Reviews of No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

March 1, 2012

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

by Oline Eaton

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s.

And yet, so often Piaf’s high spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death.

In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke’s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness — in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II.

And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title.

“That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does.

No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press.

October 27, 2011

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

by Jaime O’Neill

My daughter, Sionann, used to live in the Belleville district of Paris, the neighborhood that produced Edith Piaf, one of the most enduring icons in all of French history. More than a half-century after her death, Piaf remains the vital embodiment of the way the French like to think of themselves — tough, resilient, romantic, and tender at the core. Belleville is still a working-class neighborhood, and there are currently lots of North African immigrants living there, but it’s not quite as rough as it was when Piaf was growing up in those environs, the daughter of a prostitute. For younger readers who may not have heard of her, or heard her amazing way of delivering a song, listen to “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and try not to be moved. That song, as Piaf sings it, has emotional power even if you don’t understand a word of the language. There have been earlier accounts of Piaf’s life, in books and on film, but Carolyn Burke’s is as readable as a novel, bringing to life the singer and her times. I loved it. Read it. You won’t regret it.

19 de outubro, 2011

A vida nada rosa de Edith Piaf

Ivan Claudio

A grande voz da música popular foi abandonada pela mãe, criada em um bordel, dependente química e infeliz no amor. Mas tinha uma grande capacidade de superação.

A cantora Edith Piaf (1915–1963), “a voz” da França, foi a Amy Winehouse de sua época. Como Amy, a intérprete de “La Vie en Rose” morreu relativamente jovem (47 anos), vítima de uma equação mal resolvida e de variáveis clássicas: infância de abandono e privações, decepções amorosas e fuga no alcoolismo e nas drogas. Isso tudo é sabido — a própria Piaf tratou desses assuntos em dois livros “ditados” a escritores. 

A novidade da biografia “Piaf — Uma Vida” (Leya) é que a autora, Carolyn Burke, tenta desfazer o clichê do gênio consumido pela própria chama e traçar um perfil de uma artista disciplinada cuja luta pela sobrevivência — e pelo sucesso na carreira — falou mais alto que o impulso autodestrutivo.

Só mesmo a força vital e criativa justifica a superação de tantos obstáculos: filha de um contorcionista e de uma cantora de cabaré que a trocou pela boêmia, Piaf foi criada no prostíbulo de sua avó e, quando o seu pai percebeu que ela tinha uma voz acima do normal, passou a utilizá-la em seus espetáculos mambembes. A convivência com o universo de párias sociais ajudou a sua emancipação precoce. Aos 16 anos, lá está o pequeno pardal (significado de Piaf) vivendo sozinha com uma amiga e cantando em espeluncas de Pigalle, a “zona ver­melha” de Paris. Casou-se com um entregador (de quem logo se separou), teve uma filha que morreu aos dois anos de meningite (moléstia mortal na época) e buscou abrigo nos braços de um cafetão, Ali-Babá, cujo comparsa atendia pelo nome de Tarzan. Ao ouvir dele que mulher de bandido tem que “rodar a bolsinha”, Piaf respondeu que conhecia uma forma mais rentável de trabalhar nas ruas. Ou seja: cantando.

Nesses primeiros tempos, ela tinha rendas extras, tipo “colecionar rolhas”: fazia companhia a homens solitários e os incentivava a entornar garrafas e garrafas de champanhe. Ganhava depois pelas rolhas acumuladas. Embora evitasse falar desse período, segundo Carolyn a cantora chegou a se prostituir. Precisava de dez francos para custear o enterro de sua filhinha; e o cliente, sensibilizado, pagou mais. 

Movida pela impulsividade que a fazia afastar-se de pessoas negativas, Piaf logo saiu desse ambiente – em direção à fama. Faz parte da mitologia moderna o encontro da cantora com o dono de cabaré Louis Leplée, que a viu cantando numa esquina, deu-lhe cinco francos e um palco iluminado. Daí para a plateia seleta do Playhouse de Nova York, em 1947, quando foi paparicada por Gene Kelly, Greta Garbo e Marlene Dietrich, não foi mais uma questão de sorte. Apesar de detestar a companhia feminina, Piaf ficou íntima de Marlene. Segundo a atriz alemã, ela se achava feia e insegura, mas “seu carisma era tão grande que podia ter qualquer homem que quisesse”. E foram muitos. 
Um deles marcou a sua vida e a deixou devastada quando morreu num acidente de avião: o lutador de boxe Marcel Cerdan. Ela passou a exagerar na bebida e a se drogar com morfina, vício adquirido para aplacar as dores após dois acidentes de carro. Ao final, com muitas complicações, voz falha e aparência de “mariposa agonizante”, começou a esquecer letras de músicas que conhecia de cor. Entre elas o seu hino: “Não me Arrependo de Nada”.

October 19, 2011

Not a rosy life for Edith Piaf

by Ivan Claudio

The great voice of popular music was abandoned by her mother, raised in a brothel, an addict unlucky in love. But she had a great capacity to overcome.

The singer Edith Piaf (1915–1963), "the voice" of France, was the Amy Winehouse of her day. Like Amy, the singer of "La Vie en Rose" died relatively young (age 47), the victim of unresolved situations and classic variables: a childhood of neglect and deprivation, heartbreak, and escape in alcohol and drugs. This is all well known — Piaf herself addressed this subject in two books “dictated” to the writers. The novelty of the biography “Piaf — A Life” (Leya) is that the author, Carolyn Burke, tries to undo the cliché of genius consumed by its own flame, and profiles a disciplined artist whose struggle for survival — and success in her career — spoke louder than the self-destructive impulse. But many obstacles were overcome; the daughter of a contortionist and a cabaret singer who left her for a bohemian life, Piaf was set up at the brothel of her grandmother, and when her father realized that she had a special voice, he began to use it in their rickety shows. Living in a world of social outcasts aided her early emancipation. At 16, the little sparrow, Piaf in French, was living on her own with a friend and singing in the dives of Pigalle, the “red-light district” of Paris. She married a deliveryman (they soon broke up), had a daughter who died of meningitis (a deadly disease at the time) at age two, and sought shelter in the arms of a pimp, Ali Baba, whose gang was called Tarzan. Upon hearing that the wife of this villain had to “turn tricks,” Piaf said she knew a more profitable way to work the streets: by singing.

In those early days, she gained extra income from “collecting corks”: convincing lonely men to buy bottle after bottle of champagne. Money was earned after the corks accumulated. Although she avoided talking about that period, according to Carolyn the singer became a prostitute. Ten francs was needed to pay for the burial of her daughter, and the customer, aware of this, paid more. Struggling to escape her bad circumstances, Piaf left that environment — to fame. A modern legend describes her meeting with the cabaret owner Louis Leplée, who saw her singing on a street corner, gave her five francs and a lighted stage. Her appearance at the Playhouse in New York in 1947, where she was doted on by Gene Kelly, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, was no longer a matter of luck. Despite avoiding female companionship, Piaf became intimate with Marlene. According to the German actress, she felt ugly and insecure, but “her charisma was so great she could have any man she wanted.” And there were many. One left her devastated when he died in a plane crash, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. She indulged in alcohol, and became addicted to morphine, taken to appease the pain from two car accidents. In the end, with many complications, a cracking voice, and the appearance of a dying butterfly, she began to forget lyrics she had known by heart, among them “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

The great love

and the naïf

May 29, 2011

Piaf biography invites new look at French icon

SYDNEY — A new book about legendary French singer Edith Piaf reveals much about her life before stardom, including her yearnings for poetry and philosophy as a young girl working to overcome her tough upbringing.

Writer Carolyn Burke said her biography No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf delves deeply into the early life of the “Little Sparrow,” and invites a reassessment of one of the most famous singers of the twentieth century.

“We get the young Piaf that we didn’t necessarily know about, even if we heard her sing,” Australian-born Burke told AFP at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this month.

Burke’s book is among the first to draw on more than 100 letters written by a young Piaf to one of her mentors, the scholarly Jacques Bourgeat, held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and only recently released to scrutiny.

“Those letters reveal aspects of Edith Piaf that we couldn’t have known about,” Burke explained.

“You see her desire for an education, to better herself. We learn about her emotional and spiritual development even, because she had a strong wish . . . to not only study poetry but philosophy.”

Burke said the letters reveal a tenderness between Piaf and the middle-aged, poetry-writing Bourgeat, who instructed the young woman with scant education after a hand-to-mouth existence on what to read and how to improve her French.

“So the next thing she’s reading Baudelaire, she’s reading Rimbaud, she’s reading Plato. It’s so moving to find out about this,” she explained.

“I was sitting there reading Edith Piaf’s handwriting, seeing her mistakes in spelling and grammar, and she says things to him like, ‘I’m making progress, aren’t I? Is this a better letter?’ He’s trying to help her learn proper French. It’s so important to know that.”

The unlikely pair, who were not lovers, corresponded for the next 25 years, and Burke believes the letters provide “the very best source for a deeper look at who she was and how she developed.”

Piaf began writing lyrics shortly after meeting Bourgeat at a Paris nightclub, and Burke believes it was in part with his help that she acquired enough confidence and experience with the language to become a lyricist.

“As a woman who had no education, no background, nothing . . . her family wasn’t even working-class, they were the lowest of the low . . . how she managed to do what she did with such generosity to others . . . it’s fascinating to me.”

Almost 50 years after her death, aged 47, Piaf remains a formidable cultural influence — inspiring singers as diverse as Martha Wainwright and Lady Gaga — and has a devoted fan following around the world.

Burke’s research led her to some of these fans, the collectors of Piaf items such as one of her signature black dresses, old recorded versions of her songs, and home movies taken by members of her entourage.

