Titi & Lorelei

A euphoric Paris critic recently told his readers of an artist whose work has "an intense living presence because it is drawn from the pulsing daily life of breathing humanity." This panting prose was directed to the achievements of a 31-year-old singer named Mick Micheyl. With Juliette Greco, who last week was breathing her dusky ballads to patrons of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, Mick is the most extravagantly acclaimed of post-Piaf popular French "art" singers. Singers Micheyl and Greco look as if they may become the most exciting exports from the Paris nightclubs since Piaf began looking at the unrosy side of La Vie en Rose.

The girls are a study of Gallic contrasts. Mick Micheyl is sunny; Juliette Greco is subterranean. In her simple sheath or plain skirt and white broadcloth shirtwaist, Mick affects the saucy style of a French street urchin--the impertinent type Parisians call un titi. Juliette, in her clinging, floor-length black, displays the kind of world-weariness that once moved Jean Cocteau to speak of "the 'ruinous jewel of her heart." Both Mick and Juliette, intense admirers insist, do not merely sing--they have something to say.

Sentimental Perfume. The daughter of a Lyon lingerie manufacturer, tiny (5 ft.) Singer Micheyl started out to be a painter, changed her mind at the Lyon Ecole des Beaux Arts and talked her way into a job singing in a little Left Bank nightspot. From there she graduated to the big clubs. She writes her own material, all told has turned out some 80 songs, 50 of which have been published. They are simple, marked by a soap-opera concern for the minutiae of middle-class life, and full of frankly sentimental perfume, e.g., "It takes so much love for a single flower to be born of a morning." Micheyl sings the songs in a lilting, open-throated voice, shaking her tight golden curls. Songs like Ni Toi Ni Moi, which celebrates the fact that love is stronger than anything, have moved Parisian poets and musicians to confer on a Micheyl record the Grand Prix du Bisque, a sort of musical Oscar.

When she is not performing or composing, Micheyl paints, will have her own show opening this spring. She has just finished a movie in which she stars and for which she wrote the music. Last week between recording dates she was learning English, for in June she will follow her records to the U.S. and try out her calculated gamin style in Manhattan.

Bittersweet Memories. If Mick Micheyl is a Parisian spring breeze, Juliette Greco is a gust from a dark grotto. In Manhattan last week, with her weedy dark hair hanging to her waist, she chanted in French the bittersweet songs that have made her famous at home. Her large, square hands shaped the phrases; her high-cheekbonsd, chalky face was alternately sullen and sad. In her best song, I Hate Sundays ("Every day of the week is empty and hollow, but there's worse than the weekday, there's pretentious Sunday"), her voice faded to an organ whisper. Even in the gayer songs, delivered in a gutty shout, she seemed to be drowning out the memory of something she would rather forget.

A member of a homeless Paris street gang at war's end, Singer Greco was adopted by the existentialists. Sartre, Cocteau, Raymond Queneau, Franchise Sagan wrote poems for her to sing. But she says that 1) the existentialists are not really sad ("Jean-Paul Sartre, he is very gay, very gay, really, really, he is healthy"), and 2) she is not really an existentialist. There has been a break between her and the healthy Sartre, according to Paris rumors, possibly over the fact that she changed some of his lyrics.

Stroking her long tresses ("I like very much my hair; it is a good friend of mine"), she delighted New York audiences as a kind of dark Lorelei. But that might not be the last image of Juliette Greco, for she feels that she can change her style as she wishes. Says she: "I have no limits--if tomorrow Eisenhower writes a good song, I can sing it."

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