by Sherry Jones
She touched the rabbit’s foot Mrs. Jones had given her when saying goodbye in Philadelphia. Everybody needs some good luck now and then. She’d carried it ever since, and it had worked thus far.
“Lord, whatever you do,” she prayed, “please don’t send me back to New York unless it’s in a casket.” She’d rather die than go back to that sorry life where she couldn’t eat in restaurants, couldn’t use the bathroom, couldn’t even take a drink from the water fountain. She remembered the flames burning the homes in the East Saint Louis riots, the fires of hell blasting across the Mississippi, the shrieks of the children running for their lives, their burning hair, the sweet smell of burning flesh rimming her nostrils with every inhale. She’d rather die here, or anywhere else, than live in America.
She heard a knock on her dressing room door and Mrs. Caroline calling her name. She fumbled with the latch, opened the door, and saw the woman looking like she wanted to cry or kill somebody, or both.
“You are going to harm your soul with this decision,” Mrs. Caroline said.
As if Mrs. Caroline had been thinking of Josephine’s soul, telling her she’d be the star of La Revue Nègre when she’d already hired Maud de Forrest as her singer, letting Josephine bomb on the Berengaria just to teach her a lesson, coaxing her to dance naked onstage so she, Mrs. Caroline, could make money. Everybody wanted something from Josephine, as much as they could get. No one had her interests at heart—except herself. And that, she realized, was plenty.
“But, missus,” she said, “I’m feeling just fine.”
CHAPTER 12
1926, Paris
It didn’t take long for her to wonder what she’d gotten herself into. During the first dress rehearsal for her Folies-Bergère revue, she crouched on the mirrored floor inside an egg-shaped cage that, upon touching down on the stage, had opened to reveal Josephine dancing nude except for a belt of bananas—the costume she’d designed as a joke, but the joke was on her—and then closed again to lift her up, up to the rafters. When it had nearly reached the top, though, the contraption lurched to a halt and Josephine fell over.
The world under her shifted and tilted, and the cage swung open. Josephine slid sideways. Her fingers slipped against the smooth glass as she tried to find something to grasp, to stop herself from plummeting to the stage so far below. The winch turned, jolting the contraption again and she screamed, sliding in earnest now, before clutching with her fingertips the mirror’s edge to which she clung, dangling. If she fell, she’d hit the stage. The impact would kill her.
Arrêtez! M. Derval cried, running up to the rafters. She could see him up there, so near but too far away to help, his face as white as death. From below she heard pandemonium, a cry for a doctor, feet scurrying, shouts in French. Her arms trembled. Sweat ran from her scalp into her eyes, stinging, but she couldn’t wipe it away, she had to hang on.
Stay calm, she told herself, you ain’t come all this way to die before opening night. They’d find a way to rescue her, and she could hold on until they did, her arms muscled and toned from her daily exercise, “the new woman,” she’d been called, strong on the outside and on the inside instead of weak and limp like most women, like Mistinguett, even, whose half-a-million-franc legs looked like fifty cents next to Josephine’s. Squats and splits and lunges and pull-ups and push-ups and even barbells. She sweated and worked to shape her body like a sculpture, like one of those statues in Count Kessler’s house, because, like them, she was on display.
When she’d begged to sing, M. Derval had made her audition and then turned her down, saying her voice was trop mince—too thin. And when she’d given him her costume design, a spangled dress that would reflect the colored stage lights, he’d shaken his head. “Where are your nichons? You have covered up your fesses.” Tits and ass, ass and tits, that’s all people wanted from her, so M. Derval thought, but Josephine knew better. It wasn’t just her body that set her apart but also her spirit: the affection she showered on her audiences and the adoration they gave back to her. Her dancing differed from everyone else’s the way that sex differs from lovemaking.
Annoyed, she’d drawn another costume as a joke, a belt of bananas jutting saucily upward. “I call this one ‘Circle of Dicks,’ she’d said while slapping it spitefully on his desk. What good were tits and ass without dicks? She’d watched him with her arms folded, waiting for him to reject the vulgar design, but instead he’d cried, Voilà!, and sent it down to the costumers. Now, clinging to the slippery mirror, hanging on for dear life above the gawking, fainting cast and crew, that crazy belt was all she wore. Be damned if she was going to die in it.
