{"id":129834,"date":"2018-10-05T11:00:40","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T15:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129834"},"modified":"2018-10-05T15:44:38","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T19:44:38","slug":"why-charles-aznavours-global-fame-never-reached-american-shores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/05\/why-charles-aznavours-global-fame-never-reached-american-shores\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Charles Aznavour\u2019s Global Fame Never Reached American Shores"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When he passed away this week at the age of ninety-four, the singer, songwriter, and actor Charles Aznavour was still touring. He was a living link to the golden age of French chanson. As a young man, he had been maligned as short and ugly, an immigrant with a hoarse voice, but he became a prot\u00e9g\u00e9e of \u00c9dith Piaf, and then a global star in his own right. While his success in the anglophone world never equaled his renown in other countries, he was, by any reckoning, one of the twentieth\u00a0century\u2019s most popular entertainers, often referred to as the French Sinatra (Aznavour sang with Sinatra on the latter\u2019s Duets<\/em> record). He sang in five languages, appeared in at least thirty films, wrote somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand songs, and sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am popular because I am like everybody in France,\u201d he told Lillian Ross in 1963. \u201cMy face is the face of anybody. My voice is the voice of anybody. My face is the face of their hope.\u201d That face was a soft inverted triangle, with mournful, wide-set eyes over a pursed, ironic mouth and parenthetical dimples\u2014atop the trim, muscular but miniature frame of a lightweight boxer (he described himself as \u201cshort and a bundle of nerves\u201d). He embodied for many devotees of chanson the combination of masculinity and vulnerability, of sincerity and self-conscious drama, that is a hallmark of the style.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As a songwriter, he was at the vanguard of a more personal, naturalistic vision of chanson known as chanson r\u00e9aliste<\/em>, which emphasized, he said, \u201csubjects that were near the knuckle\u201d: romantic malaise in \u201cYou Let Yourself Go,\u201d a sympathetic portrait of a gay transvestite in \u201cWhat Makes A Man,\u201d the expressionistic masochism of the alcoholic in \u201cI Drink.\u201d Toward the end of a memoir studded with excerpts of lyrics carefully placed next to relevant memories, he denied that his songs were autobiographical. \u201cMy originality was in the lyrics, not the music,\u201d Aznavour wrote. \u201cTake away the music and you can recite them onstage.\u201d His early hero, Maurice Chevalier, was shocked at Aznavour\u2019s songs, which used what he considered a vulgar vernacular and were banned for a time from French radio. \u201cThere are things one just can\u2019t say in chansons,\u201d Chevalier told him. \u201cSoon everyone will start saying them,\u201d Aznavour replied. \u201cWhen I want to say merde<\/em> I say it, when I want to say piss, I say piss \u2026 My vocabulary is the same in my chansons as in my speech.\u201d He insisted on realism in the songs\u2019 narratives as well. Yves Montand turned down Aznavour\u2019s \u201cJ\u2019ai bu\u201d after Aznavour refused to take his suggestion that the narrator commit suicide at the end. If every drunk in France killed themselves, Aznavour replied, it would reduce the population by a third.<\/p>\n

His commercial success was more robust than his critical acclaim: Aznavour was a crowd-pleaser. He didn\u2019t have the sexual explicitness of his contemporary George Brassens, the bleak existential cynicism and passionate melodrama of the younger Jacques Brel, or the ironic, rock-influenced provocations of Serge Gainsbourg. He had none of the nihilism that made those men appealing as cult figures. In the anglophone world, his lyrics suffered from bowdlerized translations that smoothed out their rougher edges, unlike the Mort Shuman adaptations of Brel. But he was undeniably, as Life<\/em> once said, an \u201cinternational show business phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n

