No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [88]
Before leaving to tour the Western United States, the couple flew to Montreal to perform together and see Edith’s sister, Denise, who had lived there since her marriage. The young woman was shocked by the changes in Edith brought on by cortisone: “Her face was puffy, she had gained a lot of weight.… Her hands were not yet deformed but her feet hurt terribly.” But she was relaxed enough to cajole Pills into promising her a mink coat as well as one for Denise. Her sister amused her by taking credit for her success, since Edith had begun singing in the streets after Denise’s birth changed the dynamics in their household. “I never thought of that,” the star replied. “I’m famous because of you.”
Once they reached Los Angeles, it was clear that Piaf was far from famous there. Despite her appearance at a Hollywood gala for John Huston’s Moulin Rouge and the publicity for her stint at the chic Mocambo Club, her New York success had had little impact. In January 1953, she and Pills appeared for a week at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, where Judy Garland, to whom Americans often likened her, had recently performed. On their return to Los Angeles, the couple met Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, and Humphrey Bogart, and Edith befriended Lena Horne, who had come to her opening night at the Playhouse in 1947. Edith admired Lena as a highly professional performer who, like herself, had had her share of adversity. (Horne and Lennie Hayton, the white musician who become her second husband, had fled to Paris in 1947 to escape the widespread hostility toward interracial marriages.) After a two-week gig in Las Vegas, where they applauded Horne’s glamorous show at the brand-new Sands Hotel, Piaf and Pills flew to Miami Beach. “You’ll weep, sob, thrill, you’ll stand up and cheer,” her Riviera Lounge poster promised. But even though the local critics deemed her show a “smash hit,” she missed Paris, her friends, and their way of life.
Edith planned to come home in March, she told Cocteau. “What a joy it was to read and reread your letter. I know how many people love you, but if you could only know how much I love you in spite of the rare times that we see each other. I have a funny feeling each time I see you that I want to protect you against the world’s meanness, then I realize each time that it’s you who make me feel better and give me the strength to deal with this hard world. Don’t you think it’s marvelous to love someone without needing him, to love him just for himself? Well, that’s the way I love you.”
In March, Piaf and Pills moved into the Boulevard Lannes apartment, which had remained empty during their six months in America. “It was too big for Edith,” Jacques’s sister Simone recalled. “She felt lost.” When Simone came to live there after their return, she found little furniture but many signed editions of French classics, including the works of Cocteau. Edith preferred the bedroom, the kitchen, and the salon, where aspirant composers waited by the Bechstein piano until she was ready to receive them. (She preferred to pick out tunes on its companion, an electric piano called an Ondoline.) “From the start,” Simone said, “I was seduced by Edith’s intelligence, her desire to keep learning, her enormous talent.”
Simone soon learned to do everything Edith’s way. When she writhed in arthritic pain, her sister-in-law called the doctor for more cortisone. When she had