From Buenos Aires, Joséphine and Pepito traveled by train through the Andes Mountains to Chile, where 20,000 people waited. She loved looking at the natural scenery as they moved on to Brazil and Uruguay. While she was in South America, Joséphine’s movie debut, La Sirène des Tropiques opened at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, New York, on September 20, 1929. New York City’s mayor, James J. Walker, attended the performance; it was the first time a New York mayor had gone to a Harlem theater. But the film did not receive good reviews. One columnist wrote: “The closest I can come to telling what it is like is to say that five minutes of her acting in an American studio would cause the director to hit her in the head with the camera.” Black audiences also criticized Joséphine for abandoning her American roots and her native language in the French film. However, since she wasn’t in New York, she wasn’t bothered by any of it.
Joséphine finished her performances in South America and left Rio de Janeiro on the SS Lutetia just before Christmas of 1929. While they toured the world, Pepito had hired French, Spanish, and German tutors to improve Joséphine’s language skills. He helped her develop her own fashion style and gave her lessons in table manners. She left Paris a clown; she returned a lady. The changes both pleased and worried her. She wondered about the reception of the “new” Joséphine in Paris. Would Parisians like her as a polished performer?
But it wasn’t Joséphine’s personal changes that presented challenges when they returned. They found the theaters in crisis because the new talking movies had captivated audiences. Instead of seeking immediate stage performances for her, Pepito decided to reintroduce Joséphine to Paris through a variety of social events. His work paid off, and he got her a contract to star in a revue at the Casino de Paris, the most respectable of the city’s music halls in the 1930s. Henri Varna ran the club, which emphasized singing and dancing more than nudity.
For many years, a 54-year-old woman who went by the stage name Mistinguett had reigned over the Casino as its chief performer, but Varna believed a staged rivalry between the two women would attract more patrons.
MISTINGUETT, QUEEN OF THE MUSIC HALL
From childhood, Jeanne Marie Bourgeois wanted to perform in the French music halls. Although she did not have a great voice, could not dance well, and was not a physical beauty, she had gorgeous legs which were at one time insured for 500,000 francs (in today’s value, $560,000). More important, she possessed a forceful personality that radiated from the stage. When she was 12 years old, she rode the trains into Paris every day to be around singers, dancers, and actors. To get money for the trips, she sold flowers at the entrance to the Casino de Paris.
After she appeared in a few shows, she adopted the nickname Mistinguett. A songwriting friend had made up the name Miss Tinguette. Jeanne Marie liked it and, after dropping a couple of letters, she came up with her stage name: Mistinguett. In her performances, she introduced the practice of a show’s star making her entrance from the top of a staircase. Mistinguett performed in both the United States and England but was never as popular in those countries as she was in France.
Varna hired Joséphine to star in the 1930–31 show called Paris qui Remue, or Swinging Paris, and he planned to alternate the years in which Mistinguett and Joséphine starred. Mistinguett objected strongly to the shared show. She also complained about the director’s purchase of a cheetah for her rival’s menagerie. The cheetah, named Chiquita, went everywhere with Joséphine on a leash attached to a diamond collar valued at $20,000. Later, Joséphine bought Chiquita a collar to match each of her outfits, making the performer and her big cat prime advertisements for the show.
Before rehearsals began, Mistinguett enlisted the aid of Earl Leslie, the show’s choreographer and her boyfriend, to make practices difficult for the young performer. Traditionally, Mistinguett entered the stage by descending a golden staircase. She did not want Joséphine to copy her, so Earl complained to Varna. He said Joséphine did not have the poise to make such a dramatic entrance. To counter the objection, Varna worked with Joséphine to improve her posture. Balancing first two books, and eventually six, on her head, she descended the stairs time and time again until she could do it with confidence.
Mistinguett made one more attempt to get rid of the woman challenging her place at the Casino by starting a fight with Joséphine in public. Both women attended a movie premiere, and when the older star saw Joséphine in the theater’s lobby, she called out to her using a racial epithet. Joséphine forgot all the “ladylike” training Pepito had provided her. She grabbed Mistinguett’s arm and dug her fingernails into the woman’s flesh. At the same time she spit in her adversary’s face. Mistinguett spat back before others separated them.
Although the show was scheduled to open on September 26, 1930, a string of misfortunes made that date questionable. A chorus girl sprained her ankle, a costume in the “Electricity” sketch short-circuited, and the wind machine stopped working. All of the tension upset Chiquita, who chewed a hole in the leg of one of the dancer’s pants. Joséphine was glad she had all those rabbit feet in the dressing room. Her luck held and on opening night Joséphine appeared at the top of the staircase as a white-plumed forest bird wrapped in huge swan feathers. With charm and grace, she descended the steps while 11 projectors bathed her in flickering lights. She reached the bottom and winked at the audience as if mocking what she had just done.
Joséphine loved animals as well as the impression she created strolling through the streets of Paris with one of her big cats. For performers to have exotic pets was considered chic.
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Each sketch in Paris qui Remue represented a different French colony, and Joséphine appeared in all of them. In one scene, she sang a song written especially for her—“J’ai Deux Amours,” or “I Have Two Loves,” referring to her own country and Paris, as well as perhaps sending a coded message of her bisexuality. She and the audiences both loved the song, and she sang it at every performance for the rest of her life.
