Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  By opening night everyone’s nerves were ragged. Although there were sold-out notices plastered outside the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and flowers were heaping up at the stage door, many of the venue’s two thousand seats were unoccupied when the curtain rose on the first half of the show. This was not the revue itself, but a music-hall programme of singers, dancers and Japanese acrobats, yet even so, as Josephine warmed up backstage, she was convinced she’d come to Paris only to fail.

  During the interval, however, crowds began to fill the theatre, and by the time Josephine came onstage to dance her first number, a comic Charleston, she could sense their warm, excitable presence. Clatters of applause greeted her high kicks, and laughter rumbled round the theatre as she rolled her eyes, yodelled, puffed out her cheeks and exited the stage on all fours, her bottom arched high in the air. The excitement in the auditorium pitched even higher when Sidney Bechet started to play the music for ‘Big City Blues’, a number set in the streets of New York. Afterwards, Caroline Dudley swore that with the first searing notes of his clarinet, she could feel the public’s reaction vibrating through the building: ‘It was like the trumpets of Jericho, the house came tumbling down.’

  All this was familiar territory for Josephine. But when she was back in the wings, waiting for the music of her Danse Sauvage, she felt drawn towards a very different place. She and Joe began their duel of seduction: their bodies coiling and retreating, their feet thrumming a fierce rhythm, and as she later recalled, a kind of ecstasy possessed her: ‘Driven by dark forces I didn’t recognize, I improvised, crazed by the music, the overheated theatre filled to bursting point, the scorching eye of the spotlights … Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone. I felt … intoxicated.’6 Josephine was still imprisoned within a stereotyped sexualized fantasy, yet naked and exposed as she was onstage, she nevertheless sensed a new creative freedom.

  * * *

  Josephine couldn’t understand exactly the terms in which Paris acclaimed her. To the eminent dance critic André Levinson she was the quintessence of ‘African Eros’, the ‘black Venus who haunted Baudelaire’;7 to Picasso she was ‘the Nefertiti of now’;8 to the novelist Paul Morand she was a pure physical force, ‘une machine à danser’.9 These references meant nothing to her, and it was much easier for her to gauge her success by the number of journalists who were waiting outside her hotel the following morning, clamouring for a photograph and a quote from the city’s new star. Also by the solid evidence of the box office, where there was such a run on tickets that the revue was rapidly extended beyond its initial two-week season. Out of superstition Josephine kept the first thousand-franc note that she received from her weekly wage tucked under her garter, where it eventually became too creased and faded for use. The rest she began to spend. She upgraded herself to a suite in the Hôtel Fournet, with two bedrooms and a private bathroom, which until recently would have been an unimaginable luxury. And she began to surround herself with the kind of treats she had longed for as a child: a flowered cretonne bed cover from Galeries Lafayette; a collection of baby dolls, which she named and laid out on her pillows, and a small menagerie of pets, including two baby rabbits, a snake, a parakeet and a pig named Albert.

  It was not unusual for stars to surround themselves with an animal entourage. The size of Sarah Bernhardt’s was legendary, and it was surely a mark of Josephine’s sudden celebrity that the Hôtel Fournet allowed her to keep so many pets in her rooms, despite the mess, the noise and barnyard smells. Primarily, though, she sought comfort, not status, from her new pets. Being in Paris made her nostalgic for her sisters and brother, with whom she had shared a mattress at home, and having these grunting rootling animals helped to alleviate her loneliness. As she later admitted, ‘I used to tell them everything, my joy’s [and] my hurts.’10

  Josephine was learning to spend her money in style, but another consequence of her success was the number of presents that started to arrive for her: flowers, poems, little items of jewellery and, above all, clothes. The city’s couturiers – always a rapid register of fame – sent dresses, hats and shoes for her to wear, and while Josephine initially felt as thrilled as a child on her birthday, she was soon overwhelmed. She had no idea how or when to wear these lovely things, and she began to leave them lying on the floor where she’d unpacked them, crumpled heaps of exquisite, expensively cut fabric from Molyneux or Patou. The singer Bricktop, with whom she had become friendly, scolded her, suggesting she should at least ask a maid to hang them up, but Josephine shrugged helplessly, ‘Oh no, Brickie, they are going to take them away tomorrow and bring me another pile.’11

