Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  But to one of the guests, Harry Kessler, it seemed that Josephine retained a curious ability to transcend her surroundings. As she danced she made herself oblivious to the roomful of watching men, losing herself in the movements of her body. To Kessler, at least, she ceased to be erotic; rather, she seemed to have clothed herself in the unselfconscious grace and dignity of her dancing.

  This transformation fascinated Kessler and it reminded him of the Shulamite Woman, in the Bible, who manages to retain her spiritual purity even when forced into King Solomon’s harem. It seemed to him that Josephine’s talents could be wonderfully showcased in a pantomime ballet based on that story,* and he invited her to his home to discuss the project. Josephine had assumed it would be another party like Vollmoeller’s, and when she arrived she was mortified to discover that female guests were present. She explained to Kessler that to strip off in front of respectable ladies was demeaning, that it broke her own private code of honour. However, when he explained his motive for inviting her, Josephine’s mood changed and without hesitation she agreed to improvise a solo for the Shulamite Woman, there in his drawing room.

  Kessler thought her performance was remarkable. Showcased in the room was a large sculpture of a crouching woman by Aristide Maillol, and instinctively Josephine latched onto it for inspiration. She danced as though the sculpture were a sacred idol and she its rapt priestess; at the same time she seemed to absorb the shape of the sculpture into her own body, imitating its lines and mass as she moved. Afterwards Kessler added his pleas to those of Reinhardt, insisting that Josephine must remain in Berlin and achieve the true expression of her talents under their direction.

  All this was tempting to Josephine. These men clearly had money and influence and could do important things for her career. She could also imagine settling in Berlin, whose street life and food reminded her a little of home. But as she smiled and nodded her acquiescence to Kessler and Reinhardt, she apparently failed to consider her other, competing commitments. One of these was obviously the revue, which Caroline Dudley planned to run for many more months. The other was a contract she had signed even before leaving Paris to appear at the Folies Bergère.

  Paul Derval, owner-manager of the prestigious venue, had spotted Josephine’s outstanding box-office appeal as soon as she had arrived in Paris and had approached her privately with an offer to star in his next spring production Folies du Jour. Without telling Caroline, or indeed anyone else, Josephine had signed up with Derval, then more or less forgotten about it. In her world legal documents were not serious: marriage certificates and divorce papers were worth little more than the paper they were printed on.

  Now, with her plans for Berlin beginning to advance, Josephine carelessly talked to the press about her enthusiasm for the city, and inevitably her comments reached Derval. An agent was dispatched to Berlin to remind Josephine of her agreement and to demand that she return at once to begin rehearsals. When Josephine was forced to confront the muddle she had made, she tried to turn it to her advantage. Berlin was clearly not an option if Derval was going to insist on holding her to their deal, but she would at least make him pay for depriving her of the option and told his agent that she would only return to Paris if she was paid an extra four hundred francs per show, bringing her earnings to the equivalent of $5,500 a month – a staggering sum that made her, reputedly, the highest paid performer in Paris.

  As for the Revue Nègre, that would have to survive without her. Caroline was horrified when she was told of Josephine’s imminent defection and, confronted with the collapse of her project, she did everything she could to dissuade her. She tried to shame her into acknowledging everything the revue had done for her, and appealed to Josephine’s professional instincts, warning that the commercial Folies stage would present her as nothing more than ‘a trussed-up performing mannequin’. Josephine was unmoved, however. Caroline’s emotional argument that moving to the Folies would ‘hurt her soul’ raised only a stony-hearted quip, ‘Missus, I’m feeling fine.’25 Caroline set in motion a suit for breach of contract, but didn’t have the heart to pursue it. She understood Josephine well enough to know that the concept of loyalty was an abstract luxury to her: ‘She was a child still, a street child, taking what she needed.’ Josephine’s fellow performers were not so understanding, however; just a week after she left, the Revue Nègre was forced to close. None of them had any money saved, and while some found jobs in Europe, others were forced back home. As for Caroline, she was left with $10,000 worth of debt, which, according to her daughter Sophie, precipitated the break-up of her marriage.

