Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Among the things she loved: “Wives of gentlemen, because it is frightening to think that without them, I would be alone with all the men on earth,” and dogs “because you cannot eat dogs, you cannot make furniture of dogs, or shoes of dogs or cigarette holders of dogs.”

  She loved money too, and was pleased when she got an offer to endorse Pernod. The man in charge of the liquor company’s advertising treated her like a daughter, helped with her business affairs. He was rewarded with reprimands—“Monsieur Bondon, you are spending too much on stamps!”

  On March 6, 1927, she not only signed her first movie contract—a script was to be written especially for her by the well-known novelist Maurice Dekobra—she also began rehearsing the new Derval revue, Un Vent de Folie. This show was no challenge for her; in fact, in a scene called “Plantation,” she was dressed in overalls and white socks almost entirely copied from a Revue Nègre costume. In another sketch, she went bare-breasted, draped in a few ropes of pearls, a bunch of red feathers plastered to her backside. Again, in blackface, checked pants, and derby, she performed a bit of larceny, imitating Johnny Hudgins (though this time, she gave him credit in the program).

  Josephine had asked Bessie Allison to come to Paris and be her companion, but Paul Bass (who was married to Bessie’s sister Alice) said Bessie didn’t stay long. “She could not stand the ménagerie of animals Joe kept, and she couldn’t stand that pimp of hers, he used to beat the hell out of her.”

  Hadn’t Josephine fought back? “I guess not,” Paul said. “I guess she liked it. Joe had talent, but Pepito really made her do things.”

  “She just wanted to do what pleased her,” said Marcel Sauvage, “but Pepito would lock her in her room until she had learned a song, or whatever he wanted her to learn.”

  Every afternoon, the impoverished countess came, and the pupil made progress. Now Josephine’s French, still broken, was charming, her grammar improved, and she could offer her hand for a kiss in the properly blasé way.

  On June 3, 1927, she turned twenty-one and, in rapid succession, committed two acts of recklessness. First she got her driver’s license. How she passed the test is still a mystery, she was a nightmare of a driver, though that didn’t prevent the driving school from using her in an ad. Once, motoring past the Grand Hôtel near the Opéra, she crashed into a lamppost, emerged nonchalantly from the car, signed a few autographs, got into a taxi, and went home.

  But her driving was in no way so incautious as her announcement of a wedding to Pepito. She said they had been married on her birthday, at the American consulate, by Ambassador Herrick. She said Pepito was a count, and that made her a countess.

  Would there be a honeymoon? Yes, as soon as her contract with the Folies ran out. “We will go to Italy. My in-laws are enchanted because they know I’m a serious woman.”

  Why had she got married? “To be happy, it’s as simple as that.” And why a secret ceremony? “I did not need a crowd around, and I thought it too theatrical to be coming out of a church in a white dress with a long train.” Besides, “I’m only twenty-one, it’s the first time I got married, and you see I really didn’t know what to do.” First time, second time, third time, who was counting?

  Variety reported that Josephine’s “tieup with the Count” was the sole topic of conversation in Harlem. Now, in a long Amsterdam News interview with J. A. Rogers, Josephine’s words were sober. She declared she could never again live in America. She wanted to see her mother, but “I couldn’t stand that dogging around we used to suffer when I was on the road, especially in the south.

  “I’m glad of my success, and believe me I have worked hard for it. I’m glad because it makes it easier for colored people to get employment on the stage here. La Revue Nègre started a vogue for colored musicians in Europe. Of course many had been popular before I came. I do not for a moment wish to take any credit from them.”

  “The Countess,” wrote J. A. Rogers, “admitted that she had made a fortune,” but was looking forward to becoming even more famous than she was already. “ ‘The Count . . . is going to devote the rest of his life to perfecting me.’ ”

  Then the sky fell in. Reporters who went to the American consulate and the Italian consulate could find no record of the wedding. The mayor of the arrondissement in which Pepito and Josephine lived didn’t know anything about it either. A prefect of police showed up backstage at the Folies to explain that married people’s taxes were different. He demanded to see some legal papers. A priest at Trinity Church found himself confronted by an American journalist who asked if he had married the couple. The priest could not believe the question. “Me? This stranger, this colored woman, this music hall artist that is shown naked in posters all over Paris, with bananas as her only covering? Monsieur, you are making a joke!”

