Piaf, Edith (1915–1963)

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Piaf, Edith (1915–1963)

France's greatest popular singer of the 20th century, whose tragic life made her an interpreter of the lives and loves of ordinary men and women and whose ability to perform despite near-fatal bouts of illness became legendary. Pronunciation: aye-DEETH pYOFF. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion on December 19, 1915, in Paris, France; died at Plascassier (Alpes-Maritimes) of cirrhosis and hepatitis on October 10, 1963 (some sources erroneously cite the 11th), and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery; daughter of Louis-Alphonse Gassion (1881–1944, a contortionist) and Anette Giovanna Maillard (1895–1945, a singer under the name Line Marsa); had a year or two of schooling in Bernay (Eure); married Jacques Pills, in 1952 (divorced 1957); married Théo Sarapo, in 1962; children: (with Louis Dupont) daughter, Marcelle (1933–1935).

Cured of blindness by a purported miracle (1921); sang in the streets of Paris (1930–35); discovered by Louis Leplée (1935); questioned in Leplée's murder but recovered her career (1936); Raymond Asso got her an appearance at the A.B.C. music hall (1937); had a sensational run at the Bobino (1939); starred in Cocteau's Le Bel Indifférent (1940); sang forFrench POWs in Germany (1942–43); promoted Yves Montand (1944–46); made New York debut (1947); had affair with Marcel Cerdan (1947–49); began her addiction to morphine and other drugs after two auto accidents (1951); starred at the Olympia (1956, 1958); collapsed in New York, and at Dreux after a "suicide tour" (1959); had a sensational run at the Olympia after long illnesses (1961); made another triumphal return to the Olympia (1962); made last Paris appearance, at the Bobino, and last performance, at Lille (1963).

Selected discography (of some 300):

"Chand d'habits" (Alfred-Bourgeat), "L'Étranger" (Monnot, Juel-Malleron), "Les Mômes de la cloche" (Scotto-Decaye), "Mon amant de la Coloniale" (Juel-Asso), all 1936; "Browning" (Villard-Asso), "Mon Légionnaire" (Monnot-Asso), both 1937; "C'est lui que mon coeur a choisi" (d'Yresne-Asso), "Elle fréquentait la rue Pigalle" (Maitrier-Asso), "Le Fanion de la Légion" (Monnot-Asso), "J'entends la sirène" (Monnot-Asso), "Le Mauvais Matelot" (Dreyfus-Asso), all 1938; "Paris-Méditerranée" (Cloërec-Asso), "Je n'en connais pas la fin" (Monnot-Asso), both 1939; "L'Accordéoniste" (Emer), "Le Grand Voyage du pauvre nègre" (Cloërec-Delanoë), "On danse sur ma chanson" (Poll-Asso), all 1940; "C'était un jour de fête" (Monnot-Piaf), "Où sont-ils, mes p'tits copains?" (Monnot-Piaf), both 1941; "C'était une histoire d'amour" (Jal-Contet), "Histoire de coeur" (Monnet-Paif), both 1942; "Le Brun et le blond" (Monnot-Contet), "De l'autre côté de la rue" (Emer), "Y'a pas de printemps" (Monnot-Contet), all 1943; "Regardez-moi toujours comme ça" (Monnot-Contet), 1944; "C'est marveilleux" (Monnot-Contet), "Je m'en fous pas mal" (Emer-French), "Un refrain courait dans la rue" (Chauvigny-Piaf), "Les trois cloches" (Villard-Herrand), "La vie en rose" (Louiguy-Piaf), all 1946; "Un homme comme les autres" (Roche-Piaf), 1947; "Bal dans ma rue" (Emer), "Pour moi tout seule" (Lafarge, Monod-Gérard), "Le Prisonnier de la tour" (Blanche-Calvi), all 1949; "La Fête continue" (Emer), "Hymne à l'amour" (Monnot-Piaf), "Il fait bon t'aimer" (Glanzberg-Plante), all 1950; "Le Noël de la rue" (Heyral-Contet), "Padam … Padam" (Glanzberg-Contet), both 1951; "Bravo pour le clown" (Louiguy-Contet); "L'Effet que tu me fais" (Heyral-Piaf), "Johnny, tu n'est pas un ange" (Paul, Stellman-Lemarque, Roberts), all 1953; "La Goualante de pauvre Jean" (Monnot-Rouzaud), "Sous le ciel de Paris" (Giraud-Dréjac), both 1954; "C'est à Hambourg" (Monnot-Delécluse, Senlis), 1955; "Les Amants d'un jour" (Monnot, Delécluse-Senlis), "Autumn Leaves" (Kosma-Prévert, Mercer), "L'Homme à la moto" (Leiber-Stoller, Dréjac), all 1956; "Comme moi" (Monnot, Delécluse-Senlis), "La Foule" (Cabral-Rivgauche), "Les Grognards" (Giraud-Delanoë), "Les Prisons du roy" (Gordon-Rivgauche), "Salle d'attente" (Monnot-Rivgauche), all 1957; "Je sais comment" (Bouquet-Chauvigny, Bouquet), "Mon manège à moi" (Glanzberg-Constantin), both 1958; "Milord" (Monnot-Moustaki), 1959; "Les Amants merveilleux" (Veran-Gall), "Les Blouses blanches" (Monnot-Rivgauche), "Les Flons-Flons du bal" (Dumont-Vaucaire), "Mon Dieu" (Dumont-Vaucaire), "Les Mots d'amour" (Dumont-Rivgauche), "Non, je ne regrette rien" (Dumont-Vaucaire), all 1960; "Les Amants" (Dumont-Piaf), "C'est peut-être ça" (Dumont-Vaucaire), "Exodus" (Gold-Marnay), "Toujours aimer" (Dumont-Rivgauche), all 1961; "A quoi ça sert l'amour" (Emer), "Le Diable à la Bastille" (Dumont-Delanoë), both 1962; "La Chant d'amour" (Dumont-Piaf), "L'Homme de Berlin" (Laï-Vendôme), both 1963.