She understands their passion, having been struck by the beauty of the language and power of Piaf’s voice when she first heard her sing on the radio as a student in Paris.

The result is a biography which has been criticised as too kind to Piaf — known for her many lovers, her associations with the gangster class, and her reliance on painkillers in later years.

Burke said her book was no “whitewash,” but it was time for a kinder judgement on the woman who held listeners spellbound with the haunting voice she carried within her diminutive frame.

“The problem is, people have lots of stereotypes in their minds about who entertainers are, and in particular Piaf. People think, ‘Oh, we know who that was — poor self-destructive waif’,” she said.

“And my book goes completely in another direction, which shows how creative she was and how much she shaped her own repertoire and legend. So I am offering a different look at her life.”

Burke draws on Piaf’s experiences in World War II, how she helped shelter Jewish friends, assisted in a daring prisoner escape plan, and sang songs written by Jewish writers, contrary to German orders.

At times her life reads as invention — her father was a travelling contortionist, her mother a singer who left her as a toddler and became a drug addict, and her early childhood included time living in her father’s family’s brothel.

Burke said that much written about Piaf is exaggerated or even malicious.

“For instance the business with the drugs, those were all prescription drugs that she took to manage her horrible chronic pain,” she said.

“The pain that resulted from several car accidents. What she took was prescribed by doctors so that she could go on singing.”

Burke wants to remind the world, and France, that Piaf was an entertainer who displayed enormous creativity, courage and resilience despite her difficulties and personal sorrows.

“I mention that she was tyrannical and that she made her entourage do things exactly the way she wanted. They had to eat the same meal every night for a week if that’s what she wanted. And they had to get up at 4 am if she rang.

“But it’s true that I wanted to take a different perspective to show her rather admirable traits, I think, because they have been underplayed.

“There may be time for a new look at Piaf in France. And wouldn’t that be good if an Australian could do it?”

May 7, 2011

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf by Carolyn Burke

Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow” with the cavernous throat, sang herself onto the Paris pavements between the wars.

Always waiflike, by the time she died in 1963, aged 47, she had started to look like a Disney witch; she seemed smaller than her 4 feet 10 inches, her famous hands, which fluttered about on the stage like moths, were stiff with arthritis, her liver was destroyed, her frizzy hair had thinned to the point that you could see her scalp, and the mask-like face beneath the pencilled brows was swollen and yellowed by drugs.

For 30 years, as Carolyn Burke puts it in this concise and compelling book, Piaf had represented “France to the French,” and 40,000 mourners joined her funeral procession.

Then began the afterlife, in which her few intimates (including Marlene Dietrich) and many hangers-on (her so-called “sister” Simone Bertaut, known as Mômone) gave conflicting accounts of Piaf’s rise to fame while competing over who had known her best.

Whichever version of Piaf’s life you read, it’s a terrific story and a biographer’s dream. Burke’s approach is rational rather than romantic, and she dispenses with a good deal of the myth.

Born in a hospital in Belleville, a slum on the outskirts of Paris, Edith Gassion was abandoned by her young mother — a street singer and drug addict — to be raised by the prostitutes in her grandmother’s brothel.

Piaf later described how, aged six, she lost her sight and the women of the house took their rosaries to the grave of St. Theresa. When her vision returned soon afterwards it was treated as a miracle, and her life was seen as blessed.

Burke suggests it was the doctor rather than the saint who cured her, but Piaf remained a committed Catholic with a sense of divine purpose.

She was encouraged by her father — a 5-foot-tall trapeze artist — to belt out her boulevard ballads on street corners, where she was discovered by a homosexual nightclub owner, Louis Leplée, who not much later was shot in the eye by hoodlums.

Piaf’s only child died, aged two, of meningitis, after which, desperate to love and be loved, the singer surrounded herself with dependants. She began and ended sexual relationships with terrifying velocity, her scores of lovers circling her life like aircraft waiting to land.

Her “great love” was the middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, who was killed in an accident on his way to see her in New York; Piaf afterwards supported his widow and children, while the menacing Mômone, part of her entourage of lost souls, faked seances in which Cerdan advised his grieving mistress to part with large sums of money.

Piaf married twice, on the second occasion to a Greek hairdresser 20 years her junior. Neither marriage was happy.

“The song is my life,” said Piaf, who would sing herself to death, and Burke accordingly gives us the life through the lyrics. Because there are so many, and because Burke describes so well their composition and performance, placing each in its historical and emotional context, it was helpful, I found, to play them as a soundtrack.

This also served as a reminder of the astonishingly feral quality, the trance-like strangeness, of Piaf’s voice. Her mode was chanson réaliste: spare, tragic tales of the downtrodden, whose verité drew the attention of the likes of Jean Cocteau, who became her friend.

The famous “Non, je ne regrette rien” was written after an illness brought on by Piaf’s “suicide tour” of 1959, when she would frequently collapse on stage. The song, she said, brought her back to life, and her audiences also saw it as a sign of resurrection.

“Piaf was singing,” writes Burke, “for all who believed that old amours could be transcended and sorrows overcome — that what counted was a resilient heart.”

The song’s debut performance brought Piaf 22 curtain calls. “I think it’s working,” she said backstage.

Burke, who clearly adores Piaf, at times exchanges the objectivity of the commentator for the loyalty of a fan.

Piaf’s public life is explored in more detail than her private demons, and she leaves us wanting to know more about the terrors that kept the star from sleeping at night (Piaf compared sleep with death), which led to her dread of being alone, and made her so sexually and emotionally unsatisfied.

It would also be good to know Burke’s uncensored opinion of some of Piaf’s “friends” and lovers, but the biographer’s politeness aside, No Regrets is poised, persuasive and powerful -- like the sparrow herself.

May 7, 2011

by Linda Herrick

The legend who lived for love

It must be tough, being a biographer. Carolyn Burke, whose book on American war photographer Lee Miller inspired a dramatic image-driven session at the Auckland Writers Festival a few years ago, decided her next subject would be the legendary French chanteuse, Edith Piaf. Much of her research entailed lengthy periods of time living in Paris. How ghastly. Then she heard of two men living in Marseilles who were Piaf collectors — so she had to go down to the balmy French Mediterranean coast to meet them. Twice.

“They have the biggest collection of Piaf records, films, memorabilia of all kinds,” says Australian-born Burke, on the phone from Santa Cruz, California, where she has lived for many years. “They even had her car. I sat at the wheel of her car. And they had her little black dresses, her handbags. I was able to get as close to her in a physical way as possible. It was quite thrilling.”

Extremely thrilling, actually, for someone who has been enchanted by Piaf since she — Burke — was 19, and living in Paris in the late 1950s while she studied French at the Sorbonne. Piaf was in her mid-40s at the time, and alarmingly frail.

“I lived in a maid’s room on the top floor of a seven-storey building,” Burke recalls. “I had to walk up seven flights of stairs. I gave English lessons to the family, and they called me ‘La Miss.’ I first heard Piaf on the radio — I was very impressionable and thought, my, this is amazing. Then I learned from my French professor that he considered her an example of perfect French diction, so I started singing along with Edith Piaf songs to perfect my French.

“Piaf was still alive, doing what the French press called her ‘suicide tour.’ She was so ill, they were taking bets on whether she would die on stage. She did indeed fall quite ill that year, and had to stop singing for almost a year, but you heard her songs on the radio all the time, and she was always in the papers.”

Ill as she was — arthritis and liver ailments after years of drinking and addiction to pain killers — the indomitable Piaf wasn’t quite finished. As Burke relates in her book, No Regrets, the singer made a remarkable last surge, inspired by a song. “She wouldn’t see anybody — she’d had several surgeries and long convalescences, but she still wasn’t doing very well,” says Burke.

“One evening the composer Charles Dumont came to her apartment with a new song, but she wouldn’t see him. Then she changed her mind and let him in — this is the story he told me in an interview — and he played the song we know in English as ‘No Regrets.’ She perked up and said, ‘Play it again.’ Gradually she sat up and called in her entourage. She had him play it 20-something times, all night long, and it had an unbelievably tonic effect.”

Piaf was convinced she could return to the stage, and booked the Olympia Theatre in Paris to give a programme based on the new song. “Dumont wrote a lot of songs for and with her, and so that is the story of how she revived,” says Burke. “By the end of the year [1960] she was back with a long run at the Olympia and everyone talked about her resurrection. She had sheer will and determination in great quantities.”

Other books have been written about Piaf’s life, including her own “whitewashed” memoirs, The Wheel of Fortune, and an unreliable biography by the singer’s lifelong friend (very much on and off), Simone Berteaut, aka Momone. “While Momone’s account of Piaf’s life was highly picturesque, not to say sensational, you have to use it with great care, because she told a lot of lies to inflate her own importance,” says Burke.

Burke was fortunate, because she came to the project at exactly the right moment. In 2006 the embargo expired on a huge collection of Piaf’s correspondence held by the French Bibliotheque Nationale — the National Library. The letters were mainly between Piaf and poet Jacques Bourgeat, who the singer regarded as her spiritual mentor. But first, Burke had to gain several kinds of approval, not least of which involved etiquette, from the literary lawyer in charge of the Piaf Foundation in Paris.

“I had to go over to Paris to see him. I speak fluent French, and that certainly helps. I had several long interviews with him, and he could see how I was thinking about the project, and I guess that satisfied him.

“I had some trepidation about being an outsider coming in and trying to work on this national icon. Because I have lived in France a lot, I also know something about how to behave, and that really helped. If you don’t follow the protocol and do things properly, the doors will shut.”

