“She was beautiful and wanted to forget that she was a woman of color. She did her hair like the Parisian women, long and curly, wore light makeup. . . . She wanted to be married to a white man . . . she did not want to know that her color played a great part in her success at that time.”
Josephine worked hard in rehearsals, but she also threw her weight around. No other artist could have his name printed as large as hers in programs or on posters for En Super Folies, all publicity would revolve around her, and she could fire whom she liked.
“By now,” Gyarmathy says, “Josephine’s talent was not disputable, she shone in the sky of international stars. She no longer thanked . . . her audience with words, she threw kisses with those admirable hands, long, narrow, supple, capable, and she was good to everyone she worked with—except the too talented ones and the ones with no talent. There she was exactly like all the other stars, including Mistinguett. For Miss, the ideal partner was the partner who served her well but wasn’t noticed.”
For some reason, Josephine took Gyarmathy for a soulmate, confessing her deepest anxieties. “You see, Michel, I do not like myself deep inside. And you will understand me because you are Jewish, and the skin of a Jew is as easy to recognize as the skin of a black, so I know you hate your skin, and at the same time want to claim justice for your brothers.”
This was news to Michel. That there were black Jews, white Jews, brown and yellow Jews, and their skins were not colored by their religious beliefs had never dawned on Josephine, who was convinced of what she was saying. Again, she told him her father was a Spanish Jew—this was a story she came back to with great regularity—so there was double persecution in her history. “I would like to be white,” she said, “and go to crusade for those who are black. Michel, I’m talking to you, Michel . . .”
Weary of these intense and sometimes lunatic confidences, Michel would try to steer the talk in another direction. “Josephine, I have a beautiful white fox cape for you to wear in the North Pole sketch . . .”
En Super Folies provided Josephine with two fine dancing partners—not only Paul Meeres, but Frédéric Rey, a young man who had been smuggled out of Vienna without a passport when Mistinguett hid him in a wardrobe trunk.
Fred Rey, Gyarmathy recalled, “was making all the girls lovesick, but they despaired. He was not eating that kind of meat.”
“Josephine knew I was gay,” Rey says, “but she did not care: I had to sleep with her. Since we were dancing together almost in the nude, I guess it made her feel better. She had to possess you. When we danced, she let herself go with total abandon, so she had to know her partner well. Once I slept with her, we were good friends, and it never happened again. She was half that way herself, or at least she had the soul of a gay person.”
On September 21, two weeks after the opening, Pepito died.
“The last time I saw him,” said André Rivollet, “was in the pink of a spring morning, near the Parc Monceau. He was gaunt, coughing, shabby-looking, no brilliantine in his hair . . . ruined, perhaps, after a difficult tour in America. Racial laws had kept them apart; she stayed in Harlem while he strutted about in a classy hotel on Fifth Avenue. They became estranged and he tried to cash in.
“As her ex-manager, he claimed damages, demanding the larger part of the fortune she had made with his unselfish help! No talk of love or friendship now. But she showed her gratitude after his death. She asked me to escort her to his funeral service in Neuilly. He had lived there with a beautiful redhead from the Folies. Flanked by two lines of chorus girls in mourning, I walked behind the widow-in-title, carrying a huge heart of red roses that I laid on the coffin.
“Josephine mourned with dignity. She glanced with pity across the wreaths at her white-skinned substitute. Being romantic and possessive, she decided she wanted his body and would have a marble mausoleum built for him in his native Sicily. It would be as large as a Renaissance palace, it would be sparkling as a show at the Casino! Meanwhile, the coffin stayed in a drawer of the crypt of the church in Neuilly. A temporary resting place that almost became eternal.”
For some months after Pepito’s funeral, Maurice Bataille told me, if he happened to be driving Josephine within three blocks of the church at Neuilly, she would start to scream. “I don’t want to go so near Pepito, he has the evil eye on me.”
Anna Sosenko, musician, producer, and manager of the singer Hildegarde (“I created Hildegarde!”) knew Josephine and Pepito in the thirties. “He was the brain,” she says. “He did the dirty work, and the minute she thought she didn’t need him anymore, kaput. I don’t think she felt the loss of Pepito until she had to fight on her own, until she had managers to whom she was just another act.
