No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [92]
Piaf recorded “Ça ira” before leaving with Pills to tour France with Achille Zavatta’s Super Circus, an extravaganza combining circus acts with big-name stars. The year before, Tino Rossi had earned a small fortune as the featured entertainer. This year, Pills would end the first half of the program, and Piaf—“the most famous female singer in the world,” according to the poster—would close the show. Zavatta no doubt knew that her family had been circus people. Piaf’s memories of touring with her father may have made her look with favor on the engagement, but the chance to earn a handsome salary would have been hard to refuse in any case. One can imagine her camaraderie with Zavatta, who clowned, did acrobatics, trained wild animals, and played the trumpet, drums, and saxophone; he was also a freethinker who belonged to the Masons. What Edith may not have envisioned was the grueling nature of their tour, eighty cities in nearly as many days.
On May 23, to the delight of those who remembered her as a child, the Super Circus performed in Bernay. The Bernay cinema ran Boum sur Paris in Edith’s honor. The local paper boasted, “After applauding Edith Piaf, Jacques Pills, and the orchestra, you’ll want to hear them all over again.” Edith barely had time to see her relatives in Bernay and Falaise before touring the rest of Normandy and all the towns along the Atlantic coast. By July, her health had deteriorated. A local doctor who treated the star for a pulmonary infection and probably gave her morphine ironized, “She’s fortunate to have been vaccinated by a phonograph needle, which lets her touch people’s hearts when she has another kind of injection.”
Edith left the tour in July to return to the clinic. After her treatment, Pills took her to his family home, where she spent most of the next six weeks in bed. Her illness, diagnosed as peritonitis, required surgery and another period of convalescence. By late October, she was able to go onstage but had to intersperse concerts with less demanding engagements, including brief television appearances. With Gilbert Bécaud she wrote “Légende,” a ghostly tale of ill-fated love (the narrator speaks from beyond the grave). Introduced by her long spoken prelude, it was a departure in Piaf’s effort to reach the audience, like another new song in a different vein, the anti-war “Miséricorde.” Both would be recorded with lush orchestration and dramatic background choirs, a popular (though intrusive) device at that time.
In December, Piaf participated in Jean Renoir’s first film in France in fifteen years, French Cancan—a tribute to the fin de siècle Montmartre that gave rise to the chanson réaliste as well as to the cancan, the art forms that had recently been depicted in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. A Frenchman from a great artistic family, Renoir meant to celebrate popular culture more authentically than Hollywood had done. To this end, he asked Piaf to play her precursor Eugénie Buffet in a reprise of Buffet’s “Sérénade au pavé,” a serenade to the streetwalker figure that clung to Piaf’s image. This time the star wore not peasant garb but the long skirts and bonnet of the 1890s. She received top billing and a salary of seven hundred thousand francs for a cameo lasting three minutes.
On December 19, Edith’s thirty-ninth birthday, she may have reflected that 1954 had consisted of poignant returns to the past punctuated by bouts with illness and rehabilitation. In the new year, she took a holiday with Emer, Barrier, and the lyricist Jean Dréjac, whose songs of prewar life, particularly the nostalgic “Ah!