Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  “I was puzzled, and ran to the Folies that evening.”

  Rivollet asked Josephine about the rumor, and she denied it. “She pulls her kimono around her body . . . tears fill her eyes. ‘You know all about my life, how could you believe . . . if I were to marry anyone, it would be you.’ ”

  The next day, at lunch in Neuilly, he heard the news from Jean Prouvost, the owner of Paris-Soir. “Josephine Baker got married!”

  “I was hurt in my pride,” Rivollet admitted, but gave himself reasons for Josephine’s action. “She had searched high and low for a white husband. Too many potential lovers, not one potential husband. Eventually I realized that she believed she would be legitimized if she married a white man.”

  On their wedding day, Josephine and Lion arrived in his village of Crèvecoeur-le-Grand to traditional sounds of greeting—hunters firing shotguns, percussion caps being thrown under the feet of horses and cows and geese, not to mention the more modern sounds of photographers’ shutters clicking and reporters yelling out questions.

  Jean Lion’s parents were Jewish, they were bourgeois, they had not harbored dreams of their beloved son’s marrying a black woman, but they were dutifully present for the ceremony, and the entire population of the village cheered the couple as they made their way into the city hall.

  He was twenty-seven, she was thirty-one; Paul Derval and Georges Lion (Jean’s brother) were the principal witnesses. On the wedding license, Josephine gave her parents’ names as Arthur Baker and Carrie McDonald. The mayor of the village, Benjamin Schmidt, pronounced himself delighted by the goings-on. “Heretofore, the prominence of our village has been confined to a fifteenth-century château and our famous black chicken hatcheries,” he said. “Hereafter, it will be known as the village La Belle Baker chose for her wedding.”

  In a sable coat, she became a French bride, and a French citizen. (Or so it seemed. Since, as far as anybody knows, she was still legally married to Billy Baker, this latest “wedding” to a Frenchman did not confer on her the nationality she would claim—and flaunt—from that day forward.) She later told the press that she would be leaving show business, after the upcoming English date. “I have finished with the exotic,” she said, “you won’t see me dashing around with my pet cheetah any more. Home, children . . . those are the things I am looking forward to now. . . . I lived for my public, for the excitement of show life. Now I am a little bit tired, perhaps the time has come for me to say goodbye. Then I shall not be Josephine Baker, just plain Madame Lion.”

  Not so plain. Jean had exquisite taste, and he brought elegance to Beau Chêne. It had already been furnished expensively, but with flamboyance, Josephine and Pepito being, after all, show people. Now the newlyweds had linens embroidered with gold thread from the house of Noel, and eighteenth-century crystal chandeliers from Baccarat, and servants in white gloves waiting table in the grand dining room where sixty-four people could be seated.

  What they did not have was a marriage.

  “Jean was the type,” Albert Ribac says, “who would get bored with a woman—before Josephine, and during Josephine, he was going out with girls, and he would ask me to join them. I would tell him, ‘Two is a couple, three is a crowd,’ but to be honest, I didn’t complain that much because I picked up his crumbs.

  “It was not a grand amour on Josephine’s part either. She was impossible, so was he. He was a tombeur, a lady killer, but it was involuntary, I must say, women just fell for him. The atmosphere around them was dreadful, fights, screams, you had to leave.”

  Maurice Bataille liked Jean Lion, but believes that he spent—in one year—five million francs of Josephine’s money. Even the four-carat diamond he gave her on their wedding day had been cut down from a thirty-carat heirloom presented by one of her protectors. Jean said the thirty-carat ring was old-fashioned.

  Four days after the wedding, Josephine received her French passport; by December 18, she was performing in London on the first leg of her “farewell” tour. She told one reporter her new husband sent her two letters a day and phoned every afternoon. She told another reporter, “I feel we might be divorced in the next three months.” Score one for Albert Ribac.

  A macho Frenchman, Jean wanted to make the rules. He kept his own apartment on avenue Victor-Emmanuel, but he moved to Beau Chêne. Now Josephine came home from England to discover her house was often filled with his relatives. She played at domesticity, sitting with Jean’s mother, knitting little garments, Mrs. Willie Wells all over again. She let everyone believe she was pregnant, the girl of the Roaring Twenties tamed at last. Then: “I lost my baby. . . . Mama Lion did her best to comfort me. . . . I wanted to flee, like an animal that hides in the forest to nurse his grief.”

