Like the beat poets of 1950s San Francisco or the decadents of Weimar Republic Berlin, there really was a postwar bohemian enclave in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood on Paris’s Left Bank. It was a place where poets and actors and philosophers congregated daily in sidewalk cafes, smoked bitter French cigarettes, swapped wives and lovers, and left an indelibly self-cultivated image. Its heyday was approximately two decades, from the liberation of Paris in 1944 until 1968, when a new, more earnestly political generation shoved it aside.
No one personified the artist’s life of postwar Paris quite like the singer Juliette Greco, who died last week at her home near Saint Tropez. She was 93.
Greco was not contemporary France’s best-known singer. That would probably be Charles Aznavour, who died two years ago at 94. Nor even its most famous woman singer. That would be Edith Piaf, who died in 1963 at 47. All three were masters of the chanson francaise, a distinctive style of dramatic, sometimes melodramatic singing-storytelling about love, privation, despair, and revolution, sometimes all four at once.
Unlike Piaf, however, whose tragic ballads mirrored an equally tragic life, Greco had a silken, seductive style, a deep, husky, carefully calibrated voice, and a memorable look. She always dressed in black, her dark hair cut straight and fashioned in bangs, and (in the words of the New York Times) her “liberally applied eyeliner” gave her the appearance of a Gallic Cleopatra. Above all, she was a survivor.
Born in Montpellier, near the south coast of France, Greco’s Corsican father abandoned the family early, and her mother left her two daughters in the care of her parents. In the mid-1930s, when the grandparents died, Greco’s mother, who once taunted Juliette that she wasn’t her daughter but “a child of rape,” transported the two girls to a life of genteel poverty in Paris. Greco became a ballerina at 13, and when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, her mother joined the Resistance. In 1943, her mother and her older sister were transported to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck while 16-year-old Greco was briefly imprisoned in France.
Her mother and her sister survived the war. But after 1945, 18-year-old Greco lived on her own in Paris, working at a nightclub, studying drama, occasionally dressing in the baggy, castoff clothes of male admirers that, combined with her charismatic beauty, charmed such photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In 1949, this led to the break that made her career. Although almost entirely untrained, she began singing at the newly reopened cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit. She was an overnight sensation in France, attracting the attention of promoters and songwriters who, in 1951, furnished her with her first enduring hit, “Je Suis Comme Je Suis” (“I am what I am”). It also yielded a lengthening list of celebrity lovers: Albert Camus, the race car driver Jean-Pierre Wimille, singer Sacha Distel, and visiting Americans Marlon Brando and Miles Davis.
The pianist-composer Ernest Lubin described Greco’s “deep, throaty voice [ranging] from a near whisper to raucous abandon,” and Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote lyrics for her, marveled that she had “a million poems in her voice.” Her first LP was a global sensation, and her 1954 concert at Paris’s Olympia Hall led to appearances across Europe and a triumphant U.S. tour. Her appeal and her concert career went on for decades, even surviving a stroke at 89.
In the 1950s, one of her lovers, the Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck, tried to make her a movie star but with mixed results. He straightened her nose and dyed her hair and put her in films opposite Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and even Orson Welles, but it didn’t work: “She states banalities in a tragic voice and tragic things with banality,” wrote a critic in Cahiers du Cinema.
Greco, like her fellow chanteuses, was an acting singer, not a singing actor, and was at her best alone, onstage with a microphone, singing the musical dramas she brought to life very nearly up until the hour of her death.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
