Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  His enthusiasm could be catching, though. Sometimes, she’d let herself dream with him, of her name in lights at the Ziegfeld Follies, her face on the screen in a Hollywood movie, her book a bestseller in bookstore windows from sea to shining sea. First, though, she had to conquer Paris again after several years away.

  Would the city embrace her now? She’d fretted all the way home from South America. Aboard the Lucretia, posing naked as her lover, the architect Le Corbusier, sketched her, she sang the Negro spirituals of her youth and told him how God had promised her a crown. He’d smiled and said that Parisians were not as forgiving as God.

  Pepito begged to differ. “They will adore you as I do,” he said, and took her to a Paris radio station to announce—in French—that she’d become a chanteuse, the naked, clownish caterpillar transformed into an elegant singing butterfly. Then she’d gone to sign a contract at the Casino de Paris to star in Paris qui Remue, “Paris that Spins.”

  “You will become the new Mistinguett,” M. Henri Varna said.

  “Being the new Josephine Baker keeps me busy enough,” she said.

  He opened the bottle of champagne cooling in a bucket on his desk. “Congratulations, you got everything you wanted,” he said as they toasted the agreement. “But the best part is mine: Josephine Baker will be my new étoile.”

  Josephine laughed, feeling so light she might just float away on a champagne breeze. She’d bargained hard for her salary and would now, at last, earn more than Mistinguett. But when Josephine raised her coupe, she drank to an accomplishment far more precious: she would be the first Negro star at the Casino de Paris, not a dance hall with nude showgirls but a real theater that featured the city’s biggest celebrities, chanteurs and chanteuses, including Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguett. At last, her lifelong dream would finally come true. Let Paris call her “savage” now.

  Speak of the devil: Mistinguett swept into the room on the arm of a man with thin, dark hair, and heavy-lidded eyes. The great star had dyed her hair platinum blond, but there was no mistaking the ravages of age: deepening shadows, a hint of jowl.

  “Oh, it’s La Négresse,” she said.

  “Have a coupe, La Vieille,” Josephine said. “We’re celebrating my new show at the Casino de Paris.”

  If looks could kill. But Miss was a pro; see how she pulled herself together. She marched over to the bucket and lifted the bottle, turning it to see the label.

  “I get the good stuff for my contract signings,” she said, and swept out again.

  Josephine poured herself another glass. Miss was worried and she ought to be: everything had a season, and Josephine’s was on the rise. After Paris qui Remue, Parisians would struggle to remember what Mistinguett looked like. Anything she could do, Josephine could do better. Hell, she could outdo Pepito, too, she was finding. He’d be shocked to discover how much she’d gotten M. Henri to pay her.

  Maybe it was time to make a change. Walking back to the hotel she thought that maybe Pepito’s season, like Mistinguett’s, was on the wane.

  When she walked into their hotel room, though, he stopped her bombshell with a few of his own.

  “Good news, darling: I have signed a producer for another film for you. The famous Marc Allégret will be your director. He made Fanny, and you will have your choice of costar. He suggested Jean Gabin, what do you think? It will be a sensation.”

  Josephine threw her arms around his neck. Fanny was the most popular film in France, and a good one. A real writer! No more falling in flour bins and coal bins and wearing fur coats in the tropics.

  “Oh, Pepi, you’ve made me so happy.” She kissed his neck and pressed her body to his, but he pulled away to smile into her eyes.

  “Hold that thought, darling. I have another surprise for you, too. Come with me.”

  André drove them to Le Vésinet, a suburb just outside the city, steering the car through a gate and down a long, tree-lined driveway to a breathtaking house.

  “Le Beau Chêne,” Pepito said then they’d stepped out of the car. “The Beautiful Oak. What do you think?”

  “Who are we visiting?” she said.

  “Not visiting, ma chère. This is ours.” She widened her eyes as he added, “I purchased it today for us. Do you like it?”