“These people always think everything came to them naturally, but nothing comes naturally. The talent is there, but you have to get somebody who can nourish it. That happens once in a lifetime if you’re lucky. When Josephine had problems at the end of her career, nobody could really help her out. She was shrewd, but she did not have vision, this came from him. She was impulsive, first she did it, then she thought about it. I think she had as much understanding as you can have when the whole wide world is telling you how great you are, but I think a good part of her died when Pepito died.”
It wasn’t until April 1937 that Josephine wrote to Miki Sawada in Japan to say she was at the Folies, having an “enormous success,” and adding that Pepito had “passed away. No need to tell you I was much distressed, you know he was only 37. . . . He had a liver cancer. You see that in any case we are not a big thing on this earth, and it is useless to grieve oneself or complicate one’s existence as we do. But let’s not talk about it anymore, the subject is so sad.”
In the next sentence, she was on to other matters. Beau Chêne was marvelous, she was going to make another film, and right this minute, “while I’m writing to you, I have a little rabbit on my knees. . . . Here, everybody is getting ready for the Exposition.”
The Exposition Internationale opened in May, foreshadowing things to come. Albert Speer had designed the German Pavilion, over which a Nazi flag billowed. Parisians could not have guessed that within three years, all public buildings in the city would be flying the swastika.
Josephine’s association with Pepito had not, as it developed, ended cleanly; all her possessions were still in his name, and it took a while for her to regain houses, jewels, the Bakerfix royalties, the music publishing company. She had a good lawyer, but even so, she had to give a portion of her fortune to Pepito’s sister. Oddly, she harbored no resentment. After Pepito died, she wrote to Christina Scotto saying, “You are the only family I have.”
That she had no sense of money had been proven beyond a doubt in New York, when she signed the contract with Paul Derval and told herself how clever she had been. She was to get half the box office take, true enough, but out of that, she had to pay salaries for cast and musicians, along with various other production costs that would have left her next to nothing. Mortified and incensed when she discovered this, she told Derval she would not appear, the services of the good lawyer were once again called into play, and a new contract for En Super Folies was negotiated.
A love letter from Josephine to her public was printed in the program. It said she had often sung of her two loves, “My country and Paris,” but now she wanted the audience to understand, “My country, it is Paris, and Paris, it is my country.”
She had cut the United States out of the equation.
But she was still proud of the accomplishments of fellow Americans. When Leslie Gaines, a dancer who was one of The Three Dukes, opened (with Chevalier) at the Casino de Paris, Josephine not only attended the premiere, she climbed up to the Dukes’ dressing room. “Here comes this gorgeous lady,” said Gaines (nicknamed Bubber). “And she said, ‘I’m Josephine Baker, I’m at the Folies-Bergère, and you’ll never know how you thrilled me.’
“We’re looking at her, we don’t know what to say except, ‘Oh thank you, Miss Baker,’
and she says, ‘I want you to come around to the Folies-Bergère.’
“She was so warm and human, and my God, there was nobody in France the people loved more than her. Josephine was the Frenchmen’s mistress.”
An unpunctual mistress, who was always late for her own show. “Sometimes she had a new love or something else on her mind,” says Michel Gyarmathy.
In the second half of En Super Folies, she appeared in a number called “The Marvelous Jungle,” seated on a papier-mâché elephant painted jade and gold. Once the applause faded, she got off the elephant and drifted down the stairs. There always had to be a reason to use those stairs. “But one day,” Gyarmathy recalls, “she was so late that she jumped on the elephant in her street clothes. After dismounting, she came down the staircase very dignified, starting to undress, and handing her clothes to chorus kids all the way down. They would run off and bring her costume back to her piece by piece. It was so beautiful I wanted to keep it in the show, have her do it every day.
“Derval said no. ‘Or she will never show up on time.’ ”
During the run, Mistinguett would sometimes visit Derval’s office. “How is the show doing?” she would ask. “How is—I forget her name—that colored girl, my substitute?” Josephine retaliated with innocent sarcasm, always referring publicly to Mistinguett’s “long” career and her brave beginnings “back in 1895.”
