No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [47]
“Whatever people say or imply about her,” Dédée Bigard wrote of this time, when she became Piaf’s confidante as well as her secretary, “she was a woman of great purity.” And, it should be said, one whose support of friends created ties that would outlive their years of angst and vagabondage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1942–1944
While Edith toured the zone libre the summer of 1942, conditions worsened in the north, especially for Jews. Since May they had been made to wear a yellow six-pointed star with the word Juif stitched in black letters. Newspapers ran campaigns on the “Jewish peril.” An exhibition presenting Jews as cheats, criminals, and sexual deviants drew thousands of Parisians before its successful tour of the country. People whispered about raids, but few knew of the Nazis’ plans to arrest some thirty thousand Parisian Jews until two days after Bastille Day, when the combined forces of the gendarmerie, the mobile guard, and the police herded their victims to the Drancy internment camp, northeast of Paris.
By then, although some non-Jews wore yellow stars in protest, most Parisians were more concerned with food shortages, power cuts, and the difficulty of getting anywhere because of minimal public transport. To supplement the diet obtainable with ration coupons, those who could afford it turned to the black market for butter, eggs, and cheese. Marie Claire told readers how to stay healthy by balancing menus, assuming they could find the ingredients, and offered “easy recipes for difficult times”—a substitute for wine made of pea pods, a soup composed of nettles. Riding a bicycle would keep one fit, the magazine explained, and since it was impossible to get stockings, backs of legs could be painted with a dark line.
“Edith Piaf is coming back to us,” headlines announced in October. Her reappearance in the capital after more than a year’s absence was the singer’s way of showing solidarity with her fellow citizens. When she and Dédée stepped off the train, “all of Paris was waiting at the station,” she wrote to Glanzberg. “It was wonderful!” she continued. “I had to give a press conference at lunch, as if I were a princess!” She could not admit that he failed to return her affection, but her dream of love had come true on a different scale, with her overjoyed reception by the adoring crowd.
The press treated Piaf’s opening night as the event of the season. She came onstage with renewed self-assurance for her reunion with the public that had been awaiting her. After a few standards from prewar days, she sang all new songs, including Emer’s “Le Disque usé”—a risky choice in that it ended with Edith’s imitating a broken record, but even more so because the composer was Jewish. (What was more, its heroine, another poor girl waiting for her lover, maintained a proud, haughty stance—“fière et hautaine”—that could be taken as a kind of resistance.) The program also featured Edith’s compositions, including “Je ne veux plus laver la vaisselle” and “Le Vagabond,” whose dream of escape inspired rapturous applause. She took a greater risk by performing “Où sont-ils mes petits copains?” with the stage lit in blue, white, and red—the colors of the French flag. The next day, she was summoned to the Propaganda Staffel and told to replace the lights with a neutral spot.
Journalists treated Piaf’s A.B.C. engagement as her homecoming. The very genre of song had returned, a critic noted, “in the person of the one who created it.” Piaf’s was “the best tour de chant since Yvette Guilbert, Damia, and Yvonne George,” another wrote—and one that eschewed the current vogue for talky introductions and other forms of “trickery.” She simply came