No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [99]
The star followed her Carnegie Hall triumph with engagements in Montreal, Chicago, and Havana, then flew back to New York in February for a month at the Empire Room. On her nights off, she took in Broadway musicals and listened to her favorites, Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. Unable to overcome her exhaustion, she asked Bourgeat to send her books on spirituality as a cure for her “disequilibrium,” the unbalanced state maintained with tranquilizers, mood elevators, and drugs for pain that helped her keep the grueling pace she had set herself. In particular, she wanted Allan Kardec’s works on the science of Spiritism (his coinage) to supplement her Rosicrucian readings.
Piaf told Bourgeat that she meant to “study spiritual science seriously this time, without being blinded by grief or surrounded by exploitative bastards,” in a letter scolding him when she did not find the books she had requested on her return to a brief rest in New York. That spring, she maintained an even more dizzying pace, flying to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in May for extended engagements. In São Paulo, on learning that her divorce from Pills had become final, she told Bourgeat how much she missed “Paname” (Paris).
The books on Spiritism finally caught up with her in San Francisco, where she sang two shows a night at the Fairmont Hotel in June. It is unlikely that she had time for study, but she did take a day off to travel south, past the region’s apricot orchards, to San Jose, to visit the Egyptianate Rosicrucian Temple with Liébrard and the Bonels. That day, they were all welcomed as brothers and sisters of the AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis). Marc Bonel reflected, “She was seeking a philosophy designed to avoid harm and give protection, a peaceful way to love.”
About this time, Piaf found another unexpected source of renewal, in a melody that accompanied her throughout her travels that year. This mesmerizing thirties tune, which she first heard in Argentina, proved to be Angel Cabral’s “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir,” a vals criollo, or Peruvian waltz, with a fast, light tempo that belied its lyrics on the pain of love. In August, after a return engagement in Hollywood, she flew back to Paris with Bourgeat’s books and Cabral’s score, spirituality and music being complementary paths to the “profound peace” she sought even when embarking on new adventures.
“After Jacques [Pills], my long pursuit of love began again,” Piaf said a few years later. “But it was as if I had been playing blind man’s buff,” she reflected, perhaps remembering the sense of helplessness she had known as a child. But if she wore a blindfold where love was concerned, she was clairvoyant when it came to music. After Monnot heard Cabral’s waltz and said that she wished she had composed it, Piaf acquired the rights. That autumn, during the long-awaited rest she had promised herself, the star had time to absorb the musical genres encountered on her travels—American blues and jazz, Mexican mariachis, Latin love songs. But it was the Peruvian waltz that stayed with her, inspiring her vision of an updated repertoire for the changed musical scene in France. One day, the lyricist Michel Rivgauche brought her his adaptation of the American folk song “Allentown Jail” (called “Les Prisons du roi”), which she adopted on the spot. As he was leaving, she gave him Cabral’s score and asked him for lyrics to suit the tempo, the alternations of strong and weak beats that give the waltz its intoxicating sway.
Rivgauche returned with lyrics that suited both the melody and Piaf’s persona, that of the woman who finds love only to see it vanish before her eyes. His poem imagines a couple brought together in the crush of a Paris street crowd—as on a simmering Quatorze Juillet. The woman first evokes the euphoric atmosphere: “Je revois la ville en fête et en délire / Suffoquant sous le soleil et sous la