Edith Piaf

Edith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris on December 19, 1915, during the second year of the First World War ^[1]. Her mother, Annetta Maillard, sang in cafes under the name Line Marsa and had little capacity or inclination to raise a child. Her father, Louis Gassion, was a street acrobat who spent long stretches touring. A persistent legend claims the infant was delivered on a pavement in the Belleville district; hospital records indicate she was born at the Hopital Tenon, though the street birth story followed her all her life and she never worked hard to correct it ^[2].

Her childhood was unstable in almost every respect. Abandoned early by her mother, she spent part of her infancy with her maternal grandmother, then several years in Normandy with her paternal grandmother, who ran a brothel in the town of Bernay. The women who worked there helped care for the girl. During this period she suffered a serious eye condition, and by her own later account she was blind for a stretch of her childhood before recovering her sight, an episode she attributed to a pilgrimage made on her behalf to Saint Therese of Lisieux ^[2].

Around the age of seven she rejoined her father and traveled with him as he performed acrobatics in streets and squares across France. She began singing to draw crowds and collect coins, and the experience gave her an unpolished but commanding delivery. By her mid teens she had struck out on her own, singing in the streets of Pigalle, Menilmontant, and other Paris quarters ^[1]. In 1932 she began a relationship with a delivery boy named Louis Dupont, and in 1933 she gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle, who died of meningitis in 1935 at the age of two, the only child Piaf would ever have ^[3].

The turning point in the story of who was Edith Piaf came in 1935, when Louis Leplee, owner of the fashionable cabaret Gerny's near the Champs-Elysees, heard the twenty year old singing on a street corner. Struck by the power of a voice coming from a woman barely 142 centimeters tall, he hired her and gave her the stage name La Mome Piaf, Paris slang meaning roughly the little sparrow ^[1]. Leplee coached her stage presence, dressed her in the plain black dress that became her lifelong uniform, and publicized her debut, which drew celebrities including the actor Maurice Chevalier.

Success nearly ended as quickly as it began. In April 1936 Leplee was murdered in his apartment, and police questioned Piaf because men from her old street circle were suspected of involvement. She was cleared, but the scandal filled the newspapers and threatened to destroy her reputation ^[2]. She turned to the lyricist Raymond Asso, who became both mentor and companion. Asso reworked her repertoire around songs drawn from her own hard experience, drilled her in diction and stagecraft, and persuaded her to adopt the name Edith Piaf.

Under Asso's direction she moved from cabarets to the music hall stage, appearing at the ABC theater in Paris in 1937 to strong reviews. The composer Marguerite Monnot became a close collaborator, writing melodies that suited Piaf's dramatic style, among them Mon legionnaire ^[3]. By the end of the 1930s Piaf was recording steadily, broadcasting on French radio, and drawing comparisons to the great realist singers of the previous generation, whom she would soon eclipse.

The catalogue of Edith Piaf achievements begins with the songs themselves. In 1945 she wrote the lyrics to La Vie en rose, with a melody credited to Louiguy, and recorded it in 1946. Initially undervalued by her own entourage, it became her signature and one of the most recognized French songs ever written ^[1]. Later triumphs included Hymne a l'amour in 1949, with words by Piaf and music by Marguerite Monnot, Milord in 1959, and Non, je ne regrette rien in 1960, written by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire, a song of defiance that arrived when her health was collapsing and became inseparable from her legend ^[3].

Piaf was also a maker of careers. She promoted Yves Montand in the mid 1940s, taking him on as her opening act and shaping his repertoire before he became a star in his own right. In 1946 she championed a nine man vocal group, Les Compagnons de la chanson, and recorded the hit Les Trois Cloches with them. Later proteges included Charles Aznavour, who wrote for her and traveled as part of her entourage, and Georges Moustaki, who co-wrote Milord ^[2].

Her international standing set her apart from every French singer of her era. She first appeared in New York in 1947, and after a lukewarm start she won over American audiences, returning many times and performing at Carnegie Hall in 1956 and 1957 ^[4]. During the German occupation of France she continued performing, including before French prisoners of war in Germany; after the Liberation she faced scrutiny, and accounts collected by biographers describe her using photographs taken at prison camp visits to aid escape efforts, testimony that helped clear her name ^[2]. She also acted in films, beginning with La Garconne in 1936, and starred in the 1947 stage play Le Bel indifferent, written for her by Jean Cocteau ^[1].

