“Ooh la la . . . what are they going to say in my country if they read that. They are capable of not letting me get off the boat.”
On May 12, La Créole closed.
On May 14, Josephine wrote to Miki Sawada that she had bought an airplane, and that after only six hours of instruction, “I fly myself, and I’m crazy with joy. They make a lot of stories each time there is a plane accident and they almost never speak about car accidents. That’s why the public is afraid; it is ridiculous.” Pepito was home—“Think how happy I am to see him, after a month and a half”—and soon they would leave for North Africa, where “I film my next movie before I come to America.”
On May 19, she wrote again. Paris was cold, they slept with winter blankets, she was tired because they were going out so much. “Lily Pons had a great great success here. . . .” Again, she spoke of starting her next film “in four or five days, then I rest in Italy before sailing for New York.”
On May 25, Josephine and Pepito left for Tunisia (and Tangier) to shoot Princesse Tam-Tam, based on an idea by Pepito. It is, in Josephine’s words, “the story of an Arab urchin who is transformed into a social butterfly by a French nobleman.”
Once again, she plays a free spirit. A famous French novelist, suffering from writer’s block, comes to North Africa, where he finds her, and is so entranced he almost forgets he has a wife back home. He attempts to “civilize” Josephine, and next thing we know, she’s in Paris attending the opera. She thinks she loves the writer, but she doesn’t love having to use silverware, or to wear shoes. “Why do we have to put our feet in boxes? Why live in houses where they walk on your head . . . where the sun doesn’t penetrate?”
She has two songs—the voice is beautiful, since La Créole it has grown even stronger—and dances the conga, but after a wise maharajah advises her, “When birds of the sky take food from the hands of men, they lose their freedom,” she goes back to Africa. The generous novelist has left her a villa, she marries an Arab, has a baby, and welcomes a donkey into the parlor to eat a book called Civilization.
This last action is appropriate for Josephine, who in real life has told the world, “I have what I want now: A big dictionary in seven volumes, full of pictures. No, I do not open it, I do not have the time. I set down each volume and it makes me laugh. Everything makes me laugh. It is not my fault, but words do not weigh that much.”
By early September, Pepito and Josephine were vacationing in Italy. They had been together for nine years; many people thought he was using her, but she knew better. “In the world of the theatre, each time a man manages his wife’s business, people say he is a pimp. I think it’s funny. . . . No, what is heavy for me is his jealousy. Meanwhile, I have the best manager in Paris.”
From Paris, Josephine wrote Miki a last letter before sailing to New York. “I hope to leave on the Normandie the second of October . . . dear Miki, I don’t want to live in a hotel. If you know a good family . . . that would take me . . . naturally, I want to pay. I would rather live with friends, don’t you think it’s best? Pepito is going to live in a hotel, we are going to live apart because for my success, it is better that the American public think I am not married.”
So far, all business, but here comes the cry of the heart. “Then too . . . I don’t want to be refused in a hotel.”
On the day she quit Paris, theaters were already playing Princesse Tam-Tam, and Une Vie de Toutes les Couleurs, her autobiography written with André Rivollet, was in the windows of every bookstore in France.
“In New York,” the book says, “where I’m going to star in the Ziegfeld Follies, they ask me to sing and dance on top of a skyscraper. . . . I would love so much to be able to dance under the sky in the open air. It seems that all the kisses of the city are coming toward you.”
And she is coming toward the city, traveling first class.
Chapter 23
BAD TIMES IN HARLEM
“She insisted on speaking only French”
Before she returned to her native land, Josephine might have found it instructive to consider the bitter experience of her old friend, Fredi Washington.
In 1934, playing a black who passed for white, Fredi had starred in Imitation of Life. Here, said historian Donald Bogle, “is a black woman who does not seek so much to be white as to have a chance at white opportunities. . . .” Not wanting to be a servant like her mother, she becomes a rebel “with a daring thirst for freedom.”
