No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [67]
She could have not found much comfort in the lukewarm New York Times review: “She is a genuine artist in a particular tradition,” the critic allowed, “making no concessions to a heedless metropolis abroad.” The audiences’ lack of response to her in the weeks that followed made Edith feel that she might as well go home. New Yorkers did not respond to her storytelling: they simply wanted to dance. Years later, she understood that by 1947 most Americans preferred musicals to vaudeville-style revues, or favored bubbly tunes like “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Except for the GIs who had seen her in France, they had little knowledge of songs that lacked a happy ending. Audiences had expected her to sing “syrupy melodies where amour rhymes with toujours and … tendresse with ivresse or caresse,” Piaf recalled. What she did not say in her memoir was that Les Compagnons had stolen the show. If her réalisme, which came across as world-weariness, puzzled Manhattanites, the group’s boyish energy suited their wish for an upbeat evening.
Her memoirs also fail to mention her disenchantment with Jaubert. Despite her threats to dissolve their partnership unless he married her, he refused to do so, because she was a Catholic. A misalliance would break his mother’s heart. “I’ve had enough,” she wrote Bourgeat on November 4. “I deserve better.” She had already found Jaubert’s successor—Marcel Cerdan, who was in New York for a few days before his return to France. Once in Paris, the boxer would call on Bourgeat at Piaf’s request. “I hope you will love him as I do,” she continued. “He loves me sincerely, without any thought of gain. I hope you will show him how to improve himself as he really wants to.… Before each match he makes the sign of the cross.” Cerdan, a man of the people, respected her but did not need her, she wrote: “I need him, he makes me feel safe.” Because Cerdan was married, she told Bourgeat to keep their affair a secret.
Edith’s professionalism kept her from breaking her contract despite New Yorkers’ failure to embrace her. Their lackluster response did not change until the composer Virgil Thomson wrote in the Herald Tribune that her performances demonstrated “the art of the chansonnière … at its most classical.” Showing his compatriots how to take this foreign import, he noted her stationary stance and sparing gestures, the purity of her diction, and her “tremendous” power of projection. “She is a great artist because she gives you a clear vision of the scene or subject she is depicting, with a minimum injection of personality. Such a concentration at once of professional authority and of personal modesty is both delightful and no end impressive.”
A few days later, a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece extolled Piaf’s charms. Having heard the singer in Paris, a staff writer wanted to see if she had “brightened up her repertory … on the theory that Americans demand optimism.” Asked about “those wonderful sad songs she used to sing,” Piaf said that though their heroes all died at the end, she was not a pessimist: “there is always a little corner of blue sky … somewhere.” Her song entitled “Mariage” was different in that it began “in the cell of a woman who has already murdered her husband. She reviews her life, she hears the wedding bells, she sees herself in the arms of this man whom she has killed, an innocent young bride.” Though Piaf had not herself married or killed anyone, in her view love always turned out badly. “But,” she added, “I’m always optimistic.” At the Playhouse, the writer was delighted to hear some of her gloomier hits—“Mon Légionnaire” (“that old honey about the woman who falls in love with a Foreign Legion soldier … and he