Piaf's private life was as dramatic as her repertoire, and the two constantly fed each other. The love of her life, by her own testimony and that of nearly everyone around her, was the boxer Marcel Cerdan, world middleweight champion in 1948. Their affair captivated France. On October 28, 1949, Cerdan died when the Air France flight carrying him from Paris to New York, where Piaf was performing, crashed in the Azores ^[1]. She insisted on singing that night, and grief over Cerdan marked the rest of her life. Hymne a l'amour, which she had premiered shortly before his death, became bound to his memory.

She married twice. In 1952 she wed the singer Jacques Pills, with Marlene Dietrich, a close friend, serving as a witness; the marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In October 1962 she married Theo Sarapo, a Greek born hairdresser turned singer twenty years her junior. The match drew mockery in the press, but Sarapo cared for her devotedly through her final illness, and the two recorded the duet A quoi ca sert l'amour ^[3].

Her body absorbed extraordinary punishment. Two serious car crashes in 1951 left her with broken ribs and a shattered arm, and the morphine prescribed during recovery hardened into addiction, compounded by heavy drinking. She underwent repeated treatment for dependency and later for ulcers and liver damage ^[2]. Friends described a woman of reckless generosity who earned fortunes and gave or spent nearly all of it, dying with large debts despite decades as the highest paid singer in France ^[3].

The final decade tested her fame against her failing health. Between 1955 and 1962 she headlined the Olympia music hall in Paris in a series of runs that are still cited among the defining engagements in that theater's history. The 1961 series, undertaken when she could barely stand and the Olympia itself faced financial ruin, was built around Non, je ne regrette rien and is often credited with saving the venue ^[4].

Onstage collapses became part of the grim theater of her last tours. During a 1959 engagement in New York she fell during a performance and required surgery, one of several operations in her final years. Journalists wrote openly about whether each tour would be her last, and audiences came partly out of devotion and partly from the sense that they were witnessing an ending. She kept working, telling interviewers that singing was the only life she knew ^[2].

In September 1962 she sang from the top of the Eiffel Tower for the premiere of the film The Longest Day, her voice carrying over the Champ de Mars. Her last public performances came in early 1963, and her final recording sessions took place that spring. Exhausted and gravely ill with liver failure, she retreated to the south of France. Edith Piaf died at Grasse on October 10, 1963, at the age of 47; her death was announced from Paris the next day, and the writer Jean Cocteau, her longtime friend, died within hours of learning the news ^[1].

The Archbishop of Paris denied Piaf a funeral Mass because of her divorce and the irregularities of her life, yet tens of thousands of Parisians lined the route to Pere Lachaise cemetery on October 14, 1963, and the crowd at the graveside halted traffic across the east of the city. Reports at the time described it as the only occasion since the Second World War when Paris traffic stopped entirely for a private citizen ^[4]. Her grave remains among the most visited in the cemetery.

Her recordings never left circulation. La Vie en rose entered the international standard repertoire through versions by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and many others, and the 1998 Grammy Hall of Fame inducted her 1946 recording ^[5]. Non, je ne regrette rien has been borrowed by filmmakers, advertisers, and political campaigns for six decades. A small museum maintained by a private association in the Menilmontant quarter preserves her dresses, letters, and memorabilia, and a Paris square near Belleville bears her name.

Among Edith Piaf facts that explain her endurance, the simplest is that she fused an unmistakable voice with an unmistakable life, so that each song seemed to carry autobiography inside it. Scholars of French culture treat her as the figure through whom chanson realiste reached its widest audience and its emotional peak ^[6]. The 2007 film La Vie en rose, directed by Olivier Dahan, brought her story to a new generation and won Marion Cotillard the Academy Award for Best Actress, the first Oscar given for a French language leading performance ^[4]. Singers from Aznavour's generation to present day interpreters continue to measure themselves against her phrasing, her economy, and her refusal of ornament.