Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  “But I want to sing,” she said again, and Mrs. Caroline laughed.

  “See what I mean, Spencer?” she said to the piano player. “She’s a natural comic.”

  “I want to yo-o-odel,” he sang, winking at Josephine. “Can you yodel, gal?”

  She didn’t want to, but she tried, her voice sounding choked, blocked by all the feelings stuffed there.

  “You can do better than that!” he said.

  She tried again, and her voice trilled. Still playing, he made up a verse: “I love dance time, dance-y dance time.”

  The music lured her; she took a step toward him, then another, and then she was shuffling, snapping her fingers, gliding to stand beside the piano and sing with him. Here was a song for her—“I want to yodel”—and she yodeled again, strong and pure and laughing. She saw the white people looking at her and did a little dance, and applause rang into the air, a struck bell—clangy-clang bell—and she yodeled and crossed her eyes. Shouts and cheers clamored into the infinite night; they loved her at last. She lifted her dress and hitched up her bottom and danced in earnest, kicking and wriggling and swinging her arms. The people cried out, her people, now, making a great noise to scatter the starry stars and send tremors through the ocean all the way to Gay Paree.

  CHAPTER 9

  1925, Paris

  Listen to those Frenchmen argue! Lord, if they didn’t love to hear themselves holler, louder and louder, faster and faster, all trying to outtalk one another, voices and hands rising, and what about?

  “The jungle.” M. Jacques-Charles, standing on the stage in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, lifted a fistful of feathers from a cardboard box. “Parisians want the jungle.” The dancer he had brought in, Joe Alex, the blackest man Josephine had ever seen, had barely taken his eyes off her. The first thing he did when he saw her looking was shrug off his long-sleeved shirt and flex the muscles rising on his arms like mountain ranges. In the stage lights, his skin shone as he pointed to her again.

  And then Mrs. Caroline gasped and clasped her hands to her chest, looking at Josephine like she’d just seen a heavenly vision.

  “Oui,” she said. “C’est parfait.”

  “You are going to save us,” she said to Josephine. The theater’s owner, M. Rolf de Maré, and his friend M. Jacques-Charles disliked Maud’s song at the end of the show. Parisians wanted to leave with their spirits lifted, not be put to sleep, they’d told Mrs. Caroline. They wanted a big finale—with Josephine at the center.

  M. Jacques-Charles had come today to fix the “terrible chaos” of La Revue Nègre: its “too much tap dancing,” which the French disdained; its light-skinned cast that would disappoint a city expecting “real Negroes”; and its preponderance of ballads. “You will bore them to death,” he had said, and vowed to rechoreograph the entire revue in less than forty-eight hours. In ten days they would perform the dress rehearsal, to which the crème de la crème of Parisian society and the most eminent critics had been invited. And M. Jacques-Charles seemed not at all concerned about whether they could do it.

  Mrs. Caroline, on the other hand, had gotten all ruffled up, her face red and her voice saying non, non as she argued in rapid French. Monsieur lifted from the box a fancy, velvet tricorn hat with a long white feather. He paired it with some overalls, grinning at Caroline, who rolled her eyes. Josephine and her fellow cast members huddled at the back of the stage like cattle in a pen.

  None of them except Louis Douglas could understand a word of what they said, so as the three men and one woman bickered, he translated. Mainly, the Frenchmen thought La Revue Nègre stank to high heaven. Josephine had already figured this out: M. de Maré had rudely held his nose while they’d run through the show the night before.

  Earlier, as they’d assembled for today’s rehearsal—the musicians tuning their instruments, the dancers stretching, Josephine bending and twisting her body into provocative shapes, tilting her ass in Claude’s direction and bending over to show her cleavage, reminding him of what he was missing—Mrs. Caroline had walked onto the stage and announced that M. de Maré was going to make some changes. In a few minutes he would arrive with his friends, including M. Jacques-Charles and a new dancer, from Nigeria.

  “What do we need a new dancer for?” Josephine said.

  “They want more . . . color,” Caroline said. Too dark? Not for them. The French were not interested in Negroes who looked white. Vive la différence: They wanted exotique.

