Chapter 30
JOSEPHINE DUMPS A MILLIONAIRE FOR A BANDLEADER
“I can’t marry Claude, he’s much too jealous”
They played Brussels, Copenhagen, and by late June, Josephine was again on the road to Morocco to entertain air force troops. And again, she landed in the hospital. Odette Merlin came from Paris on an army plane dispatched by General Bouscat to bring the patient home.
“When I arrived,” Odette says, “the rumor was that Josephine had received the bouillon d’onze heures, a poisoned soup fed her by the Glaoui’s women.” Was it possible? Had the Glaoui’s women—or the women of some other Moroccan nobleman whom Josephine had dazzled—thought, with the war over, they were finally rid of her, the veil-less one? And here she was back again, so they had tried to kill her with eleventh-hour soup?
Four days later, she was delivered to the Clinique Ambroise Pare in Paris. “She was cold and gray,” Odette says. “A doctor opened her up, then did nothing. He was afraid. Jacques and I were desperate, we did not sleep for three days.”
By now, Jacques was engaged to Jacqueline Ceiller de la Barre, a girl from Sarlat, who joined him and Odette in their vigil. “I knew he and Josephine had been lovers,” Jacqueline says. “She could barely speak, but she dissected me with her eyes.”
At two o’clock one morning, Jacques found Josephine covered with sweat “like a dead body. There was a doctor in Paris who was famous for blood transfusions, and we called him.”
An hour later, accompanied by a donor (a burly young policeman), the transfusion expert showed up. Isn’t it odd that, in 1931, in Mon Sang dans Tes Veines, Josephine wrote about a black American girl giving her blood to save the white boy she loved, and in 1946, a white French policeman came out of the night and gave his blood to save Josephine, yet she never spoke of him to anyone?
A few weeks later, the recuperating invalid wrote to Donald Wyatt (home at last in Nashville, Tennessee, and teaching at Fisk University) that she was engaged to Claude Menier. “He is in Switzerland, also quite sick. As soon as I am in good health, and he as well, we are going to be married.”
Claude wrote to Donald too. “Josephine is now much better, thank God. She was decorated with the Medal of the Resistance and had a reception at her nursing home.”
It happened on October 8, and made the papers. SECRET AGENT OF FREE FRANCE DECORATED! At Josephine’s bedside were Blanche Bouscat, Colette Mars, Colonel Guy de Boissoudy, and General de Gaulle’s daughter, Madame de Boissieu. De Gaulle himself had written to congratulate her. “I knew of and much valued the great services you rendered not long ago . . . the enthusiasm with which you put your magnificent talent at the disposal of our cause . . . My wife and I send ardent wishes for your quick and complete recovery.”
“Josephine was weak, but she looked radiant,” Colette says. “She asked me to help her pull on long white satin gloves, and to put some pillows behind her. ‘I would like to be upright, to receive a medal from France.’
“During the speech of Colonel de Boissoudy, I cried all the tears in my body. You could see the emotion Josephine felt as the colonel pinned the medal to her hospital gown.”
From Claude to Donald on October 12: “I have not seen her for five months now, but I write her very often. I hope to have some news, and that it will be very good.”
From Josephine to Donald on October 29: “I do not think I will marry Claude, for he is much too jealous and wishes me to leave the theater. It is a lot to ask, for there is no woman in Paris who can star in a large theater. Mistinguett is too old, so that leaves me alone. I cannot stop now, Donald, and I am sorry for Claude and myself, but alas, there is nothing that can be done about it.”
That same month, Josephine emerged from the hospital and insisted on giving Jacques and Jacqueline Abtey their wedding party. Ninety-three people attended the reception at Beau Chêne, though many were surprised by the arrangement. (Josephine’s liaison with Jacques was widely known.) Artists, the wedding guests told each other, are different.
“Josephine came down the grand staircase supported by Jacques and me,” Jacqueline says. “She was wearing a long gown from Balenciaga, one side white, the other ruby red. I hadn’t been able to find anything but a plain gray dress—Josephine’s closet was full of beautiful outfits, but she never offered me one—and Jacques was in uniform.