In one emotional scene that protested cruelty to animals, Joséphine again appeared with wings attached to her body. This time they were made of a delicate transparent fabric and resembled those of a dragonfly. She walked down a steel ramp to the stage that had been transformed into a forest, where fierce hunters appeared and pretended to attack her. She begged them to stop and even escaped for a moment. They circled around her, tore her wings from her body, and left her huddled in despair on the stage floor. Many in the audience were moved to tears by Joséphine’s performance. A review the next day said: “The beautiful savage has learned to discipline her instincts … Her singing, like a wounded bird, transported the crowd.” Paris qui Remue was so popular that it ran for 481 performances during the 1931 season. To Mistinguett’s dismay, her nemesis’s shows drew larger crowds than her own.
One night, Joséphine was surprised by a visit from Noble Sissle, the playwright who had featured her in Shuffle Along and The Chocolate Dandies in the United States. He invited her to return to America and star in the new version of Shuffle Along that he was producing. The invitation was tempting, and the idea of being a star in her own country appealed to Joséphine. However, she didn’t know how her home country would receive her. Furthermore, Joséphine believed she could do more to advance race relations by performing with interracial casts in Paris than with all-black casts in the United States. Ultimately she declined Sissle’s offer and stayed in Paris.
In 1931, the Paris Colonial Exposition took place to celebrate France’s colonial empire. Just before the exposition opened, officials invited Joséphine to be “Queen of the Colonies.” Since most of France’s territories were in Africa, choosing an African American star seemed appropriate for the show’s theme. Joséphine viewed the invitation as an indication of her acceptance by the general population. However, many of the French still regarded her as a foreigner, even though she claimed Paris as one of her two loves. To her dismay, the appointment caused an uproar. Crowds p
rotested that she was not a French woman. Others claimed she did not speak either French or any of the colonies’ dialects with native fluency. The biggest insult, as far as Joséphine was concerned, was objectors’ arguing she was too old. At the time, some African women were wed at 12 or 13 years of age. By the time they reached Joséphine’s age of 25, they were often grandmothers. Officials bowed to public pressure and withdrew the offer.
While she enjoyed great success at the Casino, Joséphine began to separate her life into two parts: the popular, glamorous performer and the quiet homebody. For her role as a star at the Casino de Paris, Joséphine wore exciting, expensive dresses, drove a car, and signed autographs. At home at Le Beau-Chêne, she wore simple skirts and blouses. Joséphine raised orchids in the greenhouse, visited her menagerie of animals, and planted onions, potatoes, cabbage, and black-eyed peas in her vegetable garden.
1931 PARIS COLONIAL EXPOSITION
The Paris Colonial Exposition opened on May 6, 1931, in a huge park outside eastern Paris. The event offered the French government an opportunity to convince its citizens of the value of having colonies of native peoples that the French government controlled in places such as Guinea, Morocco, Martinique, and Cambodia. For the mammoth display, the government brought native people from its various colonies to Paris, where they were placed in housing similar in design but much larger in scope than what they had in their home countries. One of the most impressive buildings was the massive reproduction of a Cambodian temple, Angkor Wat.
While over 33 million visitors paraded past the people in their native costumes, the colonists practiced their crafts and demonstrated their music and dance. The French government displayed the colonies as part of greater France and showed resources supposedly available to the French people. However, the displays were a sham that did not truly represent life in the colonies. People did not regularly wear native costumes, and the displays depicted a misleading sampling of their lives. In reality, colonial resources added to the government’s power and wealth rather than to that of its citizens. However, for the most part, French citizens accepted the government’s premise that the diverse cultures and huge resources of the colonies were good for France.
Unfortunately, the unpredictable behavior of her professional life carried over to her home life. According to Hélene Guignery, wife of the electrician who rewired Le Beau-Chêne, “She could be very bossy with her employees, even cruel sometimes, especially if she thought they were fooling around, not doing their jobs.” She might be playing with the cats or working in the garden when a single word or gesture by an employee could bring on a temper tantrum. Her rapid mood changes might come once a day, twice a day, or only once a week. Sometimes a crisis lasted a whole week.
Part of her stress came from Pepito’s constant pushing her to keep moving upward in the performance world. The more she relaxed in their country home, the more she rebelled against him. She showed her displeasure by shopping for clothes—buying an outrageous number of pieces she did not need. Joséphine associated clothes with her beloved grandmother who had given them to her for dress-up and for performances in her basement. Her grandmother always told her granddaughter how pretty she looked, and Joséphine related clothes to love, something for which she still yearned.
She also longed to have a child, but in the meantime, she visited the children at St. Charles Orphanage in her neighborhood. She donated clothes, furs, jewelry, and knickknacks to raise money for the orphans to visit the ocean. She became godmother to all 50 children at the institution. She built a playground with swings and slides on the grounds of her own home and invited the orphans to play there and enjoy the many animals she kept. At Christmas Joséphine gave a party that included a gift for each child. She loved the children and associated that feeling with her love for her animals—all of them being innocent and pure. A companion who helped her deliver the gifts said, “The sight of Josephine picking up the little ones, stroking their heads, made tears come to my eyes. This was not done for effect, or for an audience.”
