Hamburg. “My best memory of Germany. It’s good American cooking, but a little more grease. I sang, in German, ‘I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.’ ”
The photographs taken at that time show how much she had changed. We see her holding a saxophone in the Berlin Chez Joséphine; the pose isn’t goofy like the old shots on Revere Beach or in La Revue Nègre. She’s a well-dressed young woman in control, no longer a waif you want to take care of. Her eyes are sad, worldly. But she fascinates crowds wherever she goes. And where she and Pepito are going now is back to Paris, the city that isn’t fun anymore because there’s “no money left.”
Many of the French still adore her, though they laugh at themselves for this fixation. “It was so easy for Josephine Baker to have us in the palm of her hand that she got tired of us,” says an article in Chronique du Pingouin. “The good white Parisians are so dumb it was enough for her to wiggle her bottom, and they fell at her feet in adoration. The black idol got tired of humanity lying there like a rug, and left us to conquer new kingdoms . . . secretly hoping to encounter a resistance to match her talent.”
Paris forgives her infidelity, she takes its love as her due. Now she wants to show how much progress she has made in French, she wants to play in French sketches. Unfortunately, the impresarios of Paris are not so constant as the public. News travels fast, they know that on the road Miss Baker has improved not only her French, but also her gift for being unreliable. No big theater offers are forthcoming.
No matter, there are friends to see, dresses to buy, and anyway, Josephine tells Le Journal, she has really hurried back to help Dr. Gaston Prieur, backer of the first Chez Joséphine. He is on trial for fraud, accused of presiding over a syndicate of fake doctors who treat 750 fake patients every day and split the insurance money with them.
“Poor Doctor Prieur,” says Josephine, “what a fine fellow he is.”
Despite Josephine’s presence at his trial, Dr. Prieur drew a jail sentence, a fine, and was told he could not practice medicine for the next ten years.
Then Josephine got herself in hot water. She was riding in a taxi, one of three loaded with her luggage, when the first cab hit and knocked down a pedestrian. All three cabs stopped, but Josephine was unwilling to be held up by some stupid accident. She ordered her convoy to get moving. People surrounded her, indignant. A gentleman intervened on behalf of the wounded pedestrian, whose face was bloody. He got the victim into one of Josephine’s cabs, and dispatched the driver to the hospital. Josephine grew more outrageous. “I’m Josephine Baker,” she screamed at the crowd. “The one you applauded like imbeciles, in the show!”
The horrified listeners advanced as if to attack her, at which point, her driver accelerated and drove off. It is hard to know what to make of such a scene. Josephine was moody, she could be kind or unkind, you never got what you expected. “She was sick,” Pepito declared, after the taxi mishap. “What she said was not what she meant.”
In the spring of 1929, Josephine and Pepito went to Italy to visit his family, then boarded the ship Comte Verde, on their way to South America. Two weeks later, in Buenos Aires, they were again greeted by headlines: THE SCANDALOUS JOSEPHINE.
“My heart sank,” she said. President Yrigoyen denounced her, and on opening night, the theater was filled with Josephine supporters fighting Josephine detractors. It made her angry to be used “as a banner waved by some in the name of free expression and by others in defense of public morality. . . . What did I care about Argentine politics?”
In her dressing room, hearing Pepito tell the theater manager he feared for her safety, she cried, “That stage is mine, no one can keep me off it!”
Demonstrators had put firecrackers under the seats; they exploded as Josephine came on. Hoping to appease the hotheads, the orchestra played all the tangos of the world. The show was, of course, a tremendous success. Two hundred performances, twenty-five hundred seats, sold out every day. “I have never made as much money,” said the director. He should have thanked President Yrigoyen.
And so to Chile, by train, through the Andes. “The train goes up and down, women fainted. We were at an altitude of 3,200 meters, and stewards ran from one car to another to give oxygen to the fainting ladies. Through the window, I see we are in the clouds, I see an eagle, his scream more piercing than any siren I have heard.
“Maybe twenty thousand people were waiting for me in Santiago, it reminded me of my arrivals in Europe. I was rescued by the station chief who drove me away in his old Ford, like in the movies.”
