The remarkably messy love life of Édith Piaf
For a woman who created perhaps one of the most famous love songs of all time, Édith Piaf wasn’t half in need of a taste of her own medicine.
However, it was the mark of a true hopeless romantic that Piaf never stopped pining after love, painting that rosy mirage in her professional life all too well, in order to mask the far bleaker reality of her personal one. The reality was that despite the singer being among the greatest lustful voices of all time, she never quite mastered the art behind the scenes.
Of course, to reveal this stark truth would have been an absolute marketing disaster for Piaf of the highest order if she were to really take the plunge and come clean. So, throughout the course of her life and even bigger fame, the subject of her own romantic affections was somewhat kept on the down low, avoiding the notion that her romantic ruse was an utter sham.
It all began with the fact that, tragically, Piaf gave birth to a daughter aged 17, before the child’s father took her away, and the baby died from illness two years later. Startlingly reminiscent of Piaf’s own childhood, where her mother left and was never to return, it was understandable how the experience haunted the singer for the rest of her days.
She would never ultimately have another child, but as the most streamlined version of her life story would have you believe, she went through another few solid relationships over the years, but largely remained settled. This is a slight – well, major – stretch of the truth, that was only safely uncovered over half a century since Piaf herself had passed away.
Without wanting to make this sound too judgmental, it’s difficult to actually get a grip on the nature and real timeline of Piaf’s love life, simply because it was so messy and there were so many potential suitors to go through. Naturally, many of these men were laced with a certain star-crossed quality, given she was in the process of climbing to the top of the ladder of fame by this point.
Movie stars, athletes, and even fellow musicians: Piaf had all of these types of men in her orbit at one time or another, but none that she could ever permanently secure to be hers and hers alone. There were, of course, the more notable men to emerge – namely the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, whom Piaf met in 1947 and instantly knew was the love of her life.
But their relationship devastatingly lasted no more than two years, after Cerdan was tragically killed in a plane crash. Thereafter, the sense of grief and loss can’t have helped matters for Piaf in terms of finding her one true love – she quickly veered into the territory of marriage when she tied the knot with Jacques Pills in 1952, but another five years later, she found herself single once again.
This is not to say that it was an act of desperation, but in 1962, when the singer married for a second time to Theophanis Lamboukas, it seemed that she was giving over to the sense of doing anything just to find love. It sounds like an insult to poor Lamboukas, but given he was 20 years younger than her, and not to mention gay, it was a pretty unlikely romantic pairing.
Nevertheless, when Piaf herself passed away the next year from liver cancer, she went to her deathbed under the slight hint of delusion that true love belonged to her at last. The mess of her real story may seem ironic to some, but in a way it reflected a real tragedy that she clearly went to pains to hide. Life was certainly not as pink as she might have liked to believe.
