Simone Signoret

...Bad conscience about this plagued her throughout her life, and no doubt helped propel her to the left, which was then perceived as the cause of peace and social justice...

...Montand, whose real name was Ivo Livi, came from an abjectly poor Italian working-class and Communist family who had fled to Marseilles from the Fascists...

...He started singing professionally from an improvised platform to working-class women, and changed his name...

...Montand's singing, like Simone's looks and Hermes outfits, duly impressed the Russians...

...The French title of Simone's last international hit, La Vie devant soi (here called Madame Rosa), was prophetic: a new life lay before her, as well as behind her...

...Montand had became embourgeoisg, unlike his older brother Julien, who became a Communist official and organizer...

...In 35 years of married life she only once—once—cooked dinner for Yves Montand: overdone spaghetti (a rash choice)"—because Ivo Livi was an expert on spaghetti...

...There had to be what Mme David calls "a secret rivalry, probably subconscious, which led them to be constantly shifting the balance from one to the other in the public eye...

...Yet even their rivalry was useful...

...My loneliness has made friends with hers...

...It was the leads of two of his bleak films, Dicke d'Anvers (1947) and Maneges (1949) that Simone Signoret, no longer Kiki Kaminker, achieved stardom, her good English making her employable in that language, too..I saw the films in reverse order, and so, for me, Simone remained the sleek rich bitch of Maneges rather than the touching tart of Dedee (and a bit later La Ronde...

...The man was handsome, elegant, and proudly smiling...

...Georgette respected and encouraged Simone's intellectuality, but as the girl grew, she grew away from Neuilly's staid atmosphere and her mother's overprotectiveness...

...But at first this was the great, absolute love, Montand wanting Simone all to himself, and she ready to give up her career for him...

...There she met Montand under circumstances that have since been glamorized beyond what they actually were...

...Soon she moved in with Montand—as she always called him, "Yves" being reserved for Allegret—in his apartment in, of all places, Neuilly...

...From her window, his mother would call down into the street to him in Italian, "Ivo, monta...

...Her own interest was mostly in cases where individuals were grossly mistreated for political reasons: 'You never know whether the people you're siding with are really innocent or guilty," she remarked...

...Feet were the problem of many glamorous French actresses, Brigitte Bardot and Juliette Greco included...

...But the young woman was triply radiant...

...She does not even sketch in the importantrelated lives: nothing about the later years of the father, very little about Montand's six years after Simone...

...M eanwhile her film career got a boost when Jack Clayton (not, as the book has it in one place, Peter Glenville) cast her in Room at the Top...

...Yves, who fathered the actress Catherine Allegret on Simone and eventually married her, was more leftist, more pessimistic, and more talented than his brother...

...In Becker's painterly film, fastidiously observing period atmosphere, Simone looked like a cross between a Manet and a Renoir, a little fuller than in her earlier films, and glowingly alive...

...Rebuked by the Party, they expressed remorse, which is what Signoret's Communism was largely about, whereas Montand simply followed in the footsteps of his father and elder brother...

...Both continued being political, with Montand veering much more sharply to the right, where she did not always follow: "Sometimes Abbott appears without Costello," she commented...

...How serious was their Communism...

...Young Ivo could not even indulge in the luxury of secondary school, but worked at various menial jobs that led to, his becoming a ladies' hairdresser who entertained the clients with jokes and songs...

...Instead, the cooking was done by a "woman you never, never called 'the maid.— In due time, the couple acquired a comfortable country house in Autheuil, where Montand had a mini-theater to rehearse in, and many guests came to stay...

...T his pragmatic approach to her work allowed her to remain unspoiled...

...The, right-wing press sneered at the couple—he with his Bentley, bought from the Prince of Monaco, she with her furs and haute couture—but they stayed cool and committed...

...Sometimes the spouses pooled their talents, as when they appeared—first on stage, later on screen—in the leads of an adaptation of Miller's The Crucible, the movie version written by Sartre...