  Josephine forgot, then, about leaving Pepito. She had a home! As he showed her the great stone fireplaces, the polished wood floors, the sturdy beams, the sweeping staircase, the ten bedrooms, the atrium for her birds, the stables, and the flowering gardens, she marveled at the luck this day had brought to her. A contract with Henri Varna, a film with the director of Fanny, and now, a home of her own. All her dreams were coming true. Now she only needed children.

  “Let’s consummate our new house,” she said, spreading herself like a meal on the downstairs mantel, letting her dress fall away, parting her legs.

  Pepito walked over and gave her a peck, but his eyes barely made contact with hers. He stared beyond her at some unseen delight.

  “What furnishings will you desire, ma fleur? We must order them soon. In only one month we begin your performances in Spain, and soon—chérie, I have been saving the best for the last—I have had a call from an agent in the States who wants to book you on a national tour. Imagine, Josephine: America, the greatest country in the world, and you are going to take it with wild horses.”

  CHAPTER 20

  1935, New York

  She should not have come back. Why had she? As the white clerk—white hair, white eyebrows, skin like paste, white shirt—in the Hotel St. Moritz shook his head, Josephine stared down at her fists, blood singing in her ears.

  “Je suis Josephine Baker,” she said softly, and turned her back so he couldn’t see her tears. The exquisite lobby done all in gold—curtains, ceiling, chandeliers—seemed to mock her now, like the beautiful dolls in the windows of Saint Louis department stores that Negroes weren’t allowed to enter.

  Her friend Miki Sawada, who’d brought Josephine from the airport, tapped her fingers on the counter.

  “Do you know who this woman is? She’s Josephine Baker, a world-famous celebrity and the new star of the Ziegfeld Follies.”

  “This hotel is for whites only,” the clerk said. “I’m sorry.” Josephine spun around.

  “You bet your ass you’re sorry,” she said in French. “A sorry excuse for a human being.” And she told him, still in French, where he could shove his hotel and every cracker in it, including Pepito, who stood holding his brass room key and looking confused. When she gathered her fur and strutted toward the door, Pepito followed, asking her what had happened.

  She rounded on him. “You said we were all set to stay here.” He’d announced the hotel’s name as if it were the Taj Mahal: “The most elegant hotel in the city, with a reservation for the Count and Countess d’Abatino.” Josephine had jumped up and down at the news. The St. Moritz! Things had changed in America.

  “I do not understand,” Pepito said. “The manager said that everything would be ready for you.”

  “Did you tell him I’m a Negro?” He gave her a blank look. “I didn’t think so. This hotel will never be ready for me.” She narrowed her eyes at the clerk, who watched her with a hand on the telephone as though he might have to call in reinforcements.

  Pepito looked crestfallen; he’d waxed rhapsodic over the suite with its terrace overlooking Central Park. She’d looked forward to inhabiting the swankiest rooms in the fanciest hotel in New York, but she’d dreaded having to deal with the controlling Pepito again. Now she saw her opportunity, and seized it.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll find a place. Maybe in Harlem.” Harlem, her ass. No way in hell would she let them shunt her off to “colored town,” but Pepito didn’t have to know that, did he? The farther away he thought she was, the better. He wrung his hands, saying he felt bad—as well he should, putting her in this situation.

  How it had happened still made her teeth hurt. The comedian Eddie Cantor had come backstage at the Palais
Garnier after seeing her in the opera La Créole—Josephine, an opera star! When, he asked, would she return to the States? She’d given her ready answer: “Never.”

  “But you’ve gotta tour America,” he said, rolling his bug eyes at her. “You’ll be a huge hit. Listen, doll, you’ve conquered Europe and South America already. Why not try the good old U.S. of A.?”

  Josephine could have told him why. But Pepito took over, and with the help of Mr. Cantor’s interpreter they had quite the gabfest. Josephine slipped out to her car and sped away to Montparnasse, where Sim awaited at La Coupole.

