No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [52]
In contrast to her knotted feelings for Line, Edith’s affection for her father never wavered. Once she commanded high wages, she added to Louis’s monthly stipend the services of a houseman, whom the aging acrobat liked to call his valet de chambre. Though marked by a lifetime of acrobatics and gros rouge, Louis dressed well in the clothes his daughter bought him and told amusing stories about his exploits: “Groomed and coiffed by Edith, he looked like an ex-pimp,” Contet noted. She often visited Louis at his apartment in Belleville, where her reputation as a local who had made good enhanced his reputation. Her father came to see her several times a week, Madame Billy recalled, but never stayed to lunch: “He didn’t seem to feel at home.”
The aging acrobat surely saw that his daughter had formed a new kind of family, whose members were related through artistic affinities. That Edith was esteemed by Cocteau placed her in an unfamiliar social world. (The poet called her Madame Piaf to show his respect; though Edith often gave intimates nicknames, such as Riri and Dédée, she addressed him as Jean.) What was more, her reserved young secretary was setting a good example. Without seeming to criticize her rambunctious employer, Dédée often told her, “Mademoiselle, that just isn’t done. This is what you do in such circumstances,” Billy noted. “At first, Edith did whatever she felt like, but in time, one saw that the lessons had hit home”—though her high spirits never left her.
Dédée’s tutelage had a greater effect on the singer than Madame Billy realized. A number of loosely organized resistance groups had begun to sabotage the Germans by whatever means possible—attacking railways, power lines, and the sinister black automobiles in which the Gestapo patrolled the streets. Workers rioted when forced by the occupiers to leave France to become “volunteers” in German factories; by 1942, the Compulsory Labor Service (Service de Travail Obligatoire, or STO) had produced thousands of réfractaires—the term for those who refused to comply with the Führer’s plans for occupied populations to support the war effort. Clandestine groups of the refractory, or, as they were soon called, la Résistance, operated throughout France at great risk to their lives.
When Dédée joined one of these networks, she hesitated to tell Edith, not wanting to compromise her, but also because she was unsure how Edith would cope with the information. Soon, “with her remarkable intuition, she guessed that I was plotting something,” Bigard recalled. “She became a highly effective partner and got us out of difficult situations by making use of her vivacity and notoriety.”
Starting in August 1943, Edith turned an invitation to entertain French soldiers imprisoned in Germany into a way to help Dédée carry out a mission. Singers were told that their visits would improve the prisoners’ morale; most knew that to accept the offer—the kind one could hardly refuse—meant being seen to compromise with the enemy. Maurice Chevalier, who initially supported the Vichy regime, agreed to perform at the German prison camp where he had been held during the Great War on the understanding that ten prisoners from Menilmontant and Belleville would be freed following his visit. When his actions were misrepresented by the Free French broadcasts from overseas, which condemned him as a traitor, he retired to private life.
Even so, Piaf agreed to tour Germany for seven weeks with Charles Trenet, Fred Adison’s band, and Dédée. A few days before their trip, she spoke with a journalist about her plans. She would perform new songs for the soldiers, she said. Asked whether they might not prefer older ones, she said, “I don’t think it would be helpful to stir up old memories.… What I hope is that when they listen to me they’ll think less about the life they left