TamTam Books News Friday, November 07, 2003: An amusing piece by Stuart Jeffries in today's Guardian Saturday November 8, 2003 The Guardian Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau died on the same day. Cocteau, chivalrous at the last, obeyed the rule of ladies first. "Ah, la Piaf est morte," he said on the morning of October 11 1963. "Je peux mourir aussi." [Ah, Piaf's dead. I can die too."] And then he promptly died of a heart attack. Or so legend has it. But in these matters, legend is all-important, while what actually happened concerns only those with no imagination or soul. No doubt this is what was going through the mind of Piaf's second husband and final lover, the actor Théo Sarapo, when he put her corpse in his car and headed for Paris shortly after she died of cancer. He had to race against time to make it look as if the great French singer had died in her Paris apartment, because that is what her fans would have expected of her - faithful to no man, but ever faithful to Paris. It was Piaf's funeral not Cocteau's that brought Paris to gridlock. One of her lovers, the singer and actor Charles Aznavour (whom Piaf helped to launch in showbusiness), said that her funeral procession marked the first time since the end of the second world war that Paris traffic had come to a complete stop. Because of Piaf's louche life - the lovers, the booze, the drugs - the archbishop of Paris forbade her a mass; none the less, her funeral at Père Lachaise was mobbed by 40,000 fans. Forty years on, the roles are reversed: Paris can talk of nothing but Jean Cocteau. An 864-page biography has just been published by Gallimard to coincide with the anniversary of his death. An exhibition devoted to Cocteau at the Pompidou Centre has its own 450-page catalogue, showcasing the display of 900 objects that tries to convey his many talents in poetry, cinema, music and art. There are 950ft of glass cases showing his books and writings, 32 audio-visual installations with film clips, 335 drawings and 300 photographs. In the visitors book, there are many messages hailing this multi-media hoopla, and suggesting how the exhibition demonstrates the cultural superiority of France over the barbarian US. It's all very different if you want to commemorate Piaf's death in Paris. There is no big retro spective at the Pompidou for her, no improbably fat biography. True, you could station yourself at a pavement café, order a bottle of Dubonnet, put her greatest hits on your personal stereo and cry your mascara runny. Otherwise, though, you should take the Métro to Menilmontant in the 11th arrondisement, a delightfully picaresque Parisian quartier, to visit the apartment that houses the Edith Piaf museum - as long as you booked an appointment first. Once there (a tiny plaque outside reads "Les Amis d'Edith Piaf"), you must climb four flights because the apartment block has no lift. The director, Bernard Marchois, will escort you through the museum's two small rooms, to the constant soundtrack of Piaf chansons. On display is a life-size cardboard cutout of Piaf (all five feet no inches of her) next to a giant teddy bear, given to her by Sarapo. There are her tiny shoes (size 34), her tiny dresses, her many gold and platinum discs and other memorabilia. You can buy an Edith Piaf keyring if you want. Apart from sharing the same death date, what did the adorable Gallic bawler and the often-derided aesthetic gadfly have in common? In origins, not much. Cocteau was born into a bourgeois family on July 5 1889. He described his mother as a "madonna swathed in velvet, smothered in diamonds, bedecked with nocturnal plumes, a glittering chestnut tree, spiked with rays of light, tall, abstracted, torn between the last promptings to be good and one last look in the mirror". His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide while Cocteau was a child. Piaf, by contrast, was born in the gutter - although one suspects that legend, again, trumps whatever really happened. She was the daughter of an Italian singer and a French circus acrobat, and was originally called Edith Giovanna Gassion. (The name Piaf was given to her later by a nightclub owner who gave her her first break; it is Parisian slang for sparrow.) According to legend, she was born outside 72 rue de Belleville on December 19 1915. Her two midwives were local gendarmes, one of whom shielded the birth from public gaze with his cape. Neither of her parents was ready to look after such a sickly baby, so she was packed off into the care of a madame of a Normandy brothel. She remained there until she was seven, when she joined her father, a travelling showman, on the road. At 15 she started singing in a duo with a woman called Simone Berteaut, who was destined to become her misguiding