A tiny figure, barely 4'10", and weighing less than 90 pounds, moonfaced, chalky white, with a broad forehead, wide-set eyes, and auburn hair cut in bangs (later in life a thinning, frizzy mop), garbed always in a short black dress and wearing a small gold cross, her feet firmly planted, her arms and hands at her sides, gesturing only sparingly while belting out a song in a voice which could be heard for a city block—this was Edith Piaf, a giant in the world of popular music whose recordings decades after her death at 48 continued to sell in huge numbers. She was (and doubtless will remain) the greatest exponent of a French specialty, the chanson réaliste—songs in the form of minidramas telling of the lives and especially the sad loves of humble folk, the people of the streets. That she herself was a product of those harsh streets and lived a life full of woe and heartbreak added immeasurably to her appeal, which transcended all class boundaries. Hundreds of thousands of people (by some estimates up to two million) lined the streets of Paris to view her cortege on its way to Père Lachaise cemetery. Piaf was in every way a phenomenon, one of the true monstres sacrés of the entertainment world in the 20th century.

Legends grew up around her life which she did nothing to dispel. She seems to have believed most of them, in fact, beginning with the tale that she was born on the streets, literally—on a gendarme's cape in front of no. 72, rue de Belleville, in a working-class locale, when her impoverished mother could not get to the hospital in time. There is even a plaque there attesting to the "event," but in truth she was born at the Hôpital Tenon in the grimy faubourg of Ménilmontant.

