Word: piaf
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Toast of the Town (Sun. 8 p.m., CBS). Ed Sullivan's variety show, with Edith Piaf, Helen Hayes, Pat O'Brien...
...doesn't matter very much that most U.S. listeners will not understand the words. Dietrich's voice nudges and teases such old melodies as Time on My Hands, Mean to Me and Taking a Chance on Love until they brood like bittersweet numbers by Edith Piaf...
Manhattan nightclub reporters groped for the right words for the newest French import. Wrote one: "She sounds like Edith Piaf [TIME, Oct. 3, 1949] but looks like a younger edition of Peggy Hopkins Joyce." Tried another: "A young Piaf, but pretty." Meanwhile, blonde Marjane (short for Marie Jane Thérese Gendebian) had Manhattan café socialites begging for more of her songs...
Marjane herself sees no reason for all the comparisons with Piaf, but her show is much the same. First comes a chatty little resume of the story of her song in French, followed by a charmingly painful version in English. Then, with a piano tinkling away discreetly on either side, she flashes a white smile and launches her husky cognac contralto into the songs her admirers have come to expect: Amour, April in Portugal, Mile. Hortensia...
...Marjane, who is married to a captain in the French army, sings "more the popular song." Like Piaf, she likes "a song that tells a story." The difference, she says, is that "Piaf is kind of morbid, she sings of death. I don't go so much to the point. I stay around the awful thing, but I never quite...