Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Atkinson: “After her cyclonic career abroad, Josephine Baker has become a celebrity who offers her presence instead of her talent . . . her singing voice is only a squeak in the dark and her dancing is only the pain of an artist. Miss Baker has refined her art until there is nothing left of it.”

  Hammond: “The most prominent Negress since Eliza in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ . . . exhibits herself and her person . . . in African displays too exotic for me to talk about.”

  Mantle: “. . . Josephine sings unusual songs. I suspect they are descriptive songs, but I could not catch the words, so I cannot tell you as to that. . . . It just goes to prove that fifty million French press agents can be over-enthusiastic.”

  Brown: “Josephine Baker, whose voice sounds gnome-like in the vast spaces of the Winter Garden, is on hand. . . .”

  There were others. The nameless reviewer for Time magazine sneered, “In sex appeal to jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type, a Negro wench always has a head start, but to Manhattan theatregoers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any nightclub show, whose dancing and singing could be topped practically anywhere outside France.”

  Variety weighed in with a left-handed compliment. “Miss Baker cannot sing but sure can wear clothes and roll those eyes.”

  Compliments like that could give a star a headache.

  If she hadn’t already got one from reading the accolades accorded Fanny Brice. “Fanny is marvellous. . . .” “It is her evening. . . .” “Miss Brice . . . is given many a chance to bring her delicious mimicry, her occasionally crossing eyes . . . and her knees that often are not on speaking terms with one another to skits and songs which gain enormously because of her ever-hilarious presence.”

  Josephine had once got such raves for her crossed eyes and her rubber knees; she must have wondered if God was playing a joke on her.

  The Amsterdam News reported that Josephine had told friends she regretted having come back to the States “because of the hostile attitude of the white public here.” And not just the white public, either. “Harlem observers feel the French star’s style of work is outmoded,” the paper added, noting that Josephine had opened in the Follies, “despite the rumor that she had been dropped from the cast.”

  It came close to being more than a rumor. Maude Russell was working with Fats Waller’s band at the Loew’s State Theater when representatives of the Shubert office approached her. “They wanted a replacement for Josephine because she wasn’t going over,” Maude says, “and I had opened on a Monday and got a beautiful write-up in the paper, so they came looking for me on Tuesday.

  “I said, ‘What happened to Miss Baker?’ They said she was acting up and they were fixing to get rid of her. At that time, nobody wanted to see a colored girl being twirled around with four white boys and dressed up like a queen. All those people were saying, ‘She’s black, trying to be white, why don’t she go on and be her original self like she was in Shuffle Along, when she was stickin’ her fanny out and looking ugly?’ But that same day, they had a conference with her and patched things up. I don’t know whether she ever knew they had talked to me. I never told her.”

  Fanny Brice denied that she had threatened to resign if Josephine stayed in the cast. “I have never snubbed a performer in my whole life,” she said. Maybe so, but Balanchine witnessed one unpleasant scene. “We were sitting at a run-through, Larry Hart, Josephine, Gertrude Niesen, Fanny Brice—she really didn’t like Josephine—and Josephine said something in French. ‘Ah, you nigger,’ Fanny Brice said, ‘why don’t you talk the way your mouth was born?’ ”

  Fred de Cordova, the movie director who would in time become producer of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, stage-managed the Follies. “I have the belief,” he told me, choosing his words with tact, “that there was no particular cordiality between Fanny and your mother.”

  Offstage, Josephine retreated to the safety of her lavish dressing room, where walls and ceiling were draped with sky-blue satin (the beloved blue of Clara Smith’s feather boa) and her feet rested on a white fur rug. “Next time my brother and I worked the Cotton Club,” Fayard Nicholas says, “we made our room all blue.”

  One night, after finishing her own show at Loew’s State, Maude Russell went to see Josephine in her dressing room. “She had changed into a beautiful blue outfit with a chiffon bottom, real frilly, and she sat there like a madonna, and when I walked in, she smiled sweetly.

