her,” Paul Meurisse observed, “even at the most tragic of times.” Her lover went with her to Lyon, the first stop on their joint tour: she was again accompanied by Norbert Glanzberg, the German pianist with whom she had worked while singing with Django Reinhardt in Pigalle. She and Meurisse performed at Toulon, Nîmes, and Marseille before his return to Paris for another engagement. Piaf was at loose ends, as was Glanzberg, but for different reasons.

Having made his way to the zone nono (French slang for the zone non occupée) Glanzberg, who was Jewish, knew he had to watch his back—especially in a place like Marseille, where thousands of refugees awaited passage out of the country. In October, at the louche Café des Artistes, he had met the Corsicans who ran show business on the Riviera. One of them, the impresario Daniel Marouani, had hired him to accompany Piaf on her tour, starting in Lyon.

Within a short time, Glanzberg joined her entourage—the musicians and handlers, driver, cook, and secretary who functioned as her court, and whose expenses she paid. At twenty-five, Edith commanded such high fees that she could fill her hotel rooms with flowers and treat friends to black-market items like champagne. Glanzberg remarked years later, “She knew that because of the way she abused her health for the sake of her career, she wouldn’t have much time to enjoy what she earned.” (He seemed unaware that she had never acquired bourgeois habits like putting away funds for one’s old age.)

Piaf and her new pianist shared little but a love of music and a gift for survival. Glanzberg, a classically trained composer who became an accompanist and songwriter after fleeing to Paris, scorned French popular music and the cabarets of Pigalle, where he had earned his living in recent years. Once the SACEM blocked access to his French song rights, Edith became his lifeline. But in his opinion she did not measure up: a scrawny little thing who lacked good manners, she sang like a fishwife. (Her intelligence and sense of humor nonetheless impressed him.) Still, at each performance, when Glanzberg worried that his features would betray him, he gained strength from her presence: “When Edith leaned on the piano, the better to create that intimacy that bound her to the music, to her music, I was seized by a mysterious, enchanting power.” In those moments, he was sure that nothing bad would happen.

Because Edith had a horror of being alone, her entourage was expected to stay up late with her. One night, when Glanzberg was preparing to leave, she dismissed the others and told him to stay since it was after the curfew. “What could I do? It was Edith Piaf or Adolf Hitler,” Glanzberg