Seductress (13 page)

The first was a thoroughbred. In 1841 she descended on a spa in Ems in a borrowed wardrobe and nabbed the famous, wealthy concert pianist Henri Herz. Thanks to her three-year seduction-intensive and “rare, disturbing” sex appeal, she held on to him for half a decade. The affair would have lasted longer except that when she brought Henri to the brink of bankruptcy, his parents intervened and forcibly drove her from the premises.

After a lean stretch Thérèse remobilized her willpower. The night before her campaign, the writer Théophile Gautier found her surveying her “arsenal of clothes” like a general before battle. “I am not badly equipped, am I?” she said. But “I may misfire,” and asked for a vial of chloroform in case she failed.

Failure, however, wasn’t in Thérèse’s vocabulary. On her first night in London she landed Lord Stanley in the next box at Covent Garden. He led to bigger game—namely, a Portuguese marquis, Albino Paiva, who fell “madly in love with her” and married her. His wedding night, though, held a diabolic surprise. Spreading her hawk wings, Thérèse told him she’d attained the position she wanted whereas he’d acquired a prostitute. “You go back to Portugal,” she commanded. “I shall stay here with your name and remain a whore.”

The obliging Albino trundled home and later committed suicide. La Paiva meanwhile widened her offensive and hauled in ever-richer princes, dukes, and captains of industry. As aggressive a “snatcher” as her tutelary deity, she stalked her prey with craft, cunning, and guile. To win Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, a “magnificent human stallion” worth billions, she logged months on the road and spent three hundred thousand francs. She trailed him from St. Petersburg to Naples, pretending to ignore him and making herself as conspicuous as possible.

When no respectable women wore makeup, she powdered her black hair blond and painted her face like a “tightrope-dancer.” She wore
bouchons de carafe
(diamonds the size of decanter stoppers) and furs thrown over cashmere gowns with shoulder straps designed to fall off and reveal her deep cleavage and the “reddish hair under her arms.” Transfixed by her “strange and voluptuous beauty,” Guido at last came around and fell “in love to such an extent, to such a degree” that he offered her his entire fortune if she would live with him. Her bedcraft probably sweetened the pot. So renowned were her sexual performances that one man agreed to a session lasting until ten thousand francs in notes burned in her grate.

When La Paiva accepted Guido, he lived up to his end of the bargain and made her “the greatest debauchee of the century.” In keeping with her mythic persona, she had a Midas touch. A hawk-eyed businesswoman, she multiplied Guido’s fortune to such proportions that she “couldn’t ruin herself if she tried.” She tried. She bought a sixteenth-century château and built a gaudy “temple dedicated to the worship of physical pleasure” on the Champs-Élysées.

At this ornate shrine to the “Golden Calf,” with its alabaster staircases and Baudry murals, La Paiva feted the upper crust of intellectual Paris. Though entirely unschooled, she held up her end of the table with “witty” persiflage and encouraged “sparkling, original” talk on a variety of outré topics, such as the colors of emotions. Celebrities like Delacroix, Sainte-Beuve, and Gautier were regulars at these lavish feasts, which cost five hundred francs apiece. The door was barred to bores—and other women.

La Paiva, rivaling the bitch bosses of pulp fiction, ruled her domains with a bullwhip. She fined gardeners fifty centimes for every leaf she found on the lawn, forbade fires in winter, and killed a horse with her pistol when it threw her. The doting Guido uttered no protest. He eventually married her and tagged behind her like a faithful “trainbearer,” never swerving in his adoration. It must have been tried on occasion. In 1870 she earned the lasting contempt of the French when she turned her home into a German espionage center during the Franco-Prussian War. Hissed in the street, she was publicly tarred in a Dumas
fils
play as the diabolic Césarine, a “foul, adulterous, prostituting, infanticidal” “beast.”

The countess von Donnersmarck, smug on her mountainous millions, gave less than a damn. She had a leviathan ego. Ultimately, though, her enemies got the better of her and banished the Donners-marcks to their estates in nether Silesia. There La Paiva batted around a drafty castle in solitary grandeur with all the mirrors destroyed. When she died of a stroke at sixty-five, Guido was so devastated that he bottled her body and stashed it in his closet, where his second wife discovered it bobbing around in a vat of alcohol.

