This semester, we are reading the play Bus Stop by William Inge. Marilyn Monroe brought it to the screen.  She played the lead role: Cherie.  I see a lot of parallels between Marilyn and Cherie. They both want to be considered serious perfomers, but they don't get the respect they deserve. In this post, I discuss the layers meaning built into the word "chanteuse."  I described Cherie.  I made a connection to Marilyn Monroe.  That's not bad. 

A chanteuse is a nightclub entertainer -  a woman - that sings slow ballads or torch songs.

The ballads are slow because they usually express the devastation of a broken relationship.  The “torch” probably refers to the emotion burning deep inside.  A chanteuse doesn’t have to be French.  She doesn’t have to speak French.  She doesn’t have to be in France.  But a chanteuse has to have an attitude.  The songs are serious.  The women who sing them are committed.  They’ve all been hurt really bad.  In Bus Stop, Cherie identified as a chanteuse.

When Elma asked her what she did for a living, she didn’t say she was a singer or a nightclub performer.  She said, “ I'm a chanteuse. I call m'self Cherie.”  I doubt she spoke more than a few words of French, but here she uses two in one sentence.  It’s clear, Cherie has lived a hard life.  By referring to herself as a “chanteuse,” she seems to lift herself up a little bit.  She feels a sense of sophistication.

It’s not lost on me that the person most responsible for bringing Bus Stop to the big screen  is Marilyn Monroe. Like Cherie, Marilyn was a dreamer.  From an  early age, when she was separated from her mentally ill mother, she lived her life bouncing between orphanages and foster families. She grew up lonely and vulnerable.  It was the movies that gave her hope.  She identified with the glamorous stars on the screen. Cherie was a second-rate cabaret from the Ozarks, who saw herself as a chanteuse.  For her, the word has a ring of class.  Before Marilyn began shooting Bus Stop, she enrolled in The Actors Studio in New York.  She had little reason to – she was already one of the biggest movie stars in the world.  But Marilyn had greater ambitions than that.  She wanted to be known and respected as a world-class “artist.”  This brings me back to my definition.  Singers sing.  A “chanteuse” is a woman people listen to. She has a story to tell.