  “She was never pregnant,” says Ribac. “I saw Jean every day, and I would have known it.” Even so, newspapers ran with the story. INTERNATIONALLY FAMED DANCER BEARS CHILD FOR WEALTHY WHITE HUSBAND IN PARIS announced the Amsterdam News. Josephine never denied that she was a new mother any more than she had denied—until trapped—that she was a new countess; all publicity was good publicity. And anyway, there was a baby lion (lowercase l) in her life; she had recently christened him at the zoo. Now things would be fine as soon as she could move some of the two-legged Lions out of her house.

  She used to come to Blanche Guignery with her woes. “She had lost her gaiety,” says Madame Guignery. “She could no longer go around naked, that made her a prisoner in her own house, and she couldn’t run things because Jean’s mother was in charge. There were sometimes twenty people, mostly Jean’s family, living at Beau Chêne.” One of them, Jean’s brother Georges, became Josephine’s financial adviser. “He would tell me, ‘She’s impossible,’ ” Albert Ribac says.

  Nonetheless, for a short time, Jean and Josephine were seen everywhere together, this amazingly good-looking couple at the races and at supper clubs, entertained and entertaining. Lydia Jones, then living in Paris with her husband, Ed, and their two children, remembers Jean Lion as “very elegant. Josephine took him away from the actress Simone Simon. But she kept pestering him all the time, I think she really drove him away by pestering him.”

  In her unhappiness with her new family, Josephine escaped the only way she knew, to her old family, the public. She went back on the road. So much for a farewell tour. Tony Clyde, a dancer who had been with her in En Super Folies, was in her troupe. “We were out for fifteen months, and they were very agreeable. She wanted all of us to sound very French, so she changed my name to Gaston Lefort, which I did not like, but agreed to.

  “I was her porteur, and with her high heels and feathers, she was taller than me. We were sold out every night, and Josephine got not only a big salary but a percentage of the box office.

  “In Norway, we couldn’t play—someone from the royal family had died, and some of our numbers were too daring. In one, Josephine and I were almost nude, and her gold G-string was minimal, but in my whole artistic life, I never saw a body as fabulous as hers.”

  For South America, Josephine auditioned potential dance partners on the stage of the Folies-Bergère. (The long-suffering Derval gave her the use of the hall.) “It was like a slave auction,” said a dancer who used the stage name Chalin. “We had to show our muscles, she came onstage and poked our bodies like you examine a cow in a livestock auction.”

  She hired Chalin, but refused to give his dancer girlfriend a part in the show. The troupe’s departure from the Gare d’Orsay was marked by an army of journalists, and Jean Lion presented Josephine with a wreath of violets as tall as she was. Then the train took the performers to Bordeaux, from which port they sailed on the Massillia.

  Chalin proved indifferent to Josephine’s sexual advances, even after she summoned him to her cabin, where she was lying naked on the floor. “Look at my body,” she said, “all the world is in love with that body, why are you so arrogant?” Spurned, she was “very nasty. But she still wanted me to teach her some new steps. She was not a good student, she danced he
r own way.

  “We played in three casinos in Brazil with a lot of success. Then Jean Lion came to visit her, and they had a big fight. Josephine had her household statements sent from France, and she discovered that Jean had charged her account for the wreath of violets at the Gare d’Orsay. She called him a thief, and he left.”

  On February 1, still in Brazil, Josephine filed for divorce.

  Chapter 26

  JOSEPHINE GOES TO WAR

  “I am ready to give the Parisians my life”

  The came home to Paris in July 1939, and found change everywhere. Posters appeared on the walls: “Because of the aggressive attitude of the German government, the government of the Republic has declared a general mobilization. You will answer with courage, discipline, and composure the call of the fatherland in danger.”

  With the situation in Europe deteriorating, Henri Varna’s plans to put on a Brazilian extravaganza—for which Josephine had brought him two new South American dances—were abandoned. On September 1, the German army (having annexed Austria and—with the help of Hungary—dismembered Czechoslovakia) marched into Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war against Germany. France believed it was protected by the Maginot line, a system of fortifications that included underground bunkers, munitions dumps, power stations, and stretched along the country’s northeastern frontier, from Switzerland to Montmédy.