...Montand and Signoret were mutually supportive, she in particular...

...The author does make several honest stabs at defining Signoret's acting style, but the big problem is Mme David's writing style...

...Particularly touching was her difficulty, in Costa-Gavras's The Confession, with the part of a rabidly Communist wife who leaves her Communist husband unjustly jailed by his party—because that husband was played by her own husband, whom she couldn't think of betraying...

...Both of them had double careers: he as singer and dramatic movie star...

...Many years later, she translated and introduced the woman's memoirs...

...The couple remained deaf to accounts of Soviet horrors, but the Hungarian tragedy of 1956 did shake them...

...They never joined the Communist Party, but were its enthusiastic supporters, partly out of guilt feelings...

...Simone played Marie, the belle of Belleville, who proves fatal to lovers and enemies alike...

...To recuperate from Maneges...

...They named it the Trailer (Sally Sampson, translating la Caravane into British English, calls it the Caravan...

...When Yves and Simone were married at the Colombe d'or, Prevert was best man, and Picasso sent a drawing done with something new in France: a felt-tipped pen...

...When that film made her, again, a star, the Montands realized a long-standing dream: a trip to America, where Yves was to have a run with a one-man show on Broadway...

...Equally important is what she did not do: join, like so many other artists, the Resistance...

...Most of the time you're siding against those who think that they have the right to side against the accused, when they have no right at all...

...She began to come of age with her baccalaureate philosophy dissertation, "Define the connections between passion and will," although she scored only 14.5 out of 20, and more fully at the Cafe Flore, where she scored 20 out of 20...

...Signoret was superb in the rustic love scenes, and perhaps even more so in the staggering final scene, watching her essentially innocent lover being guillotined...

...This despite the author's having known the actress only during the last year of her life...

...Yet when the journalists Tacchella and Therond (as they report in their book Les Annees eblouissantes) talked to her about stardom, she replied, "I don't have a star's life...

...Among my cherished possessions, there is a two-CD set, Jacques Prevert et ses interpretes, whose high point is the 27-second recitation of a tiny Prevert love poem, "Le Jardin," by Signoret...

...A story of love and crime in the working-class Paris quarter of Belleville during the belle époque (not so belle in Belleville), it displayed Simone, in the words of the critic...

...In her two autobiographical works and her lengthy novel, she also addressed her Jewish origins, and settled her accounts with Communism...

...But there was also the opposite urge, to reinforce the other...

...She then went off to Italy for another movie, while Yves started shooting Let's Make Love with one of their many new Hollywood friends, Marilyn Monroe...

...Unsung, because the snobs still patronize him...

...Georges Sadoul, "in the full bloom of her beauty" and, it might be added, happiness...

...She gradually discovered writing, and so rediscovered her past and ancestry...

...In the popular Sleeping-Car Murders, daughter Catherine acted as well...

...Because she wears her golden tresses piled up on her head, she is known as Casque d'or, golden helmet...

...It often verges on prose poetry, and hardly of the best kind...

...On a later concert tour in Czechoslovakia, Simone ignored a distant cousin whose husband she might have helped get out of political imprisonment...

...Julien and his family lived there until much later, when he and Yves had their biggest political falling out, and the brothers hardly ever spoke again...

...But he was also the author of splendid screenplays, most notably Les Enfants du paradis...

...There's nothing else to say...

...Simone Kaminker was, with the possible exception of Juliette Greco, the prettiest girl in attendance, and though she worked for a right-wing newspaper (whose publisher showed real courage in hiring a Jew), became one of the muse-mascots of the café, and absorbed the intellectualized leftism of the place...

...Andre Kaminker returned to civilian life, and little Kiki grew up in Neuilly, an archetypally bourgeois suburb of Paris...

...But it was not till the crushed Prague Spring and two books by victims of Communist "justice" that Simone, in 1969...

...she had gone to ' the charming and still fashionable Colombe d'or at Saint-Paul-de-Vence...

