Singers: Rising Sparrow

SINGERS Rising Sparrow

A year ago, Mireille Mathieu was just another unknown teen-ager trying her luck on a French TV show called The Game of Chance, an amateur tal ent contest sandwiched between the halves of a rugby match. Standing rigid as a rail, she sang one two-minute song, but it was enough to send a shock wave of recognition through thousands of viewers. That vibrant power, that haunting, husky throb. It was Edith Piaf reincarnate. Even her birdlike dimensions—4 ft. 10 in., 90 Ibs.—matched Piaf’s precisely.

The resemblance was sufficient, in fact, to launch Mireille on a career that has become, as one French magazine termed it, “a tornado, a cyclone, a cataclysm.” Dressed in the death-wish black that was Piaf’s trademark, she caused a sensation at Paris’ Olympia music hall singing the plaintive ballads that made “the Sparrow of the Streets” a national idol until her death in 1963. Soon Mireille’s recordings were topping the bestseller lists; this summer she sang 64 consecutive sellout concerts in the provinces, outdrawing all other French and foreign singers. Last month her pixyish face, framed in a heart-shaped helmet of chestnut hair, appeared on the covers of France’s three leading women’s magazines, refueling the Piaf mystique.

Sunny Side. Like Piaf, Mireille comes from humble origins. Daughter of an Avignon stonecutter, she is the eldest of 13 children. When her big break came last year, she was employed as a factory worker operating an envelope-folding machine for $15 a week.

Ironically, as her career skyrocketed, the specter of Piaf gradually became a restricting influence. Mireille wanted to develop her own style. Actually, though the similarities in intonation are unmistakable, Mireille’s budding voice has little of the bittersweet pathos and built-in sob that endeared Piaf to generations of Frenchmen. When Maurice Chevalier heard 19-year-old Mireille sing a few months ago, he counseled: “You are young, pretty, and your success has made you happy. You should not sing unhappy, tortured songs. Sing on the sunny side of the street.” And so she has, trading in her black dress for bright miniskirts and a repertory of new upbeat songs written for her by France’s best young songwriters. Now, says one French critic, “Mireille is not imitating Piaf, she is continuing Piaf’s work.”

No. 14 on the Way. In the past two weeks, leading an entourage that included her aunt as a chaperon, her accompanists, a reporter for France Soir and a camera crew filming her every movement for a French TV documentary, Mireille hopscotched from Paris to Manhattan to Dallas to Hollywood, where she signed substantial contracts for two movies and several appearances on the Danny Kaye and Andy Williams TV shows. Then she rushed back to France to embark on a tour in which she will-sing 46 concerts in 46 days, at $5,000 per performance. Under the stern scrutiny of France’s leading impresario, Johnny Stark, she also keeps up a rigorous schedule of daily lessons in diction, breathing, modern dancing, physical culture and English conversation. So far, she has mastered “hello,” “goodbye,” and “I love you.”

Meanwhile, back in Avignon, it was life as usual at the Mathieu house.

When Mama Mathieu recently announced that she is expecting her 14th child in May, it was headline news in Paris. French law says that anybody who produces that many enfants gets to name Charles de Gaulle as godfather of No. 14.