Access to the letters and the lawyer’s full backing meant Burke’s biography could include lengthy quotes from those letters, the first time they have been published in English. Piaf’s words give an insight into a woman who was born and raised rough (her father was a tiny acrobat, her mother a drunk who abandoned her) but possessed a keen intelligence and a determination to learn. Burke was astonished to discover Piaf was fascinated by Greek philosophy.

“It was a complete surprise. I learned that from the correspondence — it really allows us to see her in a new light. She talks to Bourgeat about Plato — you can’t believe it. When she went to tour Greece after World War II she was quite disappointed that modern Greece was not the way she had imagined,” she laughs.

When Elizabeth Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, she demanded that he read “improving” literature, and a similar, amusing detail emerges in the book that Piaf made her lovers, or “protégés,” study the heavy philosophical works she thought were so important. For some, it was more than a struggle.

“Some of them were not so delighted with Edith’s reading list,” Burke laughs, “but another thing I learned from the research and interviews was how generous she was with her protégés, how much she taught them. Yves Montand [one of Piaf’s earlier lovers and a singer of French cowboy songs when they first met] owed an immense amount to her, because she decided to pass on her own training. He’d been singing those cowboy songs in French until he met her. Then he became a huge star.”

It is staggering to read about the number of relationships Piaf had, and the fluidity with which she passed from one man to another. Burke admits even she was surprised.

“I even thought of putting all their names in an appendix, but my editor didn’t want me to do that.”

She doesn’t necessarily agree, though, that Piaf was essentially a lonely person. “To look at it from another angle, she was very adept at forming an alternative family through affinity, all those various musicians and impresarios, the people that gave her a lot of companionship. She couldn’t bear solitude — but things didn’t always work out so well with her men.”

The great love of Piaf’s life, the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan (who was married), ended in 1949 when he died in a plane crash on his way to join the singer in New York. They had been together for less than a year. “I can think of only one thing, to join him,” Piaf told Bourgeat in a letter quoted in the biography.

“Their relationship was fraught, to say the least, because he was married,” observes Burke, “and they were both so famous they were hiding from the press. Who knows what would have happened? She certainly idealised him and the relationship.”

What the book makes clear was that Piaf was always searching for a “perfect love.” Burke believes that may have stemmed from the abandonment by her mother.

“Her mother left her when Edith was 2, although when she retold the story in later years, she made it worse by saying it was when she was 2 months old. Later on, when she was a success, her mother tried to profit by singing Edith’s songs and extracting money from her all the time. I think that failed mother-daughter relationship must be at the bottom of her inability to accept that love is never perfect, and it’s always a set of compromises, which must be more difficult when two entertainers are involved. She was searching for perfect love — not too likely to find it on this earth.”

When Piaf died in October 1963, her great friend, writer Jean Cocteau, said on state radio: “I never knew anyone who was less protective of her spirit. She didn’t dole it out, she gave everything away . . . only her voice remains.” An hour later, he too passed away.

Nearly 50 years after her death, Piaf’s voice endures, her persona revered around the world, her singing copied by many, with varying results.

“Piaf seems to present the virtues and the resilience of the little people, the spirit of battling on no matter what your circumstances are, and finding your way,” says Burke.

“Another part of it is her extraordinary voice, that is still so powerful. Practically all the female singers in France trying out for French Idol learn the Piaf songs as if she is the gold standard, and they have to show that if they are real singers they will perform Piaf.”

Edith Piaf

Born Edith Gassion, December 19, 1915, in Belleville, Paris. Her father Louis Gassion was a street acrobat; her mother Annetta abandoned them both when Edith was 2 years old. At the age of 14, she joined her father on his street performances, when she first started singing. She had a baby girl when she was 16; the child died of meningitis aged 2.

Her singing career took off in 1935 when she was discovered by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, later murdered by mobsters. Her manager changed her name to Edith Piaf, cleaned up her image, and her career started to soar. After the war she became hugely popular across Europe and the US.

Married to Jacques Pills (in 1952; her friend Marlene Dietrich was matron of honour) and Theo Lamboukas (1962). She died of liver cancer in 1963.

April 27, 2011

by Rick Kleffel

La Vie en Prose

We make our own lives out of words from the stories we tell ourselves and rarely realize our own good fortune. To understand, we need to see words that describe another’s life and fortune, to see that life from within after having seen it from afar.

Edith Piaf is an artist who commands our attention, whose pure voice takes us out of our lives into a world now lost. We know the externals of her story, from the streets of Paris to Carnegie Hall. It is a triumph of art and of song. But to understand, to see our lives in hers, we need to experience her story from within. Carolyn Burke’s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf lets us live in the heart that broke hearts.

Burke’s biography of Piaf is a sublime vision in which art captures the artist. From Belleville, where Piaf — then named Edith Gassion — found the passion to give voice to impoverished slum-dwellers, to Carnegie Hall, where that voice was graced with the finesse to change lives, Burke’s prose builds for readers a life worth living in the most terrible of times.

Piaf is a complicated figure and a compelling character. She was a poet, a lyricist and a mentor to other singers. She took part in Resistance efforts in World War II. As Piaf knew her strengths, Burke knows her own. She combines intense, detailed scholarship with a flair for storytelling. Piaf did not sing or live gently — it’s desperation mingled with joy. She took her voice and her life to the edge. Burke’s biography takes us to the center of that life and lets us look out for a moment. When we are done, we can look back at the life we never lived as if we might have lived it.

April 24, 2011

by Mark Shenton

Edith Piaf — No Regrets: Legacy of a French Songbird

Edith Piaf, born Edith Gassion in 1915, accumulated a lot of myths around her life

Like many stars, Edith Piaf, born Edith Gassion in 1915, accumulated a lot of myths around her life even as she made musical magic, and they collided in the stage name with which she became known.

Piaf was French slang for sparrow, and as the diminutive singer adopted the name, she remarked, “I was baptised for life.”

However, while great artists are invariably born, not made, the peripatetic circumstances of her early life, brought up first by her maternal grandparents in the town brothel that they ran, then by her itinerant circus entertainer father, fuelled the insecurity that, coupled with the desertion of her mother, led to what she once reflected was “a desperate, almost morbid, need to be loved.”

Those early chapters of her life are etched in pain, and her eventful life was characterised by tragedy, including giving birth, aged 17, to a daughter who would die of meningitis two years later, and the death of the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan, in a plane crash in 1949.

Like Judy Garland, Piaf also died at the age of 47, and there is “something both tumultuous and sad in the way each lived; their legacy will endure far longer than the years they spent on earth.”

Piaf’s life has been the subject of previous stage and film treatments, including Pam Gems’s play, Piaf, with two separate West End productions, and the film La Vie En Rose. However, fuller justice is now done to both the person and her phenomenal career in Carolyn Burke’s frequently frank, always fascinating and revealing biography.

The author indulges a penchant for generalisations, comparing her to Billie Holiday and Garland, for instance, and adds: “Piaf’s legend appears to fit the template for successful artists who pay the price in their descent into suffering caused by drink, drugs, and, in the case of women, promiscuity.”

Of the latter phenomenon, she notes that “it has, at times, been a dizzying task to keep track of her many lovers.”

The book does at least pay Piaf the respect of seeing how that turbulent lifestyle and the myths around it also fuelled her art.

“It is often impossible to separate fact from fiction,” Burke writes, and adds it is
“an ambition that is probably beside the point, since her art and legend nourish each other, circling back to the streets where she got her start.”

It was on the streets that Piaf’s raw passion as a singer was first exposed. As an early advocate of hers on French radio put it, she had a voice “that came from the heart rather than her head.”

This book pays Piaf the supreme compliment of coming from both the heart and head of its author. You can feel a palpable love for her subject, and there’s also clear-headed analysis of what made Piaf tick which helps to make this book tick, too.

April 14, 2011

by Frances Wilson

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf by Carolyn Burke

The extraordinary life of the 'little sparrow' who sang herself to death

Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow” with the cavernous throat, sang herself onto the Paris pavements between the wars.

Always waiflike, by the time she died in 1963, aged 47, she had started to look like a Disney witch; she seemed even smaller than her 4 feet 10 inches, her famous hands, which fluttered about on the stage like moths, were stiff with arthritis, her liver was destroyed, her frizzy red hair had thinned to the point that you could see her scalp, and the mask-like face beneath the pencilled brows was swollen and yellowed by drugs.

For 30 years, as Carolyn Burke puts it in this concise and compelling book, Piaf had represented “France to the French” and 40,000 mourners joined her funeral procession. Then began the afterlife, in which her few intimates (including Marlene Dietrich) and many hangers-on (such as her so-called “sister,” Simone Bertaut, known as Mômone) gave conflicting accounts of Piaf’s rise to fame while competing over who had known her best.

Whichever version of Piaf’s life you read it’s a terrific story and a biographer’s dream. Burke’s approach is rational rather than romantic and she dispenses with a good deal of the myth.

Born in a hospital in Belleville, a slum on the outskirts of Paris, Edith Gassion was abandoned by her young mother — a street singer and drug addict — to be raised by the prostitutes in her grandmother’s brothel.

Piaf later described how, aged six, she lost her sight and the women of the house took their rosaries to the grave of St Theresa. When her vision returned soon afterwards it was treated as a miracle, and her life was seen as blessed.

Burke suggests it was the doctor rather than the saint who cured her, but Piaf remained a committed Catholic with a sense of her divine purpose.

She was encouraged by her father — a 5-foot-tall trapeze artist — to belt out her boulevard ballads on street corners, where she was discovered by a homosexual nightclub owner, Louis Leplée, who not much later was shot in the eye by hoodlums.