“Josephine!” M. Derval called out, and she stretched her neck to see him dangling upside down, two stagehands holding his feet, his arms reaching toward her. “Can you pull yourself into the open lid? Then we can join hands, and I will pull you up.”
Stop shaking. One wrong move might tilt the whole contraption again, and send her tumbling down. M. Derval dangled so close, his face red from the blood rushing to his head, his forehead a wrinkle of fear, his voice as quiet as a funeral telling her to reach for him, to clasp his wrists if she could, and the crew would pull them both to safety. Josephine crawled into the lid and stood slowly and steadily, calm, her head clear—she’d dangled like this before, hadn’t she, as a girl of thirteen in a Cupid costume falling on a wire? Here, at least, she had some control.
Someone from below cried out as she shifted her grasp, again, from the cage to M. Derval’s hands, then swung free to hang high above the stage, bananas waving, legs bicycling as if to speed her ascent. Little by little they rose, inch by inch, each heartbeat a lifetime, each thought a prayer. Sweat slicked her palms, or maybe his, or both. She thought her arms would come loose from their sockets before the final heave pulled her up and onto a rafter, where she lay—shivering and wet, tears on her face—and clung to the rough-hewn beam.
M. Derval called for a doctor but she said no, and struggled to her feet and raised her arms, smiling at the musicians and cast members and crew gathered in a crowd far below. “Ça va,” she called out. Everyone applauded and some cried, “Bravo!” Josephine blew kisses as if she had just given a great performance, when in fact she was giving one now.
M. Derval’s eyes twinkled as though they’d pulled a fast one on everybody, as though they would now share a laugh together. He reached out to help her descend the steep, narrow stairs.
“You’ll need to come up with a different act for me,” she muttered, her teeth chattering, as she rejected his hand. “I ain’t going up in that fucking egg ever again.”
THE AUDIENCES LOVED her at the Folies-Bergère, filling the house night after night and selling out performances weeks in advance to see, first, the long opening act in which eight nudes strolled through Paris shop windows and put on clothes, jewelry, hats, and shoes, a strip-tease in reverse, like the German playwright’s idea that Josephine had shared with M. Derval. “Trés genial, brilliant,” he had said, and added the skit, saying it would “make the audience feel better when the clothes come off again.” After a short intermission, Josephine came out in her banana skirt, ass in the air, walking her hands and feet backward on a tree limb, jungle ape, one of the Russian dancers, Olga or Helga, hissed when the scene was finished. As the girl danced onto the stage, Josephine stuck out her foot to make her stumble right in front of the crowd.
The egg dance was a triumph, an easy Charleston for Josephine, her image reflected by the mirror and broken like shards by the lights, which threw her shadow this way and that. The crowd went wild; she’d never heard anything like it: they loved it better than her Savage Dance with Joe Alex, they loved her more than ever. During intermission, when the comic Benglia came out in his own banana skirt poking fun at Josephine with a jangly elbow-swinging knee-knocking Charleston, they screamed with laughter and shouted for Josephine to join him on the stage. Laughing and crying, she blew kisses to the crowd and pretended to catch the ones they blew back, the footli
ghts hot on her bare skin, her body taut with energy, her skin flush with love. How could she have ever thought to leave Paris? She would not make that mistake again.
The critics were not all as adoring as the crowds. For every writer who called Josephine the “black Venus” there was another who said she was a devil. The writer E. E. Cummings said she was the most beautiful star on the Parisian stage—surely making Mistinguett gnash her teeth—but the music-hall critic Gustav Fréjaville mocked the revue as “trash.” Josephine, he said, was debasing the Folies-Bergère and Paris by pandering to foreigners, who had no taste. Josephine had cursed when she’d read it, angered not only by the review but also by the one who’d slipped it under her door out of spite. It had to be that Russian girl, Olga or Helga, Josephine never could remember, the chorus dancer M. Derval had sent up and down in his precious egg twenty times to satisfy Josephine’s concerns about its safety. She’d given Josephine the evil eye for a week after that. After getting that awful review, Josephine saw the girl out with the snooty ballerina Anna Pavlova, the two of them waltzing into Le Grand Duc like they owned the place. As Josephine danced on the little stage that night, they arose from their seats at a front table and walked out, Olga-Helga openly yawning.
