“I would say, ‘Yes, Josephine, but then I would not have been able to do all your complications.’ She always called my work her complications.”
Before Christmas 1932, a giant tree was once again set up and decorated in the salon of Beau Chêne, and Josephine was busy sending presents home. (For a long time now, she had been indulging her family. A house for Carrie, a pair of Russian wolfhounds, Oriental rugs, the grand piano for Willie Mae.) But before that year’s holiday largesse reached St. Louis, Willie Mae was dead. On the death certificate, under “Profession,” it said Domestic.
“You know how she died?” asks Richard, Jr. “She had three abortions. I remember Dad took me to see her in her coffin. I was a little bitty baby and he picked me up so I could see his little sister, and I looked in her face. I will never forget it. She was very black-skinned, and had a white flower in her hair.”
Baby Sister dead, with a flower in her hair.
“Tumpy was sending money over for her to go to nursing school after, you know, she got that artificial eye,” Helen Morris says. “Willie Mae was very sweet, very quiet, very pretty. When she passed, Miss Carrie asked Mama to let me be her daughter, and she bought me a brand-new outfit, a brown and white linen suit and brown and white shoes, and that was in honor of Willie Mae.”
In the Martin house, a light had gone out. For days, Margaret could not stop crying. “Mama would ask, ‘Why are you crying?’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know, Mama, I keep seeing Willie Mae.’ ”
Thousands of miles away, Josephine too kept seeing Willie Mae. “You play,” she said to Marcel Sauvage, “you make jokes, and life is there, summoning you back to order. Death too. . . . It is hard.”
Chapter 22
A STAR OF THE ZIEGFELD FOLLIES
“I don’t want to be refused in a hotel”
Duke Ellington made his first visit to Paris in 1933, and Josephine had him out to Le Beau Chêne, where “she heaped goodies on me as though I were really somebody.”
She did the same for Evelyn and Ethel Sheppard when they arrived with a show from the Cotton Club. They hadn’t let her know they were coming to France. “Just because she lived in our house when she was a kid,” Ethel told me, “that don’t mean that’s she’s our dear friend forever and ever, you know what I mean? And we were scared after what she did to those other girls.”
Those other girls who had set out for Paris to become famous like Josephine Baker. The ones who had treated Josephine badly, but thought she would forget. “My sister and I laughed,” Ethel said. “Honey, they packed their clothes and went, they thought Josephine was so dumb she was going to show them Paris and introduce them to all these white men, and she wouldn’t even see them!
“So when we got to Paris, we stayed with Bricktop, and then Josephine heard we were in town, and she sent for us. We went to her gorgeous house, and she said, ‘You mean to tell me you didn’t write me a line and let me know you were coming?’ And we told her, ‘Listen, Joe, we heard what you did to those other girls.’ Well, she just hollered. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘I knew something was wrong.’
“So then there was so much hugging and kissing and how is your mother, and oh, we had a time. She took us down to the basement. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I got something to show you.’ Well, I thought I was in the Bronx Zoo. I never saw so many cages with all kinds of animals looking at you. We screamed, and she said, ‘They can’t get out, they’re locked in.’ The place didn’t smell at all.
“We were only in Paris for a couple of weeks, and she brightened our whole trip. I remember it like it was yesterday, the white, uniformed chauffeur, the car so shining you could see your face in it. Don’t you know, honey, after that, everybody in that theater in Paris treated us like we were somebody.”
The weather in the spring of 1933 was bad, but the Tour de France, Josephine presiding, took place anyway, with the race starting in Le Vésinet in front of Le Beau Chêne. “All the cyclists were there,” said Madame Guignery, wife of the electrician at Beau Chêne. “And Josephine had brought flowers. We decorated the bicycles, and then she cut the ribbon, and they took off, and the officials came to her house for a cup of champagne.”
When Josephine didn’t have time to make a personal appearance for a good cause, she sent cash. Madame Guignery thought she sent too much. “My husband always told her, ‘Josephine, one day you will finish on the straw.’
