by Sherry Jones
“He sits at his own table in the back—table fifty,” Bessie said. “Holding court, I’ve heard. Everybody with a news tip or gossip knows where to find him. The club’s owner, Sherman Billingsley, even installed a phone at the table for him. He wouldn’t dare treat us badly with Walter around.”
When they stepped out of the car and up to the door, however, the doorman shook his head. “We’re full up.”
“We have a reservation,” Bessie said, but the doorman refused until Roger and Solange came up the walk. Roger confirmed the reservation and the doorman let them in, watching them from the corner of his eye as though he expected them to pocket the silverware. Josephine entered with curiosity, wondering what the fuss was all about. The place seemed pretty standard with its chandeliers and red carpet, an abundance of flowers in vases and brocaded walls. The rich smell of grilling meat made Josephine’s mouth water; she hadn’t eaten in twelve hours. Roger led them to a side room where a uniformed man stood guard before a gold chain. Greeting him as “Saint Peter,” as if heaven itself lay beyond, Roger slipped the frowning guard a ten-dollar bill and then another before the man allowed them into the sanctum.
“He’s grumpy tonight,” Roger said. “I wonder what gives?”
Josephine waved to Walter, sitting in the back corner of the room scribbling notes as the actress Grace Kelly spoke, holding him so enthralled that he only lifted his pen in reply. A waiter came and took Roger’s champagne order, but brought flutes for him and his wife only. Roger had to ask three times before Josephine and Bessie got glasses.
“The shows have just let out, and they’re swamped,” he said. “That’s why they’re slow.”
“That had better be the reason why,” Bessie said. “These folks don’t want to mess around with Josephine.”
“At least there’s no WHITES ONLY sign on the door,” Josephine said. “I was surprised to see them still in the South.”
“Why break the law openly when a doorman can provide the same result?” Bessie said.
Roger flagged a waiter who stopped for their orders: Chicken and pasta for him, salad for his wife, steak for Josephine, and crab cakes for Bessie. Again, the waiter never glanced at either of the colored women. Josephine ordered a bottle of red wine for the table, St. Emilion, Roger’s favorite, but the youth acted as though she hadn’t spoken until Solange repeated the order.
“He’s awfully young to be hard of hearing,” she said to her husband.
“Walter Winchell told me the owner doesn’t like Negroes coming in,” Josephine said. Solange patted her arm and told her not to worry, and refilled her glass. As Josephine drank, a warm buzz rose from her empty stomach and spread across her face and chest. The waiter brought the wine and opened it, pouring into the wine glasses he’d brought for Roger and Solange and, again, neglecting her and Bessie.
“They don’t like Negroes, that much is obvious,” Bessie said, sipping red wine from her champagne flute.
“I had not thought of it, but you may be right,” Roger said. “I have never seen a colored person in this place.”
“What’s that crashing sound? Another barrier falling?” Josephine said, giggling, the wine having gone to her head.
After a long while, their bottle of wine almost empty, the food arrived at last—or Roger’s and Solange’s meals did. The waiter spoke only to them as he set down their plates, still acting as though the Ricos were sitting by themselves in a cozy tête-à-tête. The Ricos watched their food cool until Josephine encouraged them to eat. She lifted her hand to ask where her and Bessie’s meals were, but no one seemed to see her; eyes slid away as though she were invisible. Roger said he’d never seen the place so busy, but Josephine noticed that the waiters only seemed to hurry when passing their table. Her stomach rumbled. The Ricos were finishing their meals; the wine was gone. Josephine looked across the room at Walter, and pointed to the empty place where her food should be. He frowned and, seeming to realize what had happened, shook his head and averted his gaze.
A waiter rushed past. Josephine called out, but his step never faltered. Roger stood, cursing, and stepped over to the front counter where their waiter stood writing up a tab. He exchanged a few words and the man followed him back to their table.
“We have waited more than an hour for our order,” Josephine said.