  * * *

  Caroline Dudley was not alone in predicting that Josephine’s unique qualities would be commodified. When Nancy Cunard reviewed Folies du Jour for Vogue she complained that it had become much harder to experience ‘the perfect delight one gets from [her dancing]’.26 Yet for Josephine herself, the lustre of a show that cost half a million dollars to stage represented a fabulous milestone in her career. The Folies was the city’s oldest music hall; it had been stage to Maurice Chevalier, Charlie Chaplin and, above all, to Mistinguett, the French chanteuse upon whom Josephine had now fastened as her principal ideal and rival. And while it used to have a seamy reputation, under Derval’s management the prostitutes who traditionally traded at the back of the theatre had been cleared out and the Folies’ trademark nude scenes were repackaged with modern technology and expensive design.

  Each show was programmed around a theme. For Folies du Jour, Derval planned to showcase the ‘primitive’ vitality of Josephine’s dancing against scenes that portrayed the frippery of ‘artificial’ civilization. All the other dancers in the show were to be blondes or redheads, cast as Louis XIV’s mistresses in a spectacular Versailles routine, or as Parisian flappers in a skit on modern window shopping – ‘lèche-vitrine’. When Josephine appeared in her jungle dance, she looked like some fabulously vital creature, slithering down a tree branch, naked except for a tiny tutu of fake bananas,* while a man dressed as a hunter lay ‘sleeping’ at the back of the stage. But if Josephine was being presented, even more overtly, as the white man’s erotic dream, the confidence she’d gained during the last six months in Paris and Berlin allowed her to spin her material into something both sophisticated and anarchic.

  Her virtuosity in this number (preserved in some 1927 film footage†) was remarkable. In the Charleston ‘fan’ move her knees and hands criss-crossed with the flashing speeds of a conjurer’s card trick, she made every dance phrase pop with an unexpected rhythmic wit, or with the startling punctuation of a deep splits or high kick. But the glitter of the performance came, principally, from its confident spirit of mockery: Josephine was playing with this jungle imagery, rather than letting it play her.

  The routine became known as her ‘banana dance’ and it was her signature piece for several years. In 1926, however, Josephine was more interested in the novelty glamour the Folies had to offer, including the dance in which she made her entrance hidden inside a huge crystal ball, descending slowly from the flies. When the ball hinged open and she began to dance a Charleston, reflections of her nearly-naked body bounced off a series of mirrored surfaces, an ecstatic proliferation of angles and curves that was multiplied by a chorus of dancing shadows – Josephine recast as a live cubist artwork.

  Just as Derval had promised, dancing at the Folies ramped Josephine’s celebrity up to a new level. She was a true ‘vedette’ now, her name spelled out in electric lights above the theatre and her performances advertised by giant colour photographs. By Christmas, the first Josephine Baker dolls came out on sale and with her image beginning to feature in advertising campaigns Josephine found herself being held up to white women as a template of modern beauty – an astounding aesthetic reversal. Nancy was one of the first to adopt her look, not only in the African jewellery she collected but the black skullcap she had made in imitation of Josephine’s hair. A few months later Josephine was invited to endorse a glossy hair pomade called Baker-fix,
her photo appearing on billboards all around Paris. The vogue for suntans, started by Chanel, Sara Murphy and the Riviera set, took on new momentum with her celebrity, and beauty columns advised that walnut oil should be rubbed into the face and arms to bring a glow to pale skins. Valaze Water Lily beauty cream made new profits from its promise to deliver a ‘body like Josephine Baker’, and one expensive shop in the Place de l’Opéra placed a large moving model of Josephine in its window, next to a display of the cream.