  “I said, ‘Girl, you are something else.’ She said, ‘You liked it? They don’t seem to be taking to it here.’ I said, ‘If you had come here and they’d said you was a Moroccan or somebody, they would have accepted you to the hilt. But everybody in the world knows who Josephine Baker is now. My God, how does it feel to be a big star?’ And she said, ‘You get used to it.’

  “She was so different from the days when she was giggly, and falling over, now she was so elegant. She shook my hand, no hug, and I tried to talk about the old days, but she just cut that right off, she said, ‘France is very beautiful and fascinating,’ but she didn’t really make any conversation, and she didn’t offer me nothing, so I didn’t stay but a minute.”

  Pepito was gone now, and Josephine blamed him for her troubles. Why hadn’t he negotiated a better contract? Why hadn’t he let her quit this disaster of a show before it was too late?

  Maybe he just got tired of sailing against the wind. He couldn’t protect Josephine from her own hardheadedness, and he couldn’t protect either one of them from snide comments in the tabloids. For a proud man, it was hard to read, “Her major diversion is heckling the dapper and harried pencil-mustached fellow who says he is an Italian count and to whom she is married.”

  Jo Bouillon, Josephine’s last husband, insisted that she left “no further written account of this period of her life, nor would she talk about it. This was typical of her wish to suppress anything that wasn’t a personal victory. . . . Her failure to conquer New York in the Follies . . . barred her from a future in Hollywood.”

  Indeed, when Josephine came to New York, Hollywood was very much on her mind. And she was on Hollywood’s mind. The buzz was everywhere. She had been offered a major role in The Green Pastures, she had been offered a starring role in a movie with Paul Robeson. But after her reviews came out, the movie people’s courtship of her ceased. (Fortunately for her amour-propre, producers of stage musicals were less fickle. Ichizo Kobayashi, known as the Ziegfeld of Japan, was wild to have her do a production in one of his theaters—he said she was the best musical comedy actress he had ever seen—and though Josephine wouldn’t commit herself, she did say she thought Japan would be a nice place to work.)

  When Pepito came back to Paris, his friend Arys Nissotti (who had produced Zou Zou) was shocked by his appearance; he was jaundiced and seemed fragile. Nissotti attributed this to heartbreak. “Instead of returning to Le Vésinet,” he said, “Abatino moved into a hotel room on the rue de Marignan. I persuaded him to see my doctor because he complained of constant stomach pains. Immediately after the consultation, I received a call from my physician. ‘Your friend is dying of cancer.’ ”

  Nissotti never told Pepito; neither did the doctor.

  Upon returning from America, Pepito had sent a postcard to Miki Sawada, by then back in Tokyo. “The business between Josephine and me will be liquidated through common accord,” he wrote, “and each of us will go his new road in life. A thousand kisses to Emi. Pepito.” The postcard had a picture of the Place de la Concorde taken in the early morning before the traffic starts; the obelisk stands lonely in the square beside the Seine. Did he choose it because it reflected his own sadness, or am I only being fanciful?

  Stanley Rayburn, one of the Shubert officials who had signed Josephine’s contract, was now acting as her manager, though she scarcely knew him. He stood beside her when she announced that she was opening a nightclub on the site of Barbara Hutton’s old town house at 125 East Fifty-fourth Street. During the
day, the place was a restaurant called Le Mirage; late at night it would become Chez Joséphine.

  Frank Cerutti owned Le Mirage. “I was eleven years old when Josephine came to the club,” his daughter Doris says. “On the opening night, a friend of hers gave her a baby pig. We kept him in the basement, and Josephine took him back with her to France.

  “To me, she was a fascinating woman. I remember one night my father came home and said that an admirer had given her a brand-new Rolls-Royce! It was parked right outside!