  Mildred Hudgins was in Paris at the time. (Josephine had sent a plane ticket to her in London, where Johnny was playing.) “And this one night,” Mildred said, “after Josephine dropped me off at my hotel, she telephoned. ‘Mildred, come right away, I need your help.’ When I got to her place, she was pacing back and forth. ‘What should I do? The police are after me.’ I said, ‘Deny everything, that will give you time to figure how to get out of it.’ ”

  Now Josephine and Pepito tried to make a joke of the whole business. She was a countess, but only in the movie script written by Maurice Dekobra. She and Pepito were going to costar; he would play a nobleman who marries a girl played by Josephine.

  But black Americans had taken Josephine’s wedding seriously; they didn’t know what to make of the fake story, the contradictory bulletins the couple kept issuing. The press rebelled too. Always before, Josephine had supplied reporters with fabulous copy, and they had dutifully printed her wildest tales: She had come to Paris from Argentina by accident. Somebody had put her on a boat, and when she woke up, too late, she was on her way to France. . . . Her father had inherited—from a crazy preacher who killed himself with an axe—a shop in which her mother and grandmother, both Indians, sold shawls. . . . In New York they called her the American Sarah Bernhardt but she could not judge how accurate this assessment was because “I haven’t seen Sarah Bernhardt dance, or eat an egg, either.”

  Some journalists had adored her because she kept reinventing her life. “You tell your story,” one wrote, “and every day there’s a new version.” But this time, they felt duped, foolish.

  Three weeks later, more scandal. It began quietly enough, with a book party for Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker. She had invited friends for a glass of champagne to celebrate the publication of the little volume. She greeted guests, signed books, spilled ink on one of her publisher’s shoes. Many people praised Marcel Sauvage’s artistry—“It is a book of poems for which Josephine is the Muse”—and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck admired every word. “She dances, eats what she likes, and ignores immorality. Life to her is an apple she bites with all her teeth.”

  Those teeth could bite a co-author like Marcel Sauvage, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It occurs to me that it may have been hard for the reader to reconcile an almost illiterate young Josephine with the Josephine of her early books: “. . . an indigestion of snakeskin” requires a command of language the teenager did not have.

  But the two acclaimed French writers—Sauvage and André Rivollet—with whom she teamed up at different times were poets, and a poet is different from a historian. He doesn’t sacrifice the emotional impact of a story on the altar of accuracy. Sauvage told me how he started to write Josephine’s memoirs. “I told Paul Colin I wanted to do it, and he said, ‘Go ahead, and I will do the drawings.’ So I went to Josephine, who found the idea funny. ‘I’m too young, I haven’t many memories.’ I said, ‘I will give you some.’ ”

  When he began spending time with her, Sauvage knew no English, and Josephine no French. “In the beginning, I was accompanied by an interpreter,” he confessed. Rivollet, because he collaborated with her later, after she had learned his language, may have captu
red more of her true voice. “She talked about her past,” he said. “I took notes; her life was the colors of the rainbow, so the title of our book was fitting. She told me, ‘I want these to be my only accurate and extensive memories.’ ” But again, history was less important to their book than were flavor and style.

  It was history, however, that caught up with Josephine and Marcel Sauvage. In those earliest memoirs, Josephine said, “I heard a lot about the war. Strange story. I admit I understand nothing but it disgusts me. I am so frightened by men who have only one arm, one leg or one eye left. I pity them with all my heart, but I feel physical repulsion for everything that is crippled.”

  Vlaminck found that passage superb; to his mind nobody had “defined war and its horrors with such frankness . . . A frankness deprived of all hypocrisy.” But when a delegation of war veterans came to Chez Joséphine to protest, and her dressing room at the Folies-Bergère was invaded by reporters who “barked questions concerning her ‘insult’ to the veterans,” she was scared.

  “That book?” she said. “I don’t know anything about my book. I never wrote nor read a line of it!” She blamed Marcel Sauvage—“He made me say something bad”—and declared that she was going to sue him.