Brazil she found breathtaking, São Paulo where they spoke Italian, Rio, a city of “lights, hundreds of different orchids, thousands of monkeys playing. Ah! what beautiful films you could make here, my dream is to film in Rio.”
She loved the food—“I recommend Feijoada, black beans with burned bread, sausages and smoked pork, a marvel”—she loved the Beira-Mar Casino where she played, her only complaint about Rio was “its one stupid skyscraper.”
Thousands of miles to the north, New York, which had more than its share of stupid skyscrapers, was again talking about Josephine. Because on Sunday, September 20, La Sirène des Tropiques had its premiere at the Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue. The crowds were huge; even His Honor, James J. Walker, the mayor, showed up. “The first time,” said the Amsterdam News, “that such a high official of this city ever decided to enter one of the local playhouses.”
Most people thought the mayor could have saved himself the trip. One columnist wrote that Josephine’s performance was hard to describe. “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.” Her dancing was patronized too. “She is a spirited comic hoofer, but even in her hottest moments she isn’t any hallelujah.”
There was a hint that American blacks were starting to look at her more critically. She had been the pride of Harlem, Shuffle Along had made her a star, yet she had abandoned America and her language and her people. Even some who had lived vicariously through her triumphs were having second thoughts.
But what Josephine didn’t know didn’t hurt her. She was busy in South America, and anyway, she had already said that La Sirène was a rotten movie. (Even so, it was a big deal at the Booker in St. Louis. The Argus carried an ad heralding the arrival of “The Film Which Captured the Hearts of a Million Parisians,” and urged customers to turn out for “The International Sweetheart of the Screen . . . See Josephine . . . With the Noted COUNT PEPITO D’ALBATINA [Sic].”)
Just before Christmas, Josephine and Pepito boarded the French liner Lutetia, sailing from Rio to France. I have a painting by Covarrubias of the star and her consort on deck in the moonlight; he made Pepito taller. The architect Le Corbusier was also aboard; Josephine seems to have had a penchant for famous architects. She was already friendly with Adolf Loos, whom she had taught to dance the Charleston, and who had designed a great house for her. The plans still exist; they show a façade of black and white marble, an interior that included a swimming pool lit by the sun coming through a glass roof, and a three-story-high cylindrical tower. The house was never built.
Once she met Le Corbusier, she went off in another direction. “She wanted,” he said, “to build a little village with little houses, little trees, little roads for people to be happy. She was mad to do this project, the Josephine Baker–Le Corbusier project, near Paris.”
That village wasn’t built either, but Josephine found herself fascinated by the architect. “He was a modest, fun-loving man and we quickly struck up a friendship.”
For friendship, read love affair. She came to his cabin and he sketched her, nude. She was, he wrote in his journal, “a small child, pure, simple, and limpid. . . . She has a good little heart. She is an admirable artist when she sings, and out of this world when she dances.”
It was true, she sang well now. All the singing lessons, French lessons, German lessons, Spanish lessons, the lesso
ns in table manners, all the steps Pepito had taken to turn a great clown into a lady had borne fruit. Though many were convinced he had moved in the wrong direction, it being easier to find a lady than a great clown.
She sang to Le Corbusier—“Her Negro songs were beautiful, what a dramatic sensibility”—while he drew. They were inseparable throughout the voyage. No longer inclined to fight duels, Pepito knew Josephine would go her own way, but he also knew he was necessary to her.
Was she still necessary to Paris, though, that was the question. In her absence, other black performers had put down roots there. Alberta Hunter was having success as a singer, but she wasn’t flamboyant like Josephine, she could not be observed buying up half of the city on shopping sprees. “Alberta?” Arthur Briggs said. “She never spent anything but an evening.”
You could hear Maud de Forrest (of La Revue Nègre) at the Melody Club, Florence Jones (of Chez Florence) and Bricktop still reigned in Montmartre, and Lew Leslie was back with Blackbirds of 1929, starring Adelaide Hall, whom he billed as “The New Josephine Baker.”
The old Josephine Baker, sailing for France, walked the decks of the Lutetia “with a secret joy and a little fear. I’m going to find Paris again, I’m going, once again to try my luck in Paris.”
