No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [97]
Piaf was right about changes in the music business during her absence. Mistinguett had died earlier that year, having kept her name and her famous legs in the limelight since her debut in 1895. Her death marked the end of an era, that of the entertainers who had dominated Edith’s start in show business. By 1956, new trends were apparent in French musical culture, to some extent reinvigorated by North American rhythms but also by the successes of Edith’s protégés. Montand was now a popular star, often in movies with his wife, Simone Signoret; Aznavour had found fame as a crooner whose emotional intensity resembled Piaf’s; Les Compagnons’ upbeat harmonies had made them an international success; Eddie Constantine was enjoying a film career as a private eye. Piaf’s mentoring had transmitted to each of them her sense of métier but often at a cost to herself that she acknowledged only to close friends like Jacques Bourgeat.
There were also the new chansonniers who wrote and performed their own songs, among them Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, and Jacques Brel. Piaf admired each for his way of extending the tradition. Brassens’s bawdy poems on the lives of working people and his carnal singing style gave what was called the nouvelle chanson an idiom that spoke to the young, as did her friend Ferré’s subversive lyrics about gutter denizens, which were sometimes banned from the radio on charges of obscenity. Piaf also thought highly of Brel’s dark cadences, his way of turning each song into a brief drama that moved audiences at all levels of society while remaining intensely lyrical, an approach that owed much to her own.
Since the late 1940s, the jazz clubs in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain had shifted nightlife from Pigalle to the Left Bank, until an enterprising cabaret director reopened Cocteau’s old nightspot on the Right Bank, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Unable to afford a star like Piaf, he had invented one, the sultry, saucy Juliette Gréco, whose on- and offstage nonchalance intrigued well-heeled audiences. Since then, Gréco, the muse of Jean-Paul Sartre’s circle in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, had come to epitomize the mood of postwar youth.
Some even said that Gréco was “the new Piaf.” Like Piaf, the young woman performed in black, but instead of a dress, she wore the “existentialist” uniform, a turtleneck sweater and pants. A few years before, Piaf had flown into a rage on learning that Gréco was singing Aznavour’s “Je hais les dimanches” (“I Hate Sundays”), even though she had rejected it when he first brought it to her. Piaf began performing the song “to show that existentialist how to sing.” After recording her own version of Dréjac’s “Sous le ciel de Paris” once Gréco had popularized it, Piaf announced that she would not share “her” composers with the singer; Gréco let on that though she admired some of Piaf’s songs, she did not like her as a person.
In this context, Piaf feared that, like Chevalier, she had become a kind of national monument. She need not have worried, even if her lyrics-of-the-people tradition was one “in which the slightest exaggeration makes you look ridiculous,” as the Figaro littéraire’s music critic observed after seeing her at the Olympia. In the past, Fréhel and Yvonne George had hit just the right note, he continued, but few apart from Piaf could carry on the tradition. The public always knew if a singer was faking it, but “no such fears with Piaf.… She wins us over with the first refrain.”
To the amazement of Edith’s intimates, her onstage mastery still hit them right in the heart. Micheline Dax, who had toured with her for years, watched the star from the first row at the Olympia: glued to her seat, she had to mop her tears with her handkerchief by the end of the show. “She had that effect even on those closest to her,” Marc Bonel said. “She was like a medium, she had the whole hall in her hands.… You have Chaplin, Sarah Bernhardt, Fernandel: she was of that order.”
Piaf’s celebrity was such that