The filmmaker Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut initially approached Aznavour about making a documentary of his life, before writing for him the anhedonic titular role in 1960\u2019s Shoot The Piano Player<\/em>. (Jean-Luc Godard also reportedly considered him for the lead in Breathless<\/em>, and he had a supporting role in the Oscar-nominated adaptation of The Tin Drum<\/em>.) \u201cLike Sinatra,\u201d wrote Pauline Kael, Aznavour \u201cis an instinctive actor and a great camera subject.\u201d Slim, dour, and self-contained, with a melancholic dignity and a lowercase grin, Aznavour\u2019s performance mixed farce, tragedy, street philosophy, romance, cynicism, and hope. \u201cI am an actor only when I sing,\u201d he told Lillian Ross in The New Yorker<\/em>.\u00a0\u201cIt is not my business [on film]. I am simply there, I am empty. Others put things in me. It is an art to be empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his 2005 memoir, he spoke of planning a long fade-out into retirement: \u201cI have no wish to die on stage,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI have already written my epitaph: \u2018Here lies the oldest man in the cemetery.\u2019\u201d But what was announced as a farewell tour in 2006 stretched on another decade. \u201cWe live long, we Armenians,\u201d he told the Times<\/em> in 1992. \u201cI\u2019m going to reach 100, and I\u2019ll be working until I\u2019m 90.\u201d He almost did, and he was.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

He was born Shahnour Aznavourian (\u201cVarouch\u201d to his mother) in 1924, the second child of recent Armenian immigrants to Paris. His first name was quickly changed to the more francophone Charles, and his last name was shortened early in his performing career. In his several memoirs, Aznavour describes a family that spoke Armenian in the house, and \u201ckept our language, traditions, folklore, and religion \u2026 with a sense of humor and misfortune.\u201d Armenians, he wrote, \u201care very emotional and cry without the slightest hesitation.\u201d It was a raucous household. His father, Misha, was a cook, a good-time Charlie, and a nightclub enthusiast. His mother, Knar, was a seamstress. Both were enthusiastic amateur performers who organized, with their friends, theatrical revues-cum<\/em>-banquets with their friends. They moved often. Charles taught himself piano, and he and his sister, Aida, began to write songs together. At the age of nine, he heard Maurice Chevalier on a caf\u00e9 gramophone, and the music-hall singer became his idol.<\/p>\n

When Caucasus, a Georgian restaurant Misha was running with Charles\u2019s grandfather, went under in the 1930 depression, Charles was thrilled: \u201cI\u2019ll go begging in the streets with Aida, and I won\u2019t have to go to school anymore.\u201d But his father found work at a bistro across the street from a school for performers, the Ecole de Spectacle, where Charles eventually enrolled. He and Aida had already begun performing for Armenian audiences\u2014she sang, he did \u201cRussian dances.\u201d He began to audition for theatrical work, taking up smoking to fit in backstage, and eventually was cast as \u201ca little black boy,\u201d using a schoolmate as a model.<\/p>\n

He joined a series of theater troupes, performing both childrens\u2019 shows and juvenile parts in adult plays. At twelve, he was hired by a series of Parisian revues and radio broadcasts as a singing act. He played in drag, and on instruments ranging from the metallophone to upright bass. He came in second in a competition to a singer \u201cwith a voice as powerful as a foghorn\u201d and took away another lesson: \u201cFrenchmen like singers with a lot of voice.\u201d As a young teenager, though, playing at being a street tough, he discovered that he got more attention from girls for his singing than \u201cwhen I played terror tactics.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1939, World War II interrupted his education. When his father enlisted as an army chef, Charles took to the streets and the black market. He sold chocolate, perfume, and lingerie,\u00a0as well as bicycles that had been abandoned at the train station by Parisians fleeing the city, to the occupying German soldiers. He forged ration cards for his family\u2019s bread and dealt in bootleg sugar and coffee. He continued to perform in cabarets, doing dance, acrobatics, comedy, playing piano, and emceeing. For a while he commuted on roller skates (in his third-person telling), \u201ca packet of music scores under his arm, wearing a balaklava helmet pulled down over his ears, the flaps tucked into a large, faded dark-brown Canadian bush jacket \u2026 stained with make-up.\u201d He resoled his worn shoes with rubber from bike tires.<\/p>\n

