Edith Piaf
(1915-1963)

The critic Jean Cocteau said that Edith Piaf was like the nightingale, who when he sings "...throws everything into confusion." To Cocteau, his friend Piaf was a force of nature, a chanteuse with the evocative power of falling rain, sighing breezes or the moonlight that envelops the world of the night. She was brave, gallant and tender -- much like the legionnaires of whom she sang -- but there was a haunting element of childlike sadness in every Piaf performance, a constant reminder of the stark unhappiness of her life away from the music halls and recording studios. Piaf herself admitted as much, explaining that in singing she "cried without tears."

Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion, the daughter of an Italian singer and a French circus acrobat, on December 19, 1915. The Piaf legend began at her birth; her mother, it is said, went into labor in a doorway in the rue Belleville and so the girl who would sing so eloquently of the streets of Paris was born there, her mother's midwives two local gendarmes. Neither of the child's parents were ready for the responsibility of a baby -- especially one so tiny and sickly -- and little Edith was shifted to the care of relatives. Her infancy was plagued by illness, culminating in the onset of total blindness after an attack of meningitis. (The child lived without light for four years until her paternal grandmother took her to the shrine of the Carmelite nun, Therese of Lisieux, where her sight was miraculously restored.) Piaf's father then took her "on the road" where the little girl earned her stripes as a performer by singing in cafes, circus side shows and open-air markets.

In 1930, at fifteen, she returned to Paris. Within five years, Edith was heard by the influential club owner Louis Leplee, who gave the girl her first important break and the immortal nickname "Piaf" ("sparrow"), an apt title for one so diminutive (less than 5 feet tall) and plainly dressed. By decade's end Piaf was one of the top stars in France, a headliner at the prestigious Bobino Music Hall, an admired actress and a popular recording star. Success, however, never soothed or diminished the divine restlessness that was an essential part of Piaf's indomitable magic.

The blows that she received from life were nothing to what Piaf endured in the name of love. It seemed that whenever her name was linked with another's that the affair was immediately star-crossed. Her first mentor, Louis Leplee, was murdered and the case never officially solved. The great love of her life, the magnetic boxer Marcel Cerdan, was killed in an Air France crash in 1949. A marriage to the singer-composer Jacques Pills lasted a scant three years before they parted. There were passionate friendships with Charles Aznavour, Yves Montand and Marlene Dietrich, among many others. Much of her adult life was passed in a welter of engraved cigarette cases, saints' medals and floral tributes given and received. Her last love was a young Greek singer, Theo Sarapo, whom she married in October 1962.

Piaf made her first records for Polydor in 1936 and continued her work in the studios throughout her career, eventually working for French Decca and French Columbia, among others. It was Piaf's recordings that first brought her name to the United States, where she made her debut at the Playhouse in October 1947, beginning a love affair with the American public that lasted until her death. (Piaf was scheduled for a new New York show titled "Piaf!" when she died in 1963). Forty thousand attended her burial at Pere Lachaise. Within days of her death, there were no Piaf recordings in the shops of Paris...all had been bought by the grieving fans. As Cocteau said in final tribute to her shortly before his own death, "Her great voice will not be lost."

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