No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [50]
Though Piaf’s habitual gaiety was not in evidence during her five weeks of enforced rest, Madame Billy did her best to humor her. Given her experience of all types, Billy got on well with everyone except for Momone. Something of a snob, the madam preferred Edith’s well-known guests, Jean Cocteau and his lover Jean Marais, and the actors Michel Simon, Marie Bell, and Mary Marquet, of the Comédie-Française. In turn, these prewar celebrities were amused by Billy’s trade in what was commonly called “horizontal collaboration.”
While at Madame Billy’s, Piaf hired a Vietnamese chef named Chang to cook for her entourage. “What marvelous evenings we spent with her,” Billy recalled. “Her own happiness consisted in pleasing others.” On some nights she sang for her guests or recited the classic French poems she had learned by heart. She charmed Mary Marquet by claiming that poems were songs without music; the actress encouraged her to read Edmond Rostand’s popular plays, L’Aiglon and Cyrano de Bergerac. Edith’s home became a refuge where her friends could forget the Occupation.
Yet she was still unsure of herself, Billy thought, because of her background and because she had been insufficiently loved. She flirted with attractive men to prove to herself that she could be seductive. “She was very unstable; she could be remarkably kind or really unbearable.” Edith’s friendship with Cocteau was the exception to this unsteadiness, Billy believed. Their love was platonic, yet profound: “A real passion united these two beings.” The madame studied their mutual absorption whenever Cocteau came to dinner. Afterward, as he read his poems aloud, Edith’s face softened: “She became the good little girl who was keen to learn and understand.” If she asked him to explain obscure words or images, “he did so patiently, translating the thoughts behind the words, making clear the sense of the images.” Often, as Edith recited his poems, she became radiant: “She was as beautiful then as when she sang.”
Cocteau considered Piaf a genius in her own right. He hoped to cast her in a film opposite Jean Marais—in his view, she had more charisma than any professional actress—and wrote her another dramatic monologue, Le Fantôme de Marseille. The singer’s purity of spirit was apparent as soon as she came onstage, Cocteau observed: “She transcends herself, her songs, the music, and the words.… It’s no longer Madame Edith Piaf who sings: it’s the rain falling, the wind sighing, the moon spreading her mantle of light.”
Friends saw that they thrived in each other’s company. Their affinity was based on deep trust and affection, but also on a shared obliviousness to possessions or money, which both acquired and spent almost absentmindedly. When the poet celebrated his birthday at his tiny Palais Royal apartment, he asked only “his closest intimates”—Jean Marais, Jean Giono, Maurice Rostand, and Edith.
By then, Piaf was singing again, after being forced by the censors to remove “L’Accordéoniste” from her repertoire. For much of the spring of 1943, she did double duty, performing first at the Casino de Paris, then at the prophetically named La Vie en Rose cabaret. That summer, she sang at both the A.B.C. and the Bobino, with different programs for each venue. Although she and Contet were seeing less of each other, she featured his songs along with Emer’s “Le Disque usé”—which somehow escaped the censors’ notice.
Some critics welcomed these changes while warning her against too much art: “You have skillfully renewed your old repertoire with Henri Contet’s reveries,” one of