spirit. It was with Berteaut that she worked the streets as well as treading the boards, before bursting on to the interwar cabaret scene. What could Piaf and Cocteau have in common? After all, he was a precocious poet, a friend of Picasso, a collaborator with Satie, Stravinsky and Diaghilev; a self-conscious artist whose films, plays, graphic art and novels drew on a Greek classicism tempered by a grasp of modernist art and the vicissitudes of fashion. André Gide and the surrealists hated his shtick. As for Piaf, her aesthetic consisted in the expression of emotion in popular song. And yet these two French legends were soul mates in one respect: their lives, or rather the legends of their lives, rivalled and perhaps even trumped their art. In Patrick Mauriès's lovely essay on Cocteau, he suggests that Cocteau put more of his genius into his life than his work. Admittedly, you could hardly say the same for Piaf. The boozing and unhappy love affairs hardly amount to an expression of genius. Her life was certainly not arranged according to some intentional project. The intriguing intersection of their lives has received negligible attention: in Francis Steegmuller's 591-page Cocteau biography, for instance, there are only three entries under Piaf. Even when a biographer does allude to their relationship it consists only of a tantalising reference to Le Bel Indifférent (The Beautiful Indifferent), the play Cocteau wrote for his little sparrow in the early years of the second world war. At the time Cocteau wrote it, Piaf was living with the actor and singer Paul Meurisse. Cocteau thought Meurisse was a dull bourgeois unworthy of his beloved sparrow. So he wrote a play about their relationship with the aim of showing Paris that the passionate, man-hungry, booze-thirsty, life-devouring Piaf was shacked up with a cold fish, and also with a powerful desire to drive the pair apart. Then - what chutzpah! - he inveigled Paul and Edith to play themselves self-destructing on stage. But was it Cocteau who tore them apart? This much is suggested in Annie Caulfield's recent Radio 4 play Piaf and Cocteau. In her play, Cocteau is depicted as a master of psychology in luring Piaf to perform in a play and convincing her that it will make the object of her affections besotted with her, when really he is intending the reverse. Shortly after the pair appeared together in a long-forgotten film called Montmartre-sur-Seine , Piaf fell for Norbert Glanzberg, a Jewish pianist, and someone who appealed to her taste for provocation. It was also potentially a very dangerous affair for both parties given that she was performing for high-ranking Germans at the One Two Two Club in Paris. Her performances at the club earned her the right to pose for photos with French prisoners of war whom she visited in the stalags, ostensibly as a morale-boosting exercise. Once in possession of their celebrity photos, prisoners were able to cut out their own images and use them in forged papers. The only love of Piaf's life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in an air-crash over the Azores, and following that great loss, her final years became a series of dashes between clinics (where she was treated for morphine and alcohol addiction) and recording studios. Cocteau, though, was responsible for rejuvenating her career as it went into a popular tailspin in the early 1950s: one night he found her singing in some grim Parisian dive, and wrote an article that drew attention to her talents again. She even appeared in a revival of Le Bel Indifférent, opposite her then husband the singer-composer Jacques Pills. Perhaps as Sarapo drove up from the south of France with the corpse of Piaf in his car he had learned, as so many of Piaf's lovers did not, what love was all about and why it was important. Sarapo arguably learned his love lesson from Piaf in a recording studio the previous year when he collaborated with her in a duet called A Quoi Ca Sert l'Amour? (What's the Point of Love?). He had no experience of singing, but she taught him enough to get through the recording convincingly. The conceit of the song is that he has a low opinion of love, while she, with her lifelong experience of passion and loss, understands it all too well. At the end of the song he sings: "If I have understood correctly without the pleasures and pains of love, frankly we have lived for nothing." Maybe his understanding made the drive back to Paris easier. He was living for something, if only the loving preservation of a legend. · Musée Edith Piaf is at 5 Crespin du Gast, Paris. Details: 00 33 1 43 55 52 72. Jean Cocteau: Sur le Fil du Siècle is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until January 5. Details: 00 33 1 44 78 12 33 Tosh // 6:15 PM ______________________ Comments: Post a Comment
