She stood a towering 4’8”. The towering part was her voice and personality.
Edith Piaf projected her tumultuous life of sorrow and triumph in every note she sang. She had been there and back. Audiences responded to the reality that resonated in her voice.
It’s a quality that can’t be faked.
She was born Edith Giovanna Gassion in Paris
in 1915.
Her mother was a circus performer, her father was
a street performing acrobat. She was abandoned by her mother at birth and abandoned by her father at age one, when he enlisted for service in WWI.
Father left her in the care of her grandmother, known professionally as Maman Tine. Maman Tine was proprietor of
a brothel in Bernay, Normandy.
Abandoned by her parents, shuffled in infancy from Paris to Normandy, living her earliest years in the company of whores; it wasn’t a promising beginning. To make matters worse from age 3 to 7 she was blinded by keratitis. The whores pooled their money to take young Edith on pilgrimage in honor of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
The result was a miraculous cure. Possibly her first break in life.
By age 14 her father returned. She joined him in street performances on the pavements of Paris. This is when she began singing. At age 15 Edith met Simone “Momone” Bertheau, who was likely her half-sister. Together they toured the streets, singing and making enough money to rent a room in Pigalle.
It was a small room that got smaller when Edith’s lover, Louis Dupont, moved in with them - and at age 17 Edith gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle.
Several years of domestic conflict followed.
Momone didn’t get along with Louis, and Louis was appalled at Edith’s mothering skills, which were none. She never had a mother to learn from. Louis did what he could to take care of the kid. All three were children themselves. None of them knew what they were doing.
Edith’s short-lived attempt at domesticity was over
In the summer of 1933 Momone and Edith started singing at the club, Juan-le-pins, Rue Pigalle. This was the beginning of Edith’s rise to fame.
Louis Lepee caught her show in Pigalle. He liked what he heard. She was inexperienced but she had something he thought he could manage into greatness. He hired her as chanteuse for his nightclub, Le Gerny’s. Lepee gave her a stage name, La Mome Piaf, The Little Sparrow.
La Mome Piaf was a slang phrase that could also be translated as The Waif Sparrow.
The name that stuck - right up to today was,
The Little Sparrow.
Lepee coached her in both performance styling and costume styling. It was he who suggested the simple black dress and repertoire of songs about her very real street-life background and the pangs of human sorrow in general.
The name suited her well. She never changed it.
Lepee’s club, Le Gerny’s was a popular cabaret in Paris.
It was frequented by common folk as well as celebrated personalities. To ensure success for Edith’s opening night Lepee launched an intense publicity campaign. It worked.
Opening night was attended by luminaries including Maurice Chevalier. Django Reinhardt led the band, Norbert Glanzberg played piano.
Her rise to fame begin that night in 1935.
It was a life-altering year, not all of it good.
By the end of the year Edith’s career was soaring. She had produced two album’s that made her famous, in France, and across Europe - but Louis Lepee had been murdered and the Nazis had invaded France.
Up, then down, then up, then down. It was the recurrent pattern of her life.
Edith knew the gangsters who murdered Lepee. So did Lepee. Between them they likely knew all the gangsters in Paris. It meant nothing. The police thought otherwise. Edith was falsely implicated in the murder. By the time they let it go Edith’s name was muddied. She hired Raymond Asso to restore her public reputation.
Asso persuaded Edith to change her last name, Gassion, to Piaf. The word, piaf can be interpreted as both waif and little sparrow. It was effective P.R. The false association with murder was replaced by association with sympathetic, waifish little sparrows. Asso also urged Edith - now Edith Piaf - to highlight the songs that reflected her early life on the streets.
It all worked. Edith married Raymond Asso.
During the occupation Edith continued to work the cabaret’s and nightclubs of Paris. She was well attended by both Parisians and the German occupiers. The Nazis’ loved her singing. They invited her to perform in Germany.
Edith was not political, she agreed to perform in Germany if she could also perform in German prisoner- of-war camps.
The Nazis’ conceded. Edith passed notes between Parisians and French prisoners at these prisoner-of-war performance’s.
The Nazis’ allowed this because none of the notes had anything to do with the French resistance.
She was credited by some to have saved many lives.
I could find no hard details. Edith’s secretary, Adree Bigard, who was a member of the resistance, said Edith was instrumental
in helping a number of prisoners to escape.
In any case, her star rose above parochial concerns.
She sang for the sorrows of humans, all humans. They returned her artfully projected empathy with appreciation.
She was internationally acclaimed. She mixed with all the glitterati of art & commerce without interruption until 1948. In that year the public learned of her scandalous affair with, Marcel Cerdan, a boxer, and the self-avowed love of her life.
The public would have celebrated the romance if only Marcel hadn’t been married. Her star remained tarnished until 1951 when Cerdan was killed in a plane crash.
None of this mattered to her American audience.
She appeared eight times on the Ed Sullivan Show and gave two concerts at Carnegie Hall. Her records sold well, but all was not well. She had a series of injuries in auto crashes that left her addicted to morphine. Addiction combined with lifelong abuse
of alcohol led to a tortured personal life.
She was in-and-out of rehab and in-and-out of marriage
for most of her later years.
Edith Piaf died in 1963, at age 47. Tens of thousands witnessed her funeral procession. Singer, Charles Aznavour, said it was the first time since the end of WWII that traffic in Paris came to a complete stop.
Edith’s star flashed bright, and dimmed, over and over again, until it crashed to Earth at her death. The Little Sparrow fell, but Edith Piaf continues to sell records. She’s still part of popular consciousness. The title of her signature song, La Vie en Rose, was y used as the title of a 2007 film about her life.
Despite fame and fortune, the little girl without parents, who lived her young life with whores, never went away. She stood next to Edith Gassion at every turn - Piaf or not.
Fin.