La Diff

They all sing La Vie En Rose, and they all sing of an unreal Paris, but their styles are as different as a hangover at the Ritz is from a morning-after brandy in St. Germain des Pres. Blonde Vicky Autier, one of the three French singers who seem to have taken over Manhattan night life, appears at the St. Regis Maisonette in a $1,000 spangled black velvet gown, and she sings the song with gay sophistication. Blonder Lilo bounces about the Plaza's Persian Room in brief white tights, and sings La Vie with brassy triumph. But tiny (4 ft. 10 in.), frizzle-topped Edith Piaf wears a shapeless black silk dress and sings the tune (which she herself wrote twelve years ago) as a lament for everything that ever went wrong with love in Paris or anywhere else. Aging (43) Piaf seems hardly to have changed since she first appeared in Manhattan in 1947. Suave Vicky and wriggling Lilo only serve to set her off as what she is: the best torch singer in the business.

Montmartre Authority. Edith Piaf is still incredibly corny, but with such artful simplicity that the corn becomes completely convincing. Arms akimbo and skinny legs aspraddle, her only jewelry a silver crucifix, accompanying musicians hidden behind a curtain, she stares past the spotlight and pounds honest emotion into some wretched lyrics ("When at last our life is through, I shall share eternity with you"). Since most of her songs are in French, Piaf prefaces them with a dry, straightforward English precis ("She meets her lover; he goes away; she weeps"). But the translation is seldom necessary. Her hands and face and powerful voice are obviously telling of a woman scorned, a lover lost, an affair broken.

Piaf sings all this with the authority of a little girl who used to sing for her supper on the streets of Montmartre, but was too proud to pick up the pennies. A friend did that for her. Nor did her later success ever take her far from trouble. A 1949 airplane crash killed World Middleweight Champion Marcel Cerdan, who is still remembered as her great love. A marriage to French Singer Jacques Peals ended in divorce. Says she: "I am a very faithful woman, very serious about marriage. I have a lover who came with me to America, but he has gone back. I will never marry him. We are not in accord in our thinking."

All the Poor. Somehow it all comes through; hurt, humor, sentimentality and a touch of sidewalk cynicism survive in the pale, lined face. And somehow it all seems more real than the too-gay sex that Lilo (wife of a French marquis) flaunts like a cancan girl, that Vicky Autier (a protegee of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) flashes with calculated abandon. Compatriots abroad in a big city. the three women speak of each other with affection. "If we were all in Paris at the same time." admits Lilo, "we would probably tear each other to pieces." Explains Vicky: "Lilo and I are similar, but she is a little more Folies-Bergere than I am."

As for Piaf. like almost everyone who has ever heard her, Vicky is one of her fans. "Piaf." says she. "has the soul of all the poor. She gives you goose pimples."

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