...David doesn't mention the incident when, told by the Party to distribute a Communist Sunday paper in the Tuileries Gardens on May Day morning, they chose to sleep late and send the woman never called "the maid" to do the job...

...My path crossed theirs during that long, ecstatic prenuptial honeymoon...

...Berthold" for Bertolt Brecht...

...Everyone stared, transfixed...

...The Flore was the best university in Paris in the forties...

...in my little study perched in the trees that have woven a green curtain in front of the lycee Fenelon, she has played every part for my benefit—friend, sister, mother and confidante...

...It was then that she started hitting the bottle heavily and letting herself go physically to pot...

...It was a sneer from Montand that prodded Simone into accepting the lead in Marcel Carne's Therese Raquin, the Zola heroine becoming another of her chief successes, prompting the novelist Jean Dutourd to pronounce her "a female Jean Gabin...

...Even so, Montand having committed himself to a Russian concert tour, they went amid deep misgivings...

...She immediately left Yves Allegret, her movie-director husband and father of her daughter, to move in with Montand, whom she married two years later...

...And it would be nice if Sally Sampson avoided enthused, anxious (for eager), and "who [sic] for years they had assumed to be dead...

...His knowing no English and having to learn his lines phonetically brought him especially close to his similarly insecure co-star, and a world-famous affair resulted...

...Inwardly, she was gravely hurt...

...Plessetskaya," for the magnificent ballerina Maya Plisetskaya...

...It all came vividly back to me reading Catherine David's Simone Signoret...

...They give me parts to play, I'm happy, and I eat to my heart's content...

...She reads it with incomparable straightforwardness and authenticity in that low voice so exactly at the border between mellowness and raspiness, which epitomizes forme the troubling beauty of Simone Signoret and her talent...

...monta (come up), Montand...

...Simone was outwardly understanding: "Can you think of many men who wouldn't have responded to Marilyn's charm...

...There was her face, at once earthy and aristocratic, and marvelously feline...

...Lecturing him on behalf of French artists about Hungary, they salved their consciences, but achieved only new grounds for subsequent remorse...

...and Georgette née Signoret, his very French middle-class wife...

...Though he had affairs on the side (unmentioned in most books), the couple became more than ever emotionally dependent on each other...

...There are sloppinesses, authorial as well as translatorial...

...Through enormously rigorous practice of every kind, he made it to Paris as a singer, becoming for three years the lover of Edith Piaf, from whom he learned a lot...

...finally saw the light...

...her main achievement there was making off with the sandals she wore in a Grecian-style play from which she was fired for giggling...

...It was Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, and a luminousness I have never forgotten...

...Either way, here was an actress who clearly combined talent, intelligence, looks, and versatility, and was headed for great things...

...and it is he who wrote the words for several of Montand's biggest hits, e.g., "Les Feuilles mortes," "Barbara," and "Les Enfants qui s'aiment...

...And although in his final years Montand had a son by a young mistress of long standing, he never married her...

...Schooled and well-read, she educated Montand...

...it has become an obsession...

...And though the book comes with a rudimentary, incomplete filmography, the films are barely, if at all, gone into, even when, as in Les mauvais Coups, they bear a striking parallel to Signoret's own life—something unnoticed by the biographer...

...not only were Sartre and the existentialists holding forth there, but so, too, was the entire flora of the seven arts, notably writers, theater people, and filmmakers...

...Sometimes it is the uncritical taking over of a French spelling, "Jdanov" or "Ehrenbourg" for Zhdanov and Ehrenburg...

...True enough...

...Sometimes there are the author's misspellings: "Obratsov," for the great puppeteer Obraztsov...

...There was her slimly impeccable, exquisitely dressed figure...

...And so on and on, up to, most characteristically, "Probing her life story, it is my own dream that I am exposing...

...But it never obliterated that initial vision...

...sung, because countless of his poems have been set to music, chiefly by the brilliant Joseph Kosma, but also by many others, andthese chansons remain beloved of all...

...Thus it is a psychobiography, more interested in reconstructing Signoret's feelings than in relating the facts of her story...