Chapter 21
SEX AND THE (SORT OF) MARRIED WOMAN
“She saw him with his pants off, we didn’t”
In New York, the stock market had crashed. No more checks arrived in the mail, so bohemians living in Paris went home. The tourists who had filled the hotels left too, and so did the expatriate artists. Hemingway headed for Spain, Ezra Pound for Italy. Robert McAlmon, a literary dilettante who had been the rage of a moment and had seen that moment pass, chose Mexico. “I knew all too well,” he said, “that Paris is a bitch, and that one shouldn’t become infatuated with bitches. . . .”
Although Parisians still went to the theater, live entertainment was being threatened by talking pictures. “For a long time, I did not believe in talking pictures,” Josephine said. “It seemed to me impossible that one could speak sensibly, sing, shout at shadows . . . that this would be anything but gruel for cats around a screen. But in 1929, I witnessed in Vienna the filming of a boxing match. The public screamed. The people were barking. Everyone insulted everyone. It was funny. When the film was projected, there were the screams I had heard. I was dumbfounded, won over.”
Al Jolson’s two-year-old The Jazz Singer had finally made it across the ocean, and Maurice Chevalier could be seen—and heard—in The Love Parade. Audiences flocked to both, although French critics were wary. “La nature est une grande dame dont la voix ne peut être rapportée,” said one.
If the voice of the grande dame, nature, could not be reproduced, neither could the legs of the grande dame, Mistinguett. They were insured by Lloyd’s of London for five hundred thousand francs, the price of a brownstone on the Champs-Élysées. When Pepito and Josephine came home, Miss was starring in Paris-Miss at the Casino de Paris, then being run by Henri Varna and Oscar Dufrenne. (Varna and Dufrenne, who were gay, put on splendid, over-opulent productions. The Casino women were put on pedestals, draped in silks and furs and feathers; even the nude scenes gave the impression that they were dressed.)
In January 1930, Pepito’s mother died, within three months of his father’s death. Josephine grieved with Pepito; the Abatinos had loved and accepted her. But his sadness did not deflect Pepito from his purpose, pushing Josephine to develop her gifts. “I needed to be constantly in motion,” she said, “driving my roadster . . . running through the fields with my dogs. It was my way of expressing joy at being alive. What was the point of standing behind a piano practicing scales?”
Pepito told her the point. “Think of all the names that used to be in lights. The public is like a man. We’re happy to stick with one woman as long as she keeps changing!” Bananas had served their purpose, it was time for “sensitivity, songs, feeling . . . I think you’re ready.”
By sheer accident, she got the chance to show she was ready. “Oscar Dufrenne used to pick up his newspapers in front of the Paramount Cinema,” says Jean Sablon, the popular French singer. “And Dufrenne told me that one day he heard two people ask the paper seller, ‘Do you still have the 1926 souvenir program of the Folies-Bèrgere with Josephine Baker?’ The news dealer said no, ‘I never have enough. As soon as I get some, they’re gone.’
“Dufrenne went home and phoned Varna. ‘We must engage Josephine.’ And that’s how she started all over again.”
Once more, she was in the right place at the right time. The new revue, Paris Qui Remue (Bustling Paris), would be built around the forthcoming Exposition Coloniale, the purpose of which was to celebrate France’s empire. Who better than Josephine, adopted daughter of the colonies, to represent the fever of the African jungle?
She followed Mistinguett into the Casino, a huge opportunity. Pierre Meyer, her new leading man, was very good-looking, Jean Sablon told me. “And his family was rich. He had a white Rolls, and a special piano Pleyel made for him in crystal.”
Pierre Meyer opened in the show, “but he did not want to sleep with Josephine, so she had him fired.”
She couldn’t have the choreographer, Earl Leslie, fired, even though he was a boyfriend and dancing partner of Mistinguett, and Josephine considered him a spy in her camp. Mistinguett called Josephine “La Négresse,” Josephine referred to Mistinguett as “La Vieille” (The Old One), but the irony is that, in other circumstances, they might have been friends. Both came from poverty, both endured on-the-job training, both had style and wit. Twenty years later, Josephine spoke of her rival as a role model. “When I am . . . on the point of dropping, ready to throw it all over . . . I think about Mistinguett. And I stand up straight again. I accept that one must go on, work hard . . . survive.”