His prominent nose attracted \u201cthe attention of occupying forces, who took me for a Jew hiding out in the middle of the [theatre] company.\u201d More than once, he had to produce his uncircumcised penis as proof.<\/p>\n

In 1944, he began an eight-year partnership with pianist Pierre Roche. Roche was a jazz nut; Aznavour\u2019s tastes tended more toward tangos and waltzes, but their reputation grew\u2014\u201cin any case people began to know we were singers and not acrobats\u201d\u2014and brought them to the attention of \u00c9dith Piaf.<\/p>\n

The older woman, already a star, had a habit of adopting younger men (including Yves Montand and Georges Moustaki) as prot\u00e9g\u00e9es\u2014and, often, lovers\u2014making them over with watches and suits to her taste, and encouraging them to sing. They were \u201ccondemned to stardom,\u201d as one writer put it. She came to see Roche and Aznavour in 1948, and, afterward, put Charles through a kind of test of his abilities at banter and dance. When he passed, she informed them that their duo would be opening her next tour. While he successfully resisted her attempts to get him into bed (\u201cI think he loved Edith too much. Most of all, he was too decent,\u201d wrote Edith\u2019s half sister Simone Berteaut), Aznavour spent much of the next decade in her entourage. The youngest in the mercurial and demanding diva\u2019s circle, he became, in turn, her drinking buddy, chauffeur, lighting director, errand-boy, and general \u201cdogsbody.\u201d She treated Aznavour like a kid brother, referring often to their shared pasts as street kids, and calling him her genie-con<\/em> (\u201cgenius-idiot\u201d). He, in turn, was devoted to the woman he called a sacred monster. Even decades later, describing their \u201camorous friendship,\u201d he would still seem enthralled and a bit hypnotized by her: \u201cI adored every minute I spent as Piaf\u2019s slave.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a matter of learning from her explicitly, he said, since her art was so instinctive there was nothing for her to explain. Unlike the rest of \u201cPiaf\u2019s boys,\u201d he was no clone\u2014\u201cas a singer,\u201d said Berteaut, \u201che irritated her,\u201d and she would sometimes, by way of hazing, sabotage his three-song opening slots with bad advice. While she encouraged his songwriting, she turned down most of his songs (though when Juliette Gr\u00e9co had a hit with Aznavour\u2019s \u201cJe hais les dimanches,\u201d Piaf was furious). Aznavour\u2019s impulse toward recognizable, true-to-life lyrics was an uneasy fit with Piaf\u2019s taste for melodrama: \u201cWhen she was feeling down in the dumps, to cheer herself up she would call me \u2026 and say, \u2018Hey\u2014write me a song, and make sure you find me a new way to die.\u201d \u2026 I preferred to write about being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1948, Piaf invited Roche and Aznavour to join her in the United States\u2014without, however, providing for their passage. \u201cBe men,\u201d she told them. \u201cFind your way to America, and once you are there \u2026 I\u2019ll help you.\u201d They made their way to New York, only to be interned at Ellis Island for showing up without a visa. The duo spent their time entertaining their fellow detainees with a roach-filled piano. After singing parts of a popular Broadway musical to a judge, they were granted three-month visas. Piaf, suitably impressed, got them an engagement in Montreal (and bought Aznavour a nose job), which led to two and a half \u201cwild and crazy years\u201d in the francophone city.<\/p>\n

Aznavour\u2019s return to Paris meant both the breakup of his eight-year partnership with Roche, who stayed behind in Montreal, and, shortly after, his own marriage. The split with Roche, he said, was the more painful. He moved in (platonically) with Piaf, sleeping on her couch. According to her half-sister, \u201c[t]o write, he\u2019d sneak into corners where she couldn\u2019t find him.\u201d<\/p>\n