  Marcel did not take this meekly. In a letter to the papers, he fought back. “I don’t know whether Josephine Baker will be so ill-advised as to sue me on the score that I wrote her book without her, but if she does, I shall take delight in publishing additional and very spicy details. . . . I consider myself absolved of being gallant in this crisis, I shall tell brutally what I learned about Miss Baker’s private life from her own lips.”

  Josephine did not sue; instead she danced at a benefit for crippled war veterans. She needed to show she was as patriotic as the next big star, especially when the next big star was Mistinguett, who was loved by the soldiers she had entertained all through the Great War.

  The Baker-Sauvage book, by the way, illustrated with thirty-five drawings by Paul Colin, was a big success. Marcel told me it was translated into eighteen languages.

  Some of Josephine’s friends wondered why she had not chosen as a collaborator her lover of that time, Georges Simenon. I think I know the answer. I believe Josephine felt that once you had slept with her, she had shared with you not only her body, but some part of her soul; when you left, you would take away with you a little bit of the truth.

  Sauvage was never her lover—“Don’t think I wasn’t tempted,” he told me, “but it would have shattered our collaboration, that’s why I decided to remain a brother to her”—and as for André Rivollet, he was gay, and happy with his lover. With those two, Josephine felt free to create her legend, but with someone who had shared her bed, she had a certain modesty, a reserve; she would not have been able to lie to Simenon, not even to embellish the story of her life.

  By September, Johnny Hudgins was in Paris appearing at the Moulin Rouge, and Fredi Washington was there performing at the Club Florida. “Paris was like Christmas every day,” Mildred Hudgins said. “People so crazy about you, you forgot you were black.” Fredi loved France too. She and her dance partner, Al Moiret, had just played Monte Carlo, where she’d had a hotel room with a terrace overlooking the sea. “It was as if someone had thrown a handful of diamonds into the water, it was so beautiful,” she said. “And I was thinking of home, the boarding houses with no hot water, the bedbugs, the life we Negroes had to live, and how much had to be changed.”

  And so she sat under the stars, pretty little Fredi, smoking her Polish cigarettes that came in a box with a Picasso drawing of a dove of peace on its cover, living a dream, but still brooding about home.

  On September 19, Johnny, Fredi, and Josephine were reunited on the stage of the Gaumont Palace Theatre in a benefit for the American Legion. It was like the Marne Hotel in Atlantic City, the three of them together again, and Johnny found himself forgiving Josephine for past slights; she was, he told Mildred, “good for the race.”

  Ah, the race. Even far from home, it was a problem. Mildred remembered white Americans insulting French girls walking down the boulevards arm in arm with black men. The men—from places like Martinique and the Congo—didn’t understand English, but they understood an affront when they heard one, and fistfights would ensue, with the girls on the sidelines screaming, “Gendarmes! Gendarmes!”

  Mildred, often mistaken for white, was sometimes vilified as a “nigger lover” when she was out with her husband. But Johnny, to use a French expression, was not a man to keep his tongue in his pocket. Or his feet either. He would chase the offending racists down the street. “The gendarmes got tired of it,” he said. “They thought Americans were crazy to have fights because of color.”

  Yet the conflicts went on. At one concert attended by a large number of Americans, black and white, there ensued a scene right out of the movie Casablanca. The concert over, a group of white Americans launched into a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while their black compatriots stood silent. Observing this, one of the whites exhorted the blacks to join in “your national anthem.” The blacks conferred, then began to sing. Not “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but the “Marseillaise.” The French orchestra joined in, so did all the Parisian concertgoers; afterward, there was much cheering and celebration.

  Even Josephine declared herself abused at every turn by white Americans. “I can’t do it anymore,” she told André Rivollet. “I cannot stand being snubbed in hotels anymore. An American woman barred me from the dining room at the Majestic! I am exhausted!”

  But exhaustion didn’t interfere with ambition. Now came La Sirène des Tropiques, a silent film, and Josephine’s first attempt to be a movie star, if we don’t count the footage of her dancing in the 1926 and 1927 Folies. She had not enjoyed those brief flings, the lights had burned her eyes, she had looked at the cameraman when she should have looked elsewhere, but she wanted to learn the new medium “because my greatest wish is to act in a great film, beautiful and true.”

