Word: aznavour
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...Chubby Checker and a Gallic hero named Johnny Hallyday. and spawns an army of combos with names like Les Chats Sauvages. There are "The Defenders of French Music." troubadour-poets like Georges Brassens and Leo Ferre who sing their verses to naughty café melodies. And there is Charles Aznavour...
...himself. Aznavour, 38, five-foot-four. 112 pounds and esthetically alone, is the biggest of the three. As composer, lyricist or both, he has written 508 songs in the past 20 years, and an average of five a year have reached France's Top Ten. As singer and performer, he has packed the Olympia in Paris. Carnegie Hall in New York, and last week he was packing the Comédie-Canadienne in Montreal on the start of a world tour. As a result of all this, plus a career as movie star (Shoot the Piano Player) and music...
Special Pinnacle. "When I began." Aznavour says, "the radio banned my songs. They didn't want to hear my forbidden words. Nothing is dirty, everything is poetic-but moral hypocrites never admit this. For ten years the ban went on, forbidden, la vérité! Then, five years ago, the pressure of the truth was too much-I was allowed to speak my message: 'Live now, tomorrow who knows...
With his light on, Aznavour has discovered that in life I'amour rarely rhymes with toujours, and he tirelessly embroiders this theme in his songs. "What could I have been thinking of? Was it with you I fell in love?" sings a disillusioned Aznavour husband. "I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there." Other songs deal with fading Don Juans, wifely nagging, and Who Gets Lolita When Humbert Humbert Dies? "I have no intellectual colleagues," Aznavour says from his artistic pinnacle, "but my rapport is with everyone...
Special Chemical. Aznavour grew up in Paris, dwarfed by everything. At home, his immigrant family constantly sang the songs of their native Armenia, but from infancy Charles had what he calls "a little frog" in his throat. During the German occupation, his luck turned so sour that he took to hawking papers in the streets in order to support his night life as a ducktailed razou in tight pants and flashy jacket; when the nightclubs closed, he went home on roller skates. But shouting out headlines gave a resonant fogginess to his crippled voice, and soon Aznavour was a fulltime...