Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  First she would go to Fisk (at Donald Wyatt’s invitation) to speak to the students—“I want to give them courage.” Jo asked to come along. “I said no, I don’t want to be with a white. You will stay in New York . . . someone has to come help me if they put me in jail.”

  “Miss Brown” would be accompanied by a black journalist friend, Jeff Smith, who had orders not to intervene if she got in trouble. At one stop, the train sat in the station for an hour, Josephine got off, and instead of going into the coffee shop with a sign that said COLORED, went into the one with a sign that said WHITE, bought a couple of apples, and came out to be greeted by scowls from nervous blacks.

  “I found only two friendly eyes,” she told Jeff Smith. “They belonged to a poor hairless dirty dog.” She asked him to explain the strange attitude of the blacks. “You make them afraid,” he said. “Afraid? Because I bought apples?”

  By the time they got to Nashville, Josephine’s blood was up. When Donald Wyatt met her at the station, she couldn’t wait to tell him her newly hatched plan. She would get on a bus in Nashville, and sit up front. “And the bus driver,” says Donald, “would have to stop the bus, and then she was going to protest, and be pushed around, arrested. She would take a photographer and a writer from Ebony with her, so people could see what a martyr she’d been. But when she got to the jail, she would pull out her French passport, and then the president of America would have to apologize to the president of France for doing this to a French citizen.”

  Josephine never thought small. It was no police chief or governor but the president of the United States himself who would have to eat crow. Jim crow.

  “I told her I thought it would be counterproductive,” Donald says mildly. “I said black people had been sitting in the back of the bus all their lives. ‘And you come here too good to sit where we sit.’ I said the ending would be bad, because her being French gave her protection she would not have if she was just an ordinary black person living in Tennessee. She thought about it, and she didn’t do it.”

  “At Fisk, though she was not highly educated,” Donald says, “she could discuss any topic with the students.”

  She told the young people that in France, marriage between blacks and whites was not frowned on. The students were astonished.

  From Nashville, she went home to St. Louis, spent one weekend there, and announced to Carrie, Richard, and Margaret that they must come live with her at the château. “At first my husband, Elmo, said no,” Margaret told me, “but then he changed his mind.”

  Richard refused. “I couldn’t leave. In 1936, Josephine had bought me my first truck, now I had four, I transported coal, I was a contractor, with employees.”

  Surprisingly, Carrie agreed to emigrate as long as Margaret came with her. “She was willing to leave that good-looking husband, Tony Hudson, behind,” says Helen Morris. “Tumpy said he was too young for Carrie, he looked like a white man.” The reunion in France was set for the fall, giving everyone time to make arrangements, and Josephine returned to New York.

  Where there were still no job offers, but there were lots of old friends. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she went to have tea with Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Lucienne Boyer (both Piaf and Boyer were enjoying successful singing engagements in New York clubs). Sometimes Lucienne’s husband, Jacques Pills, would join the ladies. Lucienne knew he had been one of Josephine’s lovers, but wasn’t jealous. (“All the women were crazy about him,” she told me. “They ran at him with their bare breasts.” Jacques, she said, used to tease their small daughter, Jacqueline, telling her, “You know, you could have been a little Baker.”)

  Another of Josephine’s former lovers, Ralph Cooper, was now running the amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre, and one Friday, Josephine and Jo went up to Harlem to take a look. Ralph ensconced them like royalty, in a box, and at one point during the show, he introduced the legend to the audience. They didn’t stop applauding until Josephine came down to the stage to receive her ovation.

  She returned to France with enough money—mostly from South America—to get the rest of her jewels out of hock. (Boston hadn’t seen the whole array by any means.) In March, eleven thousand copies of Jacques Abtey’s book, The Secret War of Josephine Baker, were shipped to bookstores, and in April, Josephine opened at the Club des Champs-Élysées.

  Bernard Hilda, the club’s owner, found himself awed by her continuing ability to seduce the public. “I watched her many times, and I asked myself, why? Why does she get applause at the exact moment when she needs to catch a breath? And one day I understood. First of all, she looked at the people way in the back, in a cabaret. Then slowly, she raised both arms, and everyone was hypnotized, they applauded. And when she had got what she wanted, she slowly lowered her arms, and bent her head. She had obtained that second which was absolutely necessary to her.”

  “I sang again at the Club des Champs-Élysées with a big white feather fan to chase away the bad memories,” she wrote. “The King and Queen of Belgium came to see me, incognito, which means that everybody recognized them. . . .

  “Ali Khan and Rita Hayworth, sitting near the orchestra, very nice . . .

  “Emperor Bao Dai, his hair as black as mine. He froze, listening to me, holding a matchbox in his delicate fingers. . . .”

  It was during this engagement that Maryse Bouillon turned eighteen, and Josephine gave her a birthday party. “She bought me my first evening dress, by Dior. The next day, she tore it to shreds. I still don’t know what I had done.

  “From an artistic point of view, Josephine was a very great lady, but in life, she was jealous, mean. I think she had been too spoiled by what she had done, by the people surrounding her, and absolutely deformed by her own success.

  “I think she loved herself, but I wonder if, deep inside, she ever loved anyone else. Even Pepito, who had been her Pygamlion—I don’t know if she loved that man.

  “My uncle Jo dropped everything to take care of the Milandes. The Milandes was my childhood, I knew it without plumbing, no central heating, still a medieval castle. And I witnessed its transformation. Josephine was never around, the children did as they pleased. Margaret was elderly, overwhelmed by them, and they talked back, they were awful to her. Jo faced all that, and also managed to collect some money to leave to the children. He tried to bring some sense to the Milandes, he tried to slow Josephine down.”