La Paiva’s tacky vulgarities, despotism, and rapacity blaspheme the romantic Traviata visions of Second Empire courtesanry. On the other hand, she avoided La Traviata’s pathetic lot, the usual fate for sex professionals in nineteenth-century France. Plug-ugly, mean, and domineering, she nevertheless had her way. With her primal erotic spell and seductive willpower, she gained wealth, men, and celebrity and in the process convinced everyone she was a “beauty.” Dumas
fils,
though, saw her aright; she was a “beast,” an eruption from prehistory—the carrion sex goddess with her eerie fascination, cruel claws, and regenerative and transformational diablerie.

 

Rather than disappear, the Neolithic bird of prey divinities went underground in folklore and folk religion and resurfaced in classical Greece as
keres.
These were “man-seizing” spirits with “distorted ugly faces” who pestered humanity with plagues and uncontrollable lusts. The Sphinx, Gorgons, Harpies, and Sirens belonged to this tribe. Though later beautified by mythologizers, Sirens looked grotesque, with Toulouse-Lautrecian hawk bottoms concealed below their female faces. They sang the song that lured men to destruction (of forgetfulness and perfect knowledge) and symbolized the demonic undertow of unreason and erotic madness. By the same token, they contained the opposite power of resurrection and brought “things to birth.”

The squat, pint-size Edith Piaf might not have resembled a modern sex siren, but she was the spitting image of the archaic one. She fetched up so many men on the rocks with her voice and “extraordinary powers of seduction” that she lost count. Onstage she gave just the reverse impression, wailing of love gone wrong and failures with men. This, however, was a classic siren ruse to waylay the unwary. No man in fact “disappeared from her life until she ordered him out of it”; “she was the one in charge in any sexual situation.”

Her early life was a “little girl lost” parable of lovelessness and neglect, perhaps explaining her lust for erotic control. Abandoned by her mother at six, Edith was sent to live with her grandmother, a cook in a Normandy brothel. Several years later her father, a circus performer, plucked her up and took her with him on the road, where he palmed her off on a succession of “mothers.” Always one step ahead of destitution, Edith began singing for handouts while her father performed acrobatic tricks in public squares.

When they moved to Paris in her teens, she was considered too plain for prostitution, so she and her half sister sang ballads on street corners for sous. Her voice, raw, ragged, and untrained, had a strange hypnotic spell. Throngs of “young guys” clustered around her, once blocking a road in the faubourg to hear her. Soon a nightclub owner discovered her and made her the cabaret sensation of Paris. Known as the Little Sparrow, she became a twentieth-century cult figure and national logo with her little black dresses, Punchinello face, and break-your-heart torrid chansons.

She should have been called the Little Sparrow Hawk instead. Like her siren precursors, she was an aggressive, dominant, and promiscuous bird of prey. Looks were deceiving. At first sight she looked like a dismal orphan with a syndrome. Only four feet ten inches tall, she had a boxy build and an oversize head with a thick neck and wide-set Pekinese eyes.

“I’m ugly,” she conceded. “I’m not Venus. I’ve got sagging breasts, a low-slung ass, and little drooping buttocks.” But, she added defiantly, “I can still get men.” In both work and love this homely waif woman seized what she wanted and managed her affairs with fight, panache, and the “authority of a dictator.”

While still on the street corners of Paris at fifteen, Edith took control of her sex life. She strung guys along and left a tiresome live-in lover after their child died. At one point she juggled three partners simultaneously and almost didn’t live to tell about it. An aggrieved inamorato caught her on the cheat and shot at her, grazing her ear. For three years she remained relatively faithful to a Pygmalion figure, Raymond Asso, who spruced up her act and redressed her neglected education. But Edith couldn’t be man- or housebound.

Footloose and polyamorous, she migrated from lover to lover. One of her best known was Yves Montand, then an anonymous crooner of cowboy songs. Encountering this swarthy hunk at an audition, she snapped him up with a classic whipsaw maneuver. First she panned his act in brutal street French; then she praised his handsome build and told him he’d be “the greatest of them all” if he submitted to her instruction. For a coup de grace, she made him listen to her sing. Like the sirens on an Etruscan lamp encircled by Silenuses with hard-ons, she gave performances that drove men crazy. She stroked her body with her “tenacious, lizard-like hands” as she sang, and the males in the audience “leaned forward in their seats as though they wanted to take her in their arms.” She “grew beautiful.”

