“A fast examination revealed nothing special. The young men were Belgians who had escaped before the Germans.”
Abtey, knowing that worse days were coming, finally told Josephine she had to quit the Casino. “Pack your things and go to the south of France.”
She shared this advice with the Guignerys. “She came to see us and said we should get ready to move, the Germans were going to invade and occupy Paris,” Blanche Guignery remembers. “My husband was laughing, ‘But my dear Josephine, c’est impossible.’ She asked us to come and help her move everything out of Le Beau Chêne. ‘Stones I can replace,’ she said, ‘a house can be rebuilt, but my souvenirs are irreplaceable.’ ”
Trucks were loaded. “Armor from the Middle Ages,” André Rivollet said. “The gold piano, Japanese ivories, Marie-Antoinette’s bed, feather pillows, furniture and linens, everything was piled into vans. Especially linens. Feminine instinct, love for whiteness, a wish for bourgeois security. She was always ecstatic about towels and sheets.” (The Guignerys, following her instructions, would send her belongings after her.) Then Josephine, carrying a cage full of parakeets, got a lift to Paris with a young man driving by. All her life, in peace or war, someone would recognize her, stop to pick her up, and take her where she wanted to go.
She stayed a few days at her apartment on avenue Bugeaud. The life of the city seemed still quite civilized. Theaters were operating—there was a comedy by Jean Cocteau at the Bouffes, and the Comédie Française was playing Cyrano de Bergerac—and though there were meatless days, and cakeless days, supper clubs were open. The news that French soldiers were dying in the north and the east was terrible, but also made people proud.
Josephine now transferred her business—the affairs she had been trying to conduct by herself since Pepito died—into the hands of faithful old Monsieur Bondon, who was still with Pernod. Then she went to Jean Lion’s office, picked up his Packard, and left the city.
It was the first week in June. “I had told Josephine to go south,” Jacques says, “but she went southeast.” Looking for a house, she eventually reached the village of Cenac. It was château country, three hundred miles from Paris, the farmland of Périgord, where the river Dordogne runs and the earth is rich and black with truffles. The old castles hang over the river, the centuries seem to have passed without touching fields, rocks, forests.
There was even tobacco growing there, like the tobacco of Elvira’s youth. She stopped in the shop of the butcher, Guinot, and asked if any of the nearby places was for rent. Madame Guinot said yes, five miles from here. You went along a tortuous little byway, took a bridge across the river, and there in the old stone village of Castelnaud-Fayrac, on top of a hill, was the château Les Mirandes. (Josephine, who couldn’t pronounce “r” in the French way, decided to call it the château Les Milandes, which had been its name before the Revolution.)
Driving slowly up the hill along a dirt road, Josephine passed a wood and a little cemetery, so peaceful in the sun that for once she was not frightened by the gravestones. It was like a secret garden, almost welcoming her. She stopped in front of the castle, and Eli Mercier, twenty years old, son of farmers who had been at Les Milandes since 1912, opened the great iron gate for her. It was the seventh of June, 1940, he says. I asked him how he could be so sure, more than fifty years after the fact. Simple, he told me. “Because on the ninth, I was going to war.”
The place belonged to a French doctor named Males. He was happy to rent it to Josephine (his American-born wife had already taken their son back to the United States), so the deal was made.
On June 3, the Germans had bombed the outskirts of Paris, damaging the Renault and Peugeot factories, and on June 14, without firing a shot, they entered the city. It was queerly still. Two-thirds of the people had fled.
“Hundreds of thousands of refugees . . . jammed the roads south to Bordeaux for a distance of 400 miles,” wrote Louis Snyder. “They used everything that could move—carts, bicycles, taxicabs, trucks, bakery vans, roadsters, even hearses. . . . German pilots in speedy Heinkels roared up and down at tree level over the roads where civilian refugees were trapped and helpless in the traffic jams. Bombs and bullets burst among the automobiles, carts, farm wagons and bicycles, catching humans and horses in a deadly melange of flame and smoke. . . .”