Survive, yes, surrender, never. Neither Josephine nor Mistinguett would permit anyone to compete with her onstage. Reviewing Paris-Miss, a critic had singled out the young American dancer Mona Lee, calling her “delicious.” After that, says Mona Lee, “Miss was a royal pain. I was twenty-four, she was already in her sixties, she could barely kick her leg up past her knee, but the public was always on her side.”
Josephine was equally combative. Bobby Mitchell, another American dancer, remembers Josephine trying to get a girl singer fired. “She raised hell, she wanted this girl out and her number struck. They didn’t do it because they had a winner, but Josephine used to stand in the wings, and the girl’s scene would come up, and you didn’t need lighting, Josephine lit up the stage with her fury.”
The French singer left to marry a South American millionaire, which didn’t sit well with Josephine either. “I remember a Sunday morning,” Bobby said, “a bunch of us chorus gypsies sitting around Josephine’s apartment, and she’s reading about the girl’s wedding and she says, ‘That motherfucker.’ It was funny because the night before at somebody’s party, she had been so elegant.”
Though Oscar Dufrenne had suggested hiring Josephine, he confessed to his partner that he was worried. “Even if she sings, with that voice, what songs?” But Varna, watching the first rehearsal, as she took the stage and floated down the Casino’s steep stairs (which were even trickier than the stairs at the Folies), exclaimed, “She can do anything!”
(Josephine did not entirely trust music hall audiences to recognize how much hard labor went into being able to do anything. “I’m afraid they don’t really know,” she said, “how a dancer must constantly work to keep her form, renew her repertoire . . . move from dancing to singing.”)
The daughter of lyricist Geo Koger told me about the birth of the show’s most famous song. “Vincent Scotto and my father were driving, and my father said, tentatively, ‘Two loves have I, my country and Paris,’ and Scotto said, ‘What’s that?’ and they looked at each other and stopped the car. Scotto grabbed his guitar, they got out, ran under a porte cochère (it was raining), and wrote “J’ai Deux Amours.”
“When Josephine sang ‘J’ai Deux Amours,’ ” the actress Line Clevers told me, “it was the sun arriving onstage.”
René Lefevre concurred. Himself a popular performer, he had known Josephine since La Revue Nègre. “I was half in love with her from the first day I saw her at rehearsal. Once, when I organized a charity in Montrouge, she agreed to participate, and she sang and sang, and had a triumph. The mayor said, ‘Ah, Josephine, what pleasure you gave us, what can we give you in return?’ At that moment, a couple was dancing on the stage, the man was very handsome, and Josephine pointed to him and said, ‘I would like you to give me that!’ The mayor was flabbergasted.
“People were crazy about Josephine, the women were not even jealous. How could you not like such a person? She was beauty itself.” Pepito, on the other hand, got low marks from Lefevre. “He made her life hard, he was skinny, yellow, but Josephine, ah, she was a little island bird.”
By this time, despite the disapproval of friends like Lefevre, Josephine had settled into a kind of domesticity with Pepito. Taking Varna’s advice, they bought a house on avenue Bugeaud in the sixteenth arrondissement, rented out apartments for income, and kept the top floor for their personal use. They also bought the villa Le Beau Chêne in the suburb of Le Vésinet. It was a mansion surrounded by lawn and trees. A little river ran through the property, and the tub in Josephine’s bathroom was covered in silver plate. But, she said, “I was forced to leave my green oasis daily and hurry to the rue de Clichy and Monsieur Varna’s colorful, hectic world.”
The world of Paris Qui Remue. When Varna showed her a sketch of the costume—two enormous white-feathered wings—for her first number, and a drawing of the set featuring a steep ramp, she was alarmed. “I’ll never get down that wearing these wings.” As soon as the choreographer agreed—“She’s right, Henri”—Josephine changed her mind. “I looked at him coldly. How little he knew me! Precisely because he had said I couldn’t navigate the steps, I would!”
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