No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [90]
Americans never learned to spell Pills’s name, but he was acclaimed as Piaf’s partner when they returned to Paris. In April 1953, they sang separately and together for a month at the Marigny Theater while also rehearsing Cocteau’s Le Bel Indifférent, planned to follow their engagement at this elegant venue. After poking fun at their audiences (“good citizens glad to go slumming for a night by hearing the most famous muse of the streets”), Paris-Presse noted that Piaf owed her fame to “the art with which she extracts from daily life all the particles of poetry it contains.” In the slums, the critic wrote, she had discovered “dreams of all sorts—of perfection, pity and compassion for human suffering, a generalized tenderness … pure romanticism barely camouflaged.” As for Pills, this “charming” singer brought the audience back to earth with “a marked personal triumph.”
Despite the success of her heartbreaking new song, “Bravo pour le clown,” some reviewers were less than enthusiastic about the Piaf-Pills partnership. Their joint appearance was “conjugated and conjugal,” France-Soir ironized, as if this coupling of professional and private lives meant that the singer known for her unconventional ways had joined the bourgeoisie. The public remained unaware that in order to perform each night, Piaf had recourse to the morphine prescribed for her chronic pain. When the revival of Le Bel Indifférent ended, on May 28, she went back to the rehab clinic; three weeks later, after a successful treatment, she left, determined to find a new focus.
Since many believed that a chanteuse réaliste should not forget her origins, the singer took this view into account when choosing projects. The two films in which she acted that summer seemed tailor-made for her. For a cameo appearance that winked at the “conjugal” side of her life in Boum sur Paris, a musical starring Pills, the couple performed the tune that had brought them together, “Je t’ai dans la peau,” along with Piaf’s “Pour qu’elle soit jolie, ma chanson,” a witty “dispute” about music that dramatized their relations. For Si Versailles m’était conté, a reconstruction of court life at Versailles, Piaf, in peasant garb, sang the revolutionary anthem “Ça ira.” (She nearly fell off the ladder from which she called for the death of the nobility.) Leading an insurrectionary mob, even a pretend one, inspired her to add “Ça ira” to her concert repertoire, but after performing the song in costume, Piaf dropped it when she saw that she could not change fast enough for her modern songs. When the film came out, audiences applauded her as France’s pasionaria, ignoring the debate surrounding its tremendous cost and its vilification of the monarchy.
Pills may have wondered whether his wife’s revolutionary ardor would manifest itself during the holiday they planned in the conservative Landes region of southwestern France in September. Rather than return to New York and the Versailles, they were to spend three months at his family home—playing Ping-Pong, taking walks, and writing the occasional song. Villagers watched the couple ride tandem down the region’s long, flat roads and cheered at their benefit for the local school, an idea of Edith’s. While Jacques and Simone held their