An amusing piece by Stuart Jeffries in today's Guardian Saturday November 8, 2003 The Guardian Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau died on the same day. Cocteau, chivalrous at the last, obeyed the rule of ladies first. "Ah, la Piaf est morte," he said on the morning of October 11 1963. "Je peux mourir aussi." [Ah, Piaf's dead. I can die too."] And then he promptly died of a heart attack. Or so legend has it. But in these matters, legend is all-important, while what actually happened concerns only those with no imagination or soul. No doubt this is what was going through the mind of Piaf's second husband and final lover, the actor Théo Sarapo, when he put her corpse in his car and headed for Paris shortly after she died of cancer. He had to race against time to make it look as if the great French singer had died in her Paris apartment, because that is what her fans would have expected of her - faithful to no man, but ever faithful to Paris. It was Piaf's funeral not Cocteau's that brought Paris to gridlock. One of her lovers, the singer and actor Charles Aznavour (whom Piaf helped to launch in showbusiness), said that her funeral procession marked the first time since the end of the second world war that Paris traffic had come to a complete stop. Because of Piaf's louche life - the lovers, the booze, the drugs - the archbishop of Paris forbade her a mass; none the less, her funeral at Père Lachaise was mobbed by 40,000 fans. Forty years on, the roles are reversed: Paris can talk of nothing but Jean Cocteau. An 864-page biography has just been published by Gallimard to coincide with the anniversary of his death. An exhibition devoted to Cocteau at the Pompidou Centre has its own 450-page catalogue, showcasing the display of 900 objects that tries to convey his many talents in poetry, cinema, music and art. There are 950ft of glass cases showing his books and writings, 32 audio-visual installations with film clips, 335 drawings and 300 photographs. In the visitors book, there are many messages hailing this multi-media hoopla, and suggesting how the exhibition demonstrates the cultural superiority of France over the barbarian US. It's all very different if you want to commemorate Piaf's death in Paris. There is no big retro spective at the Pompidou for her, no improbably fat biography. True, you could station yourself at a pavement café, order a bottle of Dubonnet, put her greatest hits on your personal stereo and cry your mascara runny. Otherwise, though, you should take the Métro to Menilmontant in the 11th arrondisement, a delightfully picaresque Parisian quartier, to visit the apartment that houses the Edith Piaf museum - as long as you booked an appointment first. Once there (a tiny plaque outside reads "Les Amis d'Edith Piaf"), you must climb four flights because the apartment block has no lift. The director, Bernard Marchois, will escort you through the museum's two small rooms, to the constant soundtrack of Piaf chansons. On display is a life-size cardboard cutout of Piaf (all five feet no inches of her) next to a giant teddy bear, given to her by Sarapo. There are her tiny shoes (size 34), her tiny dresses, her many gold and platinum discs and other memorabilia. You can buy an Edith Piaf keyring if you want. Apart from sharing the same death date, what did the adorable Gallic bawler and the often-derided aesthetic gadfly have in common? In origins, not much. Cocteau was born into a bourgeois family on July 5 1889. He described his mother as a "madonna swathed in velvet, smothered in diamonds, bedecked with nocturnal plumes, a glittering chestnut tree, spiked with rays of light, tall, abstracted, torn between the last promptings to be good and one last look in the mirror". His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, committed suicide while Cocteau was a child. Piaf, by contrast, was born in the gutter - although one suspects that legend, again, trumps whatever really happened. She was the daughter of an Italian singer and a French circus acrobat, and was originally called Edith Giovanna Gassion. (The name Piaf was given to her later by a nightclub owner who gave her her first break; it is Parisian slang for sparrow.) According to legend, she was born outside 72 rue de Belleville on December 19 1915. Her two midwives were local gendarmes, one of whom shielded the birth from public gaze with his cape. Neither of her parents was ready to look after such a sickly baby, so she was packed off into the care of a madame of a Normandy brothel. She remained there until she was seven, when she joined her father, a travelling showman, on the road. At 15 she started singing in a duo with a woman called Simone Berteaut, who was destined to become her