All this Josephine had avoided, thanks to Jacques Abtey. That was the good side of being an Honorable Correspondent.
But Les Milandes grew crowded. Among the cast of characters were Josephine’s maid, Paulette, her twenty-two-year-old Polish valet, François (he was later shot by the Germans while carrying messages for the Resistance), an old Belgian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs, who had met Josephine in the homeless shelter, and any number of Lions. Jean, convalescing from his war wounds, and all his relatives had shown up at the château. Only Albert Ribac, whom they considered a member of the family, was missing. “They were worried,” he told me, laughing. “I had foolishly gone off to the war.”
The irritated Josephine hauled a mattress up to the attic, and slept on the floor. To further escape her in-laws, she often took the Malaury children, Georges and Georgette, whose father ran the blacksmith shop across the road, to the nearby village of Sarlat. “She spoiled us,” says Georgette. “It pleased her to see how ecstatic it made us to climb into her beautiful car. She would do her marketing in Sarlat, and buy us cakes from the patisserie.”
Josephine, who had lost touch with both Maurice Bataille and Jacques Abtey, now miraculously found them both again. First, Maurice. Back from the army, he was a guest of his former employees at their house in Beynac, a few miles from Les Milandes. “My mother had gone to stay with Yvonne and Joseph Robin, who had been our cook and butler,” he says. “The minute I arrived, Yvonne said, ‘You see the château on the hill? Josephine Baker is now living there.’ I couldn’t believe it. Joseph went up to the château on a bicycle to tell Josephine I was there, and she came right down.
“She said Les Milandes was just like Beau Chêne, Jean Lion and his family had taken over the place. Often, she spent the day with my mother, knitting scarves for soldiers and complaining.”
During the second week in June, the French government had moved from Paris to Tours to Bordeaux. (It would settle finally in Vichy.) While the new premier, the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Pétain (who had been the hero of Verdun in World War I), was preparing to sign an armistice with Germany, General Charles de Gaulle, then undersecretary of war, fled to England to head up a government in exile. Condemned as a traitor, he was sentenced to death in absentia, but on June 18, from London, he addressed his countrymen over the radio.
“Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.” It was a message many humiliated citizens had longed to hear. De Gaulle was asking them to redeem the country’s honor, to fight on from North Africa, and among those who listened, thrilled, was Jacques Abtey. He was at La Courtine—a military camp near the city of Agen—with the archives of the Deuxième Bureau, trying to save not only documents, but also the lives of hundreds of patriots and Honorable Correspondents whose names were in those papers, people “who had risked their skins so France would live.”
Unfortunately, de Gaulle’s message had not reached all of the French for whom it was intended. “It passed almost unnoticed among most of the population,” Abtey says. In mid-July, he learned that Josephine was at Les Milandes, only ninety miles away from him. “I sent a courier to her, and she came to see me in her Packard. I told her about de Gaulle’s call—she had not heard it, either—and how I was going to join him if I could find a way to get to England.”
Abtey and Josephine spent a few days together at the convent of Bonencontre, near his military base. The nuns had fled, but “we found hospitality there. Three monks and their superior lived with us, their heads in prayer books. And Josephine asked me to obtain exit visas for Jean, his family and friends.”
Jean had handed Josephine the passports—twenty of the
m, her own not among them—with a request that she use her influence to get the visas, and this had made her furious. “I will never forgive him,” she told Abtey. “It is a shame for him to be so preoccupied with all those people, and not his wife.”
When she came back to Les Milandes with the visas, she hurled them at her husband, threw his suitcase from a second-story window, and showed his family the door.
Toward the end of summer, Jacques Abtey and two fellow officers, a navy man named Emmanuel Bayonne and Joseph Boue, a flier from Brittany, came to hide out at Les Milandes. Josephine was ecstatic. Taking Abtey by the arm, she whispered, “When are we going to join de Gaulle?”
