Piaf: the sound of beautiful sorrow
Her life was a litany of tragedy and after a wretched death she
was denied a memorial Mass because of dubious mortality. Yet
mourners turned out by the hundreds of thousands at her funeral
procession and blocked Paris traffic for the only time since the
end of World War II.
Piaf: the sound of beautiful sorrow
Her life was a litany of tragedy and after a wretched death she was denied a memorial Mass because of dubious mortality. Yet mourners turned out by the hundreds of thousands at her funeral procession and blocked Paris traffic for the only time since the end of World War II.
Edith Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion in December 1915 to a 17-year-old singer and a street acrobat. Her mother abandoned them and her father joined the French Army before she was a year old, leaving her in care of his mother who ran a brothel.
Between the ages of three and seven, Edith was blind and communicated as best she could, through her voice. She loved to sing and listeners were transfixed. Soon after her sight returned she joined her father as vocal accompanist to his acrobatics. They lived in a sordid section of Paris where her world was peopled by thieves, prostitutes and drug addicts.
She left her father in her mid-teens to be on her own and at 16 fell in love with a man who abandoned her before she gave birth to their illegitimate daughter. Edith’s heart broke when her child died of meningitis at two.
Then Louis Leplee discovered her. He owned a nightclub that attracted luminaries as well as thieves, and sensed that her poignant voice would be a hit. On opening night he introduced her as “Mome Piaf” or “Kid Sparrow” because of her diminutive size. She was an immediate sensation and became the toast of Paris. Night after night customers crowded in to hear the little chanteuse sing heartbreakingly of love gone wrong. Entertainer Maurice Chevalier and playwright Jean Cocteau, who later wrote a play for her, became her close friends.
When Leplee was murdered and Edith suspected of being an accessory, her star still glowed brightly
She made her first record when she was 20 and movies followed. Edith took many lovers and helped launch the careers of some. After the Germans occupied France, she sang for high-ranking enemy officers at night but by day secretly aided the Resistance. In that period she wrote her signature song, “La vie en rose,” or “Life in the pink.”
Tragedy struck again in 1949 when boxer Marcel Cerdan, the center of her life, was killed in a plane crash. But Edith continued on and helped compose dozens of songs. She toured Europe and South America and scored an enormous success in the United States. After severe injuries in a car crash, Edith became addicted to morphine and alcohol. She married twice, the second time to a man 20 years her junior.
She developed cancer, which rapidly worsened and claimed her at 47 on Oct. 11, 1963. Her record sales have never stopped. On one of the last, the little sparrow, battered by life and love, still sings gallantly, “Non, je ne regrette rien (“No, I regret nothing”).
In the more than four decades since her death, Edith Piaf remains an enduring icon of Paris.