“As soon as she walked down the street, a monkey on her shoulder, all the children in the village would run after her, and she would take them to the candy store and buy them lollipops. She made Christmas for all the children of her servants, and the tradespeople. Her kindness was spontaneous, not calculated.
“She was loved here, she was integrated into the life of the village, so much that the priest would visit her once a week. She and I would go and distribute stew to needy people, and she would pick up a sick baby with no diaper on. She said, ‘A baby is so beautiful, it is never dirty.’
“She kept three gardeners working all year long, in the park, the beautiful statues of naked women were lit by my husband. He devoted himself to Josephine as though she were our daughter. She loved to come and have dinner with us, on a plain table with oilcloth—‘Do nothing special for me’—and one year at Easter she took out of her pockets two just-born yellow chicks, and set them on the table, and then took out little chocolate eggs. She was part of the family.”
Pepito was not so easy to adopt. “Monsieur Abatino, ah! He was a prince, arrogant. He was her manager, paying all the bills. He would examine them first, but no matter how much he argued with her, she could not save a penny.”
Josephine, said Madame Guignery, “was always naked. At the beginning, my husband was very uncomfortable. And then you didn’t notice, it didn’t matter, God made us that way.”
By fall of 1933, Joie de Paris had closed at the Casino, and Josephine went to London. During a four-week engagement at the Prince Edward Theatre, business was good, reviews were not. One critic called her “a brilliant fish out of water,” another said the songs she sang were “trash.”
There was no time to brood, Stockholm was waiting, and Alexandria, and Cairo, and Athens and Lyons and Rome. The American magazine Vanity Fair reported that Mussolini, “out of Fascist racial fanaticism,” had banned Josephine from playing in Italy, and then had relented, “whereupon the entire royal family turned out to applaud her.”
It was not until late spring 1935 that Josephine learned of the death of Arthur Martin. So far as I can tell, she didn’t know anything that was going on in her family; she had no idea what had happened to the pink brick house she’d bought them on West Belle, that neat house with arched windows and trees out back.
“They’d been living high on the hog,” says Richard, Jr. “They had to sell the house, and move to south St. Louis.”
Helen Morris agrees that Carrie was not a wise guardian of her treasure. “Don’s Pawn Shop on Jefferson got every diamond and fur coat Tumpy sent over here; Carrie pawned them, that’s just the way she was. Later on when Tumpy came over here, she said, ‘Mama, what did you do with the money?’ and Carrie said, ‘Spent it! That’s what I did with it!’
“You know, Aunt Carrie opened a restaurant, and my mother cooked barbecue there. We children were little bitty things, and we would be up all night you know, sittin’ on the steps sleepin’, waitin’ on Mama till she dragged herself on home. But what happened is some money came up missing at the restaurant, and Carrie accused Mama. Imagine that! Mama said, ‘Carrie, I wouldn’t steal from you,’ and Carrie said, ‘Oh yes, you did.’ She was as bad as Tumpy in that way, when she got something in her head, it stayed there.”
After Josephine’s brother Richard married, and Richard, Jr., was born, that little family had hard times too. “Mom told me,” Richard, Jr., says, “that Dad couldn’t get work during the Depression, and he couldn’t get relief, either, because he was related to Josephine. The city people said, ‘You got a wealthy sister.’ ”
The youn
ger Richard’s recollection of Arthur Martin, his step-grandfather, is that he was “a crazy man” who used to beat Carrie for going out on dates.
“Weatherbird was simple,” Helen says, “and Carrie took advantage of that. You know he lost his mind, and it wasn’t funny. We called the police, I remember seven police, I counted ’em, and everyone of ’em would go up to the second floor, and he’d just pitch ’em down again. He was strong.
“They took him to the insane asylum, and he died mysteriously. Everybody said they gave him the black bottle. In those days, if you were difficult, they’d give you the black bottle, in other words, they’d kill you.
“Weatherbird just chewed cactus and glass, and Carrie had to put him in the insane asylum, and that’s where he died. And that’s where she got her next husband, the good-looking Mexican one. He was nuts. He’d stay on his knees all night praying, but she married him. His name was Tony Hudson, he was twenty-nine, a young man, and Carrie was old.”
