The Wild One

"The lovely days disappear, the planets turn in circles, but you walk straight toward what you cannot see: the dark days, the sagging skin." The lugubrious sentiment is by Poet Raymond Queneau, but the dark caramel voice which murmurs it in throbbing French in a newly released Columbia album belongs to a 29-year-old Parisian chanteuse named Juliette Greco. For U.S. listeners the album offers a fresh view of a singer whose literate, melancholy repertory and haunting voice have made her the musical idol of the existentialists and a reigning favorite along the music hall and nightclub circuit.

Sign of the Era. When Juliette was 15 the Germans deported her divorced mother and her sister to a labor camp. Left to roam the streets, Juliette fell in with a band of homeless youngsters, learned to steal by day and sleep in doorways by night.

One rainy evening in 1945, she and her street gang moved into a deserted club on the Left Bank. When the club reopened several months later as Cabaret le Tabou, the new owner encouraged Greco and her band to continue to make it their headquarters. "The proprietor saw in us a sign of the era," says Singer Greco. So did some of Tabou's guests. To Le Tabou came the existentialists and their friends--Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Christian Berard, Albert Camus and Jean Cocteau. They dubbed Greco and her band "Les Rats des Caves," fed and clothed them. Cocteau gave Greco a small part in his film Orpheus. In 1949 she launched her singing career.

Poems in the Throat. Garbed from head to toe in black ("I am probably the most covered-up singer in the business"), with her straight black hair hanging to her waist, she chanted the changes on blighted love, nostalgia and despair in a husky contralto which ranged from a whisper to a raucous shout. Such personages as Franc,ois Mauriac and Franc,oise Sagan dashed off songs for her. Sartre wrote that "in her throat she has millions of poems not yet written." When she took to the stage (in Anastasia) in a straight dramatic role, Le Monde's Robert Kemp was entranced by her "dignity and poetry," found her "smashing."

No longer an underfed, despairing Rat des Caves, Juliette has been married and divorced, has a two-year-old daughter, and last week was working on her fifth film (L'Homme et L'Enfant, with Eddie Constantine). She was planning a singing tour of South Africa, and had the prospect of a trip to Hollywood next winter to make a film with Danny Kaye. The wartime street days seemed far away. "They molded my life," she said, "but in my case, it's better not to look back."

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