“For about ten minutes, Josephine stayed downstairs and was charming with our guests. Then she asked to go back to her room. The maid and I undressed her and put her to bed, and she told me, ‘The only man in my life I should have married is Jacques.’ Then she crossed herself. It’s unbelievable, but true.”
On New Year’s Eve, Josephine checked into the Clinique Bizet for more surgery. This time, the operation—which should have been performed earlier—was a success, maybe because Josephine had asked the priest of Le Vésinet to celebrate a Mass for her prior to the operation. She said heaven had sent Dr. Thiroloix and Dr. Funck-Brentano “to whom I owe my life.”
She asked Odette and Jacqueline to go and prepare for her homecoming. “She wanted her bed made up with Swiss linen,” Jacqueline says, “embroidered with forget-me-nots.”
By now Jo Bouillon was staying at Beau Chêne off and on, and Odette, who had been delegated to supervise the help there, stumbled into his private life. “There was an Alsatian war orphan, blond, very good-looking, helping the gardeners, and I was surprised to see him wearing expensive leather shoes—we had no leather after the war—and an English jacket. I asked the servants where the boy got his clothes, and they told me they were gifts from Jo Bouillon. ‘And you don’t know the worst,’ they said. ‘He made that boy wear Mademoiselle Josephine’s gowns.’ ”
Jacqueline, who knew nothing of this, was startled when she entered the master bedroom. “The bed was unmade, sheets stained with blood, men’s underwear on the floor. I had to tell Josephine. It was very unpleasant, and the next time Jo Bouillon arrived, she yelled at him, ‘Go away, faggot!’ ”
Six months later, to the consternation of her friends, she announced that she and Jo were going to be married. Then she told the Guignerys that she was going to have to sell Beau Chêne. Georges tried to dissuade her—“Such a superb property so close to Paris will be very valuable in a few years”—but the owner of Les Milandes was pressing, threatening that if she didn’t buy the château, he would sell it to someone else. Afraid of losing Les Milandes, she sacrificed Beau Chêne, though she could not bear to supervise its dismantling, or, for that matter, its sale.
The Guignerys also tried to dissuade her from marrying Jo Bouillon.
Madame Guignery: “When Georges went to her and asked, ‘Josephine, why? You know what he is,’ she answered, ‘I need an orchestra and I’m going to cure him of his habits.’ ”
I believe she was in love, or at least infatuated, with Jo Bouillon, and for a while, at least, they were certainly lovers. In French, we have a saying, tout feu, tout flamme. All fire, all flame. Too hot not to cool down.
Jacqueline Abtey remembers receiving the wedding invitation in Morocco. “We were very surprised. We got to Les Milandes a few days early—Jacques and I stayed in a room under the roof, to have peace, and Josephine gave Mohamed Menebhi the Louis XVI room on the second floor. Most of the guests hadn’t arrived yet.”
The afternoon before her wedding, Josephine decided to exercise the female equivalent of droit de seigneur. “I was walking in the park,” says Georges Malaury, “when suddenly I see Josephine having sex with Jacques Abtey. I had been an altar boy, I was twelve years old, at first it gives you ideas. At the same time, it seemed shocking. But Josephine was very amorous, she had such a temperament.”
At four the following morning, her temperament exploded. “In a nightgown, she erupted into our room like a tigress,” Jacqueline says. “She was brandishing a knife and calling me names, blaming me because she was going to marry a queer. It was frightful.
“I said to Jacques, ‘I’m leaving,’ and Mohamed, hearing voi
ces raised in anger, came into the room as Josephine was chasing me with the knife, and he stopped her. He said, ‘Josephine, I will never forgive you that as a host you betrayed your duty. Never as a guest of mine did you witness such a scene. I’m sorry, but since Jacqueline is leaving, I’m going with her.’
“Jacques, Mohamed, and I went to the hotel in Beynac. We could not believe what had happened, we wanted to think she was delirious, or walking in her sleep.”
Early on her wedding day, Josephine was out haranguing the German workmen who were weeding and cutting the grass. “The war was over,” Georges Malaury says, “but we still called them prisoners of war. About ten of them had stayed behind after Germany was defeated; they rented themselves out to the surrounding farms, and Josephine sometimes employed them.
