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Nothing Personal
Courtney Love: Baby talk
Tells mag she likes "porno 44DD" girls, "and they have to be really aggressive."
By Amy Reiter
[07/14/99]

Column
Walk a mile in my hypocritical sack of shit
Hard at work on my anti-celebrity culture book, I was summoned, urgently, to be in a Sandra Bullock movie.
By Cintra Wilson
[07/14/99]

Nothing Personal
Did Little John make Robin Hood's quiver shiver?
Professor says "merrie men" were making merry, but not making Maid Marian.
By Amy Reiter
[07/13/99]

People Feature
Inside baseball
Willie Mays talks about stickball in Harlem, today's best players and his ban from the game.
By Joan Walsh
[07/13/99]

Brilliant Careers
Willie Mays
In the mid-'60s, whites weren't ready for the best baseball player to be black, and blacks weren't ready for him to be black like Mays.
By Joan Walsh
[07/13/99]

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Aznavour still has the sheet of paper on which he scrawled these thoughts, on one of the rougher nights of his decades-long climb to the summit of French pop culture. That was the night Aznavour decided that "to get on one must use one's shortcomings to one's advantage" -- to embrace his oddity, to harness his brashness and pour it into his songs. In doing so, he transformed the French chanson, and created one of popular music's singular oeuvres. He drew on a riot of musical influences, reinventing the chanson as a kind of urbane Gypsy music; he injected the vivid "language of the street" into this most self-consciously literary of pop music styles, animating it with a new cosmopolitanism and sophistication. Today, after six decades as a performing artist, having appeared in more than 60 movies, composed 600-plus songs and sold more than 100 million records, Aznavour remains a star who belongs to France and to the world: the great torchbearer of the French chanson tradition and one of the last classic pop song stylists.

He was born Varenagh Aznavourian, on May 22, 1924, in Paris. His parents were Armenian immigrants who had fled to France after the Turkish massacre, intending to go on from there to the United States. But the U.S. quota of Armenian immigrants had been reached, and the family was denied a visa -- an accident of fate that made a Frenchman of their second child, dubbed "Charles" by a hospital nurse who couldn't pronounce his given name.

The Aznavourians settled in Paris, where they lived in a succession of dim one-room apartments in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Quartier Latin and the Marais. Though they eked out their living running a restaurant, Aznavour's parents were, by background and disposition, performing artists. His father was a singer and musician, his mother an actress; the pair had met when they were both cast in an operetta, and they continued to perform in Armenian-language plays and musicals in Paris. It was at one of these productions, in front of an audience of 600 Armenians, that 3-year-old Charles made his stage debut: He wandered onstage prior to the start of the play, and recited some Armenian poems his mother had taught him, bringing down the sold-out house. "God be praised," exclaimed Aznavour's uncle, embracing the child after his impromptu performance. "He will be a great artiste."

It wasn't long before Aznavour made a mission of fulfilling his uncle's prophecy. At the age of 9, he heard Maurice Chevalier's "Donnez Moi La Main Mamz'elle Et Ne Dites Rien" -- a tuneful, sunlit trifle, sung by Chevalier with his trademark boulevardier's wink -- and announced that he had found his calling: He wanted to be a chansonnier.

Aznavour was hired for his first professional job later that year, a bit part in a music hall revue. Soon, Aznavour had quit school altogether and was on the road eight months a year, touring France and Belgium in a theatrical troupe as a singing and dancing "boy actor." His teenage and young adult years were like something out of a novel, a picaresque romp whose struggles and rollicking spirit Aznavour would later capture in his wry "Mes Emmerdes" ("My Troubles"). Bouncing on and off the road, in and out of song and dance engagements, he fell in with a bunch of like-minded aspiring chanteurs and songwriters, took the stage name Aznavour and became a fixture of Paris' Club de la Chanson. It was there that he met Pierre Roche, with whom he formed a performing and songwriting partnership that would last nearly a decade. The ambitious duo took their act everywhere, jumping trains hobo-style to seek work in provincial theaters, even venturing -- riding double on a rickety bicycle -- to theaters in the dangerous "forbidden zone" of German-occupied Normandy.

Next page | Aznavour's songs didn't escape the notice of the indomitable Edith Piaf