  “At each table in the club, there was a glass figurine of Josephine in her famous bananas costume. She was wonderful with children, but she kept telling me, ‘You cannot come to see me, you cannot come.’ ”

  Doris’s sister, Anita, almost sneaked a look. “I was thirteen, and my father seated me at his table and said, ‘I want you to be very quiet, at any moment Josephine will come and perform.’ The room went dark, Josephine came upstairs from the kitchen carrying the white baby pig and wearing this gown that had to have cost a few thousand dollars, even in those days. Magnificent. She said hello to everyone and introduced the pig, and then came back to my father’s table and said I had to leave the room. ‘Frank, I will not perform in front of the children.’ So that’s as close as I came to seeing her nightclub act.”

  And no wonder. At Chez Joséphine, the star danced (in a number staged by Balanchine) the way she wasn’t permitted to dance at the Winter Garden. She worked almost naked, flanked by two white men who maneuvered around her in a wildly suggestive adagio. And the press, which had seemed to turn on her, was beguiled again. “The Baker bumps got going,” wrote journalist Cecilia Ager, “in a costume which amazed even her press agent.”

  Snippets from other nightclub columns:

  “She works at high tension from midnight until past 3.A.M. . . .”

  “She, if anyone, was the personification of that mad, pre-depression night life which put the gay in Paree for most Americans. . . . You who are homesick for Babylon, vintage 1928, may find an echo in East Fifty-fourth Street.”

  “In the right setting, Miss Baker is a bewitching performer, and the informality of a supper club is just the setting she wants.”

  These were reviews a girl could paper her room with. Now she was able to show what she could do when she was in charge, she could even wear the fabulous gowns she had brought from France.

  She was once again working two shows a night, this time hating the theater, enjoying the club, and the presence of celebrities at the front tables. The Count de Gramont came, and Cole Porter and Fred Astaire, and Paul Robeson. Years later, Stanley Rayburn said Josephine had not wanted “colored patronage.” “What few colored people did come were seated as far back in the rear as possible. She never mixed with them. . . . She wanted to be among white people.”

  The singer Dick Campbell disagrees. Campbell played in Hot Chocolates on Broadway, he played the Savoy Ballroom, and when I interviewed him, he was eighty-eight years old. “Colored people just didn’t have the money,” he says. “I went there once, it was costly. And except for Birdland, black people didn’t go to downtown clubs much. They stayed in Harlem, they went to Small’s, and the Nest.”

  In May 1936, Haile Selassie lost his throne, Mussolini was decorated by his king for service to the “Fascist Fatherland,” Robert E. Sherwood’s antiwar play, Idiot’s Delight (on Broadway with the Lunts), won the Pulitzer Prize, and Paul Derval of the Folies-Bergère showed up in Josephine’s dressing room at the Winter Garden. He had been out front. “They don’t give you much of a break, do they?” he said.

  He asked if she wanted to be in his next show, to open in October. “I threw my arms around his neck,” she said.

  “I sat down in a white satin chair,” he recalled, “whereupon Josephine began to scream. . . . I assumed that she was just getting worked up for her usual outrageous salary demands. . . . As it turned out, she was having a fit because I had sat on top of her chihuahua.”

  They worked out the deal at Chez Joséphine, in the wee hours of the morning. The star made her own contract. (When she returned to Paris, she told Maurice Bataille how proud she was. “It’s a good deal, a fortune.”)

  Since one of the stipulations in the new contract was that she could choose the people she wanted to work with, she chose the dancer Paul Meeres (with whom she was also sleeping) to costar in the Folies-Bergère. A light-skinned West Indian, Meeres, like Jacques Pills, was famous for his “dependable object.” Before going onstage, chorus girls used to run into his dressing room and touch it for good luck. Meeres was married, but that had never stopped Josephine, and Meeres’s wife, Thelma, left behind, felt apprehensive. “The French women will go mad over my Paul,” she said.

  Paul Meeres and Josephine sailed on the Normandie on May 26, immediately after the Ziegfeld Follies closed. (The closing was blamed on Fanny Brice’s neuritis, but several people in the cast assured me that Josephine had given Fanny a nervous breakdown.) The minute she hit the deck of the French ship, Josephine felt lighter. In the beauty salon, she found Jean Clement, her old friend and hairdresser; every night she dined at the captain’s table, restored to her royal position. Her reckless mother’s loss of the family house, Fanny Brice, the cruel theater critics—it had been a bad dream and it was already receding.