“She was very harsh with them. I think she was trying, a little bit, to show them the other side of the coin, that things had changed. She was paying them back. But she was harsh with everyone. Guy Hutin was French, and acted as gardener, barman, chauffeur, whatever Madame needed, and still Josephine put him in his place. She instructed him that she wanted everything very clean for her wedding, and he said he knew it. “ ‘Madame,’ I told her, ‘Monsieur Bouillon told me that already.’ She answered me, ‘Guy, after God, I’m the only master here!’ ”
When one of the protagonists is extremely ill, French law permits a marriage to be performed away from city hall. In the case of Josephine, the mayor of Castelnaud-Fayrac thought he would be officiating at ceremonies for a dying woman, until Josephine appeared, all smiles. She was dressed in blue, with a plunging neckline, a feathered hat, a corsage of white orchids, and a gold belt, a present from Mohamed. (Bachir Ben Bachir had sent seven gold bracelets encrusted with diamonds. )
At the civil ceremony, held in a salon of the château, she again claimed—for the record—to be the daughter of Arthur Baker.
In the chapel for the religious ceremony (and not wanting to look like an orphan), she had Pepito’s sister and brother-in-law, Christina and Philippe Scotto, act as her family. During the Mass, they sat on her left. Many Bouillons were also in attendance; Jo’s parents had come, and his two brothers with their wives and children, including Jo’s favorite niece, the then seventeen-year-old Maryse. (What none of them knew was that, under French law, this marriage was no more legal than the one to Jean Lion had been. The bride was still Mrs. William Baker.) It was Josephine’s forty-first birthday.
“Famous Negro songstress puts on clothes and marries a bandleader,” said Life magazine, adding that the wedding had been “gay but genteel.” No pun was intended.
“We musicians were surprised by the wedding,” said Pierre Guillermin. “We knew that women were not Jo’s strength. A few days later, we left on a tour of South America.”
But first, Josephine bought Les Milandes; it was her wedding gift to herself. In a contract witnessed by Jo’s brother Gabriel, she stipulated that it was bought with her own funds, and would remain her exclusive property.
There were a couple of reasons why she was once again leaving France. The country was still divided politically, and even though Josephine was a die-hard Gaullist, she sympathized with the disgraced Marshal Pétain. In 1945, he had been condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the fortress jail on the Île d’Yeu. Josephine felt the marshal should be freed, that “the drama of the great old military man, whatever his weaknesses have been, hides a last secret: the possibility of once again forging in France a union of all men of good will.”
Moreover, Europe was now a sad continent, short of food, houses, jobs, money. The thought of the crazy years between the wars, the years when Josephine had reigned, made people uncomfortable. So did Josephine’s marriage. Odette Merlin says that high-ranking military men were disgusted. “Their Josephine marrying a homosexual seemed an insult to their manhood. Jo Bouillon’s crime was not the worst committed during those shameful years, but many friends turned away from Josephine. I asked her to take me out of her will. I was sad, but I could not understand.”
Jacques Abtey concurs. “From the day she married Jo Bouillon, it was as though Joan of Arc had become small, had cut off her legs, so to speak. The generals and the great French families, they did not come to her anymore.”
But the Argentinians came to her in throngs, as she toured their cities, and the Chileans, and the Mexicans. In Mexico, she found her old friends the Joneses. Lydia and Ed had fled Europe at the beginning of the war. “We went back to Chicago,” Lydia told me, “but we couldn’t take it no more the way our people were treated, and we moved to Mexico.”
In Mexico, Lydia said, Josephine fell “absolutely madly in love” with the composer Augustin Lara, who was married to the actress Maria Felix. “To affirm herself, Josephine still needed that attention from men, to sleep with them, to possess them, and one night when Jo was not around she said, ‘Let’s go have dinner with Lara,’ but he was crazy about the beautiful Maria, he did not want to be with Josephine, she did not get him.”
If Josephine could not get the man she wanted, she could still go to a bullfight and upstage the bull. The Joneses took her to a corrida, and their son George, then fifteen, recalled, “When the banderillero stuck the dart in the bull, Josephine just cried and yelled until everybody in the place got nervous.”
