BROADWAY: Troubadour from France

The lean, craggy face peering with a squinty smile into the spotlight had rarely been seen by U.S. audiences, although a few first-nighters might remember it as belonging to the guttily amoral Corsican truck driver in the film Wages of Fear. At 37. Singer Yves Montand is France’s highest paid entertainer, the hottest music-hall performer to hit the scene since the end of World War II. Last week, appearing in the open-necked brown shirt and slacks that are his trademark, Yves (pronounced Eve) Montand made his first U.S. appearance at Manhattan’s Henry Miller Theater—and proved the bravos that he has had in Europe.

Cynical Wisdom. Montana’s gift, which he describes as coming “from the belly,” consists of a throatily masculine baritone voice, an expressively mobile face and body and an air of casual virility that can curl the toes of every properly nourished female in the house. He works with few props—a top hat and a straw hat, a cane and an umbrella—but his simplest movements are vibrant with innuendo. Singing entirely in French, he baited his audiences last week into a wonderful medley of moods. In Ma Môme, Ma P’tite Môme he was every woman’s protective lover, as his shoulder and arms curved in a possessive embrace; in the upbeat La Marie-Vison, about the perils of coveting a mink coat (“There must be other ways for a girl to keep warm”), he expressed the wisdom of the cafes in the lift of an eyebrow, the cynical, gallic turn of a wrist.

Backed by a seven-man jazz combo, Singer Montand could demolish the hipster with a shuddering shimmy in Le Fanatique de Jazz or evoke the world of the provincial music hall in Un Garcon Dansait with a frozen smile and agitated feet. The display of vocal and athletic virtuosity lasted through 20 numbers (during which Montand sweated off two pounds), and at the end the audience was shouting for more.

Mesmeric Effect. Singer Montand was born Yvo Livi, the son of an Italian broommaker. Fleeing Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the family settled in the harbor district of Marseille, where Yves quit school to become successively a waiter, bartender, factory worker and hairdresser. His evenings he spent at the movies watching his idols—Fred Astaire, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Trenet; by the time he was 18, he was doing imitations of all three in suburban flea pits. The transition from provincial hoofer to Parisian headliner began in 1944 when Montand, newly arrived in Paris, happened to appear on a theater bill with Chanteuse Edith Piaf, became her protégé. With Piaf’s help, he dropped synthetic American numbers like Les Plaines du Far West, began to concentrate on the authentic, dramatic vignettes that are now his stock in song (“One has to realize,” says he, “that a song is a theatrical play”). For a time, Yves sang the Communist line, appeared at party rallies, specialized in social-protest numbers. But politics, he now believes, is not his line—possibly because he owns a chateau in Normandy, drives a $25,000 Bentley and reaps a fat profit from stage appearances and films (his latest: Where the Hot Wind Blows with Gina Lollobrigida). The mesmeric effect he has on females of all ages only occasionally bothers his wife, Cinemactress Simone (Room at the Top] Signoret. “When it gets too boring,” says she, “and a woman won’t leave the dressing room, I put on my prostitute face and just tell her to scram.”