Poor Weatherbird, big, kind, not very smart, loving a pretty, slippery woman who confused him, giving her children his name, caring for them while she caroused. Through the hard St. Louis winters, he had fought a losing battle for jobs and food, but there had also been the summer nights when he’d taken the little ones across the Eads Bridge, and fried catfish for them on the riverbank. There is no record of Josephine’s reaction to news of his death. Still, he was the only father she had known, and I wonder, did she sometimes think of him with affection, remembering soft twilights beside the river?
By 1934, the Depression had reached France, and a political crisis raged. Early in the year, during a march against Parliament organized by a right-wing group (the Croix de Feu), police shot into the crowd, killing twenty people and wounding one hundred. The government resigned.
But actors don’t pay much attention to the real world, sellers of illusion have their own jobs to do, and Josephine was once again trying to be a movie star. She spent the summer in Paris and Toulon, filming Zou Zou, directed by Marc Allegret, with music by Spencer Williams, who was brought from New York.
Zou Zou was the movie of Josephine’s that she liked best. It borrowed from her life, the tents she had sweltered in along the Strawberry Road, the laundry like Aunt Jo Cooper’s, the young heroine’s yearning for a life on the stage. She falls in love with a character played by Jean Gabin (in one of the few films where he sings). They have been brought up as brother and sister, and of course she loses him to her best friend, and of course she becomes a star, but the price she pays is loneliness, there is no one to share her life. (In the picture’s big song, “Haiti,” a feathered Josephine sits on a swing in a giant birdcage, trilling like a wood thrush. Alone.)
Carlo Rim, artist, photographer, magazine editor, wrote the screenplay for Zou Zou. He had visited Beau Chêne to try and capture Josephine’s essence. “Under a hot sun,” he recalled, “the house was a folly in whipped cream, very Second Empire. The monkeys and parrots, eyelids heavy, contemplated a hose at the end of its strength, leaking big drops that evaporated into the warm air.”
Making fun of Josephine’s accent (she could not yet pronounce “Monsieur” properly), Rim claimed Josephine had greeted him with, “Bonjour, Missie Rim.”
She wears a yellow bathing suit and is “built like a boy, long nervous legs, knees without fat, square shoulders, flat chest, concave stomach. Her head has the perfect shape of an egg, and when she smiles, her lips let you discover the whitest teeth you ever saw.” Her hands are always moving, her voice like “the deep singing of a saxophone. She sweats, fans herself with a Vilmorin Catalogue. ‘Missie Rim, take off your jacket, you are going to die in it.’
“I put my backside on a chair that breaks down.
“Josephine bursts into laughter and instantly becomes serious again, commiserating. ‘You did not break your ass? Do you want iodine, or champagne?’ ”
Skillfully, she soft-soaps the visitor. He is so kind, (even if she knows you for two seconds, she will compliment you, especially if you are important). She says she has an allergy to caviar, but eats it anyway. She scratches herself “with nails more sharply pointed than household knives,” and announces that she doesn’t want to dance naked anymore, so she is working to improve herself.
Rim’s script for Zou Zou made no mention of Josephine’s color except in a throwaway line by a young sailor who says, “She is pretty, the little Creole.”
And La Créole, as it happened, was her next venture, although when the idea of her starring in the Offenbach operetta was first broached, she balked. “What if Monsieur Offenbach doesn’t think I’m right for the part?” Told that the composer had been dead for fifty years, she shrugged. “I prefer my playwrights living so we can discuss the role.”
She did her homework. She went to Vienna to see an operetta (it was bad), she went to Brussels to see an operetta (it was good), and she wrote to Miki Sawada in New York (where her husband had been assigned to the Japanese consulate) that the music for La Créole was “simply splendid.” She ended this note with a friendly bit of advice. “You mentioned in your letter you were trying to love America. Darling, forget it.”
Every day now, Sacha Guitry, one of the most brilliant actors in France, came to Le Beau Chêne to give Josephine diction lessons. She was thrilled—“At last I would play to a family audience, without my feathers and spangles”—and terrified. “I’d never be able to memorize my part.”