  One of the most magical aspects of her success was being able to live in a city with few blatant rules of segregation. She had been exaggerating when she told journalists that the revue’s opening-night party was the first time in her life she’d been invited to sit at a table and eat with white people, but she genuinely found it extraordinary to walk through the streets of Paris without being called a nigger or having to shrink preemptively when she brushed against a white person. Although there were some shamefully racist reactions to the show, including Robert de Flers’s complaint in Le Figaro that its ‘lamentable transatlantic exhibitionism … takes us back to the apes quicker than we have descended from them’,12 these were lost in the wider adulation of the general public. As the dancer Mildred Hudgens recalled, ‘Paris was like Christmas every day. People so crazy about you, you forgot you were black.’13

  Even so, Josephine preferred to stick close to Montmartre and Pigalle. This neighbourhood felt like Harlem or St Louis, with music spilling out from hole-in-the-wall bars and voices that could be heard singing and chattering on the streets throughout the night. A reassuring number of those voices also sounded like home. The black American soldiers who had gravitated there after the war had settled into a colony and many were musicians: ‘Any time you walked down the street you’d run into four or five people who had real talent to them,’ recalled Sidney Bechet. ‘Everybody had a kind of excitement … everybody was crazy to be doing.’14

  The cast of the revue had identified the venues where they preferred to party after the show each night, including Le Rat Mort, a tough but thriving club owned by the Corsican mafia, and Le Grand Duc, known as Bricktop’s in honour of its singer-hostess. Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, nicknamed Bricktop because of the uncompromising red of her dyed hair, had become the matriarch of Montmartre’s music scene. Like Josephine, she had learned her craft on America’s black performing circuit, and in Harlem she’d been the hostess of the Barron Wilkins Club and a member of the celebrated Panama Trio, singing alongside Florence Mills. But it was in Paris, where she came in 1924, that Bricktop attained real influence.

  Holding court at Le Grand Duc, she not only performed for her clientele, she also gave private Charleston lessons – among her students were the Cole Porters, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and even the Prince of Wales. By the end of the decade she would regard Josephine as a professional rival and a disloyal friend, but when Bricktop first adopted her as a protégée in the autumn of 1925, she was more than generous with her advice, and for a brief period the two women were lovers.

  Another friend on whom Josephine came to depend was Jocelyn Augustus Bingham, a black pianist and dancer who called himself Frisco. He’d arrived in France as a soldier, and had made a handsome living ever since, playing piano in the city’s ritzier bars and clubs, and giving dance lessons in hotels and private houses. He could speak nine languages, including fluent French, and had made himself an expert in Parisian etiquette. During those early days it was to Frisco as much as to Bricktop that Josephine went begging for advice about how to conduct herself in this new city.

  She was the first to admit that on her arrival she had looked and acted like a rube: ‘I wore a checkered dress with pockets held up by two checkered suspenders over my checkered blouse. I wore a hat with feathers on the top of my head,
and I carried a camera on my left hip and a large pair of binoculars on my right hip’.15 When strangers asked for her autograph she wrote her name out as slowly and painstakingly as a small child (on Bricktop’s advice, she acquired a rubber stamp made of her signature).

  She was learning fast, though. Caroline Dudley began steering her towards a more Parisian image. The austerity of Chanel would not suit Josephine, but Caroline felt she would look marvellous wearing the more flamboyant plumage of Poiret, and the older designer, feeling under threat from a new generation of couturiers, was more than happy to be associated with a rising star. After Josephine was introduced to him at the art deco exhibition in Paris (at which Poiret’s designs were showcased in two beautifully decorated river barges), he invited her to his atelier with the promise that he would create a new gown especially for her.

  Back in America Josephine had found it difficult to walk into the most ordinary 5th Avenue store, but when she was ushered into Poiret’s atelier she felt like a queen. Two assistants took away her clothes, and a third brought in a huge bolt of material ‘beautifully silvery … like a flowing river’. As Poiret sculpted the fabric around her, tightened it around her torso and draped it around her legs, Josephine imagined herself ‘like a sea goddess emerging from the foam’.16 Yet she was not entirely overcome by the designer’s largesse. Asking for paper and a pen, she drew the outlines of what, to her, would be the ideal dress, a Harlem flapper shift, fringed from shoulder to hem in shades of pink. Whatever Poiret truly thought of her design, he professed to ‘adore’ it, promising not only to make this ‘Josephine Baker’ gown for her, but to feature it in his next collection.

