No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [56]
There had been few actual collaborators in the entertainment world, but even fewer who actively supported the Resistance. When the purge panel published a list of names of those whose voices were banned from the radio, Edith’s was among them because of her trips to Germany. Called to testify before the panel in October, she said that, though she had been forced to take the first trip in order to keep on singing, she had taken the second one to give her earnings to the French prisoners along with the maps and identity cards that helped many of them escape; Andrée Bigard supported her testimony with details. After Piaf also gave the names of the Jewish friends whose shelter she had arranged and financed, the panel voted unanimously, “No sanction and congratulations.”
Performers like herself had been forced to comply with the occupiers’ demands, she told a reporter from Ce Soir. She knew about the rumors, “some of which were not well meaning,” surrounding her trips to Germany. Now that the panel had cleared her, she could explain her actions, since she had just learned that 118 prisoners had used their fake cards to escape. “I forced myself to navigate around the pitfalls of the Nazi propaganda machine to keep the trust of the French public,” she explained. In the photograph illustrating the article, Edith has a hangdog expression and wears a dark dress buttoned to her chin, as if mourning the losses of the past four years.
Edith had already left Paris when this interview appeared in October. After a series of benefits for war victims, she toured the south of France with Yves. His renditions of Contet’s songs—“Battling Joe,” an upbeat tune about a boxing hero; “Luna Park,” on a workingman’s holiday; and the lighthearted “Ma Gosse”—went over well except in Marseille, where the public wanted cowboy refrains. Piaf told him not to lose heart. Under her wing, he learned to identify “the songs you can’t drop, and to try out other titles as I went along, fine-tuning the ones that worked, monitoring those that didn’t work right away but might one day.” The newspapers were full of praise for Piaf but also for her protégé, “this tall handsome guy full of enthusiasm … who all by himself makes the stage look very small.”
In December, they performed for the American soldiers stationed in Marseille. While Edith paced backstage, Yves delighted the audience by dosing his patter with Yankee slang. He took her to meet his family, Italian immigrants who had settled in one of the “macaroni” neighborhoods of Marseille in the 1920s, when his name—not yet Gallicized—was Ivo Livi. The whole neighborhood greeted the couple; the Livis welcomed them with a festive meal.
Yves’s sister Lydia, who would become Edith’s intimate, observed the star’s response to their clan: “She was a little shaken by our noisy celebration and seemed surprised that we talked so much and so fast. But she was also attracted by our warm family spirit.” Edith chided Yves for complaining about the Livis. He was fortunate to have them. Having grown up without one, she had tried to create such a family in her entourage of musicians, songwriters, and staff. The Livis understood that she and Yves were now betrothed, their relationship sealed by the clan’s embrace.
If the couple’s brief stay in Marseille represented their unofficial engagement, the party Piaf gave on their return to Paris introduced her new partner to