No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [58]
Piaf confessed to Contet and others that she often felt anxious about coming onstage after her costar. “When I toured with Yves,” she told one of them, “he scored triumph after triumph, and night after night I stoically bore my cross.” Even though Edith’s recording sessions for Polydor that spring may have reassured her, Yves cut his own first record for a rival firm. Show-business wags remarked on the aptness of his stage name: montant, its homonym, means “rising”—a fitting pun on his rapid rise to fame.
Despite her worries, Edith kept writing songs that would become her own triumphs. One day, when she was sitting with her friend Marianne Michel at a café on the Champs-Elysées, the young woman complained that she had nothing new to sing. Edith began scribbling words on the paper tablecloth, a tune that she had been thinking of for some time: “Quand il me prend dans ses bras, / Qu’il me parle tout bas / Je vois les choses en rose.” Her friend thought about the “choses en rose” (an echo from Piaf’s recent song for Montand, “Elle a …”) and suggested instead “la vie en rose.” Suddenly Edith had the title, lyrics, and music of the composition that would be translated into scores of languages as her theme song. But meanwhile she made a gift of it to Marianne; Piaf would not record “La Vie en rose” until two years later.
In July, she and Montand performed at Chez Carrère, a chic nightspot with white walls, chairs, curtains, and piano where they were to sing as if they had dropped in at a private club. At Piaf’s request, Montand was given a role in her new movie, Etoile sans lumière, to be directed by her friend Marcel Blistène. The scenario, written for Piaf while Blistène was in hiding during the war, became the occasion for her finest cinematic performance. As Madeleine, the double (or “invisible star”) whose incandescent voice replaces that of a silent-film actress in her first talkie, Piaf would sing five new songs; Montand would play her provincial sweetheart. It may have hit home when Madeleine told her fiancé that their nuptials had to be postponed: “You’re still a bit young,” she explains. “You have to grow up!” By then Montand’s growing reputation had made his offscreen “fiancée” apprehensive.
Still, they found much to enjoy despite the strains in their relationship and the bleakness of postwar Paris—where the power often failed, and staples like milk and meat could be had only at extraordinary prices. The day after Yves’s brother and sister watched them perform at L’Etoile, Edith invited her “in-laws” to a restaurant for a banquet, which they washed down with the best wines. The next morning, Lydia found the couple reading a Molière play aloud in bed, Edith having taken on the role of mentor as she learned it from Bourgeat, Asso, and Meurisse. (To interest both the masses and the intellectuals, she said, Yves must read the poet Verlaine and the philosopher Bergson.) The couple celebrated the first postwar Bastille Day at the Place de la Concorde, where Piaf sang in honor of De Gaulle. For the rest of the summer, their unspoken tensions simmered as they completed Etoile sans lumière, which ends with Piaf walking alone down a dark Paris street.
Some of their friends ascribed the pair’s difficulties to professional rivalry. In the more nuanced view of Montand’s biographers, “What triggered their shared distress was that