Josephine had to laugh: she didn’t care what Pavlova thought of her. When she’d met the prim little dancer at last year’s Grand Finale Ball of L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, Josephine could tell that she thought her shit smelled better than everybody else’s. Some genius had put them on the same bill, the ballerina and the dance-hall star, clearly a bad idea. The floor manager had scheduled Pavlova’s performance first, during the hors d’oeuvres. Pavlova had argued that she was the star, she had danced in the Ballet Russes under Diaghilev, and so ought to be featured during the main course—but Josephine said she was fine keeping things the way they were. Pavlova pouted until the manager told her the appetizer was very small, that the audience would finish it quickly and have more time to give their full appreciation to her dance. When he’d left to speak with the bandleader, Pavlova arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow at Josephine.
“I will perform first because ballet is a complex art form, requiring the audience’s attention,” she said in French, the interpreter beside Josephine translating. She turned to her manager and added, in English, “She is completely untrained. Anyone could dance as she does. A child could do it.”
After the ballerina tottered on her toes and waved her arms around for a while, Josephine took the floor. “It’s time to wake y’all up.” She peeled the long gown from her body to reveal a skimpy leotard. The prime minister of France, Paul Poiret, the Prince of Wales, the king of Sweden, the head of the Banque de Paris, the dashing motorcar-racer Marcel Ballot all ogled and cheered. “Voilà,” she said, and told the crowd they’d saved the best for last—making everyone laugh except Pavlova.
“It seems like everybody in Paris wants Charleston lessons,” she went on. “Folks pay me big money to teach it, but you know, it’s one of the easiest dances to learn. I can teach anybody to do it in three minutes. I could probably teach Pavlova in thirty seconds.” And she invited the ballerina to the floor.
Pavlova tried to refuse, but the crowd wouldn’t let her. They demanded to see her do the Charleston, their applause and scattered cheers pushing her into Josephine’s cunning hands. Mindful that the meals were on their way, Josephine sped the lesson along, teaching only the basics, forward, tap, back, tap, then showing her how to twist her feet so her knees went in and out, then adding arms and then kicks, increasing the difficulty until the ballerina flailed and her legs got tangled up, to everyone’s delight but her own.
Afterward, Mrs. Caroline had warned her: Russian girls were tough. Josephine laughed. Should she be afraid of a ballerina? “She’d better be worrying about me, missus.” Back at the theater, though, she now noticed that Olga or Helga had replaced her icy glare with a smirk, and that all kinds of things were suddenly going wrong: one of her shoes went missing right before the curtain, so that she had to dance barefoot; her rabbits got out of their cages and into the costume box, shitting all over the fabric; one of her wealthiest fans stopped sending her gifts, and when she saw him in Le Grand Duc said he’d received an insulting letter from her that she hadn’t sent. Josephine knew that Olga or Helga and Pavlova had cooked up a plan to make her life miserable, but when she went to M. Derval, he’d shrugged and said his “girls” had to work these problems out among themselves.
Was it any wonder that, for her birthday, she wanted only to get away? As her gift, M. Derval rented a little Renault two-seater, a convertible the color of lemon chiffon, and had it delivered to her apartment. Josephine, who’d just learned to drive, took the wheel with only one thought: escape. The car’s top was down, letting the noontime sun warm her and the breeze caress her arms through her white silk jacket as she drove along the winding road to Deauville, the seaside resort where M. Derval had urged her to go. “It is good for my stars to be seen in fashionable places,” he had said, but she just wanted the beach, where she might relax in the gentle, early-summer heat; take off her shoes and walk in the sand. No one would bother her there, they were used to seeing folks far more famous strolling on their boardwalk and lounging on their shores. She had a room reserved at the hotel Le Normandy and cash for the casino and anything else—or anyone—that might come along.