  Josephine’s heart beat a little faster. They were cutting out most of Maud de Forrest’s songs and, now, they were adding a dancer. That must mean they wanted her to sing! She saw herself on the stage in her red silk dress, draped in feathers and jewels, singing “Brown Eyes,” the audience cheering and shouting for more.

  “They want you to wear these feathers,” Caroline said.

  On her head? As a necklace? Josephine eyed the paltry bunch. From the back of the stage, she heard laughter. “Necklace, my ass,” Mabel said.

  “You are to wear only these, my dear. Feathers around your waist and nothing more, like savages in the African jungle.”

  Josephine took the feathers in her hands, wondering how they would cover her.

  “Naked?” Josephine said. “They want me to dance with no clothes on except these feathers?”

  “They want you to dance in them, with Joe Alex. The choreographer will create La Danse de Sauvage, the ‘Savage Dance.’ ” French people were different from Americans, Mrs. Caroline said, as if Josephine had not already noticed this. “They are not so prudish about the human body. Women have been appearing topless in the dance halls for many years. But never a Negro. You will be the first!”

  Josephine broke out in a sweat all over. “I ain’t a stripper, missus.”

  M. Jacques-Charles said something in French, gesturing toward her.

  “Monsieur wants you to remove your blouse,” Caroline said. Josephine crossed her arms over her chest, her face burning.

  “Choose somebody else,” she said. “Please.”

  “The others are too light-skinned. They want you, Josephine.”

  Mrs. Caroline begged, and Joe Alex pled, and M. de Maré threatened to send her home unless she did what he commanded. Everybody watched her, including the musicians in the orchestra pit, even Sidney—everyone except Claude, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. Was he feeling guilty for making her sleep with ghosts while he spent his nights in that sleazy brothel on the rue Pigalle? She’d slipped out after him and followed him there, had seen three white girls—two skinny ones with bad teeth and one with a butt as big as a mule’s—welcome him at the door, greeting him by name like he was a cherished return customer. Had he forgotten the contours of her body, the breasts he compared to sweet apples, her perfect ass? Now was as good a time as any to remind him. Keeping her eyes on Claude, she whipped off her shirt and unclasped her bra, and let it all hang out.

  One of the Frenchmen blew out his breath, as though the room had suddenly grown hot. Not knowing what to do with her arms—she wanted to cover her chest, but not from Claude, whose eyes were, now, just where she wanted them to be—she held them stiffly at her sides. In the auditorium, a man she hadn’t noticed before sprang to attention in the fifth row, his eyes alert and focused on her body and his hand moving a pencil across a sketchpad in broad, bold strokes. Josephine forgot about Claude. Each mark the artist made enlivened her, as if he were caressing her skin. Her nipples hardened. She thrust out her chest and arched her back, posing. If she had to do this thing, she might as well make the most of it. The men talked excitedly, waving their arms. Joe Alex smiled at her, big white teeth ready to eat her up.

  “Good, Josephine, good!” Caroline said. “Do you hear what they are saying? Parfait. That means perfect. You’ve got the finale—congratulations, my dear. You will be a sensation—the first Negro to dance nude on the stage in Paris. The first in the world!”

  Dance nude? Josephine shivered, suddenly cold. Forgetting the man with the pencil, she c
overed herself again.

  “But—I’m a comic, miss. A clown? Remember?”

  “Yes, you are. You will make them laugh, yes, even as they are adoring your wonderful dancer’s body. They will desire and love you—and so, perhaps, the inflammatory Parisians will not riot. Although, if they did, that would be good for us, too.

  “My God, Josephine, I hope those are tears of joy on your face! Because you are on your way to stardom, just the way you wanted.”

  ON OPENING NIGHT she was a mess, worried that she might pass out the minute she appeared on that stage wearing almost nothing, praying the black paper cap glued to her head wouldn’t fall off when Joe Alex lifted her onto his shoulders, turned her upside down, and began the Savage Dance. But if she hadn’t fainted by now on such an awful day, she probably wouldn’t.

  She’d woken up with a shriek, the Mary’s Congolese left on too long, the dream of her hair on fire all too real. She’d run to the bathroom and fallen on her knees in the tub, sobbing under the running water as hair stuck to her hands in thick, wet clumps. Afterward, she screamed at her reflection in the mirror: What little hair remained frizzed in thin tufts around great bald patches.