  Soon there were no more sightings of Josephine in overalls or ankle socks. Caroline helped her pick through the couturier’s offerings and select a daytime wardrobe of crêpe de Chine frocks, snakeskin shoes and cloche hats. She was sent to the Helena Rubinstein boutique for suitable make-up: a pale ochre foundation called Crème Gypsy and a dark red lipstick to balance the black kohl outline of her eyes. Bricktop recalled how good Josephine’s urchin body looked in its elegant new wrappings: ‘The French people loved all that chic, went out of their minds.’17

  During these first transforming weeks in Paris, Josephine also settled into an affair with the artist Paul Colin. She had modelled for him when he was drawing sketches for the revue’s posters, and he had been shameless in his pride at being the first Frenchman to make love to the ‘Black Venus’, but in return he was an affectionate, attentive and informative companion. He took her to the places where she needed to be seen, like the Salon d’Automne exhibition at the Grand Palais (where several of Tamara’s paintings were hung) and Le Boeuf sur le Toit where she heard Jean Cocteau playing drums. (The latter claimed that jazz was the best intoxicant in the world, ‘you feel yourself pushed about by twenty arms. You are the god of noise.’18)

  At the Bal Negre club in Montparnasse, Colin pointed out other people she needed to know – André Gide, Jules Pascin, Nancy Cunard – but his efforts to introduce Josephine to Paris were becoming redundant. The city’s artists were already asking to paint or sculpt her, fascinated by the paradox of raw instinct and professional polish presented by her body. Others clamoured to meet her. The composer Darius Milhaud and the surrealists Picabia and René Clair queued up at her dressing-room door, Ravel longed to know Josephine and ‘soak himself in this bouillon of culture’ and Princess Murat – the same Princess Murat whose dresses Diana had coveted at Belvoir – begged Caroline Dudley to bring Josephine to her house.

  She had experienced nothing like this new celebrity, and while onstage she felt secure in the public’s acclaim, she was unsure of who or what these clever Parisians saw in her. Sometimes when she was invited to yet another party among yet more strangers, she would suddenly freeze and run away, seeking out the security of her hotel room and her pets. She knew that people were beginning to talk and that she was getting a reputation for rudeness, and she went weeping to Frisco one day, convinced that Paris would turn against her. ‘She looked very young still,’ he remembered. ‘She was such a baby then.’ He would try and reassure her: ‘Jo. I’d say, you’re in the right country now. You just behave yourself, and you’ll go far. Very far.’19

  Behaving herself wasn’t simple, though. Josephine could now see postcards of herself on the street stalls; posters of the revue were everywhere, and even though she continued to suffer panic attacks, the widespread attention was also making her arrogant. One adoring young student who invited her out to supper found himself handing over a thousand-franc note for the privilege. As he mournfully reported to Caroline, ‘I’ve given Josephine all my money and she’s given me nothing in return. Nothing.’20 She knew it was wrong to abuse her new status – ‘I was not only crazy but a nasty girl’21 – but after nineteen years of craving love and recognition, she couldn’t resist.

  ‘Paris … turned my head a little,’ she admitted, and she was beginning to give herself absurd professional airs.22 Due to the revue’s extended run at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, a season scheduled for Anna Pavlova and her company had to be postponed. The great Russian ballerina, now forty-four, felt the slight keenly, and in mid-November, when the Revue Nègre transferred to the Théâtre d’Etoile, Josephine turned the knife in Pavlova’s humiliation by including a crude parody of the latter’s signature solo, The Dying Swan, in her own act. It was hardly as if Josephine had a point to prove, for Paris was flocking to her performances – Cocteau, an exact barometer of trends, had returned to see her six times. Moreover, Caroline Dudley had lined up yet more cities to conquer during the winter and spring, with a tour of Brussels, Berlin and Moscow.