Josephine was then singing at the top of her form—her records were selling well—and since she never liked to go right home after the show, she agreed to open another club. Jean Merlin, director of Paris’s Hôtel Château Frontenac, had made her the offer; the club—called Gerny’s Cabaret—was in the basement of the hotel. It had been run by a man named Louis Leplée, who discovered Edith Piaf singing in the street and, moved by the scrawny young girl’s voice, hired her. He also changed her name from Edith Gassion to Edith Piaf—“like the Paris sparrow.”
For her opening at Gerny’s, Piaf had worn a black dress knitted by her sister, and stared out nervously at the chic audience as Louis Leplée introduced her. “From the street to the cabaret, here is La Môme Piaf.”
The audience didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, said Piaf’s biographer, Simone Berteaut. “Her poor hair looked like a bad wig, her lipstick so red, her face so white, her hands shaking, the badly made black dress on her small body.”
After she finished her first song, there was a long silence. “It was painful,” Piaf remembered, “it grabbed me by the throat. At that moment, people started to applaud, it was like everything breaking, like rain on a drum. In my corner, I started to cry. . . . I heard the voice of Louis saying, ‘You’ve got them, La Môme.’ ”
But Piaf’s world was the streets—pimps, gangsters, soldiers, sailors—and it came to Louis Leplée’s door and ended his life. “Leplée was gay, and both he and Edith had the same taste for rough-looking men,” says Jean Merlin’s wife, Odette, “and they killed him.”
Gerny’s Cabaret closed. But Jean Merlin had started thinking about the tourists who would be coming from all over the world to the Expo, and that’s when the club became the latest Chez Joséphine.
Its star was more skittish than ever. “Some nights,” Odette Merlin says, “she would just come and take a look at the room, always very crowded, and if she did not like the people, she would have Jean call Chez O’dett, and ask Piaf to come and sing in her stead. Can you imagine how surprised all those chic people were when Edith showed up with her stained little dress? And when, at the end, she would take off her black beret and go from table to table passing the hat?”
The night the journalist Pierre de Regnier visited, Josephine was on, and he loved it. “Everything is pink, the mirrors, the leather, the glasses, the lighting.” Josephine sang and distributed funny hats. “It amuses the guests. . . . At 4 A.M. when a few customers start to leave . . . you can find Josephine doing washing in her dressing room.”
“She would wash Jacques Constant’s dirty laundry, his socks, underwear, shirts, in the sink of her bathroom at Chez Joséphine,” says Manouche (a beauty who became the mistress of Paul Carbone, the Al Capone of France, and bore him a son).
A successful stage director, Jacques Constant was, according to Manouche, “a Don Juan with a nice tail. He had slept with our Josephine Nationale, as we called her, and she was in love with him. When she was doing his laundry, she was a very big star, but she never fully understood that. At the same time, she was flirting with Jean Lion, the good-looking, blond, blue-eyed one that she would marry later on. Josephine loved to do partouzes, orgies.”
I’ve thought a lot about Josephine and her sexual conquests. Sleep with me, show me you accept me, and after that, maybe we can be friends. She used her body as a weapon against the world because it was the only thing she trusted, it had got her where she was. But scrub the makeup off the mythical Josephine of the stage, daring, modern, free, the one feminists claim as their own, and underneath, you find the little girl from St. Louis who had so much to prove. They can say what they like about her voracious carnal appetites; I think the primary object of the game was power.
She played a different—nonsexual—power game with poor Paul Derval, and he always lost. Once, she canceled a Sunday matinee, using illness as an excuse. “She was with me in her apartment at avenue Bugeaud,” says Maurice Bataille. “That apartment she kept for herself.” Like her first hotel room in Montmartre, the ceiling was mirrored; so were the walls. “That Sunday,” Maurice told me, half embarrassed, half amazed, “we had sex nine times.”
A week later, Josephine again failed to show up at the theater. She phoned Derval to say she was in the country, had shot a fox, and would send the fur to Madame Derval. “I hope she’ll like it.” She also said she would return in two days. For another five thousand francs.
