Edith Piaf: Eminent Street Chanteuse

Edith Piaf: Eminent Street Chanteuse by Roxanne McDonald

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.

When WWII called away Asso, Piaf took on her own callings. She continued to record; became involved in a new relationship with singer and actor Paul Meurisse; and would eventually help friend and composer Michel Emer escape France when it was under Nazi rule. Edith acted in a Cocteau one-act; continued her “refined” cultural education; and, as was now her signature pattern, broke it off with Meurisse and moved again with Simone…into an apartment over a brothel.

While it was suspected that Piaf, to some degree, became involved with brothel patrons—now the Gestapo and Nazi officers and men—Edith was conversely co-writing protest lyrics, performing such songs, and adamantly refusing to censor herself or her performances despite Nazi commands to do so.

In the next few years, Piaf would get involved with Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg; would reportedly pose for French prison photos that would be used for underground documents for escape; and would have brief affairs with journalist Henri Contet, soon-to-be pop phenom Yves Montand, and married boxer Marcel Cerdan. She would then make her way to America, touring at first to disappointed audiences who had preconceived ideas and expectations but coming to impress New Yorkers and launching her status as an international star.

While “Je Ne Regrette Rien” became a signature piece for Piaf, another most memorable song came about by way of Piaf’s most enduring love relationship but most unfortunate and most painful end: When Cerdan indicated he would come to Piaf in America, she wanted him to get there faster than by boast and urged him to come by plane. The plane crashed, killing her lover. While she would co-write [with Minnot] and then record the powerful “L’Hymne à l/Amour,” she would also plummet into addiction and mourning, indulging her guilt and pain by getting loaded on booze and starting a morphine habit that with other substances would have her in and out of rehabilitation for the next few years.

As had others mentored her, so did Piaf mentor. One relationship she took on following Cerdan’s death was one of multiple characteristics—minus the sexual. Young Charles Aznavour would become Piaf’s protégé, personal assistant, chauffeur, etc., and she would help him get billed and booked, taking Aznavour on tour, including his songs in recordings, and teaching him the nuances of the performing life.

A car accident with Piaf and protégé as passengers left Edith with a broken arm and two broken ribs; and the morphine the doctor prescribed accelerated her drug abuse and alcoholism. Once she married singer Jacques Pills (in 1952), though, he would insist on Edith getting detoxification and rehabilitation…which she ended up attempting three different times, all the while continuing to record, appear, and perform.

After only three years of marriage, Piaf and Pills divorced, and once again she was spiraling. This time, with the onset of DTs, Piaf was admitted to the hospital.

In a later and last detox attempt, Piaf finally succeeded in cleaning up, almost matching her health to her hearty career success. But while her acclaim escalated [her following akin to worship, says Steve Huey of All Music Guide], her health declined. After being involved in a second car accident in 1959, wherein her face was cut up, Piaf was on stage performing at the Waldorf Astoria, in New York, when she began to vomit blood. After emergency surgery, she continued her tour, and again required emergency stomach surgery back in Paris.

By the time she had romantically and creatively teamed for a time with songwriter Georges Moustaki, had returned to the studio to record the now world-classic “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” had begun a run at the Olympia, had married again, this time to singer Théo Sarapo, a man nearly half her age, and had completed performances and recordings with him, Piaf was dying…though her voice wasn’t, and never reflected weakening of any sort.

It was the summer of 1963 when the great chanteuse fell into a cancer-induced coma and subsequently went in and out of consciousness for weeks and then months…until on October 11th, she died in her bed in her Plascassier villa, where Piaf’s husband and half-sister had taken her to care for her.

Just as remarkable as was her life, so was Edith Piaf’s funeral and mourning process by more than several thousands of worshippers. First, Simone and Serapo brought her body back to Paris, so Piaf fans would believe their star had fallen where she had started to shine. Next, though the Archbishop had forbidden a mass for the woman with the scandalous lifestyle, as the funeral cars began made their way to Pere-Lachaise, there were such massive numbers [tens of thousands, reportedly 40,000, according to Deborah Straw] crowding onto the streets to express their grief and follow the funeral procession that businesses closed their shops and all ordinary traffic was halted in the very streets where the little sparrow with the astounding voice had begun her life, where she had made her first meager living, and from where she had made her irrefutable rise.

References include Deborah Straw, at Literary Traveler; Steve Huey, All Music Guide, at Vh1; and others.

and others.

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