Edith's parents were entertainers. Her mother Anette Giovanna Maillard was the daughter of Auguste-Eugène Maillard, a circus worker, and his Algerian Muslim wife, Emma ("Aïcha") Saïd ben Mohamed . Edith's father, Louis-Alphonse Gassion, son of a circus performer, was a 5' tall acrobat and contortionist who performed on streets and at fairs. Anette and Louis-Alphonse were married in 1914 when he went off to war. Edith, born on December 19, 1915, owed her un-French name to the heroic British nurse Edith Cavell , who had been executed by the Germans as a spy. Edith's mother soon left her to the slovenly care of Aïcha in order to pursue a life on the streets as a singer. Piaf never really forgave her mother, despite half-hearted attempts on both sides for a reconciliation. Line Marsa, as she called herself, lived on the fringes, singing in cheap clubs and getting jailed time and again for drunkenness and drug abuse. When Edith became famous, her mother would come by now and then for a grudging handout. She died in 1945 of a drug overdose; her frightened boyfriend, a fellow addict, left her on the street rolled up in a blanket.

Although by ordinary standards Edith's father would be termed neglectful, he did see to her care when he was in town; they never lost touch, and Piaf always expressed a sincere love for him. Probably when she was six or seven years old—establishing a firm chronology before she was discovered in 1935 is all but impossible—her Aunt "Zaza" (Zéphoria, Louis' sister) found her living with virtually no care and took her, with Louis' consent, to their mother, who was a cook in a brothel in Bernay in Normandy. Edith lived at the "house" for a year or so, during which time another event occurred surrounded by legend. By some accounts, including her own, she was at Bernay for several years from around the age of two or so, had arrived there blind, and was cured by a miracle following a visit by her and the girls of the brothel (who doted on her) to the shrine of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux . Even if it were only a sudden recovery from a severe case of conjunctivitis, as others have surmised, Piaf always maintained she had indeed been blind and been cured by Saint Thérèse—toward whom she thereafter observed a special devotion. She also noted that whenever she wanted to reach down to bring a song out of her "guts," she would close her eyes to "see" it better.

Sometime around 1922–23, she left Bernay, where she had gotten her only taste of formal schooling, and joined her father on the road through France and Belgium. She did odd jobs for him and, in time, became part of his act by singing a song or two. She learned how to size up an audience, get their attention, and live by her wits on the street. At about age 15, she cut loose to make a living on her own, traveling around Paris and its environs, often with a companion or two, sometimes getting permission to sing for soldiers in barracks. She had a close friend who would come in and out of her life many times thereafter, Simone ("Momone") Berteaut , a girl who claimed to be one of Louis' reputed 30 illegitimate children (he was a champion womanizer) and thus Edith's half-sister. After Piaf's death, Berteaut wrote an international bestseller which detailed a tangle of truth and fiction about every phase of Piaf's life and spawned numerous libel suits.

When not singing, Edith and Momone worked at sundry jobs as housemaids, assembling car headlights for Pile Wonder, making funeral wreaths, and varnishing army boots at Topin & Marguet. Once while singing on a corner, Piaf entranced an unemployed construction worker and errand boy, Louis ("P'tit Louis") Dupont. They moved in together, and in February 1933 she gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle. Piaf soon lost any taste for playing mother in a one-room garret and took to the streets again, leaving the baby in the care of Louis or a landlady, although never outright abandoning her. In fact, sometimes she trundled her along on her rounds, wresting a few more sous from a pitying public. As she drifted apart from Louis, she had a short, sad affair with a member of the Foreign Legion, which she later claimed, falsely, had inspired Raymond Asso to write her hit Mon Légionnaire. Tragedy followed in the summer of 1935 when Louis found her to tell her that Marcelle was ill with meningitis. The child died. To pay for a funeral, Edith got help from some friends, but the money they raised fell ten francs short. In desperation, she prostituted herself for the money, although, according to her other version, the customer, when she described her plight, just gave her the money and walked out, leaving her eternally grateful.

During these years, Edith had become immersed in the Paris underworld. Though promiscuous, she refused to become a prostitute; but she did fall into a relationship with a pimp, Albert, who "protected" her while taking a cut of her singing earnings. She would also spy out nightspots where women with money hung out so he could entice them away and rob them. Eventually she broke with him when one of his henchmen tried to turn a friend of hers, a sweet girl from the provinces, into a prostitute. The girl was found floating in the Seine. In revenge, Albert then tried to shoot Piaf in a bar but only grazed her neck when a man jostled his arm. And so it went—a directionless, sordid existence of singing on corners and in the seediest dives, one-night stands with sailors, brawls, and binges.

