No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [85]
That summer, a new Monsieur Piaf also came under her spell—a bicycle champion named André Pousse, who would become a well-known actor and artistic director of the Moulin Rouge. Since the inauguration of the Tour de France in 1903, the French had idolized cyclists as national heroes, much like boxers. Pousse had been famous in Paris since the 1940s, when he won the grueling six-day cycling events at the Vélodrome d’Hiver.
To show her love, Piaf gave the cyclist gifts just like those that Constantine had received and promised to forgo alcohol—a vow she was unable to keep, in part because of the two automobile accidents that she was involved in that year. On July 21, Aznavour lost control of their car on the way to Deauville, where she sang the next night with her arm in a sling. Three weeks later, when Pousse missed a turn, she suffered a badly broken arm and fractured ribs. Rushed to Paris for surgery, she stayed in the hospital till the end of August, then went home with her left arm immobilized and a craving for the morphine that had been prescribed to manage her distress.
Looked after by her Boulogne “family,” she regained her strength over the next few months but found it impossible to do without morphine, then as now a palliative for intense pain. “It was essential for my body,” Piaf wrote years later. “I was addicted.” Over the next year, until she underwent a cure, members of her entourage procured the drug for her. “I was earning millions; the drug dealers knew this and took advantage. I saw strange, disturbing people come into my apartment. I knew that they were robbing me, that they were exploiting my weakness, but I couldn’t put up any resistance.” Intimates like Dax, Monnot, and Barrier came to see her daily and did what they could to protect her, often to no avail.
By autumn, Piaf was able to do a star turn in a film called Paris chante toujours (she sang “Hymne à l’amour”). She also recorded six new songs, including three by Aznavour that showed her emotional range and his understanding of it: the lilting “Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux” (with its insider’s allusion to her love of blue eyes), a satiric send-up of traditional bourgeois Sundays called “Je hais les dimanches,” and a torrid tale of obssessive love, “Jézebel.” Another new song written to order for her, “Padam … padam,” by Contet and Glanzberg, mimed the singer’s possession by the melody that would continue to haunt her: it became one of Piaf’s greatest successes.
In November, a journalist praised her performance of “Padam” at her next stint at the A.B.C.: “Edith has found an extraordinary gesture which is not the sign of the cross. She hits herself hard on the forehead and chest; the audience shudders.” The star seemed to be telling her own story: “Ecoutez le chahut qu’il me fait / Padam … padam … padam … / Comme si tout mon passé défilait / Padam … padam … padam … / Faut garder du chagrin pour après / J’en ai tout un solfège sur cet air qui bat / Qui bat comme un coeur de bois.” (“Listen to it shake me / As if my whole life was marching by / I’ll give in to sorrow later / Note by note I parse this air that pounds / That pounds like a hardened heart.”)
That winter, as Piaf sang of being possessed by music, the cast of characters in Boulogne went through changes. Marc and Danielle Bonel legalized their union; Danielle began to manage Edith’s chaotic household. After some violent