misguiding spirit. It was with Berteaut that she worked the streets as well as treading the boards, before bursting on to the interwar cabaret scene. What could Piaf and Cocteau have in common? After all, he was a precocious poet, a friend of Picasso, a collaborator with Satie, Stravinsky and Diaghilev; a self-conscious artist whose films, plays, graphic art and novels drew on a Greek classicism tempered by a grasp of modernist art and the vicissitudes of fashion. André Gide and the surrealists hated his shtick. As for Piaf, her aesthetic consisted in the expression of emotion in popular song. And yet these two French legends were soul mates in one respect: their lives, or rather the legends of their lives, rivalled and perhaps even trumped their art. In Patrick Mauriès's lovely essay on Cocteau, he suggests that Cocteau put more of his genius into his life than his work. Admittedly, you could hardly say the same for Piaf. The boozing and unhappy love affairs hardly amount to an expression of genius. Her life was certainly not arranged according to some intentional project. The intriguing intersection of their lives has received negligible attention: in Francis Steegmuller's 591-page Cocteau biography, for instance, there are only three entries under Piaf. Even when a biographer does allude to their relationship it consists only of a tantalising reference to Le Bel Indifférent (The Beautiful Indifferent), the play Cocteau wrote for his little sparrow in the early years of the second world war. At the time Cocteau wrote it, Piaf was living with the actor and singer Paul Meurisse. Cocteau thought Meurisse was a dull bourgeois unworthy of his beloved sparrow. So he wrote a play about their relationship with the aim of showing Paris that the passionate, man-hungry, booze-thirsty, life-devouring Piaf was shacked up with a cold fish, and also with a powerful desire to drive the pair apart. Then - what chutzpah! - he inveigled Paul and Edith to play themselves self-destructing on stage. But was it Cocteau who tore them apart? This much is suggested in Annie Caulfield's recent Radio 4 play Piaf and Cocteau. In her play, Cocteau is depicted as a master of psychology in luring Piaf to perform in a play and convincing her that it will make the object of her affections besotted with her, when really he is intending the reverse. Shortly after the pair appeared together in a long-forgotten film called Montmartre-sur-Seine , Piaf fell for Norbert Glanzberg, a Jewish pianist, and someone who appealed to her taste for provocation. It was also potentially a very dangerous affair for both parties given that she was performing for high-ranking Germans at the One Two Two Club in Paris. Her performances at the club earned her the right to pose for photos with French prisoners of war whom she visited in the stalags, ostensibly as a morale-boosting exercise. Once in possession of their celebrity photos, prisoners were able to cut out their own images and use them in forged papers. The only love of Piaf's life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in an air-crash over the Azores, and following that great loss, her final years became a series of dashes between clinics (where she was treated for morphine and alcohol addiction) and recording studios. Cocteau, though, was responsible for rejuvenating her career as it went into a popular tailspin in the early 1950s: one night he found her singing in some grim Parisian dive, and wrote an article that drew attention to her talents again. She even appeared in a revival of Le Bel Indifférent, opposite her then husband the singer-composer Jacques Pills. Perhaps as Sarapo drove up from the south of France with the corpse of Piaf in his car he had learned, as so many of Piaf's lovers did not, what love was all about and why it was important. Sarapo arguably learned his love lesson from Piaf in a recording studio the previous year when he collaborated with her in a duet called A Quoi Ca Sert l'Amour? (What's the Point of Love?). He had no experience of singing, but she taught him enough to get through the recording convincingly. The conceit of the song is that he has a low opinion of love, while she, with her lifelong experience of passion and loss, understands it all too well. At the end of the song he sings: "If I have understood correctly without the pleasures and pains of love, frankly we have lived for nothing." Maybe his understanding made the drive back to Paris easier. He was living for something, if only the loving preservation of a legend. · Musée Edith Piaf is at 5 Crespin du Gast, Paris. Details: 00 33 1 43 55 52 72. Jean Cocteau: Sur le Fil du Siècle is at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, until January 5. Details: 00 33 1 44 78 12 33 Tosh // 6:15 PM