Modern audiences see her as a rebel, black audiences of the thirties saw her as a thankless child. People were so naive, said the tap dancer Fayard Nicholas, that they confused Fredi with the part she played. “They believed she was a nasty girl. It compared to when Josephine came home in 1935. Most of the blacks said, ‘Look at her, she thinks she’s white, and she’s acting like a white woman, a French white woman at that. . . .’ ”
The whites were even more snide. In Vanity Fair, George Davis wrote, “Does the Countess Pepito Abatino ever pause to dwell in memory on her pickaninny days in America . . . does Josephine Baker ever wonder what Sissle and Blake and all the other Harlem actors in her Shuffle Along days must be thinking about her?”
Exactly ten years after she had opened in La Revue Nègre, Josephine, with Pepito, his cousin Zito, a white French maid, and a white French secretary, sailed for New York on the maiden voyage of the SS Normandie. It was October 2, 1935, the day Italy invaded Ethiopia. Before she left Paris, Josephine lauded Mussolini, telling reporters that the Ethiopian emperor was “really an enemy to the American Negro and keeps his people in bondage. . . . I will organize an army of colored soldiers and fight Selassie to the limit if Mussolini gives the word. . . . I am willing to travel all around the country and tell my people that if they line up against II Duce, they will be making a great mistake.”
Then she got on the boat.
Also aboard were several of her friends—the singer Lucienne Boyer, the writer Colette, Le Corbusier, and Antoine the hairdresser/savior to whom Caroline Reagan had first taken the burnt-haired Josephine. Antoine, now quite old, was accompanied by his cushioned glass coffin. “I do not travel with it for publicity,” he said, “but just in case.”
When the Normandie docked in New York, Josephine posed for the horde of photographers and reporters who had stormed aboard. She sat on a rail, her left hand holding down her long skirt against the wind. She wore no wedding band, but Pepito’s signet ring was on her little finger. “I’ve had enough of Europe for the present,” she told the press, addressing reporters as “confreres. I’m a writer too.” She also said Pepito wasn’t her husband. “Just my manager . . .” (In a rare moment of candor—or fear—she was telling the truth, as she’d done when she went to get her passport renewed. Then she’d confessed that she’d been married in 1921, that her husband had been born in the United States, and that her marital status had not been terminated.)
The Amsterdam News put it more bluntly. “It was well known to many persons that Miss Baker’s original [sic] husband, Billy Baker, a tan-skinned waiter in Chicago, was still alive and going strong. Billy never seemed to have the urge to go to Paris to claim his wife, but he frankly admitted to friends in Chicago that there had been no divorce and that he expected to pick up relations where they dropped off ten years ago if Mrs. Baker ever returned.”
The paper was also unkind about Josephine’s lack of political acumen. She had, said a reporter, jumped “into something of which she knows so little it would take more than the public libraries of the country to contain the vast void of her ignorance on world affairs.”
Married or not, politically dopey or not, Josephine made it off the ship, escaping into the Rolls-Royce of Miki Sawada. (The Rolls flew the Japanese flag.) With them rode Curt Riess, a German journalist who had first met Josephine in Berlin.
When I contacted him in 1991, Riess was eighty-nine years old, living near Zurich; he was a little deaf, but very sharp. In 1935, he had been in New York working for Paris-Soir, which commissioned him to
ghostwrite, under the byline of some prominent black person, a series of pieces on Harlem. Having read that Josephine was returning to America, Riess decided to ask her to be his “author.”
She was delighted. “She clapped her hands like a happy child. She introduced me to her husband, an Italian count with small eyes and a little mustache. ‘We live at the St. Moritz,’ said the count, and we all drove to this hotel. But when people in the hotel saw the countess was a colored person, their faces froze. The concierge explained that the count was welcome, but not his wife. And this man that for years had lived off his wife moved in. Josephine, her maid, Mrs. Sawada, and I stood outside on the street.”
“I took Josephine around in the consulate car,” said Miki Sawada. “We went to several hotels, but were turned down. To top it off, the consulate chauffeur began to complain that he didn’t want to be seen driving a black woman. In the end, I took her to my studio where I did my painting and told her she could stay there.