Piaf’s only child died, aged two, of meningitis, after which, desperate to love and be loved, the singer surrounded herself with dependants. She began and ended sexual relationships with terrifying velocity, her scores of lovers circling her life like aircraft waiting to land.

Her “great love” was the middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, who was killed in an accident on his way to see her in New York; Piaf afterwards supported his widow and children while the menacing Mômone, part of her entourage of lost souls, faked seances in which Cerdan advised his grieving mistress to part with large sums of money.

Piaf married twice, on the second occasion to a Greek hairdresser 20 years her junior. Neither marriage was happy.

“The song is my life,” said Piaf, who would sing herself to death, and Burke accordingly gives us the life through the lyrics. Because there are so many and because Burke describes so well their composition and performance, placing each in its historical and emotional context, it was helpful, I found, to play them as a soundtrack to the book.

This also served as a reminder of the astonishingly feral quality, the trance-like strangeness, of Piaf’s voice. Her mode was chanson réaliste: spare, tragic tales of the abandoned and downtrodden, whose verité drew the attention of the likes of Jean Cocteau, who became her close friend.

The famous “Non, je ne regrette rien” was written after an illness brought on by Piaf’s “suicide tour” of 1959, when she would frequently collapse on stage. The song, she said, brought her back to life and her audiences also saw it as a sign of resurrection.

“Piaf was singing,” writes Burke, ‘‘for all who believed that old amours could be transcended and sorrows overcome — that what counted was a resilient heart.” The song’s debut performance brought Piaf 22 curtain calls. “I think it’s working,” she said backstage.

Burke, who clearly adores Piaf, at times exchanges the dry eye of the objective commentator for the loyalty of a fan. Piaf’s public life is explored in more detail than her private demons, and she leaves us wanting to know more about the terrors that kept the star from sleeping at night (Piaf compared sleep with death), which led to her dread of being alone, and made her so sexually and emotionally unsatisfied.

It would also be good to know Burke’s uncensored opinion of some of Piaf’s “friends” and lovers, but the biographer’s politeness aside, No Regrets is poised, persuasive and powerful — like the sparrow herself.

April 17, 2011

by Steven Rea

Small in all but voice and heart

Edith Piaf’s story, stripped of cliches and errors, is must reading for her many fans

“Just look at her. How can such a big voice belong to such a tiny woman?”

That’s Marcel Cerdan, the ’40s French boxing champ, marveling at the mighty intonations emanating from the street urchin-turned-chanteuse Edith Piaf. That the two became lovers, carrying on a lengthy transcontinental affair while he clobbered opponents in the ring and she floored audiences in clubs and concert halls, came as no surprise to intimates of Piaf — she was drawn to men of strength and character. The relationship ended when a plane carrying Cerdan from Paris to New York — where she waited — crashed in the Azores. No survivors.

Piaf, the child of a circus acrobat and a singer, raised in gritty poverty — and, for a time, in a brothel — never got over the loss. It was 1949. Piaf was 33. She died at 48 after a life full of doom and tragedy, and full of songs — street songs, defiant songs, songs of love and broken dreams — that tore at the soul, and inspired a nation.

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf is essential reading for Piaf fans, and they are legion, still — witness the success of La Vie en Rose, the 2007 Oscar-winning biopic with Marion Cotillard as “the little sparrow.” Carolyn Burke, a rigorous researcher and a Francophone (she’s Australian, and learned the language in part by singing along to Piaf discs in a Paris garret), has expanded on previous Piaf biographies, debunking myths and misconceptions and getting at the heart of the matter.

And the heart of the matter when it comes to Piaf is just that: her heart. Passion, pluck, the pursuit of love, and lovers (John Garfield, Yves Montand, the list goes on and on) . . . the diminutive entertainer with the “assaultive vibrato” wore her heart on her sleeve, as a scrawny teen singing for change on Pigalle corners, and as a global star spreading her hands out in the sweep of a theater’s spotlight.

Burke — whose books include Lee Miller: A Life, the riveting biography of another strong-willed woman, the American model-turned-photographer and artist’s muse — takes a straightforward chronological tack with Piaf. If the author’s writing can sometimes be dry, her observations are astute, and her skills as a biographer daunting. Burke is determined to honor her subject without resorting to stereotypes or recycling the apocryphal. “The cliche of Piaf as self-destructive waif is too rigid to allow for her complex humanity,” Burke writes in her introduction. Working from interviews with Piaf friends and colleagues, from letters and journals, films and recordings, and from previous Piaf books, Burke explores those complexities — taking the reader through five storm-tossed decades: the remarkable rise from guttersnipe warbler to the darling of Paris nightlife; her collaborations with songwriters and lyricists; her mentorship of artists such as Montand and Charles Aznavour, and her work, and friendship, with Jean Cocteau (he wrote a play for her to star in — which she did, atremble with stage fright).

And, like something out of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, there was her involvement with the Resistance: Piaf fearlessly smuggled fake identification cards, maps, and compasses to French citizens forced to work in German factories and camps during World War II. Her cover story: She was there to entertain the French laborers, a move that put her at risk of appearing in collusion with the enemy. And perform she did, serenading reed-thin Frenchmen in the stalags — and secretly facilitating their escapes.

Often, in pursuit of obscure facts and intimate details, a biographer can overlook, or simply take for granted, the big stuff — the essence of the subject. Happily, with No Regrets, this is anything but the case. Throughout her book, Burke draws the connections between Piaf’s life and her songs (offering deft translations of key lyrics), linking the artist with her art, the lover with the thing she loved most — her music.

Piaf was, as Burke notes toward the close of this eloquent and enlightening story, “a people’s diva whose courage matched her extraordinary gifts, a soul who gave of herself until there was nothing left but her voice and the echo of her laughter.”

Born to sing for France

April 16, 2011

by Anne Haverty

France’s glory, musicwise, could never be said to be pop, except in one genre, peculiarly French. This is the chanson réaliste, the realist song, the ballad of the street and the dodgy bar, which expressed truthfully, if melodramatically, the poignant but resilient lives of the poor and marginalised. The most famous and loved performer of the chanson réaliste was Edith Piaf. She hasn’t been bettered, not just because she was so good but also because the tradition, overtaken by new musical styles and by prosperity, died along with her in the 1960s.

Extraordinary voice aside, Piaf was born for the role. She came from people who hustled whatever wares and talents they could muster at fairs and markets. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was a Berber called Aïcha, whose trick was the swarm of trained fleas she kept in a matchbox. Her mother, Annetta, sang and sold sweets. The Gassions, Edith’s paternal family, were higher on the social scale. They had had their own circus, and Louis, her father, was a skilled acrobat with hopes of fame and fortune. But the first World War and his liking for cheap wine put paid to that.

When Edith was born Louis was in the trenches. Annetta gave the baby to Aïcha to raise while she worked the streets of Belleville as a singer under the name of Line Marsa. Annetta too had hopes, but, as Edith euphemistically wrote later, she had no luck. When Louis came home he took the child out of this unpromising milieu and brought her home to one that was in many ways more dubious. By now the Gassions had settled down in Bernay, in Normandy, where Louis’s mother had found a job managing a brothel, the town’s maison de tolérance.

It was an upbringing full of ambivalence. To the children where Edith went to school she was “the child from the devil’s house,” yet the prostitutes doted on her at home. She played in the salon where they met their clients, and learned that “when a man held out his hand to a woman she had to accept and go with him.” On Tuesdays the girls walked demurely in file into town to shop and visit the hairdresser and the pharmacist. It was they who invoked the aid of St Theresa, the “little flower,” for the eye complaint that made Edith more or less blind. When the household went on a pilgrimage to nearby Lisieux and Edith returned apparently able to see, the girls declared it a miracle. She was a miraculée. This event, bringing with it the conviction that she had been singled out for saintly intervention — and on the feast of St Louis — gave Edith her sense of destiny.

Louis took up his paternal duties again when she was seven, and took her to travel with him in the Caroli Circus. After that there were years of hotel rooms when they went solo as itinerant entertainers, the diminutive Louis laying out his mat in a town square to perform his acrobatics while his equally diminutive daughter busked in her heartbreaking grave manner.

At 16 Edith met a young chap from Belleville, also called Louis, and had a baby, Cecelle. But as her career was blossoming in the rackety world of the hookers’ clubs of Pigalle, where she was becoming known as “the little sparrow,” she soon did what her own mother had done and allowed the father to take the baby. Cecelle died of meningitis at the age of two. Edith’s grief had a Beckettian flavour: “When you bring life into the world,” she would say, “at that moment you also sign a death sentence.”

Carolyn Burke describes expertly and sympathetically this picturesque world of Edith’s early life. From here on the account gets just a little cursory. Success is rarely as interesting as getting there, at least to read about. Before long Edith was discovered singing on a street near the Arc de Triomphe by a silver-haired man called Louis — another Louis! — Leplée. He invited her to sing at his cabaret, Le Gerny’s, on the Champs-Élysées, through which she was inducted into a milieu of respectable music halls, recordings, radio, film and glowing reviews. She was befriended by celebrities such as Maurice Chevalier, Yvonne Vallée, Jean Cocteau and the aviator Jean Mermoz.

It was Leplée who gave her the name Piaf, slang for “sparrow,” improved her technique and dressed her in the little black couture dresses that became her trademark. He set out to transform her from sparrow to nightingale.

Leplée, who also had more than a foot in Pigalle, was the first of her several mentors. Deeply intelligent, she was avid for intellectual stimulation and read everybody from Camus to Teilhard de Chardin. As she grew ever more successful she became a mentor herself. Music was her life, her passion, and when ambitious young lyricists came to her with songs they would find themselves caught up in night-long rehearsal and rewriting sessions. She made their careers. These men almost invariably became her lovers, although her most constant collaborator and best friend was a woman, Marguerite Monnot.