Totally blown away, Yves conceived a violent passion for Edith that lasted for years and escalated into desperate marriage proposals. Edith’s departure left him “seared,” unable to forget their good times together. Contrary to the Piaf
lacrimosa
legend, she was a jokemeister and prank player who laughed “a lot” and “well.”

Unlike her character in the sentimental Claude Lelouch film in which she spins in aphasic circles, she could also talk a good game (she followed a rigorous self-study program) and bring any man around with her tongue. Her landlord during World War II, a prominent madam, said that “there was no escape” when Edith “set her cap at some handsome young man” and chatted him up. She knew in seconds “what you had to say to a man to get him to like you” and assailed him with vivid anecdotes, dramatic confessions, and poetry, her own and others.

After Yves and a succession of men, Edith found her grand amour, celebrity boxing champion Marcel Cerdan. When he died in a plane crash two years into their affair, she plunged into near dementia. Her superhuman, mythic-fueled vitality, however, saved her. A lover of those post-Cerdan years, a champion cyclist, said that “forty-eight hours with Piaf [were] more tiring than a lap in the Tour de France.”

Part of this stupendous energy included a high-heat libido. Like the Sirens (emblems of female hypersexuality with splayed crotches), she was a lech-hearted dickhound. She believed you never knew a man until you slept with him and once astonished a hotel maid by throwing back the sheets and asking her to admire the nude body of actor Eddie Constantine.

Eddie, who left his wife and child for Edith, thought she possessed occult seductive powers. “One look from her,” he said, “could pull down a ten-story building.” With Eddie, as with other favored paramours, maternal solicitude accounted for some of this occult appeal. Although militantly antidomestic and bored by decor and cuisine, she loved mothering men. She bought them expensive Italian suits and shoes, knitted them sweaters, and overhauled their characters. During their two-year affair she gave Eddie a total makeover, from gold cuff links to voice training. “She made me believe I was somebody,” he later reflected, “so that I’d become somebody”; “she had a kind of genius for bringing out and strengthening a personality.”

By the fifties Edith’s taste had shifted to celebrities at least as famous as herself. In the singing world, that left only one man, Jacques Pills, the “Monsieur Charme” of Paris, whom she married in 1952. Doomed from the start by her drug, alcohol, and adulterous excesses, the marriage lasted five years. Afterward she provided herself with a “club” of lovers, the “Piaf Boys.”

Among these were a young actor, an Egyptian guitarist, and a songwriter in his twenties. Even in her final illness, her face swollen and disfigured with cortisone treatments, she ensnared a Greek Adonis twenty-five years her junior, who married her and cared for her until the end. The end of course was no Silhouette Romance fade-out. She died at forty-seven, ravaged by substance abuse and a farrago of illnesses, chiefly rheumatoid arthritis.

Edith hardly qualifies for superheroine status. She was riddled with flaws, complexes, impulse control disorders, and self-destructive passions. At the same time, she was more than the sum of her weaknesses and “poor me” public postures. She’d have laughed at the thought of herself as a Gallic love-jinxed Judy Garland or suggestions that she “lacked confidence as a woman.” “I had a very high opinion of myself,” she declared, “perhaps with good reason.”

There were plenty of good reasons: the iconic voice and persona, superstardom, defiant grit, and seductive genius—all against ridiculous odds. “A woman who gets herself dropped,” she sniffed, “is a poor sap.” Early in her career a rival taunted, “You’re short, badly dressed, and you haven’t got a bosom. Who are you going to attract?” With her acquired charms and mesmeric siren song,
toute le monde.
Jean Cocteau rightly called her a “sacred monster.” As her half sister put it, “I never saw a man who could resist Edith.”

Russian opera lovers remembered the night of November 3, 1843, for generations. After a fifty-year ban Italian opera had returned to St. Petersburg. Music-starved aficionados, some suspended from the cupola at risk of their lives, packed the aisles and boxes to hear the coloratura soprano Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) in
The Barber of Seville.
On the last note of Rosina’s aria “
Una voce poco fà
” the house exploded in a thunderous, show-stopping avalanche of applause. From the topmost bleacher one man, his face rapt with pentecostal ecstasy, outshouted the rest; it was the “turning point” of his life.