  She yanked a towel off the hook and wrapped it around her head. How could she have fallen asleep? She barely remembered lying down. Now, the clock on her bedside mocked her: in just a few hours, she’d have to go onstage looking like a badly plucked chicken.

  Her roommate Lydia yawned in the doorway, saying she needed to pee. Josephine whipped off the towel, waiting for her response, but Lydia only asked her to hush so she could go back to sleep.

  “Look at me,” Josephine wailed. “I’m ruined.” Lydia’s face pinched itself together.

  “If you hadn’t stayed out so late this wouldn’t have happened. I went to bed early. You should have, too, instead of gallivanting all over Paris with that artist.”

  Stung, Josephine formed a retort, We didn’t gallivant anywhere except between his sheets, but it wasn’t true, she and Paul Colin had gone to so many parties she’d lost count. She had slept with him, but it was nothing worth boasting about; she’d done it only out of revenge. She didn’t normally go for bland-faced little men in round glasses, but Paul was a popular artist now, celebrated for the posters he’d drawn of her dancing nude. He would make her famous, he’d told her, but she knew it was the other way around.

  Paul had taken her to meet every celebrity in the city, it seemed, his mouth shaping too many names for her to remember: Picasso, Man Ray, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Anna Pavlova, Mistinguett. She’d remember Mistinguett, of course, the star of the Casino de Paris. Paul had taken her to see the city’s favorite lily-white dance-hall star perform to a theater full of whites who’d thrown flowers onto the stage and would have kissed her little feet if she’d offered them. Josephine could see why she was popular, the way she used her eyes as though every person she looked at were alone with her. “A great beauty,” Paul had murmured as she took her bows, but Josephine couldn’t agree. Her red hair was striking and her mile-high legs looked like they’d been sculpted from pale marble, but she was on the downhill side of her prime, her face starting to bulge and sag like dough left to rise too long.

  “Mistinguett is the biggest star in Paris,” Paul said as he introduced them backstage. The women looked down her nose at Josephine, who decided to take her down a notch.

  “Not for long,” Josephine said.

  Mistinguett’s face turned sour. Josephine had made an enemy, but she didn’t care. Soon Paris would be at her feet, and Mistinguett would be a nostalgic memory of lace dresses and silly, girlish hats, and the occasional, titillating flash of leg. She had insured those legs for five hundred thousand francs, but Josephine’s would be worth more, and also her ass and her nichons, her entire body revered along with, someday, her singing.

  Paul was doing everything he could to help her succeed, including making sure she met the right people. He’d hitched his wagon to her star, knowing that she could make him a fortune. After that rehearsal when she’d first danced nude, he’d invited her to his studio to pose. She hadn’t wanted to go, not alone, but Mrs. Caroline had encouraged her, saying it was all right, that he was the official artist hired to promote Le Revue Nègre.

  She’d only been there a few minutes when he’d told her, in French, to remove her clothes. She’d said no at first, and had started to leave; she’d seen that look in enough eyes to know what he had in mind. But he’d just kept babbling as though she’d agreed, as though a shake of the head meant yes in his language. He’d drawn a picture of a naked woman dancing and held it up for her to see, his voice rising with exclamations. Then he went to the far corner and opened up a phonograph and put on a record. The song “Copenhagen” transported her back to New York, where she had danced to Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra, the clarinets and the cornets and the drums and the slide trombone moving her every which way, her shoes coming off, her feet slapping the floor, her dress too tight so that came off, too, until the next thing she knew every stitch of her clothing had fallen to the floor except her underwear. Paul reached out and unsnapped her bra with a flick of his wrist, and it slid to the floor. Then he’d picked up his pencil and drawn her for hours while she danced.

  But she had not let him make love to her until last night.