Then one day, as if she were the heroine of the most banal melodrama, she was discovered by a passerby while singing on a corner and was set on the road to stardom. The time was October 1935; the place, the corner of the avenue MacMahon and the rue Troyon near the Arc de Triomphe; the man, Louis Leplée, proprietor of Gerny's, a club just off the Champs-Élysées on the rue Pierre Charron which was currently popular with the smart set. He gave her an audition, said she looked like a piaf (Parisian argot for "sparrow"), and a week later, after some quick tutoring, introduced her: "Direct from the street, Kid Sparrow [ la Môme Piaf]!" She was dressed in a black skirt and a pullover with a scarf hiding a sleeve she hadn't finished knitting. The audience listened in a silence, which lasted for many agonizing seconds after she finished, and then broke into an ovation, Maurice Chevalier himself half-rising to cry, "That kid has what it takes!" She was launched.

Her first year of notoriety was a rollercoaster ride. She made recordings, sang in a film (Jean Lumir's La Garçonne), and even sang at a benefit gala, at the Cirque Medrano on February 17. But on April 6, 1936, Leplée was murdered at home, apparently for money by some hoodlums to whom she had probably introduced him. The police grilled her at length, but the crime went unsolved. Leplée's death devastated her personally, and for several months she was ostracized and forced to perform out of town (Brest, Nice, Brussels) or in bistros and between shows at suburban movie theaters. In the autumn, however, the threat of a return to the streets lifted when she got a ten-week radio contract at Radio-Cité and was taken in tow by Raymond Asso (1901–1968), a former shepherd, soldier, and factory manager turned lyricist and currently secretary to the celebrated Marie Dubas . In the three years they lived together, Piaf made him famous while he made her a star. He wrote songs for her—often with music by Marguerite Monnot (d. 1961), a song composer of genius, classically trained by Nadia Boulanger , who later wrote Irma la Douce—but even more important, Asso coached Piaf endlessly, showing her how to behave in polite society, present herself as a professional, and completely master the art of seamlessly welding music to a text, the essence of the chanson réaliste. He also made her study other singers—Damia (Marie-Louise Damien), Fréhel , and above all Marie Dubas, for whose artistry she always expressed the highest admiration. In 1937, Piaf was asked to appear at a gala at the Vélodrome d'Hiver celebrating the Popular Front, but it was when Asso finally persuaded Mitty Goldin to put her on in March at the A.B.C., the top music hall in Paris, that she definitively became a star. And she was now Edith–no longer "la Môme"–Piaf.

In 1938, she gave her first formal recital, at the Alhambra, and in 1939 her run at the Bobino music hall caused a sensation. Her recordings sold in bales, composers and lyricists sought her out, and club, music hall, radio, and touring contracts abounded. The war did her career no harm. She recorded and performed in the best venues. Finding she needed more of her own material, she also began to write lyrics. From 1941 to 1943, she lived in relative comfort in an apartment over a fancy bordello much frequented by the Germans. A patriot who enjoyed a special bond with military personnel, she refused to perform in Germany but did receive permission to sing for French POWs held there. She would have her picture taken with them; the photos then would be cropped and used on false identity cards which she would smuggle back to the prisoners for use if they could escape. In 1945, the National Committee of the Theatrical Purge cleared her of any charges of collaboration "with congratulations."

