Edith Piaf

French singer

• Born: December 19, 1915
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: October 11, 1963
• Place of death: Paris, France

Piaf rose from a childhood of poverty and street singing in Paris to international acclaim. Her recording career spanned nearly thirty years, and her chansons réalistes, or sad love songs and ballads, have resonated for listeners around the world.

Early Life

Edith Piaf (pee-ahf) was born Edith Giovanna Gassion, possibly on a Paris street. Her father, Louis Alphonse Gassion, was a gifted circus acrobat and street performer, and her mother, Anetta Maillard Gassion (whose stage name was Line Marsa), was a talented café singer. Anetta abandoned the marriage soon after Piaf’s birth, and her bohemian father thereupon left his daughter in the care of first her maternal, and then her paternal, grandmother the latter of whom was said to have run a brothel in Normandy. At age four, Piaf contracted conjunctivitis and became blind. She was taken to the altar of Saint Thérèse in Lisieux, where she prayed to have her sight restored; ten days later, it was. Thereafter, she always carried an image of Saint Thérèse.

In 1922, at age seven or eight, Piaf rejoined her father, who was traveling with the Caroli circus in Belgium. After several years, they returned to Paris. In her autobiography Au bal de la chance (1958; The Wheel of Fortune , 2004), Piaf writes that the first song she ever performed was the refrain from La Marseillaise, the only song she knew by heart. Her singing became part of their act.

At about age sixteen, Piaf ran away from her father and began performing on her own with one or two others, including a girl said to be her half sister, Simone Berteaut. By age seventeen, Piaf had given birth to a daughter, Marcelle, and soon left the child’s father and returned to singing on the streets of Paris. Tragically, the child contracted meningitis and died in 1935.

Life’s Work

On an October day in 1935, the tiny Piaf (she was only four feet eight inches tall) was singing on a Paris street. After finishing the song “Comme un moineau,” a man approached her and told her that she was ruining her voice. Her reply was, simply, “I have to eat.” The stranger, Louis Leplée, invited her to the upscale club Gerny’s, which he owned.

Piaf auditioned at Leplée’s club and began performing on his stage soon thereafter. It was Leplée who gave her the stage name La Môme (the Kid). Piaf’s regular performances at Gerny’s were going well, but fate intervened. Leplée was murdered, and the tabloids of the day linked her to the scandal. With his murder, Gerny’s closed, and Piaf left Paris for a time. In 1936, she appeared in her first film, La Garçonne.

After she returned to Paris, Piaf sought help from a friend, songwriter Raymond Asso. In “Mon Légionnaire” (1936), Asso’s lyrics were paired with music by Piaf’s friend, composer Marguerite Monnot, and became a huge hit. With Asso as her advocate, Piaf was booked in 1937 into the prestigious Theatre ABC in Paris. She appeared on stage in a plain black dress with a white lace collar, which became her traditional attire. Her performance was a triumph. In 1939, Michel Emer brought to her the song “L’Accordéoniste,” and it, too, became a hit. In 1940, Piaf performed in the playLa Bel Indifférent, written for her by friend Jean Cocteau.

During World War II, Piaf began writing more of her own songs, and in 1941 she appeared in her second film, Monmartre-sur-Seine . A song from that film, “Tu es partout,” was later used in the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan (1998). Piaf also performed for a group of French prisoners of war in Germany and was photographed with them. Using those photos, false identity papers were prepared and smuggled into the camp for their use. Later, a bombing raid tragically killed a number of those same men. Piaf was instrumental in organizing a benefit for their wives and children. Also during the war, she wrote the words and music to her signature song “La Vie en rose,” which was recorded in 1945.

Throughout her life, Piaf moved from one lover to another, often taking a young singer under her wing and helping him with his career. One such lover was Yves Montand. She and Montand appeared in the 1946 film Étoile Sans Lumière . It was to be her favorite of the eight films in which she appeared.

In 1947, Piaf and nine young men of Les Compagnons de la Chanson traveled to were chosen to perform. During this time she became close friends with actorMarlene Dietrich. During her tours of the United States in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, she made the acquaintance of many notable people, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Orson Welles, Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Rock Hudson, and Charlie Chaplin. Also during the late 1940’s, Piaf began an affair with a married middle weight boxing champion named Marcel Cerdan. Anxious to see him, it is believed that Piaf called Cerdan in France in 1949 to ask him to visit her in New York. His plane crashed on the way, and Piaf was devastated.

Injuries suffered in a 1951 car accident left Piaf addicted to morphine. Alcohol and drug addiction were to plague her the rest of her life. As she became older, she suffered from painful rheumatism and other health problems, and she took shots of vitamins, morphine, and cortisone. Piaf married her first husband, Jacques Pills, in 1952, but they divorced in 1956. She continued to record new songs and tour with great success throughout the 1950’s. In the United States she was on the Ed Sullivan Show eight times, and appeared at Carnegie Hall twice.

Piaf’s many hit recordings also include “Les Trois Cloches” (1945), “L’Hymne à l’amour” (1950), “Padam . . . Padam . . .” (1951), “Sous le ciel de Paris” (1954), “Les Amants d’un jour” (1956), “L’Homme a la moto” (1956), “La Foule” (1957), “Milord” (1959), “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1960), and “Mon dieu” (1960). Along with the Cocteau play, she appeared in eight films.

In 1962, Piaf married her second husband, a twenty-seven-year-old Greek singer named Théo Sarapo. Her health problems continued, and she died of cancer on October 11, 1963, in Paris. She was only forty-seven years old. Hundreds of thousands attended her funeral procession in Paris. She was buried in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, next to her father and daughter.

Significance

Rising from poverty on the streets of Paris, Piaf became an internationally known French singer and recording artist, symbolizing France in general and Paris in particular. She captivated audiences with dramatic performances of her chansons réalistes (sad love songs and ballads). Her powerful, husky voice seemed at odds with her fragile appearance. Piaf usually performed in a black dress in a tight spotlight, which highlighted her expressive hands and face as she sang. Years after her death, her recordings enjoyed renewed popularity and were included in the 2007 film about her life, La Vie en Rose (released in France as La Môme).

Bibliography

Bret, David. Piaf: A Passionate Life. London: Robson, 2007. This 1989 biography of Piaf was reissued in 2007 to coincide with the release of the film La Vie en Rose. The French-born biographer has written a number of books on celebrities, including Rock Hudson, Marlene Dietrich, and Errol Flynn, often focusing on their personal lives.

Crosland, Margaret. A Cry from the Heart: A Biography of Édith Piaf. London: Arcadia, 2002. This well-researched biography was first published in 1985 and includes fourteen pages of black-and-white photos and two appendixes one exploring the chanson réaliste and the second providing short biographies of the singers of this style of music, the chanteuse réaliste.

Lange, Monique. Piaf. New York: Seaver Books, 1981. An English translation of Lange’s large-format biography, this book is rich with black-and-white photographs of Piaf as well as the people and places in her life.

Piaf, Édith. My Life. London: Peter Owen, 2000. This paperback book is an English translation of Piaf’s short Ma vie, first published in 1964. It was written with Jean Noli during Piaf’s last year of life and translated by Margaret Crosland.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Wheel of Fortune. London: Peter Owen, 2004. This paperback book is an English translation of Piaf’s short autobiography Au bal de la chance, first published in 1958. It includes a preface by her friend, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.