“ ‘America will not welcome home her own daughter,’ she said in tears. I could not believe this could be the same woman I had seen in Europe, standing triumphant on the stage, showered with flowers. Here she was huddled before me on the floor, weeping.”
Remembering the letter she had written Miki—“I don’t want to be refused in a hotel”—you find yourself wondering why she had swept into the St. Moritz. Had she gone there intentionally to create a problem? Did she have too much faith in the power of celebrity? In Miki’s being the wife of a diplomat? Did she feel immunized by her own fame, believing it would save her from the indignities other blacks had to endure?
It is possible that she was just being naive, trusting too much in Pepito’s ability to perform miracles. (Poor Pepito, he had dreamed with her, and with her he had become more than himself, a hustler transformed by his obsession. But how could a newcomer to America have known how deep racism ran, and in what genteel places? I think this was the first time he ever failed Josephine, and I also think it was the beginning of the breach between them.)
“Naturally,” says Curt Riess, “she could have gone to Harlem and found a place to stay, but why should she have had to? In Paris, in all of Europe, she was a star, why here should she be a second-class woman?”
Her primary challenge was, of course, to reconquer the entire city of New York. And she lived in various places while she was making the effort. First, she left Miki’s studio for Curt Riess’s hotel, the Bedford, on East Forty-fourth Street. “It was a hotel of artists and actors and newspaper people,” Riess says. “There she was admitted. She was by no means sad. She got a penthouse with a terrace, and spent a fortune on toys—dolls, electric trains, she played for hours on the floor. And she ate. I never saw anyone eat like that.” (She may have been living at the Bedford, but she sent postcards from the St. Moritz as though she were staying there. Not being able to accept the rejection, she ignored it.) She did not ignore Curt Riess. “Yes, she had a romance in New York,” he says. “With me.”
Later, she was the houseguest of Sylvio Romano, an Italian movie star. A friend of Pepito’s, he and his younger brother, Annio, lived on East Sixtieth Street. “She stayed with us for a month or two,” Annio says. “I used to play guitar for her when she wanted to learn a song.
“She could read people’s minds, and she had the softest skin. Once when she took a shower, she opened the door and asked me for a towel, and I saw that body. Mama mia! She was like an angel coming from the sky, she was beautiful.”
To gather material for their Paris-Soir series, Curt Riess and Josephine went to Harlem. “Some friends held a nice welcome-home party for her,” he says, “but the result was not nice. It was Josephine who made the mistake. To show the difference between her and the ladies and gentlemen of Harlem, she insisted on speaking only French, which few of them could understand. It was childish, but amusing. She was eager to make them realize she had outgrown Harlem.”
While waiting for Follies rehearsals to begin—they were put off several times—there were diversions. Josephine went to the premiere of Porgy and Bess, and afterward to a party for its composer, George Gershwin, given by publisher Condé Nast in his Park Avenue apartment. One of the other guests, Gloria Braggiotti (then fashion editor of the New York Post), asked Josephine why she was wearing green fingernails. “To be different,” she said.
Lucius Beebe, a chronicler of high society, was also present, and reported an exchange between Josephine and Beatrice Lillie, the comedienne then appearing with Ethel Waters in At Home Abroad. (One top white star, one top black star, Lillie and Waters mirrored the pairing of Fanny Brice and Josephine.)
Miss Lillie (who was Lady Peel, by virtue of marriage to an English lord) had listened, Beebe said, as Josephine “in a flood of French” went on about “how much pleasure she took in Miss Lillie’s performances, how she envied her wit . . . and was overwhelmed at this so happy and providential concurrence of kindred spirits.” When Josephine came to a stop, Lucius Beebe contended, “Miss Lillie looked up and said: ‘Honeychile, yo’ mighty good yo’self.’ ”
On October 13, Josephine flew home to St. Louis, stopping first in Chicago. SOCIALITES WELCOME FOREIGN NOBILITY, boasted the Chicago Defender, reporting that its editor, Robert S. Abbott, and Mrs. Abbott had entertained the Count and Countess Abatino at a reception attended by hundreds who “came to bask in the sunshine of the charm and the vivaciousness of the honoree.”
Billy Baker was conspicuous by his absence.