“Did you hear Mrs. Baker speaking to you?” Roger said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “we are busy tonight. As you can see.”
“You’re busy feeding everyone else but me and my friend. Folks who came in long after we did have had their meals and left. Where is the steak I ordered ten years ago? Where are her crab cakes?”
“We have run out of steak,” the waiter said. “We are out of crab, as well.”
Josephine stood so fast her chair clattered to the floor. “We will see about that. Who has a dime for the phone?”
Roger rose to accompany her to the main dining room, where she called Walter White of the NAACP.
“I’ve just been refused service at the Stork Club,” she said, shouting to be heard over the band. “This is a clear case of racial discrimination.”
She hung up and told Roger that they were all invited to Walter White’s apartment.
“He wants to have a press conference about this tomorrow. Will you speak, Roger? I’ll need witnesses to back me up. We’ll talk to Winchell on the way out, he saw what happened.” But when they stepped back into the Cub Room, Winchell’s table was empty.
“He hightailed it out of here as soon as you left,” Bessie said. “Practically ran out the door with his friends.”
Their waiter came out and set a plate on the table.
“What is this?” Josephine cried. “A steak or a chunk of wood? Look at this sorry, dried-up thing.” Roger demanded the tab, but the manager rushed out waving his hands and saying that Mr. Billingsley did not charge celebrities to dine in the Cub Room.
“Does he think I can be bought for the price of a meal? You’ve always been happy to take my money before,” Roger said, and flung a handful of bills on the table.
“Mr. Billingsley does not want any trouble,” the manager said. “Please come and speak with him tomorrow.”
“Come back here? You must be crazy. Tell Mr. Billingsley that he’ll be hearing from us,” Josephine said over her shoulder as she headed out the door. “But we won’t ever step foot in this place again. And by the time we’re finished, nobody else will, either.”
SHE WORE SUNGLASSES, her eyes as puffy as if she’d been crying all night instead of ranting and plotting with Walter White and her friends. She’d hardly slept, having gone to bed in the wee hours and then getting up early for a morning press conference, hoping to make the afternoon newspapers.
They held the event, called by the NAACP, outside the Stork Club, their backdrop the white facade that was, Josephine noted, the perfect color. Walter had called picketers, who circled outside the entrance with signs that read STORK CLUB: COLOR DISCRIMINATION IN AMERICA and FAMOUS NITE SPOT A WHITE SPOT. To Josephine’s delight, a crowd of reporters and photographers came—but not Winchell.
After she, Bessie, Roger, and Solange had described the evening’s humiliations, the questions began: Were there any witnesses to support their version? Service at the Stork Club was notoriously slow, a reporter said: couldn’t this be a mistake?
“There is no misunderstanding about the Stork Club’s policy of segregation,” Josephine said. To be questioned in this way was infuriating. Did these white journalists doubt her word? Clearly, they didn’t want to believe. They’d probably all had dinner in the Stork Club at some point, even while knowing that Negroes weren’t allowed inside.
“I witnessed it,” Roger said. “My wife and I were served, but Josephine’s food never arrived until we made a fuss.”
“And then it was inedible,” she added.
“So—you were served?” the reporter pressed. Was he a friend of Billingsley’s too, like that turncoat Winchell?
&nb
sp; “Walter Winchell was there, and he saw the whole thing,” Josephine said. “I’m sure he will confirm what we’ve told you.”
But Winchell did not confirm. That afternoon, Walter White and Shirley Woolf came to her suite at the Gladstone Hotel with a stack of newspapers. Walter’s jaw clenched as he handed them to her. “Somebody isn’t telling the truth,” he said.
Josephine could not believe what she read. Sure, Winchell said, he’d seen Josephine Baker in the Stork Club’s Cub Room last night, but he didn’t know she was having trouble. When she’d gone with Roger into the main dining room to make their call, he’d thought they were going to dance—a whiz-bang Brazilian group was playing samba music, and it sounded like a lot of fun. He’d have gone in to watch, he loved to see Mrs. Baker dance, but he and his friends had to leave for a late-night screening of The Desert Fox, the Warner Brothers flick about the Nazi General Rommel. The film was pure propaganda, by the way, this was what they should be talking about instead of some misperceived slight to the notoriously fragile ego of a pampered star who had waited out the war in luxury in a pasha’s palace while her fellow Negroes got sent to death camps along with the Jews.