  When she went home the next morning, Pepito wasn’t there. When he finally did come in, he was singing, tipsy with grappa and pulling her out of bed to dance her around the floor. Eddie Cantor had promised to connect them with the booking agent at the Ziegfeld Follies. Josephine would become the first colored woman to headline there, her name in lights for all to see. She didn’t think it could happen? Why not? Hadn’t they once invited Florence Mills? And she, Josephine, was now singing opera, mon Dieu, in the crown jewel of Parisian theaters where no colored person had ever performed. No one had thought she could do it, but she’d shown them. She’d sung Offenbach, stretching her voice, learning all her parts in spite of worrying that she’d never be able to. She became one of the first colored divas not only in Paris, but anywhere: another barrier for her race knocked down by Josephine Baker.

  She’d won the hearts of the French, Pepito said. Now, she must impress the Americans, not just for herself but for all Negroes.

  She’d wanted to say yes, thinking of all the good she could do for her people, but something told her not to go. “They’ll make me cork my face,” she said. “They’ll make me wear a bandanna on my head. They’ll put me in chains.”

  Worse, she said, what if she couldn’t come back to France? Being stranded in America would be worse than dying and going to hell.

  Pepito had laughed. He would never let it happen, he said. While in the States, she would divorce her husband and they would marry, and she would be an Italian citizen.

  Josephine shivered to think of tying herself to Pepito. He wasn’t even a count. She’d admitted the truth on her first trip to Italy, upon meeting his mother and sisters and seeing their cotton clothes and their modest stone house built, his mama had boasted, by Pepito himself. There were no family jewels, not even a crest, only the stonemason’s tools he’d inherited from his father. He’d gone to Paris to meet a wealthy socialite. Josephine was all he had.

  In spite of her no, he’d written to the Shubert agency without telling her, and booked passage for himself to New York for a meeting. “I’m not going back there,” she squeaked, not sure anymore that she meant it. Pepito waved her protests away, telling her to let him see what he could arrange. He would commit her to nothing, he’d promised, then sailed away with a copy of her movie Zou Zou, which had been a hit in Paris but still left Josephine dissatisfied.

  Once Pepito had gone, freedom! After nine years with him, she’d forgotten what it felt like not to have him watching her every move, tracking her like a shadow. Didn’t he realize that the harder he squeezed, the more he strangled her love? Maybe he did, and that was why he clung to her more and more desperately, as a drowning man claws at a piece of driftwood floating farther and farther out to sea.

  She bought herself an airplane. Without Pepito to hold her back, she took to the skies like a bird. She’d needed only six hours of instruction. Flying was so easy a child could do it, what was all the fuss about?

  When Pepito returned home he fumed over the airplane, his jaw ticcing as he asked about the cost, but then he’d forced a smile and said she would earn it all back and plenty more as the star of the Ziegfield Follies. Josephine could not believe her ears: he had pulled it off! With the help of Miki—a dear friend whom Josephine had met at a salon in Paris, and who now lived in New York with her husband, the Japanese ambassador—Pepito had made contacts, including a film producer who wanted to make a Hollywood movie starring Josephine, and the owner of a café that would make a perfect Chez Joséphine. Pepito had used the power of attorney she’d given him to sign a contract for her; rehearsals would begin in October. Josephine didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  They’ll kill me over there, she wrote to Miki.

  Now here she stood outside the St. Moritz Hotel, looking up at its jumble of floors, at the very top suite Pepito had reserved for them, terraced, fountained, beautiful, too good for a Saint Louis bumpkin. Her cheeks burned as she remembered the curl of the clerk’s lip, as if he smelled something rotten. Only her respect for Miki had stopped her from having a “good old McDonald fit,” as her grandmama used to say. Longing for the sharp-tongued Elvira pierced her like a blade. What would she think of Josephine now?

  Miki’s driver steered the Rolls-Royce along the pristine, tree-lined streets of midtown Manhattan, a part of the city Josephine had never seen in spite of calling New York home for two years. How scrubbed and gleaming the skyscrapers appeared compared to the grit of Broadway and the poverty in Harlem. Even the older buildings looked stately, not shabby: the stone-and-brick Saint Bartholomew’s Church; Grand Central Terminal, with its golden clock and statues, almost as elegant as the Gare de Lyon in Paris. On Park Avenue they stopped at the Waldorf Astoria, where the clerk said they had no rooms. Miki suggested the Astor, which was also full. They tried the Pierre, the Sherry-Netherland, the Ritz. At each she was turned away; after each, she hunched in her seat, her head hanging lower each time. Then Miki asked to go to the Plaza, and the driver protested, saying they had already been to Central Park.

