The Many Faces of Josephine Baker

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The Many Faces of Josephine Baker Page 8

by Peggy Caravantes


  Jacques had classified documents that he wanted to get to London. He first needed to establish contact with Portugal, a neutral country where the British had representatives to whom these sensitive documents could be safely delivered. Since the United States was also still neutral, Jacques disguised himself as an American and went by the name Jack Sanders. Knowing that Joséphine performed in Portugal from time to time, he went to see if she had contacts there to help him.

  By then, Joséphine realized she needed to get out of France. A few days earlier, a group of German soldiers had appeared at Chateau des Milandes, where she was secretly housing a number of potential Resistance fighters. The senior officer told her, “We are informed, madame, that you are hiding weapons in your château. What have you to say to that?” Her response charmed them and they left without entering: “I think that monsieur l’officier cannot be serious. It is true that I had Red Indian grandparents, but they hung up their tomahawks quite a while ago now, and the only dance I’ve never taken part in is the war dance.” Despite her cool demeanor, the incident frightened her; the time for her to move on had come.

  Jacques had already contacted Charles de Gaulle, who accepted the pair into the Free French movement. Shortly thereafter, they were instructed to go to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The neutral city had become the crossroads of international intelligence as agents for both sides spied on each other. From Portugal, information could be sent to London. Joséphine agreed to go to Portugal with Jacques, who pretended to be her secretary/assistant. He already had 52 pieces of secret information about German installations and troop movements. Joséphine risked her safety by having this secret information written in invisible ink on her sheet music.

  7

  Joséphine’s Challenges

  PORTUGAL WELCOMED JOSÉPHINE with invitations to diplomatic parties at the British, Belgian, and French embassies. As she moved from one ambassador to another, she listened for information to help the Resistance. Then she went back to her hotel room and made careful notes on slips of paper that she pinned to her underwear. She felt confident that no one would strip-search her.

  Obeying instructions sent by de Gaulle, Joséphine returned to Marseille, a part of Vichy France not under German control at that time. Although she had earlier vowed not to perform in France until all Germans were gone, Joséphine was short on cash, so she decided to go onstage again. She and Frédéric Rey, with whom she had danced in the En Super Folies, revived the operetta La Créole at the Théâtre de l’Opéra. In a flurry of activity, Joséphine selected a cast, found costumes, and opened the show on Christmas Eve 1940, all within the space of two weeks.

  While she continued performing in the opera through the month of January, Jacques Abtey got word that Germany would soon occupy all of France. He went to Marseille to warn Joséphine. The two made plans to travel to a French colony in North Africa, where they could continue to support the Resistance.

  FRENCH RESISTANCE, WORLD WAR II

  Most French citizens were shocked when France surrendered to Germany in early 1940. They believed the government had let them down. Citizens of varying political backgrounds joined together to fight their common enemy: the Germans. Germany, Japan, and Italy were known as the Axis powers. Members of the Allied resistance movement, made up of many cells of armed men and women, were from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and France. The resistance also developed an alliance with the British government, which supplied the French with equipment and trained agents. In return, the French provided the British with vital intelligence reports.

  From London, Charles de Gaulle used the airwaves to encourage his French countrymen to resist the Germans. He set up a central intelligence agency that worked cooperatively with a similar group in England. By 1943, there were 100,000 members of the various French resistance groups, gathering intelligence, destroying railways to stop the German movement, and assisting downed Allied pilots to escape. By the time of the Normandy invasion in June 1944, the French Resistance had played an important role in the Allies’ success.

  Before Joséphine left France, she sent for several of her animals to be brought from Chateau des Milandes: three monkeys, two white mice, a Great Dane named Bonzo, and a hamster. She couldn’t bear to leave the rest of her pets behind, but she believed bringing several on her voyage would be a good cover—no one was likely to suspect her of espionage if she were traveling with a menagerie.

  By the end of January 1941, Joséphine and Jacques reached the French colony of Algiers but soon moved on to Casablanca, a port city in Morocco. There they connected with the Free French Forces and became part of the Resistance network. The two also became lovers, and their relationship lasted for five years. While working for the Resistance, Joséphine moved freely from North Africa to Spain to Portugal, all the while performing to enthusiastic audiences.

  On one of her return trips to Casablanca, Joséphine consulted a gynecologist because she so desperately wanted to have a baby. The doctor performed several treatments, which should have been followed by several days of rest. Instead, the doctor released her to go on the 250-mile trip to Marrakesh, where Jacques was staying. Two days later, she doubled over with terrible stomach pains as she and Jacques strolled around the little town. He got her back to their quarters and put her to bed, but then she developed a high fever. No ambulance was available to get her back to the doctor in Casablanca, so Jacques hired a station wagon to transport her. He rushed her to a private clinic owned by Dr. Henri Comte. Joséphine entered Dr. Comte’s facility in June 1941 and did not leave until December 1942.

