Patachou, a Parisian chanteuse who “built a reputation on an offbeat name, a penchant for guillotining men’s ties and the fact that she does not look, act or croon like Édith Piaf,” as The New York Times put it in 1958, died on April 30,at her home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. She was 96.
Her family confirmed the death to the news agency Agence France-Presse.
A petite, ribald dynamo, Patachou was one of the most renowned French singers of the postwar period, known for her deep, husky voice; warm, earthy manner; and amiably irreverent stage persona. Where Piaf conveyed haunted, wraithlike glamour, Patachou, with her robust build and habitual performing attire of navy blue skirt and white blouse, looked like nothing so much as a favorite schoolteacher.
Piaf’s stock in trade was pain. Patachou, as Nan Robertson continued in her article in The Times from 1958, preferred songs “of Paris streets, Paris gamins, Paris carnivals, Paris lovers on park benches and Parisiennes who put kittens inside their bodices to attract male attention.”
She sang in nightclubs around the world, including those of the Waldorf Astoria and St. Regis hotels in New York, as well as at Carnegie Hall and on Broadway. In later years, she acted in films by Jean Renoir and Sacha Guitry.
Her stage name is a condensation of pâte à choux, the French term for cream-puff dough. “This,” Ms. Robertson wrote, “ is roughly the equivalent of Doris Day taking on the pseudonym of ‘Redi-Mix Batter.’ ”
Patachou was born Henriette Eugénie Jeanne Ragon in Paris on June 10, 1918. As a young woman, she was a typist and a factory worker. In 1948, she and her first husband, Jean Billon, took over Chez Patachou, a restaurant and cabaret in the Montmartre district of Paris.
There, despite the nightly presence of a pianist and an accordionist, the place was echoingly empty. Then one night in 1950, Mrs. Billon joined her few patrons in singing along to the music. One of them asked her to perform a solo, and Mrs. Billon, who had never studied voice or sung a note in public, gamely obliged, singing “La Seine” “just like a woman sings to herself in the bathroom,” as she told The Times.
“Do you want your place full every night?” the customer implored her afterward. “Then sing.”
Within three months, Chez Patachou was requiring reservations two weeks in advance. It was soon presenting some of the foremost names in French song, including young lions like Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour and Georges Brassens, along with Piaf herself.
Audience participation was roundly encouraged, and those who abstained paid a sartorial price. One night a patron asked for a pair of scissors and, before anyone could stop him, took them to the necktie of his nonsinging tablemate.
“It was not funny,” Patachou told The Times. “But I liked the look of terror on the man’s face. After that I, too, cut ties when a man does not sing with me. It gives me a feeling of power.”
Over time, a forest of truncated ties sprouted from the cafe’s rafters, including ones separated from Errol Flynn, the international playboy Aly Khan, King Farouk of Egypt and Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York.
Patachou, whose marriage to Mr. Billon ended in divorce, later married the theatrical producer Arthur Lesser, who died before her. Her survivors include a son, Pierre Billon, a singer-songwriter who wrote “J’ai Oublié de Vivre” (“I Forgot to Live”) for Johnny Hallyday.
As an actress, she appeared in Renoir’s “French Cancan” (1954), Guitry’s “Napoléon” (1955) and many other French films and television shows. On Broadway, she was featured in the revues “International Soiree” in 1958 and “Folies Bergère” in 1964.
Patachou had made her New York debut on Jan. 3, 1953, at the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria. That night, Ms. Robertson wrote in The Times, “she snipped not a single tie.”
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