Piaf was also avid for love. Burke confesses she found it hard to keep up with the list of her many lovers. Paul Meurisse, Yves Montand and the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan are among the better known. Cerdan was her great love, but as he was killed in a plane crash at the height of their affair her fickleness was never tested in his case. She did mourn him always, and regarded every subsequent man as a compromise. His death, says Burke, brought on Piaf’s crippling arthritis.

Despite her tiny stature and vulnerability the Piaf she describes is sturdy and insouciant. During the second World War she risked the taint of collaboration by remaining in Paris and performing in prison camps in Germany. But in Germany she distributed fake passports and money she had smuggled into the camps, and nearly 150 prisoners were able to escape. She made millions, but most of her money went to her entourage of friends and proteges, to the families of lovers and ex-lovers, and to the maintenance of her gypsy lifestyle.

When she died, only in her 40s, the archbishop of Paris refused her a Mass because of her immoral ways. But she was more spiritual than many archbishops, and her liver was destroyed not by alcohol but by the medication that enabled her to go on stage. She was a national icon by then, and all Paris turned out for her funeral.

It may be a familiar story to devotees, but Burke’s retelling of it is surely the best there can be.

April 1, 2011

by Jonathan Yardley

Frank Sinatra refused when he was starting out to anglicize his name in order to broaden his appeal in what was still very much a white-bread culture, yet he went on to be universally recognized as “The Voice” of American popular music.

By contrast the woman who was to become “The Voice” of French music simply did what she was told. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion in December 1915, she eventually found herself singing at the Paris cabaret owned by Louis Leplée, who determined at once that she needed a better name for the stage than the one she was born with:

“She wasn’t Russian, so Tania wouldn’t do, Leplée reflected; neither would Denise Jay or Huguette Helia. She must have a name to match what he felt as he watched her. A true Paris sparrow, she should be called La Môme Moineau, but that name was taken. Why not use the slang for sparrow, which was piaf? The singer remarked years later, ‘I was baptized for life.’ ”

Indeed she was. Within only a few years her name had become the most famous in all of French music — this in the era, mind you, of Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand and Juliette Gréco — and remains so to this day. Amazon.com lists scores of albums by her, and the most popular of them enjoy sales rankings that many a young pop star would happily settle for. Her extraordinary voice remains as instantly recognizable now as it was at the peak of her career during the postwar years.

Carolyn Burke, her latest biographer, reports that in France she remains “a living presence.” Since her death in 1963, “the French media have churned out magazine features, books, television specials, and films about the star, often coinciding with the anniversary of her death or the appearance of new interpreters of her repertoire. Ten years after her death, the Association of the Friends of Edith Piaf was formed and a museum of Piaf memorabilia opened; it continues to attract thousands of visitors each year.” As recently as 2007, Marion Cotilliard won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Piaf in La Vie en Rose, a film that of course added still more to Piaf’s legend. It is, like most legends, formidable and to a significant degree fictional.

Burke acknowledges that “comparisons to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland have some merit,” inasmuch as “Piaf’s legend appears to fit the template for successful artists who pay the price in their descent into suffering caused by drink, drugs, and, in the case of women, promiscuity.” All three “died young after careers that were, to say the least, hectic.” But: “The cliché of Piaf as self-destructive waif is too rigid to allow for her complex humanity. Its morality-play version of her life neglects or completely ignores her courage in World War II, when she defied the Nazis by sheltering Jewish friends and aiding resistance efforts.

“In the same way, many accounts of her life say little about her mentoring of younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour, preferring instead to shape her story by calling them ‘the men in my life’ — each of whom gets a chapter, as if her existence had been organized around theirs.”

She was born in Belleville, “a defiantly independent village in the eastern heights of Paris that remained, long after its annexation to the city in 1860, a bastion of revolutionary culture.” Her father was a contortionist, and her mother, who essentially deserted the family when Edith was very young, sang in the streets, as many talented but impoverished Parisians did in those days. By the time she reached her late teens, Edith already had a baby of her own (the girl did not live long, leaving her mother permanently grief-stricken) and a growing reputation in the streets. One neighbor said: “She had a voice fit for a cathedral; it seemed to come from far away. . . . She just stood there, her feet planted on the pavement, and sang anything. . . . She just sang, as if inhabited by the music.”

Never formally trained, she learned on the fly. Though she was tiny and appeared frail, she was tough; she was a hard worker and a quick study. The poet and playwright Jean Cocteau, who became one of her closest friends (but not one of her innumerable lovers), was dazzled “by the power emanating from that minuscule body” and by her “eyes of a blind person struck by a miracle, the eyes of a clairvoyant.”

When she became an international star and made frequent tours of the United States, one New York reviewer wrote: “Edith Piaf never lets you down. [Her voice] hits you right in the heart. It is pulsating, penetrating, like no other I’ve heard. There were times when Piaf, in all her power, sounded like an organ and a whole orchestra combined.” By the time the war broke out she was a star, in France if not around the world. For a while she retreated to Vichy France, but Paris was her home, and she soon returned there.

She fought with Nazi authorities over performing songs written by Jewish composers, winning some and losing some. She accepted German invitations to perform for French prisoners of war in Nazi stalags, but she smuggled fake IDs and other documents that enabled more than 100 men to escape. At the time, some criticized her for aiding the enemy, but after the war, when France was swept up in furious recrimination against collaborators, she was given a complete and honorable exoneration when the full story was made public.

Doubtless nobody knew or knows, herself included, how many lovers she had. She always had at least one, sometimes more. “You have no idea how much I crave a calmer, gentler life,” she said. “I’m not meant to have heaps of lovers. At the end of each affair I’m more disgusted than ever. I’d like one true, wholesome love.” It seemed that she had found this in the mid-1940s with the celebrated boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, though inconveniently he was quite married with children, but this came to a terrible end with his death in 1949 in an airplane crash. Three days later she said: “I can think of only one thing, to join him. I have nothing left to live for. Singing? I sang for him. My repertoire was full of love, and you can be sure that I’ll sing my story each night. What’s more, each song reminds me of his gestures, things he said, everything reminds me of him. It was the first time I was really happy. I lived for him, he was my reason for being, for my car, my clothes, the springtime, they were all for him.”

Some of Piaf’s more jaded friends thought that she “worshipped the boxer for the rest of her life because he left it when their love was at its height,” and her record of breaking off passionate alliances lends weight to that view. She continued to see men, many of them, and eventually she married a couple of them, each significantly younger than she was. There can be no doubt, though, of the centrality of love in her life. “Everything comes down to that,” she said, “love for humanity, for work, for the things one loves, just plain love between two beings.”

Love is at the core of many of her greatest songs: “La vie en rose,” “Toujours aimer,” “Hymne a l’amour,” “Non, je ne regrette rien” (from which this biography takes its title), “L’accordeoniste.” It is not in the least necessary to speak French in order to feel the passion that surges through all these classics, passion the years have done nothing to diminish. Piaf has been given good service by Burke, the latest of many biographers but one of only a few writing in English and, more important, that rarity among Piaf biographers, one more interested in the truth than the legend. Achieving truth in biography is impossible, but Burke’s Piaf seems very close to the real thing.

March 31, 2011

by Hedy Weiss

Flight of the “Sparrow”

Edith Giovanna Gassion wasn’t exactly born in a trunk, but she very easily could have been

The girl who would become Edith Piaf (“The Little Sparrow”) — that iconic chanteuse whose voice, better than anyone else’s, instantly conjures the streets and cafés of Paris, the life of that city’s working class from the 1930s to the 1950s and, above all, the heartache of l’amour — was the daughter of small-time artistes. Her French father was an itinerant circus performer. Her mother, of Moroccan Berber and Italian descent, was an exotic street singer whose own mother was a sideshow artist with an act that involved a menagerie of trained fleas (you really can’t make this stuff up). From earliest childhood, Piaf knew about abandonment and about the gypsy life, about singing for her supper, about the endless quest for love.

Yet if the tiny, frail street urchin — who was shuttled among relatives, grew up in her paternal grandmother’s brothel and suffered a serious bout of blindness in childhood — knew more than most about deprivation, illness, poverty, war and the pain of a broken heart, she also possessed many gifts: a formidable and mostly instinctive musicality, an impressive ability to learn from her mentors, a voice far more powerful and textured than her birdlike frame might suggest, and a steely determination to live to the fullest, even if she was destined to die at the age of 47.

But “the cliche of Piaf as self-destructive waif is too rigid to allow for her complex humanity,” writes Carolyn Burke in No Regrets, her smart, breezily written biography of the singer-songwriter that includes 32 pages of wonderfully evocative archival photographs from all periods of Piaf’s life. And noting that Piaf’s musicianship and powerful lyric writing often are ignored in favor of more tabloid-like accounts of her romantic liaisons and personal tragedies, Burke (whose two previous biographies were about women who spent much of their lives in Paris — Lee Miller, the American fashion model, photographer and World War II correspondent, and Mina Loy, the London-born modernist poet and all-around bohemian) proceeds to correct the record without sanitizing it. She also deftly positions Piaf in the events of her time.

The book captures the gritty side of Paris and Piaf’s emergence as a teenage street singer in the late 1920s, where she sang in dance halls in the tawdry Pigalle neighborhood. It deftly captures the music business of the mid-1930s, which was being transformed by the availability of records and radio broadcasts. And it notes Piaf’s ability to almost immediately memorize songs by ear (she could not read music). It documents the singer’s “discovery” by Louis Leplée, a savvy showman with underworld connections who knew this “guttersnipe” would electrify audiences. And so she did. As one critic wrote, she is “a singer who lives her songs.”