...she has been, in turn, evasive, intensive, open-hearted, irritable, unpredictable, and fascinating...

...he took her to meet his folks in Marseilles, and for the first time she experienced working-class life...

...The theater did not agree with her...

...In literary matters, he was to acquire another mentor besides Simone, their friend Jacques Prevert...

...Later, when both of them changed politics, Montand was to say they had been exploited by the Party...

...Spending long, systematic hours on her writing despite failing health and fading eyesight, she continued writing to the end (as well as acting), and finished a body of work to be reckoned with...

...T heir spirits were lifted when they discovered the apartment on the lovely Place Dauphine in the delightful Ile de la Cite, one of the most desirable spots in all of Paris...

...He was a hit, and sang also at the Academy Awards ceremony where, a bit later, Simone walked away with the Oscar for Room at the Top...

...Eventually they acquired the entire building, and were able to put up family members, close friends, and not-so-close friends oil the designated floors, sometimes housing as many as twenty...

...They noticed none of the misery around them...

...the couple were astounded one evening to be transported to a private dinner with Khrushchev and his top brass...

...It commits virtually every error a biography is capable of...

...in a previous production, they had been worn by Jean Gabin, whose shoe size matched hers...

...For example: I have spent months living with her ghost...

...She invited old age in with open arms, in retaliation or self-defense...

...Ivo became Yves...

...In twentieth-century French poetry, Prevert is the sung and unsung hero...

...she as movie star and, later, writer...

...When she left him, he fell back on groupies, of whom—whenever Simone wasn't watching—there was to be a lifelong supply...

...She also began landing roles in movies and theatricals...

...Thus on their arrival in America, when the fame of Signoret was at its height, her "main worry," as she said, "was that people would take Montand for an actress's husband...

...She was much closer to her liberal mother than to her desperately proper father, whose gift for languages she nevertheless inherited,and who, when things became impossible for Jews in France, escaped to and remained in England...

...But her movie career, like her husband's flourished...

...S imone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker was born in 1921 in Wiesbaden to an officer in the French occupying army, the son of Polish and Austrian Jews, who himself wanted above all to be French...

...It was to be an often turbulent, sometimes rocky, but invigorating marriage until Simone's death from cancer in 1985...

...As Simone predicted, no one could take her place...

...Still, even this slender and unsteady book does ultimately convey why, two years after Signoret's death, a Paris-Match poll soliciting "the twelve most significant French personalities of the century" listed Simone Signoret along with De Gaulle, Schweitzer, Picasso, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Gabin, with whom, alas, she made only one picture...

...Above all, there was her coloring: the proverbially alabaster skin, the sundrenched-sea eyes, the champagne-colored hair—and the perfect harmony into which these colors blended...

...As Mme David puts it, "She was drawn to anything working class or left wing, and, the sexual side apart, this would be the key to her original attraction to Yves Montand...

...M adame David's book, regrettably, is not quite worthy of its subject...

...As Montand's biographers, Hamon and Rotman, have written elsewhere, Simone "was a sorry housewife but a wonderful hostess...

...I learn from this biography that Yves and Simone had met at Saint-Paul-de-Vence in August 1949, when each was 28...

...I never saw Simone Signoret again in the flesh, yet her premature on-screen physical decline some years later affected me almost as strongly as if I had been living with her...

...Not only was she out front, as he wished, for his concerts, and backstage before and after, she also accompanied him on his tours...

...The setting was, admittedly, romantic, and the two artists were looking their casual best...

...In movies, things went much better, especially when, after brief affairs with the actor Daniel Gelin and the writer Marcel Duhamel, she ended up with the film director Yves Allegret, younger brother of the popular filmmaker Marc Allegret...

...The talented Jacques Becker had to useshrewd psychology to lure Simone back into acting with his Casque d'or (1952), which proved to be one of her biggest international successes...

...I was coming out of an early screening at the Cinematheque Francaise just as a young couple was heading in for the next...