American in Paris

Just about the most popular entertainer in France today is an American whom nobody in his own country ever found very entertaining, with the possible exception of some small children. He is Eddie Constantine, 38, and he is currently wowing them from the Place de I'Etoile in Paris to the Canebiere in Marseille with a hit movie, the latest of several hit records, and swoon-producing personal appearances. He expects to gross $600,000 this year, which is pretty good for a performer who only ten years ago could not have filled the Old Empire Beer Garden in Hoboken, with free beer thrown in.

A Show for Baby. Eddie's father was a music-loving costume-jewelry maker in Providence who scraped together enough money in 1933 to send his 16-year-old son to the Vienna conservatory. Two years later, Eddie returned to New York, but could not even sing up a good supper, let alone rent; at one point he was sleeping in Central Park. As a last resort, he joined up with a vocal quintet that played second-class movie and burlesque houses. To supplement their meager take, the members sometimes rented advertising space on the backs of their costumes; at the end of the act the quintet would about-face and reveal plugs for a local line of baby clothes or strawberry jam.

Then Eddie drifted to Hollywood, and he still treasures the few friendly gestures that came his way there, e.g., Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller got him a job singing a friend's baby to sleep every night. The baby loved his act.

While doing chorus work and singing commercials in New York, Eddie married Helene Musil, a ballet dancer, and followed her to Paris. There she made a success while he spun in the same old luckless groove.

Eddie's break came five years ago, when Chanteuse Edith Piaf decided that his craggy face, husky build and American accent fitted him for the role of a gangster in her music hall revue. "She taught me about singing," he says. By good luck and some whopping exaggerations about his American experience, he next broke into the French movies, where he became a smash in American tough-guy roles. In a remarkable bit of legerdemain, he transferred his popular film personality to his singing style, mixing toughness and sentiment. Onstage he wears a sharply cut suit and sings (in passable French) from a boxer's stance in a wide-open baritone. "I'm just about everything Europeans instinctively admire about Americans," he admits.

A Dot for the I. Eddie Constantine's latest record is L'Homme et I'Enfant, in which he sings sentimental answers to a little girl's childish questions--the little girl being his eleven-year-old daughter Tania. Translation:

Tania : Tell me, sir, good sir, whether the earth is round.

If this is true, the bluebird, where in the world is he?

Eddie : My child, my child, it is true, the earth is round, And for a long time I have searched for the bluebird in the world.

Like you, I cried, while holding out my arms.

But for you, I'm sure he will come one beautiful day.

The recording is pushing 200,000 sales, a hit of major proportions in France.

Nobody has been able to explain Eddie's sudden success beyond the fact that he somehow sounds much better in French than in English. French women regard him as a sort of combination Humphrey Bogart and Bing Crosby. Some of the girls dream that he will drag them by the hair to his champagne-stocked cave, while others like to weep at his middleaged, father-daughter sentiments. Most of his audiences, as a French magazine puts it, simply like to think of him as the fellow who dots the "i" in the verb aimer.

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