Composers and lyricists soon found their way to the singer, and helped her, particularly Raymond Asso, who “tamed” her wildness and also taught her “to adapt her diction and phrasing to each song” and build her career with discipline. By her mid-20s, she was becoming a star and Europe was heading into a catastrophic period of war.

Piaf saw to it that pianist Norbert Glanzberg, her lover at the time, and a Jew, was protected or hidden, but she continued to perform throughout the Occupation. Though many performers were subsequently labeled “collaborators,” Piaf escaped sanctions when it was learned she had arranged shelter and financing for Jewish friends. It was at this time she also met Yves Montand, the 23-year-old singer from Marseille whom she mentored, and who briefly became her lover.

And then it was on to New York, where her singing initially failed to translate, with one exception — a review by composer Virgil Thompson in the Herald Tribune, who hailed her tremendous power of projection, and added: “She is a great artist because she gives you a clear vision of the scene or subject she is depicting with a minimum injection of personality.”

During her stay in New York, Piaf struck up a friendship with Marlene Dietrich and fell in love with boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, “the great love” of her life, who also happened to be married. He would die in a plane crash just two years later.

Two terrible car accidents, a morphine addiction, a marriage and many more lovers would follow. So would recording triumphs and fabled concerts in Paris and at Carnegie Hall in New York. But the spiral downward was as dramatic as the spin upward to international glory. It all ended in 1963, but of course the voice still sounds.

As Burke recounts, Piaf’s friend Jean Cocteau observed that Piaf “burned herself up in the flames of her glory,” while another friend, Charles Aznavour, found in her laugh a boundless joie de vivre. Perhaps both were right.

March 27, 2011

by Susan Miron

Biography of Edith Piaf is thorough and definitive

The life and loves of the great French chanteuse Edith Piaf are a biographer’s dream, and Carolyn Burke, the twenty-ninth writer to delve into that turmoil and triumph, has produced a definitive, thoroughly researched biography.

Burke first heard Piaf’s “throaty tremor, velvety vibrato” on the radio when she was a student living in Paris in 1959. In No Regrets, she recalls trying to learn French by singing along with Piaf, shortly before the end of the singer’s life. She fell under the spell of her raw emotional power, which she conveys so well in this biography.

Burke deftly depicts the destiny of Piaf from her birth to her tragic death at age 47. Piaf’s early years have engendered many legends and half-truths, and Burke uncovers facts starting with Piaf’s birth. Piaf maintained that her mother “nearly gave birth to me on the street,” later removing the “nearly.” A document noting the baby Edith’s birth in Tenon Hospital imparts a more ordinary story. Her father, Louis Gassion, who identified himself as an “acrobatic artist,” was gone much of Edith’s childhood. Edith lived in her grandmother’s brothel, a maison de tolérance. Her eyesight failed her and, once it returned, Piaf’s version — that St. Thérèse had performed a miracle for her — was more engaging than the more prosaic medical explanation.

Burke draws a vivid portrait of Piaf’s impoverished and often difficult childhood, including her picaresque travels with her father, a time that Piaf recalled “blended aspects of Les Misérables with elements of fairy tales.” Young Edith would sing at the end of each show, making twice the money her father had earned. Piaf usually claimed the first song she sang was “La Marseillaise,” while later she told a journalist she had first sung “L’Internationale,” the anthem of communist and socialist parties worldwide. Her father, an incorrigible womanizer, provided a slew of “mothers” for Edith while her own mother was away in Turkey.

Piaf’s songs and her captivating delivery of them made her an overnight sensation; soon she became France’s iconic singer and a living legend. Burke explores what inspired many of Piaf’s songs and their lyrics, as well as who helped her compose them and where she first performed them. Piaf was famously demanding of herself and those who worked with her. A colleague observed, “She wanted to be the best, not from ambition but as her calling, a somewhat mystical sense that she couldn’t do things by halves.” Burke also deftly examines Piaf’s innumerable love affairs and explains how or why each ended. “I had a desperate, almost morbid, need to be loved,” she reflected toward the end of her life.

No Regrets is exhaustively comprehensive; Burke spoke with just about everyone who knew, admired or loved Piaf. However, nothing she writes captures Piaf as memorably as this quote from her friend Jean Cocteau: The audience watched “this astonishing little person . . . her Bonaparte-like forehead, her eyes like those of a blind person trying to see . . . a voice rises up from deep within, a voice that inhabits her from head to toe, unfolding like a wave of warm black velvet to submerge us, piercing through us, getting right inside us. The illusion is complete. There is just her gaze, her pale hands, her waxen forehead catching the light, and the voice that swells . . . and gradually replaces her.”

March 25, 2011

by James Gavin

The Rise of Édith Piaf

Popular song gained an indelible image in 1935, when Édith Piaf, France’s fabled “Little Sparrow,” first stood onstage in a plain black dress, a rat’s nest of dark hair topping her weary eyes. Singing in a piquant tone with a thick vibrato, she poured out tales of working-class lives and endurance pushed to the brink, usually by love. Face, hands and voice were all she needed to bring her playlets to life. One of her trademarks, “L’Accordéoniste,” was written for her in 1940. As she sang of a prostitute whose musician lover went off to war and never returned, Piaf rocked her arms through the air manically to the rhythm of his playing; she caressed her stomach as though remembering how he felt against her.

The public knew that her drama wasn’t mere acting. Throughout her life, the tabloids wrote endlessly about Piaf’s hardships: the childhood of poverty and abandonment; her addict mother’s fatal overdose; the death of her greatest love, the handsome boxing champ Marcel Cerdan, in a plane crash; the injuries and illnesses and prescription drug abuse. But when she sang her theme, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (known in English as “No Regrets”), Piaf defied anyone to pity her. She embraced life passionately, even at its cruelest; so long as she could use it in her songs, she felt, the suffering was worth it. Her will to move forward was herculean, but her tiny body wasn’t. After years of failing health, she died
in 1963 at 47.

Like Judy Garland, who died at the same age, Piaf still lets us live, vicariously, in a world of emotional extremes that few of us could handle. The 2007 Oscar-winning biopic La Vie en Rose set off the latest wave of interest in her. But the image persists of a pathetic waif, too frail for this world. Now, in the concise and gracefully written No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, Carolyn Burke highlights the strength of “the chanteuse who reached across social, linguistic and national divides to voice the emotions of ordinary people.” The notion of Piaf as victor has been voiced before, but it hasn’t stuck. “People have the wrong idea about Édith,” the singer’s girlhood friend Simone Berteaut wrote in Piaf: A Biography. “She wasn’t sad. She loved to laugh.”

Vivid as it is, Berteaut’s factually freewheeling book, published here in 1972, represents everything that Burke — the author of Lee Miller: A Life and Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy — sought to avoid. Drawing mostly on previously published sources (including Berteaut), Burke is meticulous. She rejects the apocryphal, precedes conjecture with “perhaps” and avoids casting anyone in too harsh a light. If risk was Piaf’s hallmark, caution and restraint are Burke’s — an approach that often seems at odds with the story of this impetuous fireball.

In writing about Piaf, though, a biographer almost can’t miss. Born in blue-collar Belleville on the fringes of Paris in 1915, Édith Giovanna Gassion grew up feeling cast aside: by her father, a traveling circus acrobat and contortionist; by her mother, a singer whose drug habit kept landing her in jail; and by her grandmother, who ran the brothel where Édith was sent to live. Not long after she had conquered a childhood bout with near blindness, her father took her to a cafe and had her sing for tips.

She’d found her calling. In 1933, she moved to Pigalle, the red-light district of Paris, and got a job singing at Lulu’s, a lesbian dive. The hookers, pimps, thugs and other lowlife there felt like family to her, and she to them. Piaf began formulating a repertory of chansons réalistes, a popular tradition of story-songs about the downtrodden and desperate.

In 1935, while singing on the street for tips, she met the first of several father figures who helped mold her into the Piaf of legend. Louis Leplée hired her to sing at his prestigious but mob-connected cabaret, Le Gerny’s. Groomed by Leplée, who took her shopping for her first black dress and christened her Piaf (French slang for sparrow), she caused a sensation. Burke quotes the singer Rina Ketty: “Her songs expressed all she had suffered in childhood. At the end of her life she had more technique, more métier, but she couldn’t have given any more of herself, since she gave her whole heart from the beginning.”

By year’s end she had sung in her first film and made her first recording. When Leplée was murdered by some of the rough-trade types he favored, Piaf found another mentor, the lyricist Raymond Asso. They lived together for two years. He translated her memories into songs written for her, while refining her coarse street accent and teaching her discipline. “Asso saw himself as Édith’s dompteur — the tamer who breaks a wild creature of its need to scratch and bite,” Burke writes.

By the late 1930s, she’d risen to the top of France’s musical elite. Later she was one of the few French stars to become an American household name. Burke writes of Piaf’s vow to leave behind her lurid chansons réalistes and sing more for the masses, as she did in “La Vie en Rose,” her romantic hit of 1946. But the fans wanted a tragic Piaf, and she gave it to them — even in the 1940s, when her fortunes were at their peak. Having learned so much from the men who shaped her, Piaf went on to mentor several important chansonniers of the next generation, including Léo Ferré, Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour.