Josephine threw the newspaper across the room, screaming and cursing. Walter Winchell would pay for those lies. He’d called her a coward? Shirley hung up from her call with Ned and rang for the maid to take the newspapers away, saying Josephine had seen enough.
“Ned says to let this drop,” she said.
“Never!”
“You don’t want to get on Winchell’s bad side. He’ll destroy you.”
“Moi?” Josephine laughed like a maniac. “He’s not good enough to lick my shoes.” Although he would have given anything if she had let him.
“He is very influential,” Shirley said. “And vindictive. Why not just focus on your tour? Ned added three new cities yesterday, including a return to Los Angeles, and a meeting in Hollywood while we’re there. You’ll make a bundle if you don’t blow it. Or if Winchell doesn’t blow it, which he is perfectly capable of doing.”
“He can blow me.”
“Believe me, Jo—I’ve seen him in action. Get him going, and he won’t stop until you lose it all. Everything.”
Josephine looked out the window, at the city spread like a smorgasbord below, hers for the taking—the entire, vast country, hers!—or so it had seemed only yesterday. If she did as Shirley advised, she could still have it all, riches beyond anything she had earned so far in her life, more than enough to pay the bills at Les Milandes.
But if she let the Stork Club’s discrimination drop, and agreed to forget about Walter’s running out the door while she and Bessie got treated like something the cat had dragged in, how would that be helping anyone except Sherman Billingsley and Walter Winchell? The Stork Club could go on telling Negroes that the place was “full” when it wasn’t, and Winchell could continue to portray himself as an advocate for the oppressed. And Josephine Baker, by virtue of her silence, would be complicit.
She would not give in to white tyranny. She denounced Winchell to the press as a phony and an egomaniac, and the traitors came crawling out of the woodwork. Valaida Snow from Shuffle Along—the Negro sax player arrested in Europe and sent to a concentration camp during the war—wrote a letter praising Winchell for helping her career; a colored newspaper editor lauded Winchell’s support for the Negro cause and criticized Josephine as a sham and a fraud “hornswoggling the colored brethren into accepting her as a group heroine and champion.”
She talked as fast as she could but she couldn’t keep up, the accusations flew faster and faster until Winchell announced that the FBI had launched an investigation into her “communist ties.” An anonymous caller told her to “watch yourself,” that they may like “commies” in France, but in America they shot them dead. Josephine called a press conference to announce that she hadn’t been afraid of Nazis, and she wasn’t afraid of the KKK. Winchell fired off a retort in the next day’s newspaper, saying it was easy to thumb your nose at the Nazis while sipping bubbly on a Casablanca beach.
“He doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about,” she said. “If Winchell keeps this up, I’ll sue his ass.”
“It’s hard to win a lawsuit against a journalist, especially when you’re famous,” Shirley said. “You’ve heard that there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”
“Whoever said that was a fool.”
“Juries tend to believe it. Hey, don’t look at me that way. As an attorney, I’m giving you my professional advice.”
It sickened her that the world might think she’d shirked her duties during the war. But how could she set the record straight without breaking her vow of secrecy? She telegraphed Jacques Abtey, asking him to fly to New York with the citations and letters she had received from de Gaulle and others praising her courage. In the meantime, she did a tour in Montreal, happy to speak French, and told Le Petit Journal that she would not succumb to slander.
“I will keep working as a missionary of peace,” she said. “I will keep on fighting for Americans because I don’t want them separated by prejudice.”
HOW WONDERFUL IT felt to see Jacques again, tanned and fit and more handsome than ever, a twinkle in his blue eyes that she didn’t remember seeing before—but, back then, they’d been fighting for their lives.