If Josephine wasn’t looking up old husbands, she and Pepito did manage to spend one evening with an old friend. They went to see Lydia Jones, who had been Josephine’s first roommate in Paris.
Lydia had been working at the Cotton Club when she met Ed Jones. “He came in one night, said, ‘I like you, would you have dinner with me?’ and all the girls asked me, ‘Don’t you know who that is? He is one of the richest men in Chicago.’ ”
One of the three Jones brothers who had made a fortune in the numbers racket (they were so powerful that Al Capone bought them out, rather than starting a war with them), Edward Jones adored Lydia. He married her, making her Lydia Jones Jones, festooned her with diamonds, set her up in a mansion in Chicago.
“The time the Defender gave the big party for her,” Lydia says, “that’s when she and Pepito came to our house and had dinner. Our cook had prepared soul food, and Pepito couldn’t get enough fried chicken.”
Leaving Pepito in Chicago, Josephine flew to St. Louis. “She came alone,” her brother Richard said. “She just slept and ate, that’s all. She slept with our grandmother, who was surrounded by monkeys and parakeets. I was married then, and Margaret was married, and Willie Mae was already dead. I spent time with Josephine, and my wife was vexed, she was jealous, but I said, ‘I’m just going to see my sister. I haven’t spent time with her in fourteen years.’ ”
“I was not reared up with Aunt Tumpy, I did not know her,” says Richard, Jr. “When I finally met her in 1935, I was very aware that she was famous, and I was very aware she looked so different from Sister—my Aunt Margaret—and so much lighter than my father. My father was proud that I could dance, and he took me in front of Aunt Tumpy, and I had to dance for her, between the living room and the kitchen of my grandmother’s apartment. I did a split, I stood on my head, I did a kind of shuffle, but I didn’t like it because they made me wash before I got to Aunt Tumpy.
“I was six years old, and she just looked at me with her aunt smile, no applause. You know, she was the star of the family, so nothing impressed her. But she was impressed with my father, she bought him a truck.”
She was also impressed with Margaret’s husband, handsome, light-skinned Elmo Wallace. Margaret told me that Josephine pulled her aside and said, “Oh, Sister, where did you find that good-looking man?”
Still, Richard, Jr., says, “I think Aunt Tumpy was absolutely flabbergasted that the beautiful house she had bought them was gone. Now, my grandmother’s apartment was on the second floor, and you had t
o go downstairs to the outdoor toilet. Josephine Baker had to go outside! She had to ask me to get her a basin of water so she could wash up, because there was no bathroom.”
“She didn’t appreciate it,” says Helen Morris. Seventeen years old at the time, Helen remembers Josephine’s entertaining the fire department. “My brother Virgil was a fireman, and one day she had all the firemen come over and eat dinner with her. She was wearing a long velvet gown, and as soon as one of those firemen would step on it, she’d stop dead till they got off. She would wear those costumes around that little apartment, she just dusted the floor with them.”
In St. Louis, in 1990, Helen took me to meet Beredester Harvey, another Martin family friend. “When Josephine came home in 1935, it was Depression time,” Beredester said, “and she would be sweeping around, coming in and out in these gorgeous robes, and everybody in the next houses would run outside. She’d just stand downstairs and talk with the neighbors, and she’d be wearing an evening dress. But you see, we wasn’t accustomed to that, why, it was like having the queen of England to visit.”
Beredester said Josephine had always been the talk of the neighborhood. “We would read about her accomplishments, she was a star in our life because we were so young, and it was just exciting. Helen and I tried to pattern after her. Helen’s brother Ikey built us a stage in the yard, and we would dress up and be showgirls.”
The St. Louis Argus reported that, on this brief trip, Josephine had “succeeded in eluding the watchful eyes of the press.” She visited the site where the Booker Washington had stood, she went to a grammar school and spoke to little children in French and English, but she wouldn’t talk to reporters, and neither would her relatives, who “declined to divulge anything about her visit or her past history.” Then suddenly, she was gone. She flew back to Chicago, picked up Pepito, went to a football game, and returned to New York.
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