“That winter,” says Lydia, “Josephine was having an enormous success in Mexico, packing them in every night, and she begged my husband to bring her back to America. To present her in America. He said okay, and he advanced her fifty thousand dollars, and an IOU to sign, but she never paid him back.
“She was going to open in Boston, but first we stopped off in Chicago for a few days. We were traveling by train, and Josephine insisted on going to the dining car and talking to everyone about the injustice of racism. I told her, ‘You are going to get us lynched.’ ”
The Joneses’ place in Chicago—they had held on to it even in their self-imposed exile—was as pleasant as Josephine had remembered it from her visit there with Pepito: a ten-acre estate, a pond, a tennis court. “My sister-in-law Jean Starr—she was a great blues singer—invited Josephine to dinner,” Lydia says. “She thought to please Josephine by cooking cornbread and chitlins. Josephine stared at the chitlins. ‘What is this?’
“Jean Starr said, ‘Oh, girl, get out of my face, you know what hog guts are!’ ”
In Boston, where Ed Jones had booked a hotel suite, Josephine assigned him and Lydia the maid’s room. “Can you imagine?” says Lydia. “She was in the master bedroom with Jo Bouillon, and we were in this hole, and it was our money we were spending presenting her to America!”
For her part, Josephine was determined to present Jo Bouillon to America—from the stage of Boston’s Majestic Theatre. “Ed told her not to do it,” says Lydia. “He said, ‘Just let Jo come on and play, you didn’t introduce him in Mexico, so don’t be a fool here. This country is not ready to see a black woman introduce her white husband.’ ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘I have to introduce my Jo.’ ”
Before the Boston opening on Christmas Eve, almost as an afterthought, Josephine had wired the French singer Roland Gerbeau in Paris and asked him to join her in Paris Sings Again, which he was happy to do. But the real excitement in the press centered around Josephine’s costumes by Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, and Jean Dessès—no star since Gertrude Lawrence had appeared with such a huge wardrobe, said the Boston Post. As for her jewels, they were so valuable, Josephine would be “under police guard while on the stage of the Majestic.”
There was a thirty-three-carat emerald, a sixteen-carat sapphire, and a black diamond that gave off “glints of red fire.” The black diamond got better notices than the show.
“The theater was empty,” says Lydia. “We lost our money, and she never even said thanks.”
“The war had just ended,” Roland Gerbeau says, “and with Josephine’s halo as an angel of the liberation, she thought it was the right moment for her American comeback.
But the show was not what the Americans wanted from her, she was a French chanteuse, nothing left of her American roots.”
Was the party over? She sent an S.O.S. to Donald Wyatt in Nashville asking him to come north and talk to the Negro press. “She was aware,” he says, “that some black people were still complaining that while they had continued to suffer the effects of segregation, she had escaped to Paris and lived a life of gaiety and luxury.
“When I arrived in Boston, Jo Bouillon was cordial but cool. I don’t think he took kindly to my occupying an adjoining room, especially when Josephine came in every night to get my dirty socks to wash in the basin with his.”
Pierre Guillermin: “She was afraid of nothing. She would sing operetta with little trills, cocoricos like a rooster, and sometimes the mouth would open and the note did not come out, but she would go on. She was conscious of having been one of the first blacks to come out of the ghetto, proud of it, but she acted superior to white people, as if she wanted to make you pay for what she had been through. You could feel it, it was her complex.
“We went to New York because she was still hoping to perform there. We had difficulty finding a place where she could stay; it was against the law to refuse her, but we tried all the grand hotels, and when we would say it was for Josephine Baker, they would say, ‘Excuse us, we made a mistake, we are fully booked.’ ”
It was the same scenario as when she had come to do the Ziegfeld Follies, with the additional humiliation that no one was offering her work. So she decided to play reporter again, to reveal America through the eyes of a simple black woman. That she was not a simple black woman didn’t deter her for an instant.
She suggested a series of pieces to France-Soir (the biggest afternoon paper in France) which agreed to print them. But for this job, “I cannot be Josephine Baker, star of the music hall. . . . I will be Miss Brown . . . the name seems to me amusing, given the circumstances.”
Josephine Baker Page 35