“Foxy, I have never seen you looking so relaxed,” she said.
“I wish I could say the same of you. Jo, why did you come here when you swore you never would do so again? The United States is not a good place for you, do you remember?”
“It isn’t a good place for a lot of people, especially Negroes. That’s why I came back.”
She got an interview on Barry Gray’s radio show with Jacques, Bessie Buchanan, and Walter White, all of them testifying on her behalf—outraged, they said, that anyone would attack a woman of such courage and strength.
“Josephine Baker is a credit to the Negro race,” Bessie said. “And Walter Winchell is an insult to the human one.”
Winchell retaliated by publishing a quote, in English, from Marcel Sauvage’s biography of Josephine—written when she was an ignorant child—in which she’d said that Harlem’s Negroes were victims of the Jews. Josephine didn’t remember saying it: was it another of Marcel’s distortions? She held another press conference denying that she was anti-Semitic, but the damage could not be undone. In her room, as she and Jacques toasted in the New Year at midnight, she received a telegram. Her next venue, in Tampa, had canceled her engagement. She shrugged and laughed, but then another cancellation came in, and another, along with a notification from Ned Schuyler that her film deal was off.
“What are you going to do, Josephine?” Jacques said, pity all over his face, like he thought she might cry. For a moment, she thought she might, too, as her hopes and dreams for America toppled over like falling dominoes. She would not win the love of her country. She would not end racial segregation. She would not earn the money she needed to transform Les Milandes into a world-class resort where she could raise her Rainbow Tribe and continue her work for equality. She would not be able, even, to start adopting babies. Yet.
But God had called her to the work she had done here, and she had heeded that call. She had given it her best. The rest was up to him, and she knew he would not let her down. Her tour of America would end, but Josephine Baker was just beginning.
She filled their glasses, and they lifted them in a toast.
“To Paris,” she said. “To Les Milandes. To freedom. I’ve had it with the United States of America, Jacqui. It’s time to go home.”
CHAPTER 32
1954, Tokyo
Surrounded by babies, Josephine blinked her eyes, bedazzled. Her eyes full of soft, warm, beautiful, sweet-smelling babies. Except the one in her arms, who suddenly didn’t smell sweet any more. Josephine handed the child to a nun, who took it away speaking in a rapid Japanese that sounded to her ears like scolding. The poor little thing! She couldn’t help herself. N
or could Josephine help her, though: she hadn’t come for a girl.
“Our staff gets overwhelmed sometimes,” Miki Sawada was saying. “We have so many children, with more coming in all the time.” Miki’s orphanage, in Kagawa, a tiny prefecture north of Tokyo, had opened after World War II. It cared for mixed-race children, at first the offspring of Japanese women and American soldiers, but now that the United States had troops in a different war, it took in Korean-American children, as well. “Like this little boy,” she said of the toddler who had wrapped his arms around Josephine’s leg.
Josephine reached down to take him into her arms, but he wriggled from her grasp like a slippery fish, laughing and chattering. She clapped her hands, feeling like a child, herself—in a toy store.
“I want to take them all,” she told her friend. Of course, she could not: filling her castle with oriental babies would ruin her plans, and Jo had agreed to adopt only one.
Coaxing him to let her start their tribe was easier than she’d expected. She’d greeted him in a slinky gown when he came home and suggested he go upstairs and dress for dinner. When he came down, she had a romantic record on the stereo, a coupe in her hand, and his favorite dinner waiting to be served, duck cassoulet with green beans and a salad. After dining, they’d danced, slow, the way they used to do. The feel of his strong, lean body next to hers aroused a thrill in her that she’d almost forgotten, so long had it been since Jo had slept with her.
She’d thought she could change him? Boy, was she ever wrong. He preferred the boys who worked in the gardens, and didn’t bother to hide it anymore. Josephine couldn’t help feeling neglected, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that Jo’s guilt worked in her favor. He would do anything for her.