  Josephine also gave impetus to the French embrace of the Charleston. While it was probably a white American dancer called Bee Jackson who first performed it in Paris in 1924, it was Josephine’s astonishing body and rhythmic intelligence that clinched its popularity as the dance of the années folles. There were rich commercial pickings to be had from its popularity, and not only for professionals such as Bricktop, who charged $10 to teach individual Charleston lessons and much more for an evening party. Sales of the shoes, frocks and accessories associated with the dance – the beads and jangling bracelets – all rose. Even the makers of bath salts profited by re-advertising their product as the perfect soaking cure for feet left swollen from a night of jazzing.

  As poster girl for the Charleston, and embodiment of a new contemporary chic, Josephine’s popularity soared. By the time she was twenty-one she was reputed to have received over forty thousand love letters and two thousand proposals of marriage. Her earnings rose too, and over the next couple of years she moved several times, each new address smarter than the last, until she was living in an apartment on the very expensive Avenue Pierre-Ier-de-Serbie. When she was out in public she took care to look nothing less than a star. Some of her most beautiful clothes and accessories were gifts, including, it was said, the new car in which she was driven around – a Voisin, painted light brown to match her colouring, and upholstered in snakeskin. But she was extravagant with her own money too, splashing out sums that would have kept Carrie and Arthur in rent for years.

  During her first season at the Folies the poet Langston Hughes arranged to meet Josephine before the evening show. As she emerged from the back seat of her Voisin, he was taken aback by the sudden, deferential stir of activity that surrounded her. One maid took Josephine’s cloak from her, while another took care of her gloves and handbag; inside the dressing room, Josephine had her shoes removed by one dresser, while another placed a towel around her neck in readiness for her make-up to be applied. ‘Here indeed was a star,’ Hughes wrote, ‘treated as no star I have ever seen, white, black, green, grizzly or grey, treated in America.’27

  Hughes stayed at the theatre to watch Josephine perform, and afterwards they chatted together. Despite her queenly behaviour around her staff, it was clear to him that she felt vulnerable still, stranded halfway between the life from which she had run away and the starry life she now enjoyed. Recently, Florence Mills had come to Paris, and Josephine had gone to strenuous efforts to prove herself the singer’s equal, sweeping in late to watch Mills’s performance, wearing a floor-length ermine coat and escorted by eight young men in white tie and tails. Afterwards she had talked insistently with Mills, but virtually ignored Johnny Hudgins, her dear friend from the Standard days, who was also performing in Mills’s show.

  Josephine not only longed to be accepted by her former stage idols, she also wanted to be included in smart Parisian society. She tried to teach herself French by reading a collection of Contes de Fées, her favourite fairy tales, and she was absorbing everything she could about Parisian culture, yet she remained helplessly ill-equipped for certain situations. Ordering from a restaurant menu and navigating a formal dinner was still an ordeal, and in conversation her lack of education could be humiliatingly obvious. Bricktop’s comment that at this stage in her career Josephine could barely speak American let alone French was a caustic exaggeration, but in certain circles that was how she was perceived. Certainly the further she moved away from Montmartre, and its relaxed ethnic mix, the more conscious she was made to feel of her ghetto background and her colour. Vogue might bestow its lofty blessing on black artists, opining that ‘the Negro … composes better than Beethoven, he dances better than Nijinsky’,28 but when Josephine was portrayed by Sem, the city’s leading cartoonist, it was made offensively clear that to sections of Paris she was little more than a novelty black sex act.

  Sem’s caricature showed her in elegant evening dress but with a monkey tail swinging from her bottom and a fly buzzing obscenely around its tip. In the face of such hatefulness it was no wonder that Josephine still chased after any beauty fad that promised to magic away the darkness of her skin, rubbing herself with lemon juice, and bathing in a mix of goat’s milk and bleach that, according to her fellow dancer Harry Watkins, ‘burn[ed] her pussy’ every time.29 It was no wonder, too, that she began to yearn for a lover, a Parisian Prince Charming who would protect her from condescension and abuse.

