Edith Piaf's life and music were filled with sadness, tragedy, glamour, and triumph, and
were so quintessentially French.
She grew up poor and rose to fame with a hauntingly beautiful voice.
Here, you get a glimpse into the singer's tragic fall from grace.
Raised in a brothel
Myth and reality are often entangled when it comes to Edith Piaf's childhood because
her life story sounds like a fable.
It has been said that Piaf was born in the streets of Belleville, a working class neighborhood
on the edge of Paris.
People have taken this to mean that her mother gave birth to her on the actual pavement.
In truth, she was born in a hospital like most babies.
Unlike other children, she was born to traveling circus performers:
her father was an acrobat and her mother was a singer.
According to The New York Times:
"Her mother deserted her after two months and she lived for two years with her maternal
grandmother in wretched conditions of filth and neglect."
According to "No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf," when Piaf's father returned from fighting
in World War I, he saw the condition his daughter was living in.
He moved Piaf to live with his mother, who ran a brothel.
By age 8, Edith Piaf went to live with her father.
They traveled with a circus for a time, but soon her father, not one for commitments,
quit and they traveled around the country.
According to Provence Wine Zine:
"At age 14, in 1929, young Piaf began working with her father in his street performances."
Over time, she developed her own repertoire of songs.
At age 16 she began working without her father.
Piaf worked with a younger acrobat, and they performed in the streets and army barracks.
She met a young man named Louis Dupont and became pregnant.
According to Provence Wine Zine:
"At 17, she gave birth to her only child Marcelle who died two years later to meningitis."
Piaf left Dupont and continued to sing in the streets and at a seedy club called Lulu's.
While singing near the Arc de Triomphe, a passerby heard Edith PIaf singing.
The man's name was Louis Leplée, and he would be the one to give her stage name, La Môme
Piaf, which means The Little Sparrow, "Piaf" being slang for sparrow.
Leplée owned an upscale cabaret near the Champs-Elysées.
He paid her 40 francs a night and helped to shape her image.
According to "No Regrets":
"He would present her not as a glamorous chanteuse, but as herself: the contrast between her childlike
mien and her assaultive vibrato would move audiences as it moved him."
Within the year Piaf became a sensation, playing on the radio, seeing her name in the newspapers,
acting in films, and recording an album.
While in Cannes for a charity ball, Leplée was robbed and murdered in Paris.
Despite being nowhere near the scene of the crime, she was arrested and questioned, but
later released.
According to The Travel Geek:
"The police thought that by working in the Le Gerny's, Piaf brought the attention of
her friends in the street mafia to the establishment."
Piaf often dated and hung around with the French mafia, something both sex workers and
Piaf did for protection while working and living in the tougher parts of town.
Although she was found innocent, it put a stain on her career.
The fact that Edith Piaf continued working throughout World War II was enough to make
French countrymen and women give her some serious side-eye.
German soldiers attended her performances, and she was popular with Nazi leaders.
While Nazi censors vetted her songs and would not play those written by Jewish lyricists,
some fell through the cracks.
For example, according to “Music and the Holocaust,” her song, "It is Not Distinguished",
has the lyrics:
"I can't stand Hitler, the Nazis seem to forget that we were the people who slammed them in
the [first world] war."
Piaf protected two Jewish musicians, whom she helped to go into hiding.
She inadvertently assisted the resistance movement by living in a home where many Jewish
men and women hid.
She went on a tour that ultimately was a covert undercover operation.
Photos taken of her posing with French prisoners in the audience were then used to make 120
fake passports that many of them used to escape.
Per Music and the Holocaust:
"She continued to sing at prison camps at her own initiative even when resistance activities
were not being carried out, and it will never be quite clear whose morale, the Nazis' or
the prisoners', she was hoping to boost."
After the war, purge panels were formed to question those who may have appeared sympathetic
to Germany.
Edith Piaf's music was banned by this panel.
After pleading her case, telling them about her efforts to help the resistance, she was
released and free to perform once again.
By this time Piaf was in her thirties.
She was famous, controlled by no one, but still desperate to keep her career afloat
since post-war France was still recovering.
The United States was popular, and other French singers had a lot of success playing in the
country, so in 1947, Piaf set sail for a U.S. tour.
Upon her arrival in New York, she was met with disappointment for not being the typical
star — not having the charisma and good looks the U.S. had come to expect from Hollywood.
And, Americans were not fans of being sad, which was Piaf's main artistic charm.
The New York audiences did not turn out for her in the way she expected.
According to All Music:
"Just as she was about to leave the country, a prominent New York critic wrote a glowing
review of her show, urging audiences not to dismiss her."
After the review, she received an eight-week run at The Cafe Versailles in New York, a
club frequented by celebrities.
She stayed in the U.S. for five months.
Edith Piaf had more lovers than she could count.
After an affair with famous actor John Garfield in the U.S., she wrote in her journal:
"I'm not meant to have a heap of lovers.
At the end of each affair I'm more disgusted than ever.
I'd like one true, wholesome love."
It was at this time Marcel Cerdan arrived in New York for a match.
Cerdan was a French boxer just as famous and beloved as Piaf.
Due to the fact that Cerdan was married with three children, they tried to hide their affair,
though it made its way into the Parisian tabloids anyway.
Both Piaf and Cerdan came from poor neighborhoods and respected each other's triumph over struggle.
The couple both traveled often for work, and at times could continue their affair if they
happened to be in the same place.
