No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [51]
With Piaf’s rise to fame, journalists began digging up any gossip they could find about her. In May 1942, when Edith’s mother had a gig in Pigalle, La Semaine published photos of both women under the headline “Line Marsa Sings with the Same Voice and Gestures as Her Daughter.” Having been abandoned by her second husband, the article explained, the older woman sang in the streets “like her daughter” until “La Môme Piaf, now famous, came to her aid.” What it did not say was that Edith had been sending her mother a monthly allowance for years. Nor did it mention that Line was a drug addict.
Since 1940, when Line spent some months in a home for destitute old people (when she was forty-five), Edith had been responding to her pleas for funds, as well as hard-to-find items like sugar, jam, chocolate, and cigarettes, with the help of Dédée. Line got in touch in May 1943 to beg for an increase in her allowance. In July, back in jail on drug charges, she had her lawyer ask Edith to pay her legal fees; she also needed clothes for her court appearance in August. Line thanked her “petite Didou” for additional support when she was sentenced to six months in prison and signed her note, “Tender feelings from your mother.”
For the next year and a half, Line would be in and out of jail. Some evenings she turned up drunk at Edith’s stage door. One day, when the police came to Madame Billy’s to tell Piaf that her mother was again in prison, the singer flew into a rage, shouting that she didn’t give a damn. Billy prepared another package of supplies as Edith, “more upset than indifferent, pretended not to notice.” When Line got out of jail, she asked for the right to sing her daughter’s songs. Dédée sent her off with sheet music and pocket money, “enough for several doses,” Billy noted.
Line continued to disturb her daughter’s home life. One night, when Cocteau and their friends were listening to Edith sing, strains of “Mon Légionnaire” performed just as she did echoed from the street—it was Line, stationed beneath her window. A new friend of Edith’s, a model named Manouche, recalled that, despite Edith’s objections, Cocteau tossed her mother a banknote—which Line pretended to use as toilet paper. “Every morning for two weeks she was out there, crowing until one of us threw her some money to shut her up.”
As Line awaited her court appearance in the summer of 1943, interviewers prodded Edith about her new persona. Asked why she no longer sang her prewar songs, she protested, “I’m not a chanteuse réaliste!” Although a creator of “popular songs,” she disdained the vulgarity of her old repertoire, its streets full of “tough guys in caps and prostitutes.” The public no longer wanted to hear about the milieu, she said. “Now you must write refrains that touch the hearts of those who hear them, errand boys, workers, salesgirls, men and women who are pure enough to be moved by love stories.” The public always embraced such songs: “The heart … is still the healthiest part of us.”
This artistic manifesto was picked up by a journalist who put her remarks in the context of the Occupation. The French had been deprived of everything, he wrote—most recently, green vegetables—“but they could still dream and shape their dreams as they liked.” At such a time, music was a kind of covert resistance, as shown by the recent success of a nostalgic waltz entitled “Ah! le petit vin blanc” that looked back to the joys of working-class life and forward to a German-free future. Asked to elaborate on her dislike for the réaliste genre, Piaf replied that it belonged to another time. She wanted to put the