  For a few weeks she believed she’d found him in a rich young playboy called Marcel, who promised her both love and luxury. He installed her in a large apartment on the Champs-Elysées with an interior designed by Poiret, a marble swimming pool and a double bed that had once been slept in by a Venetian Doge. However, when Josephine began to hint at marriage, even to imagine herself having a baby with Marcel, his interest suddenly waned. With another of her lovers, Georges Simenon, she suffered a similar disappointment. Simenon (not yet famous as a crime writer) had offered to help Josephine with her unwieldy correspondence and she had fallen in love with him, drawn by the emotional sensitivity that lay beneath his gangsterish façade. Their affair lasted long enough for her to hope that Simenon might leave his wife for her, but while Simenon liked to boast that Josephine was the only woman in Paris who could match his sexual energy, he never considered her marriage material.

  To Frisco, Josephine’s desire to be loved was very affecting. He observed how childishly happy she could be made by a thoughtful present or a simple romantic declaration. Yet no woman could take as many lovers as she did without acquiring a reputation, especially if she was black and if she danced as Josephine danced. There was no doubt, too, that many of the men who had affairs with her exaggerated her sexuality to enhance their own. A composer she met in Berlin claimed she was ‘a beast for sex, looking for the perfect penis’,30 while an Austrian actor swore to the nightly queues of men outside her bedroom, all waiting to service her. It was even rumoured that some nights she worked in a bordello, simply to satisfy her remarkable appetite.

  When Hemingway described dancing with Josephine at the Jockey Club in Montparnasse, it was as though he had bagged some fabulous prey. She was ‘the most sensational woman anybody ever saw … Tall, coffee skin … legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles … she was wearing a coat of black fur, her breasts handling the fur like it was silk’. Initially she had been dancing with a British officer, but when Hemingway cut in he boasted that ‘she slid off him and onto me’ and ‘everything under that fur instantly communicated with me’.31

  Josephine had, in fact, become part of the city’s itinerary: wealthy American students in Paris were said to follow a well-beaten path, starting with Maxim’s, going on to Le Bal Tabarin to watch the cancan girls and ending up ‘wherever Mlle Bakaire was holding forth.’32 And Mlle Bakaire was becoming ubiquitous. Despite Josephine’s love affairs and her earnest attempts to penetrate Parisian society, she was now working an average of ten hours a day. She began at a thé dansant club called the Acacia, which had been recently taken over by the small, stout American socialite, Elsa Maxwell.* Maxwell prided herself on setting trends, claiming to have been the first to ‘discover’ Bricktop in Paris, and to have invented the scavenger hunts that had the youthful elite of London and New York racing through the streets in furious, nightly competition for clues. Now, in Paris, she focused her attention on women her own age, who were no longer young or slender enough to feel comfortable in fashionable nightclubs. The Acacia offered ‘taxi’ partners for hire, willing young men who would steer he
r clientele gallantly around the dance floor, and a special opportunity to watch celebrity dancers like Josephine away from the usual evening crush.

  From the Acacia, Josephine moved on to the Folies, and then to a series of clubs and cabarets, where she danced from midnight until dawn. It was an exhausting regime but as she confided to the young writer Marcel Sauvage, it was only when she was performing that she felt sure of being loved. Sauvage had initially come into Josephine’s life to help her write a short biographical preface to Le Tumulte Noir, a collection of lithographs by Paul Colin, including several of Josephine herself. He had stayed on, however, when he realized how many stories she had to tell, and what kind of market there would be for a full-length memoir of her life.

  During the months on which Marcel collaborated with Josephine on this book he came to know her better than anyone else in Paris. She regarded him as her confessor and concealed little. Often, when he arrived at her apartment, she was wandering around naked (she always felt most comfortable without clothes). She made no attempt to clear up the muddle of newspapers, clothes, records and expensive objets d’art that lay in heaps around her, nor to regulate the noise. This, Marcel recalled, was constant: the parrot squawking, Albert the pig grunting, music playing from a gramophone and, at frequent intervals, Josephine chattering on the telephone in her mix of American and pidgin French.