Some, like Montand, became her lovers. As France’s greatest female star — and one with a burning sexual charisma — she was never without a man. But love, she explained, meant nothing to her unless she could sing about it; music held no meaning for her unless it was inspired by love. Piaf became known as “a singer who lives her songs,” and for all around her this proved exhilarating and exhausting. In 1951 came her first of several car accidents. The drivers were usually her lovers or protégés, whom she had dragged to depletion. High living, including a dependence on painkillers like morphine, helped bring her a bleeding ulcer and liver damage; more than once she collapsed dramatically onstage. By October 9, 1963, Burke writes, a bedridden Piaf was certain she’d sung her last. She died the next day.

The author surveys all this mayhem with thoughtfulness and respect. But in describing her subject’s work, she leans heavily on reviews, more of them puffy than analytical. (Piaf’s voice “hits you right in the heart,” we read, with a “unique timbre reaching to the starry sky.”) As for that bluntly lived life, Burke keeps her distance from its psychodrama, especially Piaf’s well-known tyranny and temperament. Piaf was “sometimes very cruel,” the lyricist Michèle Vendôme said; of Théophanis Lamboukas, a young Greek hairdresser turned singer-actor whom Piaf married a year before her death, she herself admitted, “People don’t like him.” But here and elsewhere, details are withheld. In a book about an artist who proudly revealed all, Burke’s politeness can be frustrating. Even so, nonmavens who want a sound overview of Piaf’s life will find it here.

Occasionally, a quotation in “No Regrets” makes Piaf leap off the page. André Brink, the South African novelist, caught her indomitable spirit in his 2009 memoir, A Fork in the Road. The fading chanteuse, he wrote, was “like a dying moth,” singing “in a voice like a shout from a tomb, . . . the voice of life itself, refusing to die, refusing to be silenced.”

March 26, 2011

by Brooke Allen

No Regrets

Edith Piaf, dead now for nearly fifty years, has become one of France’s great national monuments, as lucratively exportable a product as Maurice Chevalier, Claude Monet, and Crêpes Suzettes. Everyone here in America knows Piaf, or at least they know the recordings of her two greatest hits — La vie en rose and Je ne regrette rien — delivered in her yearning, metallic tones. Some even know the earlier numbers, chanson réaliste portraits, in the words of one pop culture critic, “of working-class life, gray with the soot of factory chimneys and abuzz with tunes picked up from bistro radios.” But not many Americans were familiar with the singer’s tempestuous and dramatic life until the recent Olivier Dahan film, La Môme (La Vie en Rose in the United States) grabbed our attention, winning an Oscar for the lovely Marion Cotillard and awakening a new mode for all things Piaf.

The publication, now, of No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf by veteran biographer Carolyn Burke reveals that far from having been a bit too melodramatic (as I had thought La Vie en Rose to be when it came out a couple of years ago), the film omitted plenty. It almost had to: if even half of the singer’s myriad lovers had made it onto the screen, audiences would have reeled in disbelief. Self-destructive stars of course are not unfamiliar to Americans, and we have become almost inured to their excesses: as I write, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are playing out very public meltdowns. But the epic mess of Piaf’s love life, as well as the scale of her talent, make this story something special, while her brutal Dickensian childhood virtually ensured that she would spend her adult life in a doomed quest for perfect love and security.

Burke has made a valiant effort to sift through the exaggerations of Piaf’s two memoirs, Au Bal de la Chance (1958) and Ma Vie (1964), and the self-serving lies dished up by Simone Berteaut, Piaf’s soul-sister and party-companion, in her own tell-all about the singer. The unadorned truth is already bizarre enough, with no need of embellishment.

The singer was born Edith Giovanna Gassion, in 1915 — and not on the city pavement, as she claimed, but in the Tenon Hospital in Belleville, a working-class area in eastern Paris. (Burke imparts the remarkable fact that at that time, less than a century ago, the now-noisome quartier was still perfumed by the scent of blooming lilac.) Her father, Louis Gassion, was an acrobat (just five feet tall, he passed on his diminutive form to his daughter); her mother, Annetta, was a would-be singer whose own mother presided over a flea circus. As if this background wasn’t disreputable enough, the feckless Annetta, an alcoholic and drug addict, abandoned the child when she was still a baby and went on to pursue an independent singing career under the name of Line Marsa. As in the vast majority of such cases, Edith never got over this primal rejection.

Louis Gassion was slightly more dependable. His own life was not stable enough to include a baby, so he took Edith to live with his parents in the town of Bernay in Normandy. Her grandmother, known as Maman Tine, was the manageress of what was euphemistically known as a maison de tolérance, essentially a whorehouse with legal standing. Petted by the unmarried “filles” of the establishment, Edith had a strange childhood, but one that was not without love, Occasionally her grandparents would take her to the Café de la Gare where they would stand the child on a table and let her sing to the assorted company. The power of her voice was already notable.

When Edith reached the age of seven her father thought her old enough to become a professional asset, and he reclaimed her from his parents to take her on the road: the child would sing as a part of his circus act, the two of them traveling with a series of lady-friends who attached themselves to Louis. “From her father,” writes Burke, “she learned an entertainer’s sense of timing, techniques for tugging on the audience’s heartstrings, and the sort of patter likely to produce a good take.” Some time during Edith’s adolescence she returned with her father to Paris, where she began singing in cafes as well as in the streets — and eventually in clubs as well, performing the chanson réaliste material that was being popularized at the time. Burke writes, “It was said of the best interpreters of this tradition — Fréhel, Damia, and soon Piaf herself — that they sang the way they lived, their songs came from the heart. (The extent to which they consciously sustained this perception went unnoticed.)”

The teenaged Edith kept louche company in Pigalle, where she now settled — if indeed “settled” can be said to be the right word. There she took up with Simone Berteaut, “Momone”: a wayward fourteen-year-old girl whom Edith dubbed “ma mauvaise génie” (my evil spirit). Over the decades Momone would be banished by countless men who tried to reform Piaf, only to be called back by the singer whenever she once again found herself alone. And almost inevitably the teenaged Edith got mixed up with le milieu, the mafia that ran much of Paris’s club and cabaret scene. During these years she usually had one or another “protector,” some thug who made sure she was always incriminated in his felonies and helped himself to her meager wages. As Burke points out, “her life with her father had predisposed her to having a boss who took her earnings and dictated her behavior.” At the age of seventeen she had given birth to a baby girl, Marcelle, known as Cécelle. For a while the baby lived in digs with Edith and Momone, but soon the father came and took her away, saying that if she wanted the child she must come home. In a haunting reenactment of her own childhood tragedy she refused to do so, though she paid for the baby’s care. Not long afterwards, the two-year-old was dead of meningitis; Edith, so the story goes, slept with a man to earn the money for the burial. The loss continued to haunt Piaf; she was never to have another child.

At the age of nineteen Edith was “discovered” by Louis Leplée, proprietor of the club Le Gerny — a swank establishment by Edith’s standards. It was Leplée who picked out the simple black dress that would become her uniform for the remainder of her career, dubbed her “Piaf” — sparrow — and selected a réaliste repertoire of songs about the “dangerous” classes from which she sprang, works that would come to define her.  Other early mentors were the author Jacques Bourgeat, who urged her to educate herself, and the lyricist Raymond Asso, who became her lover, some say her Svengali. Piaf himself credited Asso with saving her life. “It took him three years to cure me. Three years of patient affection to teach me that there was another world beyond that of prostitutes and pimps. Three years to cure me of Pigalle, of my chaotic childhood . . . to become a woman and a star instead of a phenomenon with a voice that people listened to as if being shown a rare animal at a fair.” Asso also introduced her to the composer Marguerite Monnot, the woman who would become a close friend and her most important collaborator: Monnot’s talent, she said, was “what helped me to be Edith Piaf.”

Piaf’s ascent was rapid at this point. Her next lover, Paul Meurisse, brought her to live with him in the beaux quartiers near the Arc de Triomphe and she never looked back: from then on, and as her fees reached stratospheric heights, she spent freely on high living in swell neighborhoods. Her entourage continued to expand: there were a few true friends among the crowd, but increasingly it was, in the words of one observer, “abject beings, people who amused her, pilferers, spongers, those who took her money — a concept that simply didn’t matter to her.”

As for her many amours, there is probably no way they could be counted up, and Burke doesn’t even make the attempt. Among the more significant were the composer Norbert Glanzburg, the very young Yves Montand, whose career Piaf actively promoted, movie star John Garfield, performer Eddie Constantine, bicycle champion André Pousse, singer Jacques Pills (a genial fellow to whom she was briefly married), lyricist Jo Moustaki (author, with Monnot, of Piaf’s great song “Milord”), and the gorgeous Théophanos Lamboukas, gay and twenty years Piaf’s junior, whom she married at a moment when “her romanticism won out over her sense of the ridiculous.” The great love of her life, in her own opinion, was the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, who died tragically in a plane crash in 1949 at the height of their romance. But considering Piaf’s track record, Momone’s cynical comment on the subject might not have been too far off: “If it had gone on another year,” opined Piaf’s mauvaise génie, “she might have dismissed him, like all the others.” For Piaf made impossible demands on her lovers, many of whom (including Cerdan) were already married, and eventually either they burned out or she did. Her desire for love was insatiable, impossible; she simply asked too much of it.

Of course it was this yearning that permeated her voice and immortalized it. As one collaborator, the lyricist Henri Contet, put it, “Words and music are her beloved slaves. Miraculously they submit because of her passion. She loves them as much as the earth loves rain . . . She sleeps with her songs, she warms them, she clasps them to her . . . They possess her.” During the triumphant years of her apotheosis she tore the heart out of her listeners: there are still people who remember the bliss of hearing her at the Versailles Club in New York just after World War II, when she seemed to embody a resurgent France. In later years, after Cerdan’s death, she battled countless health issues and drug dependencies, but managed, right up to the end, to gear herself up to go on stage. Her great concert at the Olympia in Paris in 1960, at which Je ne regrette rien was introduced along with other songs by her new favorite songwriter, Charles Dumont, was a triumph of the will; only months before she had seemed on the brink of death.

