No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [55]
Edith agreed to hire Montand and find him better material. Within the week, she also became his lover, a situation that replayed while reversing her relations with Asso. At twenty-three, Montand was starting what would become a major career; at twenty-eight, Piaf was already famous. The young man was touched by her loneliness. “I had fallen in love without even knowing it,” Montand said much later. “She was fresh, flirtatious, both funny and cruel, passionately devoted to her profession, ambitious, a shopgirl on the town, loyal when she loved, … one of those people who made you feel that you were God, that you were irreplaceable.” But in her role as mentor, she could also be a tyrant.
Piaf talked Contet into writing music for her new costar—which put the lyricist in the position of unwittingly helping his rival at a time when he and Piaf were still intimate. (She invited Contet to meet Montand, but it took the older man months to understand the basis of their rapport.) One night, when Contet called Edith with the lyrics for “Ma Gosse,” which he had written for Chevalier, she convinced him to save it for Montand: its breezy mood suited his persona. Even though this comical situation worked to Montand’s advantage, Dédée let Contet know that Edith would drop Yves as soon as Henri decided to leave his wife.
Meanwhile, Edith forced Yves to take their shared profession as seriously as she did. Contet watched her put him through his paces. “Yves never argued with any of Edith’s orders,” the lyricist noted. “He must have gritted his teeth more than once … [and] told himself that the rewards of the exercise were greater than its torments.” Contet went along with her plan to boost Montand’s career by praising his Moulin Rouge act in Paris-Midi; Edith began writing songs that would present her protégé as a man of the people, the counterpart to her image as the street singer who made good. The tall, gangly southerner and the Parisian waif formed an endearing couple. With Piaf, a critic wrote, “Montand, who is beginning to forget cowboys and rolling plains, has found himself a new personality.”
On August 15, as news of the Allies’ gains in Normandy reached Paris, Yves and Edith toasted their advance with champagne. Within a few days, posters urging Paris to battle went up around the city; Montand joined the actors defending the Comédie-Française; as battles raged outside, the company intoned “La Marseillaise,” the French anthem having been banned during the Occupation. On August 25, as the liberation of Paris began, he and Edith watched General Leclerc’s tanks roll down the Champs-Elysées. They fell to the pavement when German snipers fired at the crowd, many of whom sported the French tricolor and the white armbands of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (in slang, “les fifis”). The next day, Edith kept a fifi from hurling grenades at the retreating Germans: “Don’t be a fool!” she yelled. “They’re leaving.”
In September, the euphoric mood of the Liberation was still palpable. At the same time, purge panels were being set up to deal with collaborators. Many journalists, writers, and artists came under scrutiny as pro-German influencers of public opinion; some of the country’s best-known performers had been compromised by their participation in German-sponsored events. Even those who called themselves anti-Nazis worried as it became clear that the purge panels offered the opportunity