When she’d traveled about forty-five minutes out of the city, a car came barreling behind her so fast that she thought it might run her down. It tailed her until she finally pulled over, cursing, to let it pass. It whipped around her and zoomed ahead, but once she steered back onto the road to follow, it slowed down almost to a crawl. What the hell? Had Pavlova sent someone to harass her on the road, too?
The road opened up and she shifted down, grinding the gear. Intending to pass, she pressed the accelerator and jerked the wheel to the left, too hard: the Renault veered all the way across the opposite lane and nearly into the trees. By now, she had passed the red car and was speeding away, her pulse wild. She gave a whoop, letting her laughter fly away on the wind, her sleeves flapping like wings, her hat fluttering, straining against the scarf tying it to her head. She was free. After just a few lessons from M. Derval, she could drive.
The road began to wind again and she slowed to navigate the narrow, twisting curves. When she glanced into her mirror, the red car had caught up and was again bearing down on her. The driver was doing something with his hand—waving to her. How childish! It looked like he was grinning, too, a very nice grin, she could see now. He looked familiar—she’d met him at the Dead Rat last year, and seen him in the audience at the exposition. She recognized the Ballot insignia emblazoned on the car’s hood, and laughed out loud.
She’d beat Marcel Ballot, the race-car driver, in a race.
She floored the accelerator and took off. She’d show him: she’d keep him behind her for as long as he cared to follow. She didn’t have a fancy race car, but there were more ways than one to skin a rat. When he caught up with her again, she swerved her car to the left, the right, and left again, taking up the whole road until they reached the curves, where he didn’t dare try to pass. When the road straightened out, she swerved again, only moving back into her lane in the face of oncoming traffic. Whenever she looked in the mirror at him, he was laughing. She wondered where he was going, and wished she were going there, too. When they’d nearly reached Deauville, Josephine decided to hit the gas and leave him in the dust. But he stayed on her tail. Her eyes on the mirror, she forgot to watch the road ahead, but M. Ballot’s horn alerted her just in time to avoid hitting an oncoming car. She turned her wheel too sharply, though, and careened off the road and, this time, really did hit a tree.
M. Ballot was by her side in a split second, his face full of concern as he asked if she was injured. “Just my pride,” she said as he opened the door and helped her out of the steaming, hissing car. Josephine felt like a princess in the fairy tales she had once love
d, rescued by a handsome prince in a bandbox hat and a cream linen suit with a pale-blue silk handkerchief in his pocket.
“You should feel very proud,” he said. “You nearly won the race.”
Standing next to him, she gazed up into his eyes and nearly had to sit down again. He smelled of cigarette smoke, musk oil, and mint.
“I think your car is finished for today,” he said. “But it can be repaired, do not worry. And for your next automobile, I suggest a Ballot. They are faster cars, as you would have seen had you raced me fairly.” Lord, she had never seen such perfect teeth except on movie stars.
He was headed to Deauville, too, it turned out, and would be more than happy to offer her a ride. Her luggage in hand, he escorted her to his car, then took off his jacket and tossed it into the back along with her suitcase—and his. Josephine could not believe her luck. His waist was as trim as a dancer’s, his shoulders wide, his body sleek—but the way he carried himself was what made her blood sing. Like he’d won every race he’d ever driven in; like he’d had every woman he’d ever wanted.
Then, to her surprise, he opened the door to the driver’s side, and motioned for her to sit behind the wheel. “Now,” he said, “you may experience for yourself the charms of the Ballot.” His palm pressed into the small of her back.
“Yes, please,” Josephine said, smiling into his eyes. Thank you, sweet Jesus, thank you thank you thank you. “I do want to learn the Ballot charms.”
CHAPTER 13
Two months after La Folie du Jour opened, Josephine’s longtime friend Florence Mills came to Paris. Florence had sung in the New York production of Shuffle Along, and “I’m Just Wild about Harry” had made her a big star. She’d never gotten a big head, though: she gave everybody a smile that came from her heart. Now she was starring in Blackbirds, a hit New York revue touring Europe, in Paris to open the new Hotel et Restaurant des Ambassadeurs.