  There was never an official statement about why Joséphine first came to the clinic. However, a worker there said the doctor performed a hysterectomy, and after that Joséphine developed first peritonitis and then septicaemia, a blood infection that was usually fatal in the days before penicillin was available. The infections built up scar tissue that caused intestinal blockage, requiring Joséphine to undergo even more surgery. Joséphine had so many operations during her stay that she finally jokingly asked her doctors: “Why don’t you just put a zipper in? It would be so much easier.” In addition to all of the medical issues, she, along with Jacques, mourned the fact that she would never be able to give birth to a baby.

  As she recovered from her medical procedures, Joséphine’s clinic room became a rendezvous point for supporters of the French Resistance. Visitors came daily—friends, ambassadors, and American diplomats. There was much discussion about when the United States would enter the war. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ended the speculation. Three days later, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Hungary and Bulgaria did the same on December 13, 1941.

  Because Joséphine had not been seen in public for some time, in early November 1942, the United Press International issued the incorrect information that she had died. Newspapers around the world proclaimed her death in big headlines. The first assignment for a new reporter at the Chicago Defender was to write the performer’s obituary. That man was Langston Hughes, who in future years would become one of America’s greatest poets. He wrote that Joséphine was “as much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers, who fall today in Africa fighting his armies. The Aryans drove Joséphine away from her beloved Paris.” Back in the United States, Joséphine’s little sister Margaret read in the newspaper that her sister was dead. She raced to tell her mother, who replied, “Tumpy ain’t dead.” She was right.

  When Joséphine first heard a report of her death, she was 5,000 miles away at the palace of Mohamed Menebhi near the border of North Africa and the Sahara Desert. Reclining on a pile of pillows, surrounded by flowering trees, she talked to Ollie Stewart of the Afro-American. She told him, “There has been a slight error, I’m much too busy to die.”

  Gradually, Joséphine grew stronger and could move about the clinic room and go out on the balcony. She was there on November 8, 1942, when American troops landed near Casablanca as part of the Allied in
vasion of North Africa. Despite her sometimes hostile feelings toward her home country, when she saw the soldiers marching through the streets, Joséphine rejoiced: “That’s the Americans for you. Europe doesn’t know their force or their will. They’ll win the war for us.”

  Seeing her countrymen gave Joséphine new energy, and in December, after 19 months in the clinic, she returned to Marrakesh to continue her convalescence. Shortly after arrival, she developed a bad case of parathyroid disease, which affected her body’s calcium levels. Joséphine became depressed, and feared she might never get well.

  While she dealt with this new health problem, the American soldiers in Casablanca grumbled about having nothing to do. They could not date the local young women because of a law preventing their socializing together. At that time, United States forces were still segregated, and this led to tension between the black and white GIs. The Red Cross opened the Liberty Club, where both black and white soldiers could enjoy themselves, but only at separate times. Sydney Williams, the director of the club, needed entertainment for the men. He learned that Joséphine was in Marrakesh. Not knowing how ill she had been, he invited her to perform for the troops.

  Joséphine wasn’t sure what to do. She was still recovering from her multiple surgeries and illnesses. Her stomach was covered with unhealed surgical scars, and her legs looked like toothpicks. When she stood up, she saw spots dance before her eyes. Despite these physical problems, she accepted the invitation on the condition that both races must be allowed to sit together. She argued: “We’ve got to show that blacks and whites are treated equally in the American army or else what’s the point of waging war on Hitler?” The club yielded to her extraordinary demand.

  Joséphine explained: “My program included two American songs—a Negro lullaby to prove I hadn’t forgotten my origins and a Gershwin tune to show the poetry of the American soul—then ‘J’ai Deux Amours’ to emphasize that I was French now and that France was a land of liberty. For this reason she must be returned to her people.” In her first performance, Joséphine entered the club by walking down a staircase as she sang her theme song, “J’ai Deux Amours,” backed by a band of army musicians. The audience responded with emotion. From that time on, she grew stronger, performing night after night for the soldiers. As she did, she began the second part of her wartime career: entertaining American, French, and British troops. Over the next two and a half years, she made numerous difficult tours across the scorching North African desert, traveling in jeeps, trucks, and any other vehicle that could move her from one place to the other. Joséphine and her companions traveled mostly by jeep, and at night they slept on the ground near their vehicles to avoid land mines. Heat blasted them during the day, and in the darkness, cold penetrated their bodies. They ate only what they could carry—often canned tuna fish.

  Joséphine performed several times a day in front of thousands of soldiers. She filled their heads with dreams of romance and of a world without war, but she battled her own realization that many of the young men for whom she performed would die. She often knew which troops were headed for battle before they did. As she observed their energy and enthusiasm at her shows, she mourned their deaths to come. Entertaining the troops also brought Joséphine into close contact with black Americans serving in the army, most of whom served as construction workers, cooks, or food servers. Of the half million African Americans in the United States Army, only 5 percent were in combat units. Joséphine learned from them how widespread racial discrimination still was in the United States. She promised the black soldiers that when the war was over, she would return to her native country to help fight segregation.

