No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [57]
Three days before the opening, Edith learned that her mother had died of an overdose. She was forty-nine. A newspaper account stated that her corpse was left on the sidewalk by the man with whom she lived, then taken to the morgue. Piaf asked for Contet’s help with arrangements for Line’s burial in the Thiais Cemetery, Cécelle’s resting place, but did not attend the funeral. Though she had sent Line an allowance each month and helped when she was in crisis, Edith claimed to feel little for the mother who reappeared in her life only to exploit her. Once the Gassion tomb that she had purchased at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery was completed, Edith would transfer her father’s and daughter’s remains there but leave her mother where she was.
Judging by photographs of Yves and Edith at this time, she was deeply in love with her new partner. In the euphoric early stages of their romance, she wrote several songs to refurbish his repertoire and expand his range. “Sophie,” a jazzy farewell to love, resembled any number of tunes that others had written for Edith (the eponymous Sophie loses her zest for life when her lover leaves her), but it gave Yves the chance to carry off a torch song. In a different vein, her witty lyrics for “Il fait des …” depict a pop-music fan who becomes “hystérique” when he hears “musique” but turns “mélancolique” if it is “classique.” She was having fun with the lyrics while giving him the chance to make the audience smile.
It no doubt pleased her to watch Montand perform “Elle a …,” another of her tender, teasing songs about a woman like herself. “Un petit bout de femme pas plus grand que ça,” it begins (“a little woman no bigger than that”), she was his “bouquet of laughs.” Rhyming “tourments” and “moment,” Piaf implied that love and its torments were both momentary. She would have smiled as her lover crooned her praises: “Elle a des rires / Pour me séduire,” a line linking seduction to laughter. By then she was sufficiently comfortable in her dual role as lyricist and lover to let his uncertainty emerge in the refrain: “Elle a … / Des tas de choses / Des choses en rose / Rien que pour moi.… Enfin … je le crois.” (“She has … / All sorts of things / All of them rosy / Only for me.… / At least … I hope so.”)
For the time being, Montand was on top of the world. At twenty-three, he shared the billing at the Etoile Theater, whose elegant arcades and pink marble staircase must have made him feel that he had arrived. (L’Etoile, once a venue for light opera, featured concerts by well-known stars rather than variety shows.) As the first act, he was such a hit that Piaf had to work harder than usual to win back the audience, for whom her new songs by Contet—especially the one entitled “Mariage”—seemed too subtle.
“Don’t try to rise above yourself,” the critic Serge Weber scolded in an open letter to Piaf on February 15. People loved her because she was “simple and natural,” he claimed: they wanted songs to match, “with words that everyone understands.” (Weber’s gibe at Contet’s poetics came at a time when French musical life was marked by an intense desire to affirm the prewar values that had been suppressed under the Occupation.) Though other critics who taxed Piaf with being too intellectual also blamed Contet’s lyrics, L’Aurore disagreed: his songs suited her new persona. Ignoring the criticism, she would sing his lyrics (including some of her biggest hits, “Padam … padam” and “Bravo pour le clown”) for the rest of her life.
In March, Piaf and Montand performed at the Casino Montparnasse, where the predominantly working-class audiences applauded his repertoire so enthusiastically that rumors began to circulate about the