No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [77]
A well-paid three-week stint at the Paris Copacabana kept Piaf from accompanying Cerdan to Detroit in June to bring him luck at his match with the redoubtable Jake La Motta. Her heart was with him, she wrote: “I’ll be in your gloves, your breath, everywhere. I’d like to bite La Motta’s ass, that bastard. He mustn’t touch you or he’ll answer to me. Au revoir, mon petit, my boy, my life, my love.” When Cerdan damaged his left shoulder early in the fight and lost his crown to La Motta, it seemed that Edith’s medium had been right about Marcel’s needing her. Blaming herself for not being by his side, she made arrangements to travel with him in secret for the rematch in September.
Meanwhile, according to the contract Barrier had devised to maximize her time with Cerdan, Piaf toured other colonial capitals in preparation for her summer engagements in French watering spots. In July, she sang to huge crowds in Oran, Algiers, and Casablanca, often accompanied by the boxer, who also joined her for a week on the French Riviera. The day after their return to Paris in August, Piaf slipped past the press at Le Havre to board Cerdan’s ship to New York: he would train for the rematch with La Motta while she rehearsed for her engagement at the Versailles. This bout was “God’s way of letting me be close to you always,” Edith wrote, since each time they were apart something bad seemed to happen.
In New York, their schedules allowed the couple stretches of time with each other. Edith spent several days incognito at Loch Sheldrake; Marcel came to stay at her apartment on Lexington Avenue, accompanying her on daily walks to Central Park to see the squirrels. She planned to sing “Hymne à l’amour” for the first time in public on September 15, opening night at the Versailles: it was about Marcel and herself, she told her entourage. The crowded nightclub audience, full of such luminaries as Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Rex Harrison, Barbara Stanwyck, and Claudette Colbert, greeted her as the queen of song. “Edith Piaf made her debut before the most select group ever assembled, and she is better than ever,” one critic wrote. “She’s the star of the year,” another observed, “even greater than Sarah Bernhardt.” Betting on Piaf’s growing American fame, Columbia issued Chansons parisiennes, two albums of her best-known songs, with covers featuring maps of Paris and dancing policemen.
A change of plans brought Cerdan to Manhattan sooner than expected when the match scheduled for September 28 was postponed until December 2 because of La Motta’s damaged right shoulder. At first Edith was overjoyed: the postponement meant that she and Marcel could have two more months together. But, despite her supplications, the boxer insisted on going to see his family in Casablanca. “I’m terribly disappointed,” Edith told Bourgeat. “I thought that Marcel loved me more than anything and I see that I’m only his mistress.… This time was a gift from heaven and he let it go.” Since they would never have the chance to be together “without causing any harm,” she announced her intention to drop out of his life by organizing increasingly longer separations, even though they caused her great pain. “I thought he suffered when we were apart,” she continued, “but the day he was to leave, he was singing at the top of his voice in the shower!”
When Jacquot told her to think of Cerdan’s wife, Edith displaced her anger at the boxer onto her mentor: “Does that woman deserve to be happy? She isn’t capable of bringing up her children, he’s the one who takes them to the doctor when they’re ill.” Jacquot was wrong to judge Edith on conventional grounds: “If all women did their duty as I do, they wouldn’t have many regrets. Because if one day those kids get a good education, it will be thanks to me, not her.” He was more concerned with