In our Memoir in a Melody series, Biographile writers examine the storytelling of well-known musicians, exploring the autobiographical elements of their famous songs.

Do you know Edith Piaf’s song “La Vie En Rose”? You probably do, even if you think you've never heard it.

The song's been featured in hundreds of movies, from the "Band of Brothers," to "X-Men: First Class," to "Natural Born Killers"; that's without having to mention the obvious 2007 Piaf biopic, "La Vie en Rose," which reaped over $86 million at the box office and earned actress Marion Cotillard an Academy Award for her uncanny portrayal of Piaf.

Even if by some chance you haven’t heard Piaf sing "La Vie En Rose," you may have heard it covered by another artist. Iggy Pop, for instance. Or perhaps Louis Armstrong, Celine Dion, BB King, Cyndi Lauper, or Bing Crosby. They have all recorded their own takes, adding personal styles to the versatile song.

There is no shortage of documentation on the musicians who have covered "La Vie En Rose," but the same cannot be said of Piaf herself. Very little is known about her early life, and it is difficult to separate the myths from the facts. She, like her friends and admirers, helped cultivate an air of mystery, stretching the truth when occasion called.

Birth records confirm that Edith Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion on Sunday, December 19, 1915. Were she alive today, Piaf would likely tell you her mother birthed her on a Paris street corner. In truth, she was born at the Hospital Tenon in Belleville, a working class Paris neighborhood. The hospital is just a few blocks north of the historical Père Lachaise cemetery, where The Doors singer Jim Morrison and mime Marcel Marceau are buried, among others.

Her mother, Annetta Giovanna Maillard, was a French singer of Moroccan-Italian descent known by the stage name Line Marsa. Her father, Louis-Alphonse Gassion, was a contortionist and acrobat. Both were street performers, and had married only a few months prior to their daughter’s birth. World War I was raging in 1915, and Gassion was drafted soon after she was born. None too eager to be a mother, Maillard passed the infant Edith Gassion on to her own mother, Aïcha Saïd ben Mohammed -- incidentally, the daughter of acrobats herself.

Gassion wasn’t well looked after by her maternal grandmother, and when her father came home on leave he took her to live with his mother, the madame of a Normandy brothel. Living in a whorehouse, believe it or not, was an improvement: The women of the house showered the child with affection, and she got plenty to eat. At the age of three, Gassion allegedly became blind due to complications from keratitis, remaining so until age seven when the prostitutes who cared for her took her on a pilgrimage to the grave of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Her sight was restored -- at least that’s how the story goes.

Louis Armstrong's cover of "La Vie En Rose," live in Belgium, 1959.

Shortly after regaining her sight, Gassion’s father returned to claim her. She joined him on the road, trading life in a brothel for an itinerant existence as a singer and occasional beggar. She parted ways with her father at the tender age of fifteen, striking out for a career of her own with a new friend, Simone Berteaut, for company.

The singer often introduced Berteaut to friends as her half-sister, likely another exaggeration. The two became inseparable, probably as much a matter of mutual survival as affection: Their audiences were criminals, thugs, and other rough sorts. They rented rooms when they could afford them and slept in the streets when they could not.

At sixteen, Gassion fell in love with a delivery boy named Louis Dupont. After she became pregnant, the couple moved in together and Gassion had a go at a regular life. She gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle Dupont, but like her mother before her, Piaf found the call of the streets too strong to ignore. She left Marcelle in the care of Louis and resumed the life of a traveling performer. Her daughter died only two years later, a victim of meningitis.

In 1935, Gassion was spotted by Louis Leplée, a club promoter and organized crime figure who booked her at Le Gerny’s, a very fashionable cabaret. Leplée gave her the stage name "La Môme Piaf" ("The little sparrow"), a reference to her powerful singing voice and diminutive size: Gassion was just short of 4'10". He also advised her to wear black when she performed. Both worked out well for her, and good word of mouth earned her a recording contract with Polydor records. She cut her first singles in 1936: "Les Momes de la Cloche" and "L’Étranger."

A murder nearly ended her career before it could begin. Leplée was shot to death the same year she was recording with Polydor, and investigators initially focused on her as a prime suspect. She was cleared of any wrongdoing, but her reputation was damaged by the incident. "La Môme Piaf" retained the services of businessman and songwriter Raymond Asso in an attempt to repair her public image. He helped her to refine her act, and began billing her as simply Edith Piaf. The two of them carried on an affair until 1939 when Asso was drafted to fight in World War II.

