The Daily Telegraph (London), UK
Friday
‘I’m going to keep going until I’m 100’
As he returns to the UK, Charles Aznavour talks to Celia Walden about marriage, seduction and the secret to his long career
by Celia Walden
‘I am not a love god,” insists Charles Aznavour – his warm, witty face suddenly grave. “They call me that and yet I haven’t been in love more than the next man…” a small smile wavers. “But certainly not less so. And I don’t just sing love songs either. Love enters into them, but sometimes only in the last line.
“To be honest,” sighs the tiny tweed-suited singer-songwriter from a throne-like armchair in his central-London hotel suite, “those ‘I love you, you love me’ songs annoy me a bit.
‘Caress’, ‘promise’, all those regular rhymes are so overused. I like to look for rhymes elsewhere.”
That Britons persist in casting him as a romantic crooner has long been a cause of bafflement to the 94-year-old French Armenian. Never mind that the 5ft 3in singer, one of France’s most famous chanteurs, has been dubbed the Love Pixie. Or that his 1974 song She – a hit in nine countries – has been exhaustively covered the world over (the most famous of those being Elvis Costello’s theme tune to Notting Hill). Or that For Me Formidable is a masterpiece in which a Frenchman attempts to tell his English love “in the language of Shakespeare” that she is “for me, formi, formidable” and that when Le Petit Charles returns to London’s Royal Albert Hall next month, the audience will be filled with misty-eyed couples marvelling at the enduring richness of his voice.
Aznavour says he would rather be remembered “as a writer of intelligent, cultured songs than love songs”.
It’s likely he’ll be remembered for both and a lot more besides. After all, over the course of a career that began in 1933 at the age of nine on a Paris cabaret stage, the son of an Armenian restaurant owner and an actress has released 294 albums, sold more than 100million records and been voted Time magazine’s entertainer of the 20th century, eclipsing both Elvis and Bob Dylan. In the more than 1,200 songs he has written, Aznavour has covered everything from the traditional themes of love, remorse, disappointment and infidelity to those nobody but him would dare to touch.
He has devoted songs to the vicious critics who blasted him “too little, too ugly and talentless” at the start of his career (La Critique) to homosexuality (Comme Ils Disent) and to the Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, assassinated in Pakistan by Islamic extremists in 2002 (A Living Death). “Politics doesn’t interest me in the slightest. It’s human issues and themes that interest me,” he tells me, “and I like to find them in books and newspapers, but not other songs. That’s why I sometimes use very odd words. I’ve used the word ‘cellulite’ in a song, and ‘armpit’ – ‘I love the smell of your armpits.’ My wife said: ‘You can’t write that!’ But I want to get to the truth of life. I think those truths are what touch people.”
Whenever Aznavour brings up his wife Ulla of 51 years, his face takes on a look of quasi-religious beatitude. “I ended up with exactly the woman that I always wanted to have,” he murmurs, when I ask how that level of passion has endured. “A blonde with light eyes and extremely soft skin.” Aznavour’s bushy white eyebrows spring up into his hairline: “Wow. She’s 17 years younger, which is actually a great age difference, and both Swedish and Protestant so if she has a problem with something, boom! Out it comes. And over time,” he nods, “I’ve grown to like it. The secret to a lasting marriage is being completely natural with one another – and always telling each other whatever it is you have to say.”
Before Ulla, Aznavour was married twice (“The first, I was too young, the second, I was too stupid”) but aside from Liza Minnelli, with whom he had a brief love affair, all the famous women in his life have simply been friends. Edith Piaf took Aznavour under her wing when she spotted the 22-year-old singing in a Paris nightclub in 1946 and invited him to live with her as part of her entourage for eight years. “But she wasn’t my type, so instead we had what we French call ‘une amitié amoureuse’. It means that you’re very tender with each other, that you like the same things and that sometimes I take you in my arms and kiss you. But it stops there.”
Brigitte Bardot has been a close friend for decades – and lives down the road from Aznavour’s Port Grimaud summer home on the Côte d’Azur (he spends the rest of the year in Vaud, Switzerland). “But one doesn’t fall in love with someone just because they’re famous, you know,” he scoffs. “That’s not love, that’s tourism. Actually, I’ve just had a painter friend of mine do a portrait of Brigitte, which is fantastic. I have one of my wife and Marilyn Monroe by the same artist.” Did he know Marilyn, then? “No,” he replies sadly. “Maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself if she’d met me. My wife hasn’t even thought of it once.”
It’s tempting to conjure up images of Ulla as a Valkyrian blonde who keeps her husband in check, but that’s far from the case. Raised by disciplinarians who made him read all of Chekhov’s plays and taught him the Stanislavski method, Aznavour has always been a man of moderate appetites – and a self-control bordering on maniacal. “I’m glad you’re orderly,” he says halfway through our interview, spotting the two dictaphones sitting beside one another on the table between us. “I’d be quite capable of lining them up straighter if you hadn’t.”
He stopped smoking at 47 (“my voice was broken from birth though, so it made no difference”, he shrugs in an oblique reference to the early critics who branded his gravelly baritone “terrible”), reads a page a day from the encyclopedia and does 340m a day in his pool wearing a weighted belt to keep trim. “Also I only ever eat half the food on my plate.” Does he drink alcohol? “Only very, very rarely. But I drink wine, of course, and champagne.” Really, he says, his only weakness is Ikea. “I think Ikea is one of the most beautiful creations in the world. I mean we could change the whole of this room in three minutes. How? With the help of Ikea.
Everything’s beautifully made and the colour schemes are great.” How did this love affair kick off, I ask once I’ve regained the power of speech? “Well, I fell in love with a Swedish lady, so it was a direct line to Ikea from there.”
That he should have written songs for Ulla is dismissed with a wave of the hand. “I have never ever written a song for a woman. She wasn’t even written for any particular woman – it was written for a TV series, The Seven Faces of Woman. There was one song I called A Ma Femme, I suppose, and one called A Ma Fille which I wrote after my daughter was born, but then when I had a second daughter and people started saying ‘are you going to write her a song?’ I said, ‘listen – that’s going to have to do for both of them’.
Because what does writing love songs for women really mean? Should I go and have a tattoo while I’m at it?” Although the farewell tour he embarked on in 2006 is gruelling (after London he has filled out stadiums in Spain, Germany, Croatia and Belgium), Aznavour clearly still relishes performing in front of an audience. He dismisses the notion, put out by his own management, that this will be his last ever concert at the Royal Albert Hall and is adamant that he will smash all records by staging a concert on May 22 2024: the date of his 100th birthday. And that will be his last? “No, no,” he frowns, perplexed. “I will do a concert on that date – and after that we’ll see. But why would I ever stop? In order to die at home sitting in my armchair? Non merci.”
Charles Aznavour is at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7, on June 30;
‘Politics doesn’t interest me in the slightest. It’s human themes and issues that interest me’
‘What does writing love songs for women really mean? Should I go and have a tattoo while I’m at it?’