  Hitler’s generals, who had not put their faith in fixed defenses, but moved armies and matériel with lightning speed, would eventually run around the Maginot line, but for nine months of the drôle de guerre (the phony war), they made no move to do so. Their blitzkrieg roared through Norway and Denmark, lulling France into a false sense of security. The French, says historian Louis L. Snyder, “apparently anesthetized by Hitler’s war of nerves, even demobilized some of their troops and sent them home.”

  It was during this period that Chevalier and Josephine first went to the Maginot line to entertain the troops. For him, who had done all this before, in the Grande Guerre, it was déjà vu, but to Josephine it was new and intoxicating.

  Chevalier, claiming to be the bigger star, wanted to sing last, so Josephine agreed to take the stage first. The problem was that, having taken it, she seemed determined to keep it. She sang on and on, the soldiers cheering raucously. Many of them had never been to Paris, they were from villages that didn’t have electricity—there was no electricity in my village in 1943—and even if they had heard of Josephine Baker, they had never seen her. So while his co-star hogged the glory, Chevalier (at fifty-one, a father figure to that audience) waited his turn. When he finally got it, he muttered, “Josephine, you too will age.”

  Toward the end of October, Henri Varna, Josephine, Chevalier, and Nita Raya (Chevalier’s lady friend, a Jewish singer of Rumanian birth) put together a new show at the Casino de Paris. It was called, aptly, Paris-London. Blackouts, curfews, rationing were already in effect, and Varna wanted to do something cheerful for the boys—English as well as French—who would be coming to Paris on forty-eight-hours’ leave.

  The theater was always full. Josephine’s final song, “Mon Coeur Est un Oiseau des Îles,” was the prettiest Vincent Scotto had ever given her. (He wrote it for Fausse Alerte, the movie she was shooting during the hours when she wasn’t at the theater. Though Fausse Alerte was set during the phony war, it was a comedy.)

  When Josephine sang that her heart was an island bird, she could make a soldier believe she was singing only to him, believe he would go back to the front with the kiss of Josephine on his lips. That was her magic. She had seen East St. Louis burning, but from across the river; now she was in the thick of the action, France was at war, and she was ready to go all the way for her adopted country.

  The country itself seemed more ambivalent. It was a strange time; except for the soldiers in the street, you could have pretended everything was normal. “In 1914,” Louis Snyder wrote, “the French had gone to war in an outburst of patriotic enthusiasm. In 1939, they answered the call to arms like somnambulists, without spirit. . . . Sit it out. Nothing would happen. We French won’t be bled again . . . that vulgar madman across the Rhine would stop his nonsense sooner or later.”

  Much of France lived with illusions, but Jacques Abtey had lost his. As an officer working in the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence service at the beginning of the war, his job was to enlist patriots he wouldn’t have to pay, since he had no budget to hire professionals. The newcomers would be working for la gloire et la patrie, not le cash.

  “It was a delicate situation,” he says. “We needed people—we called them Honorable Correspondents—who could travel around without attracting attention, and who would be able to report what they saw. One of them, Daniel Marouani, the most successful theatrical agent in France, was a Tunisian Jew, and he is the one who suggested Josephine Baker. He said, ‘She is more French than the French.’ ”

  The French secret service rarely recruited women, but Abtey and Marouani (who knew Josephine, and set up the meeting) went to Beau Chêne. They walked up the winding driveway, and heard somebody call hello. “Then she appeared above the bushes,” Abtey remembered, “a banged-up old hat on her head, one hand holding a rusted can full of snails, which she was collecting to feed her ducks. . . .

  “A maître d’ in white jacket led us toward the salon, where a fire was burning and a bottle of champagne was waiting . . . I found myself in front of a real patriot. ‘France made me what I am,’ she said. ‘The Parisians gave me their hearts, and I am ready to give them my life. . . .’ ”

  For her part, Josephine was delighted to find Abtey young, blond, blue-eyed, the Nordic type she fancied. “She walked us to the door two hours later,” he said. “Night had fallen, it was cool, and the open can was now empty of the snails, who had gone back to their bushes.”