In 1940, France surrendered to Germany, and Paris fell under Nazi control. Piaf remained in the city, where she lived in an apartment with her old friend Berteaut. Piaf had become quite popular by this time, and performers in Nazi-occupied Paris lived precarious existences. Resisting German rule could result in imprisonment or summary execution, but being perceived as a Nazi collaborator could be dangerous as well. She had fans among the occupying forces. German soldiers attended her cabaret shows, and officers requested that she play at exclusive gatherings.

For these and other reasons, some deemed Piaf's relationship with the Nazi occupiers as too close. And yet, it might have been this very closeness that allowed her to assist in an audacious scheme by the French Resistance to help free prisoners of war being held at Stalag III-D, a camp just outside of Berlin. Piaf played at Stalag III-D twice. On her first visit, she somehow talked the camp commander into posing for photographs with her and all of the POWs. The photos were then cropped and used to create false credentials identifying the captives as free French workers living in Germany. When Piaf returned to Stalag III-D for a second performance, the new identities were secretly distributed to the POWs.

Paris finally returned to the control of the French in 1944 after the German occupiers surrendered to the United States Army and the French Resistance. In 1945, Piaf, along with songwriting collaborator Marguerite Monnot and composer Louis Guglielmi wrote what would become her signature song: "La Vie En Rose." The English approximation of the title would be "Life Through Rose-Colored Glasses."

The singer and her partners didn’t think much of the song at first, and Piaf offered it to another musician, Marianne Michel, to record. Michel modified the lyrics and released a version of the song in 1946. Piaf decided to record the song herself after performing it in concert. It was released as a single by Columbia House in 1947, and went on to sell a million copies.

"La Vie En Rose" is a love song, and a beautiful one at that. In the aftermath of World War II, most war-wary listeners were ready to view their lives through "rose-colored glasses."

(The song was originally recorded in French. The lyrics below are from the English version she recorded in 1950.)

Hold me close and hold me fast
The magic spell you cast
This is la vie en rose

When you kiss me, Heaven sighs
And though I close my eyes
I see la vie en rose

When you press me to your heart
I'm in a world apart
A world where roses bloom

And when you speak
Angels sing from above
Every day words
Seem to turn into love songs

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La vie en rose

I thought that love was just a word
They sang about in songs I heard
It took your kisses to reveal
That I was wrong, and love is real

Hold me close and hold me fast
The magic spell you cast
This is la vie en rose

When you kiss me, Heaven sighs
And though I close my eyes
I see la vie en rose

When you press me to your heart
I'm in a world apart
A world where roses bloom

And when you speak
Angels sing from above
Every day words
Seem to turn into love songs

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La vie en rose

Flying high on the success of "La Vie En Rose," Piaf began a series of live performances in New York City. While she was there, she began an affair with Mercel Cerdan, a French middleweight championship boxer. Piaf and Cerdan, who was married at the time, maintained their passionate affair until his death in a 1949 plane crash.

Piaf was a heavy drinker and on and off again drug user, and the death sent her over the edge. She began abusing morphine, and became addicted to the drug. She continued to find success as a musician as well as an actor throughout the fifties, but her drug habit and growing mental instability eventually overtook her career.

Her affair with Cerdan was followed by a marriage in 1952 to singer Jacques Pills. He, too, was a heavy drinker, and their marriage didn’t last. They divorced the following year. She married again in 1962, this time to Théophanis Lamboukas, a hairdresser turned aspiring singer. Piaf christened him with the stage name Théo Sarapo. ("Sarapo" is Greek for “I Love You.”) Their union was short-lived: Piaf became ill a few months into their marriage and died of liver cancer in their villa on the French Riviera. She was forty-seven years old.

According to her old friend Sandra Berteaut, Piaf’s last words were, "Every damn fool thing you do in this life, you pay for."

In the end, Piaf left the world with one last mystery. For reasons not fully understood, her husband took her body and drove it back to a home she owned in Paris. Apparently, he wanted the world to think she died in the city. No matter. She’s at rest there now. Piaf was buried next to her daughter in the Père Lachaise cemetery, just a few blocks south of the hospital where she was born -- unless you asked her.