“Act onstage as you do in real life,” Guitry said. “Keep the theater constantly in mind when you are not performing, and forget about the critics.”
She insisted on wearing light stage makeup, and the director told her she looked like a clown. “Creoles are light-skinned,” she argued. This time, color didn’t matter. She was working in the “legitimate” theater, not a music hall, and she was good.
“It is dazzling, there is simply no one else today who possesses such radiance, spontaneity, and unique charm,” said the composer Henri Sauget, and the composer/singer Reynaldo Hahn called her voice “true and supple throughout.”
It had been ten years since La Revue Nègre. “Now I spoke French,” she said. “I played in French at the side of strictly French actors.”
The winter of 1934 was bitter cold. In her dressing room, Josephine sipped hot toddies and celebrated the fact that the theater was filled every night. Around Christmas, Eddie Cantor came backstage. It was time, the American comedian said, for her to tackle New York. “You’ve already conquered South America and most of Europe.”
Josephine said she was tempted, “but suppose I got stranded there?” In print too, she voiced apprehension about going home. “They would make me sing mammy songs, and I cannot feel mammy songs.”
The journalist to whom she said this had come to Beau Chêne to interview her, and had described the villa with its turrets and dormers, its monkeys, birds, ducks, geese, pigeons, pheasants, rabbits, turkeys. “When they all get to hissing and gobbling and barking and chattering at once, the chorus is superb. ‘I do so love the quiet of the country,’ booms Miss Baker passionately from the middle of the din.”
At home, the interviewer said admiringly, Josephine dressed simply, wore no makeup, and sometimes went down to the grocery store “to buy champagne for guests. The shopkeeper curses her in French for a stingy American, and she curses him in fluent Harlem for a thieving bourgeois. Both understand each other perfectly, and have a fine time.”
Josephine’s show was selling out, but for some others, pickings were slim. Bricktop pronounced Christmas Eve the dullest she had experienced in years of operating a club, and said nothing would prevent her departure for America “save the complete destruction of all ships and planes.”
Pepito, perhaps encouraged by Eddie Cantor, perhaps responding to inquiries from Lee Shubert, decided he should go to New York and check things out. While he was about it, he would pack a print of Zou Zou and see if he could find an American distributor.
On March 22, 1935, Josephine wrote Miki S
awada that Pepito would sail on the Île de France, leaving April 3. “I do wish you could meet him on his arrival because he doesn’t know where to go. I mean the best hotel. And if you could get him a valet . . . You know how I feel being left alone, but we have offers to go to America next winter and Pepito wants to see for himself. . . . I do hope I am not asking too much, because you are my little sister, I take liberties.” There was a postscript. “Do take care of my Pepito. Paris is splendid now that spring has come.”
New York wasn’t bad either. Lee Shubert wanted Josephine for the next Ziegfeld Follies, but he wasn’t sure about the identity of this Italian gentleman. Josephine had to send a telegram: I AUTHORIZE JOSEPH ABATINO MY MANAGER TO SIGN ALL CONTRACTS IN MY BEHALF.
Two days later, there was an agreement. The Follies would open in October. Josephine would be assured of first-class passage on an ocean liner, she would be paid $1,500 a week, and if the show ran beyond June 1936, her salary would be raised to $1,750 a week. She had permission to double in any “smart east side cabaret,” and would be given featured billing on a separate line, and a dressing room “equivalent in size and type to the usual #2 dressing room.”
The #1 dressing room would go to Fanny Brice.
While Pepito labored in New York, Josephine was, as usual, titillating the French press. Here, a few remarks as they appeared in Paris-Magazine:
“If you ask me, how are you? I dance.
“Something enchants me, a dress, a play, a film, a cocktail, I dance.
“In dying, I will be dancing.
“I do not want to get married. I would be too black and him, he would be too white!
“Anyway, the day theatre is no longer my preoccupation, I will automatically become a widow.
“Widow of what? Of the theatre, of course, my only master, my only husband . . . I know only one God, the theatre.
“In matters of the heart, a white is worth—let’s put it, a black and a half, and don’t talk any more about it!
Josephine Baker Page 23