  Soon, Josephine informed Abtey that she had available to her two promising sources of information. Renzo Sawada was by now the Japanese ambassador to France, and she knew the family very well. Not only that, but she had good connections with Italian diplomats. (Her support for Mussolini had guaranteed such connections, though she didn’t feel called upon to mention this small error in judgment.) She could go to receptions at the Japanese and Italian embassies, and report back what had been said. Poor Miki Sawada. Sisterly devotion was swallowed up in Josephine’s zeal to prove herself a patriot.

  “Sometimes,” Abtey said, “she would write along her arms, and in the palm of her hand, the things she heard. I told her this was dangerous, but she laughed. ‘Oh, nobody would think I’m a spy.’ ”

  Almost at once, she had become Abtey’s lover, as well as his student. “She was not a crazy sex-obsessed person,” he says. “We could go one or two weeks without having sex.” At first, he worried about whether she was calm enough for intelligence work. Once, out driving, she was trying to tell him something she had heard at the Italian embassy, and she got so nervous she lost control of the car.

  As 1939 wound down, she was frantically busy. She had her assignments from the Deuxième Bureau, she was filming Fausse Alerte, every night she played at the Casino, and every Saturday afternoon she did a radio show, singing in French and English for the soldiers at the front.

  Then it was Christmas again. Josephine had a secretary come to Beau Chêne to send records and pictures to her four thousand “godsons of war,” and to help answer mail. One letter arrived from Maurice Blech, the blond boy who had seen La Revue Nègre every night of its first week (the boy she had taken to bed), and she answered it. “You are the last person I was expecting to hear from,” she wrote, going on to tell about her broadcasts, her Red Cross duties (“I’m Chief of Entertainment for Aviators”), her new animals. “Two little white mice that each gave birth to five baby mice . . . they look exactly like miniature little pigs. Thank you for asking me to be godmother of your unit, I accept with joy. Unfortunately, I cannot come and visit you for the moment because our revue at the Casino will last unti
l the end of May. After that, I think I will start again a tour of army bases. . . . I kiss you all affectionately. Your godmother who loves you.”

  Jean Lion was now at the front, and Josephine had a new lover, Jean Menier, heir to a chocolate fortune. Their engagement made the front pages, though Josephine’s divorce from Lion would not become final until April 1941. Menier gave her a ring, and went off join his regiment.

  Early in 1940, Jean Lion was seriously wounded, and Josephine asked Albert Ribac to take her to see him. “She cried all during the trip,” Ribac says. “Both ways. She was screaming, ‘My hero!’ As with all great actresses, she was fantastic, capricious, and a pain in the neck.”

  On May 10, the Germans hit the Low Countries all along the western front. The Dutch capitulated in less than a week, the Belgians held out for eighteen days, until King Leopold III ordered his troops to surrender. (In the Cartier shop on rue de la Paix, Leopold’s picture was taken out of the window and English Queen Mary’s put in its place.) Leopold’s decision saved Belgian lives, but put British and French soldiers in jeopardy. “The thunder burst,” says Jacques Abtey. “Thunder in Belgium, thunder over the Dutch. It was the end of the funny war on the terraces of Paris cafés.”

  Paris was filled with refugees fleeing before the Germans. Every night after finishing at the Casino, Josephine ran to a homeless shelter on rue du Chevaleret, and did what she could to comfort new arrivals. In times of crisis she was magnificent; petty selfishness abandoned, she made beds, bathed old people, whispered words of comfort, and kept her eyes and ears open.

  Abtey had warned her that vermin—an enemy fifth column—always preceded an invading army, and she took the warning to heart. “One night,” said Dominique Gianviti, then one of Abtey’s coworkers, “Josephine called us from the shelter and urgently asked us to come. Twenty minutes later, we arrive and find her washing the swollen feet of an old man. ‘Monsieur Gianviti,’ says Josephine, excusing herself from the old man, ‘I regret that I’m not a policeman. There are a lot of suspicious people here. Look at that strong guy, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. He should be fighting. And there are two other young ones you should have a look at.’