No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [78]
After a training match outside Paris, Marcel phoned to say that he would soon sail for New York. Edith begged him to take a plane, which would give them more time together; he promised to come as soon as possible. After their conversation, the boxer gave a statement to the press: “I have to beat La Motta, I will beat La Motta. I’ll be perfect on December 2. You can be sure I’ll come back to France with the middleweight crown placed securely on my head.” Just before boarding an Air France night flight on October 27, he told the millions of fans glued to their radios, “I’m so eager to get back to New York and Madison Square Garden that if I could have left sooner I’d have done so.” He promised to fight like a tiger.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1949–1952
Loulou Barrier and Marc Bonel drove to La Guardia on October 28 to welcome Cerdan. They were to bring the boxer to Edith’s apartment to greet her when she awoke after a night at the Versailles. On the way to the airport, they heard an ominous report about his plane’s disappearance; at La Guardia, they learned that it had crashed in the Azores. Everyone on board had died.
All New York knew of the disaster by early afternoon, when Edith, still in her dressing gown, emerged from her bedroom to find her friends pacing nervously. Thinking that they were playing a joke, that Marcel was behind the door, she asked gaily, “Why are you hiding?” Barrier took her in his arms. “Edith, you must be brave,” he said. “There are no survivors.” As she began screaming, the men rushed to secure the windows. Edith sobbed all afternoon, unable to accept what she knew to be true.
When Barrier alerted the Versailles to cancel her appearance, the manager came to her apartment with the vegetable broth he brought her each night before she went onstage. She drank it, turned to him, and said that she would sing after all. Her entourage tried in vain to protect her from the journalists besieging the apartment. Once she realized that the whole town knew of the disaster, she spoke briefly with a photographer who asked her about her plans. “Oh, Marcel!” she exclaimed, and burst into tears.
On the way to the Versailles, she stopped at a nearby church to light a candle in the hope that he was alive. The club was tense, sympathizers having rushed to book all available seats. When Piaf came onstage, Bonel and Chauvigny had tears in their eyes. She embraced them and told the audience, “Tonight I’m singing for Marcel Cerdan.” She managed to get through her repertoire until “Hymne à l’amour.” Feeling faint, she clutched the curtain, then collapsed before she could sing the final line, “God reunites those who love each other.”
“I can think of only one thing, to join him,” Piaf told Bourgeat three days later. “I have nothing left to live for. Singing? I sang for him. My repertoire was full of love, and you can be sure that I’ll sing my story each night. What’s more, each song reminds me of his gestures, things he said, everything reminds me of him. It was the first time I was really happy. I lived for him, he was my reason for being, for my car, my clothes, the springtime, they were all for him.” Along with intense grief, she was also suffering from acute arthritic pain in her joints. The first of a series of attacks that would plague her for the rest of her life, it was a condition brought on, her entourage thought, by the shock to her system after the death of Cerdan.
Some weeks later, she told another friend, “I try in vain to understand but I can’t. The pain gets worse each day. I would never have imagined I’d wish for death as a deliverance, a joy. I was someone who loved life and now I hate it.” On November 10, after Cerdan’s remains were identified by his watchband (a gift from Piaf), a state funeral was held in France, where his disappearance was a national tragedy. Piaf wrote