  “How does it look, for me to be seen chauffeuring a Negro all over the city?” he said.

  “Driving an embassy automobile,” Miki said, her voice cold.

  “I didn’t sign up for this,” he mumbled.

  Josephine slouched down as far as she could go. “I’ll put a blanket on my head, if that’s what you want,” she said. Then, cursing, she rolled down the window and stuck out her head. “No, I’ll tell you what, let the whole world see who you’re carrying around. Josephine Baker!” she shouted. “The world-famous opera star! The Black Venus!” A double-decker bus filled with tourists—men in suits and fedoras, women in pencil skirts and little hats tipped over one eye—pulled up next to them at the light, and everyone stared.

  “Damn you!” the driver cried.

  “Riding with the daughter of the richest man in Japan,” Josephine shouted. “He founded Mitsubishi! Her husband is the Japanese ambassador!”

  “Josephine,” Miki said. “It’s okay. Roland, let’s take Mrs. Baker to my studio.”

  Josephine rolled up the window. In the rearview mirror, she saw the driver’s frightened eyes.

  “Mrs. Sawada,” he said. “I didn’t know she spoke English.”

  The car pulled up to a town house of limestone and marble with large windows and a set of marble steps flanked by onyx vases of white flowers. As they topped the stairs, a manservant in a black suit and white shirt opened the door and bowed. Miki sat on a bench by the door and slipped off her shoes, and Josephine followed suit, both putting on slippers that the servant handed to them.

  “I am so sorry for my driver’s rudeness. I will have him fired,” Miki said as they walked through her sparsely furnished home into a courtyard, past a gurgling fountain where a flock of pigeons bathed, and into a small studio also made of limestone and marble. She walked to her telephone and picked up the receiver, and spoke in Japanese.

  Josephine looked around her, at the white furnishings, the colorful vases, the easel by the tall windows, the drawings on translucent paper. Miki invited her to take a seat, then handed her sake in a little ceramic cup painted with cherry blossoms, begging Josephine to accept her apologies again. She pulled her easel over and began to draw.

  “This relaxes me,” she said. “Please, my friend, relax yourself, and let us decide what to do.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Josephine dr
inking and Miki drawing. Then Josephine asked to use the phone. She pulled her address book from her handbag and found the number for Paris Soir, a Paris newspaper that had invited her to write a column.

  “I’ve got a story for you,” she said.

  The next day, she sat on a sofa with a creaky spring and drank coffee from a cracked cup in the lobby of the Hotel Bedford near Grand Central Terminal. Paris Soir had sent her there to meet her old acquaintance Curt Riess, a good-looking journalist she knew from her time in Berlin, with coffee-colored curls and intelligent green-gray eyes fringed with thick lashes. He’d fled Germany the previous year, he said, seeing the writing on the wall for Jews—“Hitler will kill us all”—and getting death threats for his reporting on the Nazi Party.

  “Adolf Hitler is a madman,” he said. “Worse than Mussolini.” He paused, waiting for her response. He’d seen her comments in Paris Soir praising the Italian fascist for invading Abyssinia. How had Josephine come to think of him as a liberator? Haile Selassie had modernized the country as never before, building roads, schools, and hospitals. Mussolini had invaded with no provocation, wanting to have African colonies as France and Britain did.

  But Josephine disagreed, saying she’d heard Mussolini speak when she and Pepito had visited Italy. “Selassie maintained slavery,” she said, “but Il Duce promised to end it. If he called on me, I’d raise an army to fight for him.”

  Riess focused his gaze on her for a long moment. “If I were you, I would keep those sentiments to myself,” he said. “America hates dictators.”