  Had the troupe actually made it as far as Moscow, it’s hard to fathom what their reception would have been. Jazz was not, in principle, banned under the new Soviet regime* – in 1923 Valentin Parnakh and his pioneering band, The First Eccentric Orchestra of the Russian Federated Socialist Republic, had been invited to play in front of the Comintern – but officials were always wary of any taint of ‘rotten Western decadence’. While a few might have accepted Josephine’s Danse Sauvage as an expression of revolutionary black feminism, it would have been more likely condemned as evidence of depraved colonial oppression.

  Berlin would be the last stop in the revue’s tour, and even there the performers were made aware of how vulnerable they might be outside the relative tolerance of Paris. Jazz had a huge following in Berlin and black musicians were not a rarity,† but when the troupe opened at the Nelson theatre in late December, an aggressive group of brownshirts gathered in the street outside. Chanting crude insults about black monkeys and their degraded music, along with slogans from Hitler’s recently published Mein Kampf, they distributed pamphlets demanding the immediate closure of the revue. Before long these fascist ideologues would present a serious threat to Josephine, but in 1926 she was too excited by Berlin to pay them much attention.

  The bright lights and the busy, brash hedonism of the German capital transfixed her. Women wore tuxedos and monocles in open view, while men flaunted lipstick and kohl. In contrast to Paris, where the raunchier clubs and brothels were herded into working-class neighbourhoods or hidden behind doors, Berlin advertised every kind of vice. Prostitutes and drug dealers traded on respectable streets; even on the grander boulevards like Unter den Linden, transvestite cabarets, pornographic cinemas and strip clubs operated next to crowded cafés and smart restaurants.

  Weimar Berlin was dancing on the edge of an economic abyss. Post-war inflation and unemployment had reduced many to beggars, while a more recent bubble of stock market gains had induced a frenzied spirit of partying among the lucky and rich. When Louise Brooks came to the city to shoot the 1929 film Pandora’s Box,* she would observe that everything and everybody was for sale. To Josephine, however, the city’s problems barely registered. Its boarded-up shops, ragged war veterans and crowds of children scavenging through rubbish bins were like scenes from her childhood and irrelevant to the consumi
ng thrill of her success. Her performances were receiving praise as highbrow as any review in the French press. The art magazine, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung or BIZ hailed her as a ‘figure of contemporary German expressionism’, an embodiment of modern form and primitive vitality. She accumulated gifts of preposterous extravagance: ‘Rings with fire as big as an egg … ancient earrings which belonged to a duchess from 150 years ago, pearls … bracelets … furs.’23 Admirers queued to take her out to Berlin’s most sought-after night spots: the Resi dance hall, where each table had a telephone to facilitate the making of assignations, and the Kuka, a club so fashionable it didn’t even open until 3 a.m.

  The most potent tribute, however, was the attention paid to Josephine by Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt was still the most influential man in German theatre, with four performance venues under his management as well as his Berlin-based drama school. His genius for spotting talent was legendary – Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had both been unconfident, blurry young women when he’d first accepted them as students. And when Reinhardt introduced himself to Josephine he spoke to her about the ‘treasures’ of her dancing, ‘the spontaneity of motion, the rhythm, the bright emotional colour’.24 He promised that he could teach her to ‘portray emotion as it has never been portrayed’. She might perhaps have dismissed the director as yet another intellectual in love with his own voice and with his own inexplicable theories of her success. But she recognized real power, and Reinhardt’s low, resonant voice and brilliant blue stare hypnotized her, just as they had hypnotized Diana. When he suggested to Josephine that he take her on as his new protégée, she was profoundly flattered and willingly complied with his desire to show her off to his Berlin friends.*

  Reinhardt was genuine in his admiration of Josephine’s art. However, his attitude towards her showed none of the consideration and respect with which he’d treated Diana. One of the first invitations he offered her was to a party held at the flat of Karl Gustav Vollmoeller, The Miracle’s librettist, and as soon as Josephine arrived it was evident to her that it was some kind of stag event, for which she, the black dancer, was expected to provide entertainment. Compliantly, she got on with her task, taking off most of her clothes and moving into an intimate, sexy duet with one of the other female dancers. She felt no particular sense of outrage: this was the way the world worked; girls like her serviced the men with money and power. She was also probably high, having acquired a temporary taste for cocaine in Berlin, which seemed to be on offer wherever she went.