Meanwhile, in 1939 she had left Asso (although she always acknowledged her great debt to him) and taken up with a singer, Paul Meurisse, for two years. Jean Cocteau, with whom she had formed a deep friendship, portrayed their troubled affair in a two-character one-act play, Le Bel Indifférent, in which Piaf and Meurisse appeared; she had the only speaking role while Meurisse remained stonily silent. It ran for three months in 1940 to critical applause and launched Meurisse as an actor. The play drew the attention of Georges Lacombe, who cast her in a film, Montmartre-sur-Seine (1941). Henri Contet, a publicist on the film and budding lyricist, replaced Meurisse in her life for a year and wrote several of her most successful songs then and later. In the summer of 1944, she met a young "cowboy" singer, Yves Montand, and proceeded to change his style completely. In 1945, they appeared in Marcel Blistène's Étoile sans lumière, her favorite film role. Montand, who was starring by 1946, was one of a number of talents she would launch, among them singers Charles Aznavour and Eddie Constantine and the Academy Award-winning composer Francis Laï, once her accordionist.

In 1945, she wrote the words and refrain to her greatest international hit, "La vie en rose." Ironically, one of her few happy songs (a sweetly sentimental piece), she wrote it for another singer, Roland Gerbeau, and recorded it in 1946 only after Marianne Michel had done so. Piaf also discovered "Les Compagnons de Chanson" in 1945 and went on tour with these nine young male folksingers. Their 1946 recording of "Les trois cloches" (in English, "Jimmy Brown's Song") was an immense success. It was with them that she first appeared in New York, on October 30, 1947. Audiences liked the group but didn't know what to make of Piaf since her short black dress and repertoire of sad songs did not fit their image of an entertainer from "Gay Paree." Virgil Thomson on the front page of the Herald-Tribune educated the public about the tradition she represented, and she finished her stay with triumphant runs at the Club Versailles and the Waldorf-Astoria. She grew to love American audiences, and from then through the 1950s she returned almost yearly, mostly touring the coasts—New York, Washington, Miami, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Hollywood. She also toured in South America. Oddly, she never had much success in England.

Jean Cocteau">
A terrifying little sleepwalker who sings her dreams to the air on the edge of a roof.
—Jean Cocteau

It was during her first New York appearance that she became seriously involved with the European middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, whom she had first met in Paris in 1946. Cerdan was married, and his handlers managed to keep their affair out of the press, though it soon was an open secret. Piaf fell deeply in love with this kind, calm, affectionate man. She was present when he defeated Tony Zale for the world championship on September 21, 1948. When he lost the title to Jake LaMotta the following June, his managers blamed her for "distracting" him. Later that fall, Edith begged Marcel to fly to New York to join her. His Air France plane crashed in the Azores on October 29, 1949. That evening, Piaf went onstage at the Versailles and dedicated her program to his memory. His death devastated her. A superstitious person who believed in the occult, she "communicated" with him for three years through table-tapping seances. Characteristically, too, she met and reconciled with his widow and helped support their three sons.

Cerdan's death and two 1951 automobile accidents, the second of which broke an arm and several ribs, appear to have shoved her strongly down the self-destructive path she had traveled for years. She became addicted to the morphine she received after the accidents, setting off a battle with drug abuse complicated by her longstanding addiction to alcohol. She nevertheless continued to record, appeared in a musical, La P'tite Lili (written by Marguerite Monnot and Marcel Achard, 1951), and in five films—Paris chante toujours (Pierre Montazel, 1951), Si Versailles n'était conté (Sacha Guitry, 1953), Boum sur Paris (Pierre Montazel, 1954), French-Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954), and Les Amants de demain (Marcel Blistème, 1958).

Concert dates and tours, however, became sporadic because of repeated collapses and hospitalizations for cirrhosis, hepatitis, bleeding stomach ulcers, pancreatitis, and detoxification. She also began to suffer from severe arthritis. Her comebacks became legendary. In 1956, she returned to the Paris stage after a two-year absence with a three-month triumph at Bruno Coquatrix's Olympia, now the top venue. On January 13, 1957, she gave a Carnegie Hall recital, and in 1958 she broke all records in another three-month Olympia run. A third auto accident followed on September 6, 1958. (She herself did not drive a car.) From then through 1959, after collapsing at the Waldorf-Astoria in late February, she spent much of the year in hospitals and convalescing—only to collapse again, at Dreux on December 14, 1959, after a "suicide tour" taken in defiance of all advice.