  In Algiers in the winter of 1943, Joséphine met Charles de Gaulle for the first time. After she gave a benefit for the Free French Forces, de Gaulle presented her a tiny gold Croix de Lorraine, or Cross of Lorraine, the emblem to represent that group. Despite the fabulous jewels Joséphine had worn in her life, she treasured the small gold cross more than any of those. The fact that she loved the Croix de Lorraine so deeply made her later decision to auction it off in a fundraising effort for the Free French Forces even more poignant. Because of her success with the fundraising, she was awarded the honorary rank of sublieutenant in the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the French Air Force.

  Shortly thereafter, on June 6, 1944, Allied troops invaded Normandy in an attack later known as D-Day.

  From Normandy, the Allied troops marched south to Paris, and after more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was liberated on August 26, 1944. General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German commander in the city, ignored an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up landmarks and burn the city to the ground rather than allow it to be liberated. Instead, Choltitz signed a formal cease-fire agreement, and General Charles de Gaulle led his Free French troops in a triumphant march down the Champs-Élysées. Two months later, Joséphine wore her military uniform when she returned to Paris, where citizens welcomed her with cheers and tossed flowers as she moved through the streets in a parade.

  D-DAY

  Although many historians have offered suggestions for what the D in D-Day represents, it is simply the army’s way of reserving a particular day for a certain activity until the actual date can be determined. This also prevents the enemy from learning of the exact timing of Allied plans.

  The most famous D-Day was on June 6, 1944, when Allied troops invaded the French coast in the Normandy region. It was the biggest amphibious military assault (meaning it took place on land and in water) in history, and the attack required unprecedented planning, coordination, and boldness. The attack combined 150,000 Allied soldiers, 5,000 ships, 30,000 vehicles, 13,000 parachutists, and 300 planes dropping 3,000 bombs. By the end of the day, 9,000 Allied soldiers were dead or wounded, but 100,000 had made it ashore and began securing the land taken from the enemy in order to launch other attacks

  Joséphine Baker in uniform of Ladies’ Auxiliary of French Air Force, an honorary title given to her for her service to France as a spy during World War II. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  Despite the joy of coming home to a free France, Joséphine hated the fact the Nazis had lived in Le Beau Chêne, her home in Paris. Although they had left it in good condition, just the thought of the German occupancy saddened her. Of more concern, though, were the terrible conditions in which many of the French survivors, especially the elderly, lived. Their situations spurred her to pawn some more of her jewelry and buy meat, vegetables, and coal for them. She planned a tour to raise more money to help the war-weary people.

  Around this time, Joséphine began to date 41-year-old Jo Bouillon, an orchestra leader from a musical French family. He and his musicians had accompanied Joséphine on some of her earlier wartime shows and now went with her on tours all over Europe during the last months of the war. One of their stops was on April 29, 1945, at the Adelphi Theater in London, where Joséphine gave a victory show to support the Allied troops. Nine days later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended. Joséphine returned to France for a celebration at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where she had appeared 20 years earlier in her first show in France, La Revue Nègre.

  Now that the war had ended, Joséphine wanted to demonstrate that people of all backgrounds and races could live together in harmony. She had first decided to focus on improving race relations while touring South America in 1929. She planned to live by example, and adopt many children of varying nationalities and races. But first she needed a place to raise the children and a husband to be a father to the young ones. For the first goal, she decided to buy Les Milandes, the castlelike, turreted château she had rented for years in the Dordogne region in the southwest corner of France. She sold Le Beau Chêne and one of her Paris apartments to help buy the property. In addition to living at Les Milandes with the children she planned to adopt, she wanted to turn Les Milandes into a tourist attraction.

  In the meantime, Joséphine and her French Resistance companion Jacques Abtey were reu
nited during the 1945 Christmas season. While they visited, he suggested Joséphine and Jo Bouillon should make a tour through North Africa and Italy to perform for the troops still stationed there. Never able to refuse a request for the soldiers, Joséphine agreed, but since she didn’t charge for military concerts, she found herself in financial straits: she still owed money on the Les Milandes property and had to pay for the travel expenses of the orchestra as well. She sold more of her jewelry to help foot these enormous costs.

  Later that year, Joséphine experienced a recurrence of her intestinal problems and underwent surgery again. While she convalesced in the hospital in October 1946, the Free French government sent a delegation to award her the Médaille de la Résistance, or Medal of the Resistance, avec rosette, a medal created by Charles de Gaulle to recognize individuals who aided the Resistance during the war. De Gaulle’s daughter, Madame Élisabeth de Boissieu, accompanied the delegation and brought a handwritten letter from her father.

  Dear Mademoiselle Josephine Baker,

  It is with all my heart and knowledge that I send you my sincere congratulations for the high distinction of the French Resistance which you have received.

  Not long ago I fully appreciated the great services you have given in the most difficult moments.

  After that I was more touched by the enthusiasm with which you have put your magnificent talent at the disposal of our Cause and for all who followed it.

 

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