No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [86]
The day before her birthday, the star had another shock. At Alice Gérardin’s urging, the police came to Boulogne in search of the Gérardins’ missing possessions, including Toto’s trophies and eighteen kilos of gold bars. Although Edith was cleared of any misdeed, the scandal landed her back in the pages of Détective, as if fifteen years of consummate professionalism since the Leplée affair counted for nothing. For the popular press she was a husband-stealer, “the George Sand of the twentieth century.” Like the novelist known for her love affairs, Piaf was said to be strangely seductive: “From her frail person emanates a magnetism that envelops, subjugates, conquers, ravishes.” Her troubles with men, the journalist implied, were the lot of the “extraordinary woman.”
Even though the press thought that Edith’s relations with Toto had ended with the return of the gold bars, she kept hoping that they might be regularized. Her “ange bleu” (his eyes were the shade of blue she loved) had shown her that she was a passionate woman. During a separation she wrote, “No-one has ever made love to me as much as you do.… How I’ll miss your body, your beautiful thighs and soft skin, your adorable ass.” She would do whatever he wished, she wrote some weeks later: “Think of Joan of Arc, who would have believed that a simple woman would do such great things. She did it for the love of God, I’ll do it for you.” In another letter she fantasized about “lying between your beautiful thighs with my head on Popol … letting my dreams come true.” Hoping they might have a child, she again vowed to stop drinking. But their rendezvous had to be discreet since his wife’s detectives were still on the job: “The more difficult our love is,” she said, speaking as much to herself as to Toto, “the more beautiful it will be!”
Meanwhile, Edith dedicated each performance of her hit song “Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux” to her “blue angel.” (An avid movie fan, she may have associated Gérardin with Dietrich’s role as the temptress in The Blue Angel—an intriguing gender reversal.) Some time later, with greater sympathy than the journalist who wrote that Piaf’s tangled love life was the lot of the “extraordinary” woman, her friend René Rouzaud observed, “This exceptional being had the right to an exceptional life without our standing in judgment. And if the tradition of French chanson was enriched by her love affairs, we should only be grateful.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
1952–1956
Hoping to put the past behind her, Edith sold her house in Boulogne and moved to an interim rental in the seventeeth arrondissement. The highest-paid French entertainer in her category, she still often spent more than she earned and for this reason multiplied professional engagements. In the spring of 1952, she was so busy that there were few opportunities to join Toto at the out-of-the-way hotels they frequented to elude the press. While touring the south of France with Aznavour, Avelys, and a group called Les Garçons de la Rue, Edith no doubt spent time with Tony Frank in Marseille during her ten-day stint at the Théâtre des Variétés. But soon after her return to Paris, she told a reporter that it was the only place for her. The city that she had celebrated in song after song claimed her heart, “especially now,” she said with a smile, that she had met a man for whom she might give up her career. His predecessor, she added, had been “a mistake.” What she did not say was that, although her rapport with this new man seemed promising, she was hedging her bets