In 1949, Piaf was back in New York, and Cerdan was scheduled for a fight with Jake LaMotta.
Cerdan planned on traveling by boat, but Piaf insisted he come by plane so they could spend
more time together.
Cerdan's plane crashed into the Azores; there were no survivors.
Piaf was heartbroken.
That night she sang at The Cafe Versailles.
She told the audience:
"Tonight I'm singing for Marcel Cerdan."
Edith Piaf was plagued with arthritis, which began around the time of Marcel Cerdan's death.
So by 1951, when she was in a car accident, she was already on a lot of prescription medications.
She was driving with her new boyfriend, Andre Pousse, when he missed a turn, and they crashed.
Piaf broke an arm and two ribs.
As a result, she was prescribed morphine.
Piaf wrote:
"I was addicted.
I was earning millions; the drug dealers knew this and took advantage."
She recalls seeing people entering her apartment and, quote, "robbing" her, but being too weak
to do anything about it.
According to Everyday Health:
"By the mid-1950s, after several car accidents, her painkiller use had become an addiction."
In addition to morphine, she also drank more heavily.
She never recovered from the death of Cerdan.
In fact, she hosted seances and kept whatever belongings she had of his as relics.
Despite having a lot of lovers, Edith Piaf had not yet married.
In fact when she met her soon-to-be-husband, singer and actor Jacques Pills, she was in
the midst of a relationship with a famous French cyclist, whom she claimed she wanted
to marry.
According to the Independent, she ended things by sending him a letter that read:
"When you receive this letter I will be married."
Her relationship and marriage to Pills was abrupt.
Pills, who was also a singer, wanted to work with Piaf on a song.
They began rehearsing every day and, soon after, announced a tour together and their
engagement.
Piaf's lifestyle was anything but stable.
Pills' sister, Simone, took care of her.
She retrieved cortisone for Piaf when she was in pain, stayed up with her when she couldn't
sleep, made sure she was up by 1 p.m., and witnessed the numerous folks around Piaf borrowing
money, flattering her, drinking with her, and endlessly partying.
Piaf was in and out of rehab for morphine and alcohol.
She was also in and out of the hospital for health problems.
After the couple could no longer tour, being together became difficult, and Piaf did not
like to be alone.
She began an affair with a lyricist and traveled all over the U.S. with him.
Upon her return to Paris, after traveling the U.S., Mexico, and South America for a
year, she and Pills divorced in 1956.
Through her addiction and ailments, Edith Piaf continued to sing and attract crowds
in her 40s.
Her lover and fellow singer, Georges Moustaki, said of her when she was on stage:
"She could breathe there, she was at home, she constructed her own world.
If she felt ill in the wings, she felt better once she went on."
In 1959, she rushed off stage on two occasions, coughing up blood.
A doctor said that she had a hemorrhaging ulcer from all the medicine she had been taking.
She was hospitalized and lost a significant amount of weight.
After that, she was in and out of hospitals, but continued to perform publicly when she
found the strength.
During a recovery period in which she couldn't even sing, a lyricist and the composer Charles
Dumont played for her the song, "No, I Don't Have Any Regrets," which became one of her
most famous songs.
Although not her final recording, it certainly felt like a song that summed up her life that
was coming to an end.
Right before her death, when her declining health was obvious, she married a young singer,
Theo Sarapo, who was 20 years younger than her.
Dumont said of this union:
"She wanted to do something mythic, to show right at the end, she embraced love, youth,
beauty.
It was hugely romantic."
Piaf died of liver failure on October 10, 1963.
She was 47 years old.
After her death one of her closest friends, Jean Cocteau, a world famous French writer,
said:
"Edith Piaf burned herself up in the flames of her glory.
I never knew anyone who was less protective of her spirit.
She didn't dole it out, she gave everything away."
Cocteau died the day after Piaf.
Within 48 hours, France lost two of its greatest artists.
The Catholic Church denied her a funeral mass because she divorced and remarried.
Despite this, she had a pretty epic procession and display of fanfare following her death.
According to The New York Times:
"About 100,000 persons lined up for hours to file past the bier."
The day of her funeral thousands of people lined the streets to see her hearse pass,
and a group of 40,000 people watched her get buried at the cemetery in Paris, where many
famous people such as Oscar Wilde are buried.
According to the New Zealand Herald, 50 years after Piaf's death, on October 10, 2013, the
Catholic Church decided to finally grant Piaf a formal mass.
It was held at St. Jean Baptiste, the church she was baptised at in Belleville where Piaf
grew up.
Edith Piaf continues to be a national monument to all things French.
In Paris, there is a street named after her, a bronze statue of her likeness, and an entire
museum dedicated to her life.
"With Oscar-winning films about her and squares named after her like here at Place de Edith
Piaf, she is perhaps Paris's most famous daughter."
According to Newsweek, the singer was not always glorified.
"During her life she was often vilified for her sexual liaisons, for breaking up marriages
and drug abuse."
Somewhere in the 2000s, there was a renewed interest, and the singer's life and music
became a celebrated national treasure again.
In 2007, the biopic La Vie en Rose, starring Marion Cotillard, helped to bring the singer's
legacy back into the world's imagination.
Cotillard won an Oscar for her portrayal of Piaf.
In 2015, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, The National Library of France held an exhibit
in her honor.
"Articulate!
Again!"
"I sing the way I speak!"
"Do what I say or go back to the gutter!"
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