“She came back,” Michel Gyarmathy said, “with her ménagerie of monkeys, goats, dogs, and said, ‘On top of all this, I have a zebra.’ We were relieved to see she’d had him flattened before bringing him into her dressing room.”
Made into rugs, or living and breathing, she adored animals “the way humans adore them,” says Gyarmathy, “making them prisoners of our caresses.
“One night, we couldn’t find the most malicious of her monkeys. As the curtain rose, Josephine, all in feathers, walked out onto the apron of the stage to explain to the theatergoers that the show could not start until we had found her baby ouistiti. Then we saw the orchestra fall to their knees, searching under their seats, calling ‘Petit, petit, petit.’ It looked like a gathering of Muslims at prayer in the mosque. When at last the darling was found, hanging onto the neck of a terrified lady in the audience, the revue began in a thunderous atmosphere.”
The company didn’t have to put up with Josephine’s animals for long; during one of her disappearances, she had signed a contract to appear in London in December.
Derval couldn’t believe his ears. “My dear Josephine, you have no right to leave me, I have a contract, you owe me two more months of work—to be exact, nine weeks.”
She was the injured one. Did he want her to break her word to the people in London? He gave up.
Jean Lion, the flame with whom Maurice Bataille was then sharing her, rode horses, flew planes, hunted. But he was not, as reports had it, a millionaire. His company, begun in 1935, consisted of three partners: Maurice Sachou, Albert Ribac, and himself. They were sugar brokers.
“We were the three of us childhood friends,” Albert Ribac says. “We each put in five thousand francs to begin the business, and we made good money. We had a plane, we had American cars, but that’s all. Jean was not a rich industrialist. We met Josephine at her cabaret in the Hôtel Château Frontenac, Josephine and Jean liked each other, and it flattered Jean.
“One day, the three of us partners were in our office on avenue Matignon, and Jean said, ‘What would you say if I married Josephine Baker?’ ‘You would be a fool,’ we said. ‘What’s the need? You already sleep with her.’
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��But Jean had political ambitions, and he thought Josephine’s popularity could help him.”
On November 30, 1937, they were married. Only a week before, Josephine had spent the night with Maurice Bataille, and in the morning, he confronted her. “I’ve heard you are going to marry Jean, is it true?” She laughed. “Oh no, that’s gossip for the journalists.”
She had dissembled as well with André Rivollet. He and his mother had spent many hours “as a family” at Beau Chêne, where “poplars, privets, spindle-trees shadowed white statues. . . . I can see Josephine running to her bedroom. She hummed from her balcony, and one day roses landed at my feet. They smelled of musk, cedar, and ambergris. She had sprayed them with Oriental scents! Josephine caressed my mother, signed her letters, ‘Your black daughter.’
“One day a friend said, ‘Congratulations, I heard of your forthcoming marriage. At a cocktail party yesterday, Josephine Baker announced, “I marry Rivollet.” ’ I thought he was kidding me. A few days later, my mother asked me to take her to the Folies for the first time in her life. During intermission, we went to Josephine’s dressing room. Josephine was peeling off her false eyelashes, and she invited my mother to sit. A bell sounded. Time to change costumes. I moved discreetly into the corridor. My mother stayed in the dressing room, making small talk.
“I’m a few steps away from the stage, naked women brushing past me with fragrant thighs. Suddenly Josephine appeared beside me, a goddess with huge eyes, tiara, gold nipples. ‘Wait!’ she said. ‘I am going to ask your mother for your hand right now.’
“ ‘Look, Joe,’ I said, ‘you’ll miss your entrance, we’ll talk later.’ I tried to break free, but she held me with her gold nails until the stage manager pulled her away. . . . The discipline of the music hall put a stop to her attack.
“Where had that proposal come from? I had the explanation a few weeks later. An anonymous phone call, a woman’s voice saying, ‘Josephine Baker gets married tomorrow!’ And the voice adding that I should use my influence to stop the madness, saying the future groom’s only virtue was his good looks.
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