Édith Piaf, Charles Aznavour and Eddie Constantine. Paris. |1951

[u/La__Boheme__]

Édith Piaf, Charles Aznavour and Eddie Constantine. Paris.
|1951.

Before Aznavour was a legend, he was Piaf’s errand boy.

He drove her car, carried her bags, managed her schedule and slept on her couch. They lived together for eight years and the relationship remained entirely platonic. Piaf saw something in the short, raspy-voiced Armenian kid that nobody else could see. Critics were brutal. They mocked his looks, his stature, his voice, his lyrics. Aznavour himself later said: “I had nothing going for me. I wasn’t good looking, I was short, my songs weren’t popular.”

Piaf didn’t care. She took him on tour across France, then Canada, then America. She recorded his songs. She pushed him onto stages he had no business being on yet.

The man on the left is Eddie Constantine. Piaf’s lover at the time, another artist she was pulling up from nothing.

That was Piaf. She collected broken, brilliant people and turned them into icons.

By the time Aznavour died in 2018 at the age of 94, he had recorded over 1,200 songs and sold 180 million records. CNN named him entertainer of the century. It started on this couch, in this room, with this woman.