Her question was about to be answered, though Abtey, at that point a frustrated man, didn’t know it. “Everywhere,” he recalled later, “the Nazis were watched by our agents, their formations identified, their movements noted . . . but none of this information had reached London, our Underground had been cut off from that city since the surrender. We needed to find a means of reestablishing contact with the British Intelligence Service.”
This problem was solved when an agent of the Deuxième Bureau arrived at Les Milandes, and asked Abtey if he still wanted “to go to the English. We will get you a false passport, then you will go to Lisbon, and from there you’re on your own.” (The best way to get in touch with the British was through Portugal, where they had representatives.)
“I had the idea that Josephine Baker should accompany me on this mission,” Abtey says. “She would be an excellent cover. Nobody would suspect an officer of the Deuxième Bureau to be associated with Josephine Baker. But I told her if she came with me, there would be no secrets between us, no flirtations with foreigners who might be spies. She pledged herself to the cause, I never saw anyone with such fire.”
It was all of a piece with the rest of Josephine’s life. Being a French citizen, and black, she could have ended in a concentration camp but for having met Jacques Abtey. It was like the opening night of the road company of Shuffle Along, when the music stopped, and she jumped out of the line and did her little dance and got the applause. Now the war has brought the world to a stop, and here she is jumping out onto another stage.
While waiting for orders, Josephine, Abtey, Bayonne, and Boue went boating, hunting, fishing, and en route to the river or the forest, they would pass Monsieur Malaury bent over his anvil. Every time he brought his hammer down, he snarled, “Un Boche!”
Living in the country, even in wartime, Abtey said, Josephine achieved a kind of tranquillity she had not known before. “I think it brought her closer to real things . . . away from the factitious life of the theater and the music hall. . . . She told me she did not like her profession, that dog-eat-dog world. . . .” (What had happened to “the stage is my God, the theater my life”? The same thing that always happened with Josephine: Whatever role she was thrust into, she acted it with brio.)
In the evenings, the friends sat, their hands on a three-legged table, attempting to communicate with the spirit world. “Josephine did not believe in it,” Jacques says. “When one of us would ask, ‘Spirit, are you here?’ she would burst into laughter, and we would say, ‘If you won’t be quiet, we’ll throw you out.’ ”
That October, with German bombs falling all around London, Winston Churchill spoke to the people of France—“C’est moi, Churchill, qui parle!”—vowing that England would never give up. And he spoke of a morning that was sure to come. “Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France.”
It was as inspiring as the speeches broadcast by General de Gaulle, speeches the Germans tried to jam. “We surrounded the radio,” Abtey says, “and listened to that voice . . . calling us to arms in the name of a Free France, an immortal France. The voice warmed us in the darkness.”
In Paris, there were those who believed the darkness had been exaggerated. Many who had fled the city returned. German soldiers on leave walked the boulevards with their French girlfriends; you could smell the chestnut trees instead of gas fumes, because there were so few cars on the streets—and those few belonged to German officials.
Some Parisians who had connections, influence, gold bars buried in their gardens, sat in cafés sipping champagne with German officers. Jean Cocteau drank his Dom Pérignon at Maxim’s, right next to the table that had been Josephine’s favorite, and, lifting his glass, offered a mocking toast: “Vive la paix honteuse!” (“Long live the shameful peace!”)
By August 1940, the Nazis had banned Negroes and Jews from the French theater—“No longer does Josephine Baker, American singer and dancer, headline Paris cabaret revues,” said an AP press release—and the Vichy government was said to be planning a “purge” of French movies and radio. Sacha Guitry had just completed a revival of his play Pasteur; he was the only first-rate French actor to have appeared since the German occupation. Soon, however, he would be followed by hundreds of his fellows.
“Among the French film performers wholly free of the collaborationist taint,” wrote Roger Peyrefitte, “there seemed to be only two genuine stars: Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, both of whom had earlier escaped to Hollywood. . . .”
Chevalier was singing over German-controlled Radio-Paris (the main radio medium for Nazi propaganda), and Mistinguett was back at the Casino de Paris; at every curtain call she begged the audience to send food and coal around to her house, and her concierge was almost buried under the avalanche of contributions.
