Pierre Perret does not hide it: he is financially comfortable. The 91-year-old singer, who recently lost his wife, spoke to “Paris Match” about his money…
Before selling millions of records, Pierre Perret lived with his wife Simone Mazaltarim, who died last January at the age of 88, in an HLM in Gennevilliers, in the Paris region. But the singer was able to get out of this situation thanks to a hit that he owes to his wife and which allowed him to earn a lot of money…
Pierre Perret: this song thanks to which he left his HLM in the suburbs
Pierre Perret, now 91 years old, remembered Paris Match that one day he had hummed a tune he had just imagined to his wife. “I had something, but I didn’t believe it. It was funny, but I thought it would only make me laugh. Rebecca comes home from work and I sing to her what I did. It was the beginning of the ‘Pretty summer camps'”he said.
Although he was unsure of himself, his wife immediately believed in the potential of this song! “She looked at me: ‘Finish it! Right away !’ She understood that it was going to work“. Thanks to his wife, this melody became the hit we know today, released in 1966, The pretty summer camps. A title which allowed him to make himself known to the general French public and to leave the HLM he lived in in Gennevilliers with his wife and their children Anne, Alain and Julie, to settle in a large property in Nangis, in Seine-et-Marne. It is an old farm transformed into a villa with a tennis court, an outbuilding and a heated swimming pool: “I built myself a swimming pool so that others could dive in it“.
Pierre Perret has “earned a good living”: “I don’t see why I should be ashamed…”
His financial situation has greatly improved since the release of this song and Pierre Perret does not hesitate to state this unequivocally. “I don’t see why I should be ashamed of having earned a good living. I didn’t take anyone’s money. Every time I sang in a theater, I was told ‘that’s the stamp’; every time I sold a record, I was told ‘you made so much’. I sold a lot of them, so much the better“, he detailed.
Pierre Perret was also able to appreciate the money he earned more since it took him time to achieve success. In the 1950s, when he was beginning his career, the singer struggled to make ends meet. “I found it difficult to get engagements in Parisian cabarets. I earned peanuts and to get by, I did five, sometimes seven every evening, at the rate of one every half hour.“, he confided to Evening Mag.
