No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [68]
Together Virgil Thomson’s review and the tongue-in-cheek New Yorker piece provoked a turnaround in public opinion that kept Piaf from going home. She told Les Compagnons to perform in Miami without her over the holidays when they received an offer, and gave all of them presents to show that there were no hard feelings. After their departure, she went back to work with Miss Davidson, in the hope of introducing her songs by herself. At the end of November, Clifford Fischer negotiated an eight-week solo engagement for her at the Versailles Club at the handsome fee of three thousand dollars per week, starting in the new year.
Edith hesitated at first because of the club’s name: it brought back memories of the night she and her friends spent in the Versailles jail after their misadventure with the innkeeper who let them dine on credit. Once she agreed to appear there, she realized that the Versailles was one of Manhattan’s most intimate yet sophisticated clubs. The room filled each night with celebrities, people from the Social Register, and, as Piaf learned to say, VIPs. Less boisterously commercial than the Stork Club, the Versailles appealed to New York’s cognoscenti—those who thought the rococo décor worth the price they paid to sip champagne and listen to the chanteuse they had read about in The New Yorker.
Each night, the talkative crowd went silent when Piaf stepped onto a raised platform. “She had us mesmerized,” a member of the audience recalled. “You thought about the sadness of her songs; even the boys got misty-eyed. The language didn’t matter a bit. You felt that she’d had a hard-knock life, that she’d seen everything and turned it into this hypnotic music.” At the end of the show, people climbed on the tables to applaud in hopes of hearing “La Vie en rose” all over again.
The European-born critic Nerin Gun found Piaf’s English “quaint but understandable.” He thought so highly of her performance that he quoted the reaction of the VIP politician at the next table. “Until now,” the man said, “the French stars we have seen have been sophisticated images of Gay Paree, ready to sell their sex appeal. Edith Piaf is different. She is a great artist whose voice hits you in the gut, but at the same time she’s a wan little thing who looks hungry, as if she suffered as a child and is still somewhat afraid. She represents the new European generation that so much deserves our help.” We do not know what Piaf thought of being a justification for the Marshall Plan, but she quoted Gun at length in her memoirs.
Just the same, illness and depression plagued her at times during the cold New York winter. At 4 a.m. one night she sounded delirious when she phoned Marc Bonel and Loulou Barrier to ask for help. “She said that she was dying,” Bonel recalled. “No one loved her, she had no father, no child, no friends except for Loulou and me.” She did not recognize them when they arrived but, calmed by their presence, fell asleep. Piaf was working too hard, Bonel thought, with English lessons, piano lessons, rehearsals all day, performances at night, “and no love since Jean-Louis left.” He understood for the first time that there was another Piaf: “a woman thrown off-balance by success and money. Though she’s made her way with her talent, she’s a sad little bird, a poor kid deprived of tenderness.”
Les Compagnons returned from Miami in time to replace Edith at the Versailles when she again fell ill. Having decided that he could go against his mother’s wishes after all, Jaubert asked her to marry him. It was too late. Yet she would go on working with the group, she told Bourgeat, though she found their attitude disappointing now that they were a success. Still, they were right to sing without her, because “we both have to make our names here on our own.” She would stay with them until she had turned them into