Her endless, chaotic love affairs had continued apace. After liaisons with two professional cyclists, André Pousse and Louis ("Toto") Gérardin, she had married a successful singer, Jacques Pills, in Paris on July 29, 1952, and had a church wedding in New York on September 20, with her close friend Marlene Dietrich as her attendant. Jacques treated her well, but the pressures of their careers and her drug problems led to a divorce (May 16, 1957). After that, there were affairs with a singer, Félix Marten; the art gallery director André Schoeller; lyricist Georges Moustaki, who wrote one of her greatest successes, "Milord" (1959); Douglas Davis, an American painter who did her best portraits; and, in 1960–61, composer and singer Charles Dumont, who wrote a string of hits including her last "signature" song, "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960).

Piaf's last four years were a kaleidoscope of hospitalizations, recuperations, and miraculous comebacks. A legion of press "ghouls" tracked her everywhere, hoping to be the first to report her death. In 1960, despite a three-month hospitalization for cirrhosis and yet another auto accident that broke some ribs, she made more recordings than in any other year of her life and capped that with a wildly sensational return to the Olympia for a long run, beginning on December 29 with a performance which won 22 curtain calls. In 1961, she underwent operations on May 24 and June 9 for internal ailments but continued recording. On June 15, 1962, she sang in public for the first time in more than a year and again won a great success. In mid-August, she became ill in Besançon while on tour, but on September 27 she tottered onto the Olympia stage, barely able to stand—by now she needed injections before every performance, and periodic transfusions—and received a five-minute ovation before singing a note. She then proceeded to prove that her voice had lost nothing whatever of its impact.

On the September 27 program, she was joined by her latest love, Théo Sarapo, a Greek hairdresser 20 years her junior whom she had made into a decent singer. They were married in an Orthodox ceremony on October 9. She loved "this man who could have been the son I never had," and he repaid her with a touching devotion through her last year. On February 22, 1963, she made her last Paris appearance, at the left-bank Bobino before an audience containing many of the working people who adored her. The ovation went on for 20 minutes. Her last performance was at Lille on March 18, and she made her final recording, "L'Homme de Berlin," in April before being hospitalized again. She spent her last summer on the Riviera in villas and the Cannes hospital, finally succumbing in a rented villa in a hamlet, Plascassier (near Grasse), shortly after 1 PM on October 10, 1963. Her body was secretly rushed by ambulance to her boulevard Lannes apartment so that it could be "officially" announced on October 11 that she had—of course—died in Paris. Learning of her death, Jean Cocteau, who phoned her frequently during her last months, died a few hours later. More than 80,000 people filed by her casket at her home, and on October 14 some 40,000 swarmed into Père Lachaise cemetery, where a disorderly scene ensued. The Catholic Church refused a mass because she had remarried, but permitted a priest to offer graveside prayers. The Foreign Legion, for whom she was a kind of mascot, sent a detachment to present arms. That weekend, her records sold out in Paris—300,000 of them.

In one of her last songs, "Le Droit d'aimer" (F. Laï/R. Neyl, 1962), she sang: "I have the right to love…. I have won this right through the fear of losing everything, at the risk of destroying myself to keep love alive. I have paid for this right." Who could deny it? Her well-publicized tribulations were a foundation of her art and touched a universal chord. She said of Marie Dubas that she could make people laugh or cry "while I can only make them cry." But she capitalized on this limitation. Her power owed much to the fact that she was in her person and themes a representative figure of the troubled era (especially in France) of the Great Depression,

the Second World War, and the postwar existentialist wave. And she was able to remain an evocative and even living presence because her career coincided with the explosion of the recording industry, thus bequeathing her voice to posterity.

