No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [65]
Egged on by Edith, the group enjoyed themselves at every opportunity. In May, it was warm enough for picnics in the forest. They brought more beer than sandwiches, Ginou recalled; she and Edith danced the cancan while the men played drinking games they had invented in Edith’s honor. After weeks of sampling the varieties of smoked fish on the menu, Edith invited everyone to her room for pasta, prepared in the bathroom. Her only disappointment came in Stockholm, when most of the audience did not come back for her star turn, after the intermission. The manager explained that in Sweden stars appeared before the second half, which featured lesser acts. Piaf then changed the order of performance to suit the Swedes, who came in great numbers. On their last night, when the orchestra played “La Marseillaise” and a member of the audience gave her a heart-shaped bouquet of blue, white, and red flowers, she burst into tears. “When you’ve been singing in your own language in a foreign country and you are honored this way, with no warning,” she recalled, “it touches you very deeply.”
Edith returned to Paris in June to finalize plans for their engagement at the Playhouse Theater in New York. After a round of appearances at resorts, she sang for a month at L’Etoile with Aznavour’s duo and Les Compagnons, who joined her for recording sessions and one of the first French television broadcasts. It would have been a shock to receive a negative review of her Etoile recital. The critic asked whether the audience’s “fervor” was justified, since in his view her voice did not have “the same ardor” as in the past; moreover, the staging was too polished to evoke a response, a state of affairs he attributed to her preparations for New York. Rather than adapt to the American love of glamour, “she should go back to being what she was, a girl from the poor districts,” he advised. (Les Compagnons, he wrote, were “perfection.”)
Piaf was perhaps too busy to notice this criticism in the month before her departure, when she also began filming a movie entitled (like her radio broadcasts) Neuf Garçons et un coeur. Counting on Piaf’s fame, the director Georges Freedland devised a fairy-tale script that let his one set do double duty—as the sordid Pigalle club where her character seeks work for her singers, and the paradise to which they are transported in a dream. Although the film was a musical (including “Sophie,” which she took back from Montand, “Les Trois Cloches,” and “La Vie en rose”), characters did not burst into song for no reason, Freedland explained. In his view, Piaf was a fine actress: “She didn’t just sing her songs, she interpreted them, played with them, lived them.” Moreover, she revealed her sense of humor in the scenes that allowed her to be “droll.” He added, “Piaf was very funny.… She never played the ‘star’ or put herself first.”
On October 9, the day after they finished shooting, she, Les Compagnons, Marc Bonel, Loulou Barrier, and the rest of her entourage boarded the Queen Elizabeth for New York. “I don’t do things by half-measures,” Piaf observed. “I was saying goodbye to old Europe for a time.… The theater managers knew that I was going away, that it would be some time before they would see me again.”
Even before they docked in Manhattan, Piaf was besieged