Piaf’s untimely death, in 1963 when she was only forty-eight, occurred at a seminal moment in the history of popular music. Only a few months earlier the Beatles had leapt to international attention. In France, rock music was quickly elbowing aside the chanson tradition, though that tradition showed significant staying power: the new girl on the block was Juliette Gréco, with her existentialist chic, and Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel were drawing crowds in Paris clubs. Piaf may not now seem to have been a progenitor of rock, but French rockers have claimed her as their own, and Johnny Hallyday, now the eminence grise of French rock, has eagerly acknowledged her influence on his generation, “the young French singers who absorbed her powerful emotional style even when it seemed at odds with rhythms inspired by American rock, jazz, and blues.” It is that powerful emotional style that grabbed listeners all over the world — for in the end, as Burke concludes, Piaf’s greatest love affair was with her audience.

April 2011

Carolyn Burke’s terrific biography of Edith Piaf shucks the simplistic arc of self-destructive urchin to offer a more complex portrait that includes the singer’s heroics in the French Resistance and roles as mentor, lyricist, and enduring icon.

March 16, 2011

by Kirsten Fairchilds

As a teenager living in Paris, Carolyn Burke would come home from school, climb to her small room at the top of a seventh-floor walkup and turn on the radio.

Exhausted from the climb as well as her intense studies, Burke would then collapse on her bed and let the voice of Edith Piaf fill the room with song.

More than 50 years later, Burke has paid tribute to the renowned singer, who aided her rejuvenation after long days at the Sorbonne, in a new biography, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, which will be released Tuesday.

“Listening to Edith on the radio made a huge impression on me,” said Burke, who studied French in Paris as a 19-year-old junior at Swarthmore College. “My instructor at the Sorbonne held her out as an excellent example of diction and pronunciation. I was able to absorb the sounds and what she was teaching by listening to and singing along with Edith on the radio.”

The title of No Regrets is the English translation of one of Piaf’s most well-known songs, “No, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” It is the third biography by Burke, born in Sydney, Australia to an English father and an Australian mother.

A Santa Cruz resident for the past 35 years, Burke, 70, will sign books and share her love of Piaf at 7:30 pm, March 24, at Bookshop Santa Cruz.

“Carolyn is an internationally recognized author — we are so lucky to have her in our community,” Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Casey Coonerty Protti said. “She’s very good at what she does, and she’s profiled really incredible lives.”

Burke’s first biography was of Mina Loy, a relatively little-known English poet who lived in Paris in the 1920s and the 1930s. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy was published in 1996 and deemed a critical success after being widely reviewed.

While researching Loy in Paris, Burke met Lee Miller, an American photographer, at an event. After completing the biography of Loy, Burke turned her attention toward Miller, widely recognized as the first female photojournalist to report from the frontlines during World War II.

Lee Miller: A Life was published in 2005 and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as well as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Biography award.

With Piaf, Burke takes on arguably her most famous subject, and one who fits the three criteria she’s developed in consideration of a subject.

“My editor asked me to do another book, and I came up with three conditions,” said Burke, whose family moved to Philadelphia when she was seven. “The first is that the person had to die young. Secondly, the person had to die childless, and thirdly, they had to have lived in Paris.

“When I thought about my conditions — and I take my conditions very seriously — I came up with Edith Piaf,” Burke continued. “I have always loved her, and she was at the top of my list. It did take some time for me to work up the nerve to do it because she seemed like such a major figure.”

Burke traveled to Paris on three different occasions to research Piaf, spending between one and two months for each trip. A fourth visit was necessary to secure rights for the photographs and song lyrics that appear in the book.

Because of Burke’s previous success as well as the sustained popularity of Piaf, Burke has been invited to Paris, London, New Zealand, Australia and the East Coast to discuss No Regrets at book festivals and other events this spring.

After spending nearly three years immersed in Piaf’s life and watching her performances on YouTube videos, Burke has seen her love and admiration for the unique yet often troubled singer continue to grow.

“Piaf was just a gift and a joy to me,” Burke said. “I came to love this project so much. I felt grief when it was done, because I wasn’t ready to let go of her and stop living with her in my heart and imagination, where she still resides.”

March 8, 2011

by Daniel D’Addario

Is the Edith Piaf moment still going? The actress Marion Cotillard, in two movies — the biopic La Vie en Rose and the Piaf-scented Inception — has kept the legend alive, and now passes the torch of Piafophilia to Carolyn Burke. Ms. Burke, who’s written biographies of poet Mina Loy and photographer Lee Miller, has to face down a far more (over-?) exposed subject in this volume. Early reviews, though, indicate that Ms. Burke debunks Piaf’s self-created myths and reveals some untold stories. Anything fresher than that familiar origin story, or with more subtlety and shades of possible meaning than a performance by Ms. Cotillard, will be welcome.

February 1, 2011

by Brad Hooper

Introduced here as “one of the greatest vocalists of the twentieth century,” iconic French singer Edith Piaf is accorded a perceptive, supportive, even definitive biography by seasoned biographer Burke (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, 1996; Lee Miller, 2005), who had access to previously untapped Piaf documents. For the singer’s fans, it’s a generally well-known fact that Piaf grew up, and grew up singing, on the streets of the shady side of Paris. With a natural, raw technique (which, as she gained both fame and new friends with experience in this regard, underwent definite degrees of refinement) and an equally natural, ingrained empathy with the habits and plights of ordinary working-class folks, Piaf gradually moved her act off the streets and into bigger and more noticed performance venues, a chronicle of events documented here with an emphasis on separating truth from legend. Piaf certainly made some unfortunate love and lifestyle choices, but Burke refuses to see her as self-destructive. Piaf was a fighter and a learner, two qualities that make for a compelling life story.

December 2010

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

Following her biographies of photographer Lee Miller and poet Mina Loy, Burke offers this eloquent embrace of the famed French singer-songwriter, Edith Piaf.
As a child, Piaf (1915–1963) grew up in a Normandy brothel run by her grandmother, then led a vagabond life, touring as a singer with her father’s acrobatic performances. A Paris street singer in her teens, she gave birth in 1933 to a daughter who lived only two years. When she brought her “velvety vibrato” and interpretations of la chanson réaliste, the tradition of gritty, slice-of-life song-stories about the downtrodden, into an elegant club in 1935, “it was as if a guttersnipe had invaded the inner sanctum where sophisticates . . . sat drinking champagne,” yet the audience was “electrified by her voice.” An overnight sensation on radio a few days later, Piaf followed with recordings, films, and concerts. Tracing her rise to international fame, Burke details her tragedies and her triumphs, her marriages and her music, and her conquest of America from Carnegie Hall to the Ed Sullivan Show. As Burke links the singer’s lyrics and life in this evocative portrait, raw emotions emerge, etched with Piaf’s “poignant mix of vulnerability and defiance.”

November 1, 2010

by Karen McCoy
Fort Lewis College Library
Durango, Colorado

In her newest biography, Burke (Lee Miller: A Life) focuses on the internationally renowned French vocalist and lyricist best known for the song “La Vie en Rose.” Piaf is commonly associated with la chanson réaliste, realistic songs that speak to the underprivileged. Most data on Piaf are paradoxical, focused on her self-destructive qualities and relationships with men. Burke goes beyond this depiction by providing a more linear and objective narrative while debunking many myths, including some Piaf conjured herself. Burke does not idealize her subject or overlook Piaf’s flaws. Her main focus is highlighting aspects of the artist that are rarely mentioned, such as Piaf’s aiding Jews during World War II. The author is at her most engaging when she reproduces the lyrics of Piaf’s songs in both French and English, demonstrating the singer’s resounding impact around the world.

VERDICT: Burke’s contextual detail and attention to research will appeal to scholars, and her masterful storytelling will engage readers. Highly recommended.

December 1, 2010

No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf

Another sharp, culturally resonant biography from Burke (Lee Miller, 2005, etc.) — this one an empathetic depiction of the French chanteuse as famed for her love affairs as for songs like “La Vie en Rose.”

Edith Piaf’s life (1915–63) was as turbulent as the gritty existences she chronicled in such early songs as “L’Accordéoniste.” She was raised for a time in a brothel managed by her paternal grandmother, and she began singing as a girl on the road with her father, an itinerant acrobat. Burke evocatively re-creates the raffish milieu of Piaf’s youth, particularly the Paris quarter of Pigalle, where she sang on the streets and in seedy music halls. Her lovers were often crooks, and her lifestyle was dissolute. Yet Piaf’s steely ambition led her to a series of mentors who improved her diction, gave her books to read and helped hone her craft so that her wholehearted emotional delivery gained the sophistication required to move into better clubs and recording studios. Though she took the traditional chanson réaliste to a new level of complexity in such mature works as “La Foule,” the public displayed special fondness for songs that reflected her personal experiences. As is almost inevitable in the biography of a performer, the book’s second half is mostly a catalogue of concerts and recordings, along with the health crises and romances that earned Piaf an American reputation as the French Judy Garland. Burke demonstrates that she was a lot tougher than Garland, but was also careless of being surrounded by spongers who happily spent her hard-earned money and helped themselves to her belongings.

Though Piaf ruined her health and died young, this lucid, unsentimental appraisal suggests that she had the life she wanted, filled with “hectic drama” fueled by the singer’s “boundless joie de vivre.”

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