Piaf's voice was distinctive: warm, throaty, husky, with a rapid vibrato and quite narrow tonal range, but running through it a strand of brass enabling her to be heard in the farthest seats. Her voice and stage presence had the ability to hit audiences "in the gut"—the most common description of the effect. But there were also the words, which to her were more important than the music, words which (as Cocteau put it) "appear to have no source, no author; they seem to spring quite naturally from the very macadam of the streets." She could barely read music but could learn a song in three hearings. That was only the beginning, however, for she worked endless hours with her composers and lyricists to perfect every feature of the notes and words. In practicing and performing, she was guided solely by her instincts. If she sensed that she was beginning to sing mechanically, she would drop the song from her repertoire. "When I am singing I give it everything I have," she said, and in her ability to convey this intense sincerity lay the most obvious source of her success. At the same time, however, she was highly involved in the mechanics of stage presentation—accompaniment, lighting, props, her plain black dress—all of it meticulously designed to further (paradoxically) the image of spontaneity and simplicity. When all elements were in place, she was, as some described her, the most formidable stage presence in France since Sarah Bernhardt .

Piaf's personality—the very wellspring of her artistry—was deeply marked by the trauma inflicted during her first 20 years. She was a cauldron of insecurities and contradictions. She had enormous willpower yet seemed unable to overcome self-destructive passions and addictions. She was a tiny tyrant, jealous and possessive, yet she admired other talented singers and helped a number to get started. She sang sad songs and was subject to severe depression, but she was sociable, loved a good time, and had a wonderful, hearty laugh. She needed people around her—"I'm frightened of solitude"—and had that bottomless need for applause and the love (however transient) of an audience so common among performers. She also knew the lone-liness of the great star after the lights go out and the people go home. She was both streetwise and naïve. She made immense sums as one of the highest-paid performers ever, but she spent it heedlessly, or gave it away indiscriminately to people with sob stories, and died millions in debt. She worked hard and played hard, driven to live every day as if it were her last. She was superstitious, a believer in spiritualism, and late in her life joined the Rosicrucians. Although she did not attend mass, she prayed on her knees every night to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and "sweet little Jesus." A child of the slums, she believed bathing was dangerous, drinking water was bad for you, red wine was good for children, and alcohol killed your "worms." Yet, while she had no formal education, she learned about classical music from Marguerite Monnot and loved Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest; and she read (on self-education binges) literary classics, history, and philosophy, Teilhard de Chardin being a favorite.

Piaf desperately wanted to be loved. This need doubtless was the source of her many liaisons. She always needed a man near her, remarking once on how comforting it is to hear a man's footfall in a house. She seemed unable to sleep well without a man next to her in bed. Her lovers agreed, however, that it was not sex she really wanted, but security. She always suspected that men did not really love her but only her name and what she could do for them. "I've always searched feverishly for the great love, the true love," she said in an autobiography. She confessed she needed a protective, dominant man, yet she was driven to try to dominate him utterly. She seemed helpless to resolve this contradiction. Sadly, her search for the great love could only fail.

Edith Piaf's passions doomed her—save for one: her passion for singing. That passion was her truest. Through the last tragic decade of her life, it kept her alive. It transformed her before her death from a great performer into a legend.

sources:

Berteaut, Simone. Piaf. Paris: Opéra Mundi, 1969 (Eng. trans.) NY: Harper & Row, 1972.

Costaz, Gilles. Edith Piaf. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1988.

Crosland, Margaret. Piaf. NY: Putnam, 1985.

Druker, Don. "The Nights of Edith Piaf: A Short Biography of Edith Piaf." Soundprint Media Center, 1995.

Gillen, Henry. "Les ancêtres d'Edith Piaf," in Heraldique et Généalogie. Vol. 3, no. 3, 1971, p. 86.

Noli, Jean. Edith. Paris: Éditions Stock, 1973.

Piaf, Edith. The Wheel of Fortune. Trans. by Peter Trewatha and Andrée Massoin de Virton. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965 (originally published as Au bal de la chance. Préface de Jean Cocteau. Paris: Éditions Jeheber, 1958).

——, with Jean Noli. My Life. Trans. by Margaret Crosland. London: Peter Owen, 1990 (originally published as Ma Vie. Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions, 1964).