He eventually moved out of Piaf\u2019s house, on the advice of his publisher that he needed to get out of her shadow (though he never truly left her inner circle, and was in the car for the two serious accidents in 1951 which contributed to her morphine addiction). He found that bookings became a challenge\u2014the Piaf connection had been a benefit to him, and when he left her, the chanson world assumed he\u2019d been expelled. Finally, though, he had a breakthrough in North Africa in 1956, which he followed up with successful headlining shows at major Paris theaters like the Moulin Rouge, the Olympia, and the Alhambra. Although a major car accident in 1957 kept him from the stage for eighteen months (and, he said, in debt for twelve years), his career as a performer was made.<\/p>\n

He had remarried in 1956 to Evelyne, who presumed to offer him career advice and who had ambitions of her own\u2014\u201cshe was already the wife of the star I had not yet become.\u201d \u00a0He cultivated an image of the French ladies\u2019 man, charming and shyly chivalrous, quick to send roses, with a somewhat antiquated sense of the role of a wife and an eye for young women \u201cwhose Pygmalion I could become.\u201d (Among his affairs\u2014\u201cmore than friendship and less than love\u201d\u2014was the teenage Liza Minnelli.) He fathered an illegitimate son, Patrick, who came to live with him at the age of nine and died at twenty-five in 1977, surrounded by \u201cdiet pills and beer cans,\u201d in an apartment Aznavour had bought for him. He married his third wife, Ulla, in 1967. They had three children and remained married until his death; she shunned the spotlight, he said approvingly, and had no interest in show business. He told the Daily Mail<\/em> later, \u201cFor the first [marriage] I was too young; the second one I was too stupid; the third time I was right on.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Aznavour\u2019s art was, in large part, a dramatic one. Reviews of his performances emphasized their control. As Brendan Gill wrote in the New Yorker <\/em>in 1983, he was \u201cruthless in the manipulation of his charm.\u201d Stephen Holden, <\/em>in 2009, wrote in the Times<\/em> that \u201cevery gesture has a pointed expressive purpose; not a twitch was wasted.\u201d He was, said the Times<\/em> in 1966, a \u201cdiminutive man with the shabby look, the look of a French postman run down at the heels \u2026 that insignificant fellow lost in the shuffle of life.\u201d (Early in his career, he was advised by the singer Leo Fuld to play up his vulnerability: \u201cIf you want to become a star you must make women feel that you need consolation.\u201d) His first decades in show business were on music-hall stages with comedians and strippers, costumes and canned jokes, and he retained the vaudevillian\u2019s exquisite sense for choreographed moments. \u201cThose people who said I wouldn\u2019t succeed were people who \u2026 saw me in those small cabarets,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI am made for large stages \u2026 I must move about when I sing. I need as much space as a dancer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The chanson tradition \u201cought to be,\u201d wrote Peter Hawkins in his book on the subject, \u201cone of the most characteristic genres of post-modernity.\u201d A self-referential mix of poetry, theater, performance, and art song, chanson mixes vernacular slang with high-culture allusions while delivering lowlife tales to bourgeois audiences. Its relation to high culture, Hawkins says, \u201cis similar to that of journalism to literature: serious art is what it aspires to, but only occasionally what it achieves.\u201d Chanson\u2019s self-conscious aspirations to poetry exist in a French context, where performative literary fluency by politicians and public figures is valorized. It can seem foreign in a culture like America, in which erudition and pretension can be a distinct disadvantage. Unlike art song (melodie<\/em>), with which it shares some characteristics, chanson highlights the text rather than using it simply as a melodic vehicle; unlike the musical comedies and operettas with which it shares a sensibility, it privileges \u201cself-contained mini-drama[s]\u201d rather than a song that moves a larger story along. In a genre that so emphasizes dramatic presentation, its most successful figures emit not just a star\u2019s charisma but inhabit a recognizable and \u201ccoherent world-view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before 1960, popular entertainers drew from the tradition known variously in the United States as vaudeville, in England as music hall, and in France as chanson. The style was one of populist live entertainment by any means necessary: song-and-dance, low comedy, sleight of hand, theater, and melodrama. From moment to moment, it could be witty and sophisticated, then broad and ribald. But as the rock-and-roll era of American song dawned, this conscious theatricality put Aznavour (and other chansonniers<\/em>) at odds with the anglophone audience.<\/p>\n

