Great entertainment families

Salon features a review of a new biography of Edith Piaf. I didn't see the movie about her a couple of years ago, but the article notes that, if anything, it underplayed the turmoil of her life.

But my favourite little bit of information is in the middle of this bit about her show biz family origins:

The singer was born Edith Giovanna Gassion, in 1915 -- and not on the city pavement, as she claimed, but in the Tenon Hospital in Belleville, a working-class area in eastern Paris.... Her father, Louis Gassion, was an acrobat (just 5 feet tall, he passed on his diminutive form to his daughter); her mother, Annetta, was a would-be singer whose own mother presided over a flea circus. As if this background wasn't disreputable enough, the feckless Annetta, an alcoholic and drug addict, abandoned the child when she was still a baby and went on to pursue an independent singing career under the name of Line Marsa. As in the vast majority of such cases, Edith never got over this primal rejection.

Louis Gassion was slightly more dependable. His own life was not stable enough to include a baby, so he took Edith to live with his parents in the town of Bernay in Normandy. Her grandmother, known as Maman Tine, was the manageress of what was euphemistically known as a maison de tolérance, essentially a whorehouse with legal standing.