Why Charles Aznavour’s Global Fame Never Reached American Shores
When he passed away this week at the age of ninety-four, the singer, songwriter, and actor Charles Aznavour was still touring. He was a living link to the golden age of French chanson. As a young man, he had been maligned as short and ugly, an immigrant with a hoarse voice, but he became a protégée of Édith Piaf, and then a global star in his own right. While his success in the anglophone world never equaled his renown in other countries, he was, by any reckoning, one of the twentieth century’s most popular entertainers, often referred to as the French Sinatra (Aznavour sang with Sinatra on the latter’s Duets record). He sang in five languages, appeared in at least thirty films, wrote somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand songs, and sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide.
“I am popular because I am like everybody in France,” he told Lillian Ross in 1963. “My face is the face of anybody. My voice is the voice of anybody. My face is the face of their hope.” That face was a soft inverted triangle, with mournful, wide-set eyes over a pursed, ironic mouth and parenthetical dimples—atop the trim, muscular but miniature frame of a lightweight boxer (he described himself as “short and a bundle of nerves”). He embodied for many devotees of chanson the combination of masculinity and vulnerability, of sincerity and self-conscious drama, that is a hallmark of the style.
As a songwriter, he was at the vanguard of a more personal, naturalistic vision of chanson known as , which emphasized, he said, “subjects that were near the knuckle”: romantic malaise in “You Let Yourself Go,” a sympathetic portrait of a gay transvestite in “What Makes A Man,” the expressionistic masochism of the alcoholic in “I Drink.” Toward the end of a memoir studded with excerpts of lyrics carefully placed next to relevant memories, he denied that his songs were autobiographical. “My originality was in the lyrics, not the music,” Aznavour I say it, when I want to say piss, I say piss … My vocabulary is the same in my chansons as in my speech.” He insisted on realism in the songs’ narratives as well. Yves Montand turned down Aznavour’s “J’ai bu” after Aznavour refused to take his suggestion that the narrator commit suicide at the end. If every drunk in France killed themselves, Aznavour replied, it would reduce the population by a third.