The show at the Casino de Paris ended in the fall of 1931. Since it was Mistinguett’s turn to star in the next revue, Joséphine went on another tour, this time with her own band of jazz musicians that she called the Sixteen Baker Boys. Everywhere they went, they were met with enthusiasm and praise. While Joséphine was touring, she received news that her cheetah Chiquita had escaped the grounds of Le Beau-Chêne by jumping over the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the property. He roamed through the neighborhood until he crawled through an open window and into the bedroom of an elderly neighbor woman. Panicked, she called the police, and they took the cheetah to the zoo. Although Joséphine tried to convince the officers she would keep Chiquita at home, they refused to release the now full-grown animal that had developed a reputation for clawing at women’s legs. At first, Joséphine visited the cheetah at the small zoo where he was housed, but the visits tapered off. In later years, if someone asked about him, she said that Chiquita had died.
In 1932, Joséphine opened in the show La Joie de Paris, or The Joy of Paris, a new revue at the Casino. In October she made an appearance in London, but it was not a big success. While there, she achieved another first when she went to a studio at 16 Portland Place and made an appearance on a new medium: television.
Following her television debut, she went on another tour all over Europe and briefly into Africa and Asia before returning to France to perform in a film written especially for her. Zouzou, a light romantic comedy, was produced in the summer of 1934. Although the film had a weak plot, audiences praised Joséphine’s natural performance in her first talking movie. Pepito worked hard to publicize it. He had stickers printed that said “Josephine Baker is Zouzou.” He then sent salesmen out into the city to talk banana sellers into allowing a sticker to be placed on each banana. It worked, and the success of Zouzou, plus the continued sales of her endorsed products, especially the hair preparation Bakerfix, caused Joséphine to be named the richest black woman in the world.
Joséphine broadcasting at the experimental Baird television studio, 16 Portland Place, London, in October 1931.
© BBC/Corbis
Though Joséphine’s professional life was doing well, her family life was falling apart. In 1934, her stepfather, Arthur Martin, committed suicide in the mental hospital where he had been committed several years earlier due to his uncontrollable outbursts of rage. Although Joséphine had kept in touch with her family through letters and money she sent, news of her stepfather’s death was a tragic reminder of the life she had escaped.
After her performance in Zouzou, Joséphine received an offer to star in the revival of La Créole, an operetta from 1875. She was uncertain about what to do when she first heard the music—it was not what she usually sang. But the more she listened, the better she liked the melodies, and she agreed to perform as the opera’s lead. The story features a Jamaican girl seduced by a French sailor who later abandons her. She searches until she finds him, and the two are reunited. As Joséphine rehearsed the operetta, she became excited about the chance to appear in legitimate theater. Up to that point, she had performed only in music halls. She was proud that after just 10 years in the country, she was acting with an all-French cast in a role in which she spoke and sang in French.
The play opened on December 15, 1934, and it was unanimously praised by critics. The show ran for months, making it Joséphine’s biggest artistic success in that decade. From the operetta she moved on to another film, Princesse Tam-Tam. Joséphine stars as Alwina, a free-spirited goatherder from Tunisia, who meets a visiting French novelist. Desperate to regain his wife’s wandering attention, the novelist invites Alwina to return to Paris with him and to pose as the mysterious Princess Tam-Tam. Through a series of misadventures and twists of fate, the novelist and his wife are reunited, and Alwina returns to Tunisia.
After she met her film commitments, Joséphine and Pepito talked about going to America. She had mixed emotions, wondering if she could
dazzle Broadway the way she had captured Paris. But when a friend asked her how she felt about returning to the United States, Joséphine told her, “I’m so excited. I’m all puffed up like a frog. Pepito’s heard that New York is a wonderful place, all new and friendly. But I’m afraid I’ll feel like a stranger. I don’t know what will happen.”
6
Storms of Life
JOSÉPHINE PROVED HERSELF IN FRANCE in the 10 years since she had arrived with the Revue Nègre. Now she wanted to impress her fellow countrymen. Pepito arranged for Joséphine to appear in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies at a salary of $1,500 a week.
Joséphine was the first and last black woman to appear with the Ziegfeld Follies. In September, Joséphine and Pepito sailed for New York on the luxurious Normandie, whose passengers included Joséphine’s friend Colette. Excitement and fear alternated in Joséphine’s mind. When she debarked in New York, a swarm of reporters and photographers greeted her. Then, she and Pepito found Miki Sawada, the wife of the Japanese consul to the United States, waiting for them. Joséphine and Miki had met at a party in Paris four years earlier. The two immediately felt a kinship, and the Sawadas became frequent weekend visitors at Joséphine’s home. Miki often accompanied Joséphine on her visits to the orphanage near Le Beau Chêne. In 1935, Mr. Sawada was transferred to the United States, so when Miki heard that Joséphine was going to America, she offered to meet her at the harbor.
The Many Faces of Josephine Baker Page 6