The Girl from Montmartre

There was once a sweetly pensive French popsy named Irma-la-Douce, who plied her trade on the streets of Montmartre but reserved her true love for a handsome young pimp named Nestor-le-Fripe. Because he returned her love, Nestor put on a false beard and booked Irma by the week. After an interlude on Devil's Island, Nestor returned to "Coulaincourt, where stroll the filles d'amour," to settle down in unmarried bliss with his Irma. This curdled romantic idyl furnishes the plot for Irma-la-Douce, Paris' most popular long-run musical; it is also the vehicle that launched France's newest singing star, Colette Renard, 28, a onetime Montmartre artist's model.

Irma and Colette go together like cognac and coffee. Colette, too, ran the streets of Montmartre when she was a child. She worked, with no success, in a succession of sleazy cafes in Casablanca, Oran and Algiers ("I don't like to sing against the sound of popping champagne corks"). After a spell as a secretary (in a music publishing house) and as a band vocalist, she moved, still virtually unknown, into the role of Irma.

Colette's equipment as a singer includes a resonant, dark-hued voice, meticulous diction, and a direct, snub-nosed charm that audiences find a welcome relief from the involuted agonizings of the Juliette Greco school. Several weeks ago she took a leave from the role that made her famous, moved to Paris' Olympia music hall. With such songs as Zon, zon, zon, L'Orpheon, and Ou va-t-on se nicher?, she brought down the house and moved the sprightly critical review Arts to lyrical flights: "She has lovely broad shoulders and fine big arms, well made for singing of love, joy and sadness. We can understand how her body could have inspired painters. She brings with her the lights of springtime and winter, sun and rain."

Colette has just completed a French folklore album, is eying the movies. But she has not permanently abandoned her friend Irma. This week she begins a tour of France, Switzerland and Belgium, and next fall she will go with the show to England to tell Londoners all about the fille d'amour from Coulaincourt who knows that true love is never up for sale.

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