Dominic Bliss follows the legendary chanteuse from a childhood of poverty to international fame…
La Vie en Rose. Conduct a worldwide poll on the most famous French songs of all time and this classic is sure to be close to the top. Written in 1945 and released two years later, it launched the international career of Parisian singer Édith Piaf. The lyrics – which she wrote herself, scribbling them on a tablecloth in a café on the Champs-Élysées – speak of blissful romance and optimism, a beacon of hope as France recovered from the brutality of German occupation.
Piaf enjoyed plenty more musical success during her career, most notably with Hymne à l’Amour (1946), Milord (1959), and that other timeless classic, Non, je ne regrette rien (1960). By the time of her death in 1963, she had recorded hundreds of songs, many self-penned, and most in the style of chansons réalistes or chanson française.
On top of her guttural, vibrato delivery, her greatest strength, especially given her petite size, was the power of her voice. “Her style epitomised that of the classic French chanson: highly emotional, even melodramatic, with a wide, rapid vibrato that wrung every last drop of sentiment from a lyric,” explains music writer Steve Huey on the online database AllMusic. “She preferred melancholy, mournful material, singing about heartache, tragedy, poverty and the harsh reality of life on the streets.”
It was a world Piaf knew all too well. Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in December 1915 in a working-class neighbourhood of Paris called Belleville, she faced a childhood of poverty. Her father, Louis Gassion, was an acrobatic street performer, her mother, Annetta Maillard, a singer and circus performer. Abandoned by her mother, Piaf later lived with her paternal grandmother, Maman Tine, who ran a brothel in the Normandy town of Bernay, where the prostitutes fussed over her, becoming her surrogate mothers in a way.
THE LITTLE SPARROW
As a youngster, Piaf was almost blind due to acute keratitis. She liked to tell the (almost certainly fictitious) story of how, one Sunday, the prostitutes accompanied her on a pilgrimage to honour a local saint, after which her eyesight was miraculously restored. At 14, Piaf joined her father on his travels around France while he performed as a street acrobat. Initially she would collect tips from onlookers but, one day, she sang a song at the end of her father’s act, which the crowd adored, showering her with coins. From then on her father had her sing at the end of every show.
Back in Paris, Piaf continued her singing, earning pocket money by performing on the streets, in cafés and in army barracks. Mixing with prostitutes, pimps and petty criminals, she endured an impoverished and uncomfortable youth that would colour her future, even after she achieved worldwide fame.
Her lucky break came in October 1935 when, while singing in the street, she was noticed by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, who offered her a regular spot at his cabaret, Le Gerny’s, for 40 francs a night. Leplée took her under his wing, taught her the basics of stage presence, beefed up her repertoire of songs and gave her the stage name La Môme Piaf – Parisian slang for The Little Sparrow.
Photo: Studio Harcourt/Wikimedia Commons
Carolyn Burke, author of No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, describes Piaf’s opening night, a performance that launched her career: “Nearly paralysed with stage fright, she made the sign of the cross while Leplée told the audience he had found his new attraction in the street. Edith came onto a stage lit by harsh orange spots. It was as if a guttersnipe had invaded the inner sanctum. Yet as the guests, electrified by her voice, put down their glasses, Édith sensed that she held them. She threw up her arms at the end of the song. There was silence, then wild applause and shouts of ‘bravo’.”
In the audience that night was actor and singer Maurice Chevalier. “That kid sings straight from the guts,” he famously said. Before long, Piaf was performing live on Parisian radio station Radio-Cité. In December 1935 she cut her first record-singing L’Étranger, Les Mômes de la Cloche and two songs in Parisian slang and acted in her first film, La Garçonne, released the following year.
Piaf_Harcourt_1946, Photo: Wikimedia Commons
But her career almost derailed the moment it started. In April 1936, Leplée was shot dead in his apartment. Due to her links to Paris’s underworld, Piaf immediately became a suspect and was questioned extensively by the police. It wasn’t until almost a year later that her name was finally cleared.
By then, she had teamed up with lyricist Raymond Asso. If Piaf was a sort of Parisian Eliza Doolittle, then Asso was her Professor Higgins. Piaf later wrote: “It took him three years to cure me. Three years of patient affection to teach me that there was another world beyond that of prostitutes and pimps. Three years to cure me of Pigalle, of my chaotic childhood… to become a woman and a star instead of a phenomenon with a voice that people listened to as if being shown a rare animal at a fair.”
It was during the German occupation of France in the Second World War that her star began to rise. She was regularly seen performing in Parisian nightclubs and brothels, the latter often frequented by Nazi officers. After the war, she was accused of collaborating with the occupying forces, and it wasn’t until the French Resistance spoke in her favour -explaining how she had performed at prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and had helped prisoners escape-that she was exonerated.
Édith Piaf performing in Rotterdam, here with husband,Theo Sarapo, Photo: Wikimedia Commons
After La Vie en Rose brought her worldwide attention, she spent the 1950s touring Europe and the Americas, performing on The Ed Sullivan Show eight times, and twice at the Carnegie Hall. She had multiple lovers over the years, including the French singer and actor Yves Montand and the American movie star John Garfield, and was married to French singer Jacques Pills and Greek singer Théo Sarapo. But her greatest love of all was the French boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, who died in a plane crash in 1949, and for whom she later recorded L’Hymne à l’Amour.
TORMENT AND TRAGEDY
In 1951, Piaf broke several bones in a car accident and was prescribed morphine for the pain. She became addicted to the drug, alongside alcohol, a situation made worse by two subsequent and near-fatal car crashes. Despite her health problems, her fame continued to grow. She released dozens of records and appeared in several movies, right up until her death.
In early 1963, she slipped into a coma caused by liver cancer. Eventually, in the October of that year, in the Provençal town of Grasse, she died at the age of 47, with these last words: “Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.” Her husband, Sarapo, secretly drove her body to Paris so fans would think she had died in her home town.
Anyone wishing to follow in Piaf’s footsteps has quite the selection of places to visit. At 72 Rue de Belleville, in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, is a plaque marking the building she was supposedly born in although her birth certificate states that the nearby Hôpital Tenon was her actual place of birth. At 54 rue Pierre-Charron, in the 8th, stands the former site of Le Gerny’s, the cabaret where she enjoyed her first real success, while on Boulevard des Capucines, in the 9th, is the concert hall L’Olympia, where some of her finest Parisian performances took place.
In Place Édith Piaf, in the 20th arrondissement, fans will find a statue of the singer and Bar de la Place Édith Piaf, filled with memorabilia and tributes. The Musée Édith Piaf (musee-edithpiaf.com) is housed in her former apartment at 5 Rue Crespin, in the 11th arrondissement. There are plans to build a second museum in Grasse, near where she died.
Her final resting place is in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. More than 40,000 mourners accompanied the funeral cortege, bringing the capital’s traffic to a halt. The weekend following her death, more than 300,000 of her records were sold. Many were purchased by the ordinary working-class Parisians whose stories The Little Sparrow had so faithfully told in her songs.
From France Today Magazine
Lead photo credit : Photo: Shutterstock
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