Poetic Motor

Among entertainers, a successful one-man show on Broadway is the equivalent in other circles of a 200-ft. yacht or a private indoor tennis court--way up near the top of the status symbols. This week the most popular of contemporary French singers, a sturdy, dark-haired theatrical dervish named Gilbert Becaud, winds up a three-week run that has put him in that tiny company of performers--Chevalier, Borge, Montand, Aznavour--who can conquer a Broadway stage on their own.

"Lungs Like Atlas." In his own country, where he survives under the nickname "Mr. 100,000 Volts," Becaud is more popular than Beaujolais. At his February concert at Paris' Olympia music hall, where he holds the record for most performances, his visitors included Mme. Georges Pompidou, wife of the French Premier, Academician Franc,ois Mauriac, Track Star Michel Jazy, and Bernard Gavoty, Paris' leading music critic. The tributes covered as broad a range. Distance Runner Jazy, who knows something about breath control, remarked in awe that Becaud "must have lungs like Atlas." Mauriac groped for a flossier figure: "One thinks when listening to Becaud of a powerful motor turning at its maximum, and the most curious thing about this machine running full speed is that it is driven by a poet."

It is, all told, a machine of considerable--and relentlessly moving--parts. Becaud at work stomps his feet to the rhythm of a song, darts to the piano to hammer out a few chords, hangs his chin on an accompanist's shoulder in a quest for greater intensity, even strolls out into the audience to invite a sing-along during some of the merrier numbers. Spotlighted in shameless mauves and chartreuses, caressing the microphone, pushing his husky voice from tenderness to remorse to rage, Becaud makes it seem that singing about love may be the world's oldest profession:

The day that the rains came down,

Buds were born;

Love was born.

As the young buds will grow,

So our young love will grow.

Whoosh. Becaud studied piano and composition, and was making a meager living writing cabaret songs when a friend suggested in 1953 that he ought to sing them as well. "When I told my wife I was going to sing," he recalls, "she said, 'You're not going to do that!' 'Yes, I am,' I said. We laughed for three hours."

Wifely laughter or no, his first performances electrified Paris. Writing all his own songs with the aid of a platoon of lyricists, he found himself swamped in acclaim. "The public took to me, and whoosh," he says. "I sang at this little cafe, Chez Tonton, and at the same time I made records. My price went up, and I still couldn't accept all the offers. This was all too fast for the classical guy I was--two, three, four five songs I had to write all at once, and yet I still needed new material."

Becaud's compulsion to compose has not been diminished by fame, money (close to $1,500,000 a year), two polo ponies and a string of houses from Versailles to Deauville to Switzerland.

He claims to have spent as long as a week with no sleep whatever while writing a new batch of songs. Even with the success in Paris of an original opera, L'Opera d'Aran, in 1962, his latter world of popular songs and popular singing remains an obsession. "When I'm vacationing," he says, "at 9 o'clock in the evening I'm a little scared; I feel stage fright even though I'm not performing. When I don't sing at night for three weeks, something's missing--like cigarettes or coffee."

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