While today, chanson and music hall still retain an influence in the popular culture of France and (to a lesser extent) England, the advent of rock in the United States relegated it to a black-and-white nostalgia around Tin Pan Alley, classic Broadway, and pre-rock icons like Frank Sinatra. The American fetish for authenticity in its performers, the idealization of rawness in sound and manner, a natural and unpracticed affect, disqualified the professionalized entertainers that had dominated popular music until that point. The broad, full-throated tenors and baritones (Anthony Lane has referred to Aznavour\u2019s \u201cstriving lungfulness\u201d) and the unironic emotional range of vaudeville have never been fully rehabilitated in American music: anyone who sings that way faces uncomplimentary references to Broadway or Meatloaf.<\/p>\n

The politics of the rock era, too, discouraged the professional entertainer. The once-political term sellout<\/em>, for musicians who worked within the popular entertainment superstructure, crossed over from the unionizing left of the thirties to the folk and blues revivalists of the fifties\u2014where it mixed with a valorization of untutored folk artistry. The sleek, people-pleasing multitalent was seen as a chameleonic entertainer with no artistic core.<\/p>\n

And yet, in the songs of chansonniers<\/em> like Brel and Aznavour, or their English counterparts like Scott Walker or Neil Hannon, the defining characteristic is empathy and humanism, a focus on detailed character sketches. (Bob Dylan, who has occasionally covered Aznavour\u2019s \u201cThe Times We\u2019ve Known\u201d in concert, has also latterly explored the heritage of pre-rock popular music.) The melodrama is that of the human comedy: most people feel their triumphs and tragedies fully and sincerely, not from an ironic distance. \u201cFor an American critic,\u201d wrote Holden, reviewing the first leg of Aznavour\u2019s farewell tour in 2006, \u201cMr. Aznavour\u2019s freedom of self-expression \u2026 arouses frustration at the degree to which our popular culture has become so youth-centered. There is much to be said for popular songs that take the long view, exploring erotic love and loss at every stage of life and connecting generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the xenophobic turn in French politics, it is instructive to remember the immigrant nature of iconic performers like Brel (Belgian), Aznavour (Armenian), Django Reinhardt (Romani), and Piaf (Italo-Moroccan). Outsiders have always dominated the tradition, and their humanism flows from that status: many of the American Tin Pan Alley songwriters (Irving Berlin, the Gershwins) were Russian Jews, and Noel Coward was far from the only homosexual.<\/p>\n

To talk about music in America is often to talk about an upwelling of underclass expression that is distinctly American, whether African American or rural white, whose influence runs one way, outward to the rest of the world. (\u201cIf my kind of song survives,\u201d Aznavour told the Times<\/em> in 1992, \u201cit will be in country music. Country music tells stories, and my songs tell stories.\u201d) But to appreciate Charles Aznavour as an American is also to reclaim an American place in an international tradition of sophisticated, cosmopolitan empathy and, yes, authentic human emotion and experience. A CNN poll that named Aznavour \u201cEntertainer of the Century\u201d in 1998 can be cited skeptically, but there is something admirable about the recognition of a man who never quite broke into America, the America that presumes its tastes in popular culture to be necessarily those of the world. A pre-rock entertainer who succeeded in multiple languages is one of the best responses to American cultural imperialism the twentieth century produced.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Franz Nicolay is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in the <\/em>New York Times, Slate, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His first book, <\/em>The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (New Press, 2016), was named a \u201cSeason\u2019s Best Travel Book\u201d by the<\/em> New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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