  Wishing didn’t make it so. She couldn’t read the French script—“Nobody bothered to have it translated into English,” she complained—and she grew to have contempt for the moviemakers. “I came, I acted in the tropics in a fur coat. . . . They did not understand anything. . . . They neglected to study, to take into account my nature.”

  At the studios in Épernay near Paris, African huts for La Sirène had been built right next to the stage where a movie about the French revolution was being shot. “Under brand new yellow straw huts we watched princesses led to the scaffold. . . . I danced the Charleston while they guillotined.”

  The plot starred Josephine as a girl who wants to leave her island “to teach a new dance to the Europeans,” so she stows away on a ship. Once aboard, she lands in a coal bin and rises up black (an old lady thinks she is the devil), then she falls into a flour bin and rises up white (the same old lady thinks she’s a ghost). When she reaches the “civilized” country that is the ship’s destination (after a nude scene in the captain’s bathtub where she is restored to her own color), she becomes a big success, falls in love with a white man but generously sends him back to his wife.

  Josephine detested the finished film because, she said, “I loathe that which is badly done.”

  Was it badly done? Yes, but there are good things in it: Josephine’s rubber body, the perfect timing. And when she is dancing, there is a candor, a sexiness that is at the same time pure and childlike; it is only when she switches to acting that one feels uneasy. Her stage gestures, the exaggerated way of rolling her eyes, which was fine when she had to reach the third balcony, were not suited to movies.

  Pepito made frequent suggestions about the script (it echoed Josephine’s own life, the poor little girl making good through dance), but, said Marcel Sauvage, “He and Josephine were impossible. Every day Josephine would impose a new story, or a part for a dog she had found on the street; her fantasies were costing the producers a fortune.”

  Luis Buñuel, at the beginnin
g of his own brilliant career, was an assistant director on the picture. He quit because the whims of the star “appalled and disgusted me. Expected to be on the set at nine in the morning, she’d arrive at five in the afternoon, storm into her dressing room, slam the door, and begin smashing makeup bottles against the wall. When someone dared to ask what the matter was, he was told that her dog was sick.”

  But how could she be on the set at nine in the morning when she had been dancing at her club until five? And before that, at the Folies? Her schedule was not conducive to good temper.

  That November, Florence Mills died after an appendix operation in a New York hospital. She was only thirty-five. “I belong to a race that sings and dances as it breathes,” she had said. “I don’t care where I am so long as I can sing and dance.” She had made famous a song in which she confided to listeners that she was “a little blackbird looking for a bluebird.” Now, as her funeral cortège left the Abyssinian Baptist Church and moved down Seventh Avenue, a plane flew overhead, dipped its wings, and released a flock of bluebirds. It was producer Lew Leslie’s tribute to the star everyone loved.

  In Paris, Josephine grieved for Florence, and found herself increasingly restless. “I was tired of always having to jig up and down. I was hoarse.” She was disappointed in La Sirène, she was bored with what she was doing in the Folies, she thought longingly of a change.

  Her contract with Derval was coming to an end in December, and Pepito had planned a long tour. They would go to all the capitals of Europe: Berlin was offering one thousand dollars a night, Copenhagen six hundred, and a producer in London sent them a blank check to fill in as they liked. But first there would be a big farewell, a gala d’adieux at the Salle Pleyel, a concert hall. Josephine invited the piano team of Wiener and Doucet to lend a touch of classical art to the evening.

  Sold out. Extra chairs are set up in the aisles. The jazz musicians are already onstage when Josephine makes her entrance. Someone in the press describes her head as looking like freshly painted asphalt. She does the Charleston. The audience is indifferent, they have seen it before. “It is as sad as a waltz, without the grace,” writes one critic. “Suddenly the audience seems to discover it too. ‘It’s ugly.’ ‘It’s horrible.’ ‘This négresse!’ Then Wiener and Doucet play, and are applauded wildly. ‘What virtuosity, how ravishing.’ ”