When Paul Derval, who had closed the Folies-Bergère and left Paris in the exodus, decided to come back, he found a sign nailed to the theater door. Reading it, he called out a warning to Michel Gyarmathy, whom he’d left in the car: “Michel, don’t come!” But it was too late. Gyarmathy was standing right behind him. The sign said, ACCESS FORBIDDEN TO DOGS AND JEWS, and Gyarmathy made a joke. “Don’t worry for me, boss, I’m not a nude dancer. My religion will not jump out and hit the Germans in the eye.” But he was shocked, he admitted later. “I turned to stone.” (In his book, The Good Frenchman, Edward Behr wrote, “Jacques Copeau, the famous theater director and chief administrator of the Comédie Française, insisted that the male sociétaires display the proof of their noncircumcision to him.”)
I think of Mildred Hudgins, of Atlantic City, and the signs on the fancy hotels there: NO DOGS, NO JEWS. And Mildred saying, “They didn’t have to put NO NIGGERS, because we knew it.”
One day in October, a courier came to Les Milandes from Captain Paillole (who was in Vichy reconstructing the Deuxième Bureau right under the noses of the Germans). Paillole had agreed that, under the pretext of embarking on a South American tour, Josephine and Abtey, posing as her maître de ballet, would get to England by way of Lisbon.
But first, Josephine and Jacques were to come to Vichy. There, Paillole and his colleagues gave a dinner to thank Josephine for her previous services in the cause of freedom, and Jacques got his new fake passport. He became Jacques-Francois Hébert, born 1899. (No man under forty was permitted to leave France, and Jacques was thirty-five.)
Then Paillole gave Abtey and Josephine papers and pictures—“all the information that had been gathered concerning the German army in France.” The photographs, Abtey says, were pinned under Josephine’s dress, and as for the written material, “Using invisible ink, we transcribed all fifty-two pieces of information onto Josephine’s sheet music.”
“You look good together,” Paillole said. “Good luck.”
“To get to Lisbon,” Abtey says, “we would have to cross Spain. To cross Spain, you had to have a transit visa. Josephine convinced the Spanish consul in Toulouse to grant me one, alleging that she could not leave for Brazil without her ballet master. (Prior to this, she had also pried visas for me from the consuls of Brazil and Portugal.)
“To make myself look older, I sported spectacles and a heavy mustache. Josephine was enveloped in an immense fur coat, her face grave, but shining,
as we got on the train that would take us through the Pyrénées. It was November 23, 1940.
“At the Spanish frontier, nobody paid any attention to me . . . the Spanish police and the German plainclothesmen were infinitely more interested in the star Josephine Baker than in the shabby little man carrying her suitcase.
“In Madrid, we were lucky enough to get the last two seats in a plane leaving for Lisbon. When we were alone on the plane, Josephine laughed. ‘You see what a good cover I am?’ Then she slept, disappearing into her fur.
“Let me try to explain the importance of what she had just done. If the Spanish or German authorities had discovered my true identity and arrested me, if they had found the information on the music sheets, they would have realized that the French Secret Service had reorganized covertly and was working against them, that we were not respecting the terms of the armistice, and as to the fate that would have been meted out to Josephine and myself, I would rather not dwell on it.
“This woman had undertaken, of her own volition, to cover me to the very end, closing the door behind her and binding her fate to mine. I call that courage.
“Luck was still with us in Lisbon, for the major who had been head of British Intelligence in Paris opened to us the doors of his headquarters in Portugal.”
Portugal being neutral territory, Lisbon was full of life, light, spies. It was a set for a James Bond movie—beautiful women, war profiteers, people offering jewels, paintings, gold, to get berths on ships going to America. In the streets, Abtey recognized German agents, but they didn’t exchange words. At the Hotel Aviz, Josephine was mobbed by journalists (she charmed them) and within one week, there was word that London was pleased with the information Abtey had sent, but that he and Josephine were not to come to England. He was to stay in Portugal awaiting further orders, Josephine was to return to France.
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