  He’d tried, she had to give him that, plying her with gifts, with introductions, with parties at the homes of rich people. Confused by the babble of words she could not understand, she’d spent most of those evenings at the food table, eating fish roe on little pieces of toast, meaty little frogs’ legs, snails in butter, raw oysters, great chunks of lobster, until Paul would drag her away to meet someone new. At one soiree, in a gold-and-white penthouse apartment overlooking the Seine, the fashion designer Paul Poiret, full of himself in his goatee and pink silk necktie, had offered to make a dress for her—and Paul the artist had bowed as though the man were God Almighty. At Gertrude Stein’s stuffy parlor crammed with ugly paintings, Picasso, a rumpled man whose mismatched clothes begged for a consultation with Paul Poiret, had invited her to pose in his studio. The jealousy on Paul’s face when she’d said yes! She hadn’t even slept with him, yet he acted like he owned her.

  Last night, after the dress rehearsal, Paul had taken her to the home of Maurice Chevalier, whose greasy smile made Josephine want to take a rag to his face. He’d played the piano and sung his hit song “Valentine” for his guests, winking at Josephine until Mistinguett, glaring, sprang to the top of the grand piano and lifted her skirts to dance. Afterward, M. Chevalier had talked about Hollywood, asking if Josephine had been there and surprised to hear her say no, as if California were a short jaunt from New York. He was hoping to go soon; his agent was trying to get him a starring role in a moving picture—and now Josephine was the jealous one. While he boasted, preening back his sand-colored hair, Mistinguett clung to him like a leech and warned Josephine with her eyes not to come one step closer.

  Josephine shrugged it off. The woman had good reason to worry, old as she was getting to be. She had more years on her than Chevalier did, and they showed, while Josephine, at nineteen, had skin as smooth and taut as a young girl’s. She didn’t want the smarmy actor, anyway—a man so vain would have little to offer in the sack, and she meant little. When he kissed Josephine’s hand and gave her naughty looks, she played bashful while Paul nearly had orgasms on the spot. Did she know the favors Maurice Chevalier could do for her? Of course, he would want something in return, every man did—waving his hands as if he felt silly for stating the obvious. Josephine didn’t have to ask what he wanted, the way he strutted around with her on his arm as if he’d already had her, like he knew something nobody else did.

  He didn’t know anything, though, not yet. Claude was giving her all the love she could handle. After she’d taken off her shirt for M. Jacques-Charles, Claude had come back to her with a face full of hunger, as she’d known he would. This time, though, he was serious. He’d left Mabel, now slept with
Josephine every night, and was even talking about marriage—she hadn’t told him about Billy. And speak of the devil, here came Claude, striding into the party in his white tux, turning heads, definitely the best-looking man in the room, better, even, than Chevalier. As she approached him, she felt her insides turn to butter.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” she said, giving him a wink. “This party is fun, but not as much fun as we’re going to have later.”

  He cleared his throat. “Josephine, I meant to tell you sooner. But with the dress rehearsal tonight, and now this party, I just haven’t had the chance.”

  “What’s the matter, honey?” She touched his arm—and he drew away.

  “I’m not—I mean to say, I’m back with Mabel.”

  Josephine put a hand to her chest and choked back the sob trying to break loose, the emerging sound like a strangled laugh.

  “Well, if that ain’t a hell of a note,” she said. “You and Mabel together again, two peas in a fucking pod.”

  “We’ve known each other since we were kids, Josephine,” he said, dropping his voice and testing the room with his eyes, wondering if anyone could hear.

  “You’re shitting me.” She laughed out loud, breaking the French code of decorum—even at parties the noise level never rose above a murmur—and drawing looks of distaste as if she’d cut a brazen fart. Claude’s own nostrils flared as he asked what was so damned funny.

  “I’ve seen you buck naked, but I’ve just figured out that you don’t have any balls,” she cried. Would you look at all the raised eyebrows! L’Américaine, si gauche, she heard a woman mutter. Claude’s frown deepened.

  “Better thank the Lord for that,” she said. “Because if you did have any, I’d plant my foot in them right now.”

  Claude slinked off to his precious Mabel while she laughed some more. Josephine knew she’d hurt him, but she didn’t care: he deserved it. That’s what she told herself while downing one glass after another of Chevalier’s expensive champagne, willing herself to get drunk, not caring that opening night was less than twenty-four hours away. She was finished with men. Willie Wells, Billy Baker, Claude Hopkins—they were all losers, not worth the salt in her tears. Well, maybe Billy was. What was he doing now? Did he miss her?