  Chapter 25

  ANOTHER HUSBAND, MORE LOVERS, AND SEX, SEX, SEX

  “She knew I was gay but she had to possess you”

  Back in her beloved Paris, she was surprised to find herself lonely. “Without Pepito,” she observed, “Le Beau Chêne was an empty shell.”

  “He had been so much part of her life,” says Maurice Bataille. “Like a shadow. She asked me to come and stay at Beau Chêne. In the day, she kept herself busy going to the Folies-Bergère, getting on with the rehearsals for the new show, but at night, she could not be alone.

  “She went to call on my mother, dressed in a sober dark-blue suit, and carrying a large bouquet of red roses. She knelt in front of my mother and said, ‘Madame, I have the honor to ask you for the hand of your son Maurice.’

  “My mother helped her to her feet. ‘My little Josephine, it is Maurice you should ask.’ And can you imagine? That scenario was repeated four times.”

  Why hadn’t Maurice married Josephine? I put the question, and he shrugged. “I was in no rush, that’s all.”

  While Josephine was begging Madame Bataille for her son, Carrie Martin took a husband without asking anyone’s permission. On June 17, 1936, Josephine’s mother became Mrs. Tony Hudson in St. Louis. She hadn’t even confided her plan to the daughter with whom she shared a house. “My husband went upstairs where Mama lived,” Margaret told me, “and she was all dressed up, and she said, ‘I’m getting married.’ Elmo came back downstairs, astonished. ‘Your mother’s getting married today!’ So then I rushed up and she told me, ‘It’s none of your business.’ ”

  A month after Carrie’s latest wedding, Elvira died of old age. Another door had closed. Elvira, the little slave girl with the long silky hair, was gone, and with her, the secrets of her blood. “Maybe there was some Blackhawk Indian in my grandmother,” Richard told me. “But she always said her family had struggled on the desert, and from that I thought she was African.”

  Beau Chêne without Pepito, St. Louis without Elvira, neither place would ever again be the same for Josephine.

  She now became even more obsessed with having a baby. “Doctor after doctor had told her she could not,” says Maurice Bataille, “and my mother finally sent her to a famous gynecologist, Professor Alexandre Couvelaire.”

  By the time I started researching this book, Alexandre Couvelaire was dead, but I was able to speak with his son, René, a professor of urology. “I met Josephine,” he said, “when my father went on vacation and left her my phone number. She called me to Beau Chêne. My father had told me she had a congenital malformation of the uterus and could not conceive a child. He took care of her until the war started, then he destroyed his dossiers bec
ause he did not want them to fall into German hands.”

  She went, says Maurice Bataille, from one medical man to another, some reputable, some quacks. I once said that Josephine had a fairy godmother watching over her cradle. Really, there were two of them, and they could never agree. One said, “You are going to be black”; the other said, “Yes, but I’m going to put some milk in your coffee.” One said, “You are going to be a great sex symbol”; the other said, “Yes, but you are not going to be able to bear children.”

  The sets and costumes for En Super Folies were being designed by Michel Gyarmathy, and Josephine told him he could do whatever he liked, as long as she was center stage at all times. And as long as everything was white.

  “Michel, you understand, in the North Pole number, I want white snow, white furs, white sled dogs; in the circus number, there should be a white parade; in The Fairy Dream, I will be queen of the white country . . .”

  He understood. Gyarmathy, a young Hungarian, had first met Josephine in Budapest in 1928. “I was a student at the Beaux-Arts, and she was playing two shows a day, doing some sketches in Hungarian, and doubling every night at the Moulin Rouge cabaret. The Moulin Rouge held a contest for the best poster to announce Josephine, and I won first prize.

  “She impressed me very much. She impressed all the Hungarians, because of her hairdo—all glued back, black, polished—and her music and the way she held herself. Women imitated her, they used the Bakerfix. When I met her again eight years later at the Folies-Bergère, she was just back from the Ziegfeld Follies, where she had not done well.