Meeting Édith Piaf

One day, somebody will post up on YouTube this scene in my mind’s eye: Agent 99 from Get Smart singing “La Vie en Rose” in a smoky café during some sting operation with her partner Maxwell Smart. (It’s not there; of course I checked.) That was my first exposure to that Édith Piaf classic as a kid, at home sick from school. I remember a combination of the song, a melancholic copy of the Defenders comic book (issue 101), and my fever gave me a lump in my throat.

And so.

Tomorrow, I’m meeting French actress Marion Cotillard for lunch at a 5-star hotel restaurant in the 8th arrondissement for a magazine interview. Cotillard, the 31-year-old César winner (the French equivalent of the Oscar), played Édith Piaf in the amazing La Vie en Rose this year. Here in France, the film was called La Môme. I sat down with actress/director Julie Delpy in the spring, star and screenwriter of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset and it was my pleasure. Before Sunrise was such a touchstone of my 20s that I stuck the film in an erotica story I wrote long ago, “Diva Moves.” Anyway, Marion Cotillard’s next film should be Nine, alongside Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a movie by Chicago director Rob Marshall.