Cognac Contralto

Manhattan nightclub reporters groped for the right words for the newest French import. Wrote one: "She sounds like Edith Piaf [TIME, Oct. 3, 1949] but looks like a younger edition of Peggy Hopkins Joyce." Tried another: "A young Piaf, but pretty." Meanwhile, blonde Marjane (short for Marie Jane Therese Gendebian) had Manhattan cafe socialites begging for more of her songs.

Marjane herself sees no reason for all the comparisons with Piaf, but her show is much the same. First comes a chatty little resume of the story of her song in French, followed by a charmingly painful version in English. Then, with a piano tinkling away discreetly on either side, she flashes a white smile and launches her husky cognac contralto into the songs her admirers have come to expect: Amour, April in Portugal, Mile. Hortensia.

Chanteuse Marjane, 30, could hardly be more pleased with her U.S. debut. Bom in Boulogne and raised in Vienna, she wanted to be a lawyer--"I was such a talker!" Then "I thought I would be an actress. Actors and lawyers, they are the same in many ways." But when she started "to pay attention" to songs, "they captured me, and I think no more of this acting--I must sing."

Now Marjane, who is married to a captain in the French army, sings "more the popular song." Like Piaf, she likes "a song that tells a story." The difference, she says, is that "Piaf is kind of morbid, she sings of death. I don't go so much to the point. I stay around the awful thing, but I never quite say it."

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