"It was before Gréco’s rise as a chanteuse that she and Miles met after his performance with the Dameron group at the Salle Pleyel. Despite their language barrier, they found themselves completely smitten by the end of dinner. It was the beginning of a passionate love affair that would last until the end of Miles’s life. Never mind that he was married and had already fathered a child at the age of 17. Gréco admired him as an artist and was taken by his debonaire, Giacometti-esque figure. He and others like Dizzy Gillespie brought over their new bebop jazz style to post-war Paris and transformed the music scene.J ean-Paul Sartre, the great French intellectual and existentialist philosopher, once asked Miles (he was a fan of both Gréco and Miles) why he didn’t marry her, to which Miles replied that he loved Gréco too much to make her unhappy. History bore out Miles’s attitude toward the racism prevalent in America correctly. A few years later, when both of them had made it big, Gréco was in New York for a big show and invited Miles to the Waldorf Astoria for dinner. The maitre’d made no attempts to hide his disapproval. Who knows, maybe he didn’t even know that it was the famous French chanteuse, Juliette Gréco, but just another white woman with a black man. No food was delivered for almost two hours, until the waiter finally slammed their plates down on the table. It was excruciating for both of them. Miles called later in tears, saying that he never wanted to be with her in America again because of what happened. Recalling the incident in an article penned for The Guardian, Gréco said, “I suddenly understood that I’d made a terrible mistake, from which came a strange feeling of humiliation that I’ll never forget. In America, his color was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris, I didn’t even notice he was black.” Recently, the iconic chanteuse, Juliette Gréco, now 88, was interviewed by veteran French jazz journalist Philippe Carles in The Guardian. She remarked, “Between Miles and me there was a great love affair, the kind you’d want everybody to experience.”