Word: edithe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Edith Wharton is enjoying a hot season, 56 years after her death, that would be the envy of many a living novelist. Buoyed by Martin Scorsese's film, The Age of Innocence is the No. 1 paperback best seller. Sales of other Wharton titles have doubled, and three have been snapped up for possible films. As if | Wharton didn't write enough, her last, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, has been completed (and, alas, flattened and sentimentalized) by scholar Marion Mainwaring (Viking; $22). It too has been optioned by Hollywood...
Less than three years before she died, Edith Piaf found the song that became her anthem. Non, je ne regrette rien rang through Paris' Olympia Music Hall as the frail singer, weakened by illness and drug and alcohol abuse, sustained by injections and pills, made an emotional comeback. Night after night, from Dec. 29, 1960, to April 13 of the following year, the diminutive woman in her trademark black dress lifted a chalky face to the spotlights and bared her soul. "I regret nothing, good or bad. All is forgotten, I don't care about the past . . . I'm beginning...
...Thirty years after her death on Oct. 10, 1963, at the age of 47, France has revived the romance. Record companies have rereleased her hits, and six of her nine films are on videotape. Observing the flood of visitors who have made the pilgrimage this year to Paris' modest Edith Piaf Museum, curator Bernard Marchois says that "it is as if she never went away." And in one sense, she has never left...
...touched everyone, from the misbegotten of the meanest quartier to the most refined boulevardiers. Jean Cocteau, who died within hours of Piaf, called her a genius: "There has never been another like her . . . and there never will be." He compared her to a nightingale, but the impresario who discovered Edith Giovanna Gassion at 19, singing on the corner of a Paris avenue, had bestowed a more fitting name: Piaf, which in the city's argot of the 1930s meant sparrow...
...also not a really mediocre movie. It's either a really good movie flawed by bizarre cinematographic antics, wooden acting and a horrendous voice-over, or a really bad movie partially salvaged by charming period images and a touching plot. In either case, Martine Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel of manners gives you, if not a run for your money, at least an elegant trot...