Edith Piaf: Eminent Street Chanteuse
Edith Piaf: Eminent Street Chanteuse by Roxanne McDonald
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Non, rien de rien Non, je ne regrette rien Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait Ni le mal tout ça m’est bien égal!~Edith Piaf |
You may have heard these lyrics in the final scenes of The Dreamers; in La Vie en Rose; or even [sadly] in a recent commercial. However you get your first exposure, you likely can’t help but take notice of the evocative, part guttural part warbled vocals of the legendary Edith Piaf.
So much of what contributes to the Edith Piaf mystique is in her unique and visceral rendering of the chanson-style singing. But her life experiences surely impacted followers and fans, as well—to the point where many details have evolved as possible legends rather than truths:
She was born Edith Giovanna Gassion in December of 1915, to father Louis Gassion, a touring acrobat and street performer, and Anita Maillard, an aspiring singer who was known as an alcoholic who would also work the streets as a lady of the night when she wasn’t busking as Line Marsa.
When her father was called to serve during WWI, the little girl was sorely neglected, inspiring her father to send her to live with Edith’s paternal grandmother, a brothel madame in Bernay.
Besides having a more doting grandmother, five-year-old Edith was often cared for by the prostitutes, women who in one instance reputedly closed down the brothel when Edith became temporarily blinded by acute conjunctivitis: the women turned to keeping a day-long prayer vigil. A few days later, Edith’s sight returned.
Louis Gassion retrieved his daughter in 1922, when Edith was seven, old enough to join her papa first cutely passing the hat to encourage larger contributions then singing, by the age of nine, on the streets of Paris.
By the time Edith was a teenager, she had developed her voice, joined up with her half-sister Simone, and was singing for tips in cafes, at military camps, and on the streets, when she wasn’t running with the thugs or engaging in transient rendezvous in one of the flop houses or cheap hotels where she and Simone stayed. More accurately, Edith would use the tougher men of Paris, the pimps and petty criminals, as protection on the streets.
At seventeen, Edith fell in love with Luis Dupont, a delivery boy. They had a child together whom Edith neglected as much as she would soon neglect her lover—busy singing and bored with the relationship as she was. She would leave him holding their daughter, a child who soon died in his care because of meningitis [not because of his parenting]
Always to be one to engage in less than healthy relationships—or those that were unusual, short-lived, or short on “normative” dynamics, which bored her anyway—Piaf hooked up with another street denizen, a protector, a pimp who kept a generous percentage of her performance earnings. This instead of prostituting her in the usual fashion. Reportedly, as she continued a pattern that would last her lifetime and readied to leave this man as well, he took shots at her—shots that she barely escaped being felled by.
Now nineteen, Edith was discovered on the streets by cabaret owner Louis Lepleé—who took her in, groomed her for the role of star act, and determined she was la môme Piaf (the waif sparrow, the little sparrow, or the kid sparrow, depending on who translates).
No longer Edith Gassion but Edith Piaf, the teenager with the powerful, mournful voice with its “rapid vibrato that wrung the sentiment out of every lyric” had a manager who streamlined her song list, mentored her in stage presence, and gave her what would be her trademark little black dress.
From her stage debut, attended by the day’s celebrities, to her first Polydor Records contract, Piaf had become one of the most sought-after stars of the time. But running with the same sort of street people would keep her suspect in more ways than not. In 1936, for instance, the man who had reinvented her was shot and killed in his Paris home. Because of her continued associations of ill repute, police made Edith the prime suspect in Lepleé’s death. Despite the fact Piaf was cleared, the media’s persistent speculation kept her at the center of the scandal—a phenomenon that now threatened to ruin her future as a professional singer.
Giving up the weak reception tours outside of Paris, Edith returned to the city to seek support in resuscitating her singing success. She approached songwriter, businessman, and Foreign Legion veteran Raymond Asso—whose work she had earlier declined performing. Asso not only took her on as a charge, managing her career, he consummated his great attraction to her, making her his lover, forbidding her continued association with the pimps and other undesirables, and establishing a basic education regime Edith had been deprived of in the first part of her life.
But Asso didn’t altogether erase the street urchin in Edith: rather, he encouraged her stories of being virtually born on the streets [one legend has it she was born under a street lamp] and of having grown up on them. These stories he used to create [and co-create, with Marguerite Monnot] the Piaf repertoire, to showcase Piaf the anomaly, to usher in Piaf the Parisian star.