Sunshine Girl

Paris has exported a new chanteuse. She calls herself Patachou (rhymes with not-a-shoe), because the word is French for creampuff dough and she used to run a pastry shop in Montmartre. After two highly successful months at New York's Waldorf-Astoria, and a record released by Columbia, Patachou is currently wowing them at Los Angeles' Coconut Grove. Her fans claim she is the biggest thing that happened in France since Mistinguette wore pigtails. What is so special about this ex-pastrycook? Part of the answer lies with her predecessors.

Rural Reactionary. French nightclub singers, much easier to remember than French premiers, are possibly better guides to their country's history. There was Lucienne Boyer, who had her heyday in the uncertain years between the wars, a trim but still sizable singer who put across Parlez-Moi d'Amour as if Paris and amour had not changed since the golden nineties (although one line in the song admitted: "Actually, I don't believe any of it"). Then came Edith Piaf, so thin that she was barely visible through the nightclub smoke, with an occasional sentimental number (La Vie en Rose), but in reality a siren of disillusion, a kind of existentialist among chanteuses. But Patachou is almost a rural reactionary, who goes back to a sturdy, bucolic France that persists beneath the phony Parisian sparkle.

She is blonde, reassuringly well-fed, and appears on stage in a white peasant blouse (by Dior). Most of her songs are simple story songs, like the one about the girl who finds a kitten, puts it in her bodice, and attracts a good deal of male attention. But she also goes in for old rousers like Alouette and Au pres de Ma Blonde. As she sings, her hands flicker gaily through the air, over her body, across her face, like the hands of a village girl telling a story at the well. She dislikes sadness and expresses the feeling in broad caricatures of moaning pop singers. Hers seems to be the Montmartre of old, when sheep grazed its slopes and windmills turned. "I like sunshine and I live," she says. "I sleep with my windows open."

Train Stopper. Patachou (real name: Henriette Ragon Billon) never sang in public until five years ago, when she and her husband opened a small cafe next to the pastry shop. One night she joined a crowd of singing customers and they loved her. After that, she sang a little every night, walking from table to table, coaxing people to join in. One night Patachou saw a man cut off his friend's necktie for a joke. "I think this is most funny," she recalls. "I like the look of terreur on the man's face. All of a sudden, this tie-cutter is as strong as the man with the red flag who stops trains. After that, I, too, cut ties when someone will not sing with me."

During the next two years she collected some famous four-in-hands--Farouk's, Errol Flynn's, Governor Dewey's, Aly Khan's. When Maurice Chevalier told her she must leave her little cafe for bigger things, she obeyed. Patachou likes big rooms and big crowds. Says she: "If they are a good audience, I have a good time. But if I am excited and they are not excited, then I feel like I am the only one in the room and there is no fun."

With Patachou in the room, there is almost always fun.

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