Word: patachou
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Paris has exported a new chanteuse. She calls herself Patachou (rhymes with not-a-shoe), because the word is French for creampuff dough and she used to run a pastry shop in Montmartre. After two highly successful months at New York's Waldorf-Astoria, and a record released by Columbia, Patachou is currently wowing them at Los Angeles' Coconut Grove. Her fans claim she is the biggest thing that happened in France since Mistinguette wore pigtails. What is so special about this ex-pastrycook? Part of the answer lies with her predecessors...
...song admitted: "Actually, I don't believe any of it"). Then came Edith Piaf, so thin that she was barely visible through the nightclub smoke, with an occasional sentimental number (La Vie en Rose), but in reality a siren of disillusion, a kind of existentialist among chanteuses. But Patachou is almost a rural reactionary, who goes back to a sturdy, bucolic France that persists beneath the phony Parisian sparkle...
Train Stopper. Patachou (real name: Henriette Ragon Billon) never sang in public until five years ago, when she and her husband opened a small cafe next to the pastry shop. One night she joined a crowd of singing customers and they loved her. After that, she sang a little every night, walking from table to table, coaxing people to join in. One night Patachou saw a man cut off his friend's necktie for a joke. "I think this is most funny," she recalls. "I like the look of terreur on the man's face...
During the next two years she collected some famous four-in-hands-Farouk's, Errol Flynn's, Governor Dewey's, Aly Khan's. When Maurice Chevalier told her she must leave her little cafe for bigger things, she obeyed. Patachou likes big rooms and big crowds. Says she: "If they are a good audience, I have a good time. But if I am excited and they are not excited, then I feel like I am the only one in the room and there...