  It wasn’t possible. She had too many reasons to keep moving. After all, wouldn’t the date in Milan pay for a soccer field? She was possessed by the notion of modernizing Les Milandes, building an amusement park that tourists would pay to visit. In 1940, a wandering dog had discovered a cave at Lascaux dating back to Cro-Magnon man, its walls painted with pictures of cows, bison, horses; that this nearby wonder could attract two thousand visitors a day convinced Josephine she could lure equal numbers to her kingdom. If she built it, they would come.

  “When she bought the château, it was in terrible shape,” Georges Malaury agrees, echoing Maryse. “Barely water, barely light. She wanted to do a casino and a guinguette, which is a little bar-discothèque, and a swimming pool in the shape of a J, but there was no water here. There is the Dordogne, the river down there, but the people didn’t want to let her go through their land, so to make a well, she had to buy everything. She bought a big farm of a Monsieur Dartin, who never wanted to sell to her because she was black, and because she was show business. Then one day he fell off his bicycle and died, and the family sold to Josephine.”

  In the end, she got five of the seven houses that surrounded the château, and was in the throes of designing her own little Monte Carlo when Carrie, Margaret, and Elmo arrived in Le Havre.

  On November 3, Jo went to the pier to pick up his wife’s family, whom he later described as “three round-eyed gaping figures without a word of French.” (Helen Morris remembered that Carrie and Margaret had their teeth pulled “and new teeth put in because they wanted to look good for the French people. I saw poor Tony Hudson a coup
le of times after that. He was very sad. He thought she would come back, but she never did.”)

  Jo drove the newcomers directly to Les Milandes, where “they fell into Josephine’s arms. . . . The important thing was to get everyone settled down in the château as quickly as possible.”

  Josephine, to help to pay for all the reconstruction going on, was still working nights in Paris at the Club des Champs-Élysées, a cabaret the American dancer Katherine Dunham remembers well.

  “This little man,” Dunham says, “he was prince of one of those African states, took me to the club to see Josephine. She came over to our table, but seemed upset. I got up and danced with the prince, and then I realized why she was glaring at us. He had tennis shoes on, and she was trying to make that club go on a snob level.”

  Bobby Mitchell once witnessed the rivalry between the two prima donnas. “It was on the Riviera. Dunham was there with the then Aga Khan, the big fat guy. And she showed up at the Casino in Monte Carlo wearing these emeralds, earrings, necklace, bracelet, all matching. Then Josephine swept in (she always made a big entrance), took one look at these emeralds, and sparks flew from her eyes.

  “So she disappears up to that hotel, the elegant one, the Hôtel de Paris. And she comes down, and she’s got these diamonds on that she wasn’t wearing before, and she makes sure she sits next to Dunham at the table, and every time she reaches for anything, there are these diamonds glittering. And Dunham sits back with this marvelous posture of hers and keeps adjusting the bloody emeralds. It was so funny, those two out-bitching each other.”

  By March of 1949, Josephine was rehearsing for Féeries et Folies (Derval had broken his rule—this title had fifteen letters) at the Folies-Bergère. France was still recovering from the traumas of war, the tourists were returning, there was an exhibition of sixty-four Picassos at the Maison de La Pensée Français, but Josephine was a nervous wreck. She had been, she said, “dreaming for months about the show, then . . . seeing the scenes we have conceived taking form, starting to live—it’s wonderful. . . . But one day, the doors will open, the public will come and judge . . . and I worry, I have stagefright. Was I right to change a formula that had proved itself? I tremble, I feel my heart pound. . . .”

  She wanted to offer Paris a new Folies-Bergère; there would still be naked girls, but Josephine the war heroine would cover her body with thirty different costumes, and play many famous women of history—most of them French. She would start with Eve (nationality unknown), mate to Fred Rey’s Adam, go on to the Empress Josephine, and finally she would personify the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots. But she demanded a lot of reinforcement from her director. “Michel, I’m too old. First, there was an infatuation with me, then I did the war, but I’m forgotten now.”

  Gyarmathy told her what she craved to hear, that she was fabulous, and she returned the compliment. “You are to me like Max Reinhardt,” she said, “and the things you propose to me are things I have never done—to dance with bananas doesn’t interest me anymore.”

  “She was an angel during rehearsals,” Michel says, “first to arrive, last to leave. She rehearsed in Jo Bouillon’s underwear, with a towel around her hair, which she had burnt off one more time.”

  First to arrive? Last to leave? Here was a new Josephine, except for the burnt-off hair, and this time it was Jean Clement, not Antoine, who was called to the rescue. “Before the Folies rehearsals began, she asked me for some défrisant, a kind of French Congolene. I warned her not to leave it on too long, but she did her hair, started to read, and fell asleep. She phoned me, hysterical. ‘Chéri, a catastrophe, I’m shorn like a woman collaborator, I can’t do the Folies-Bergère.’

  “The next day, she came into my salon. Arletty, Edwige Feuillère, la Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec, they were all there. Josephine twirled around, said, ‘Changement de décors,’ whipped off her turban, and laughed like a crazy person. She had only little tufts of hair left. I got the idea to do her the way they do flower arrangements, build a wire foundation with two crowns of hair woven on it for Mary Stuart, and a ponytail for her next number.

  “On opening night, I was shaking. I was afraid it would come loose. I had used long pins and turned the few poor hairs around them; it was very painful for Josephine but she never complained.”

  The hair didn’t come loose.

  “I told Josephine, ‘They will cut off your head,’ ” Gyarmathy says. “She loved it. She walked up the big black staircase, her back to the public, and at the top the executioner was waiting. I used some Beethoven, I forget what, and she knelt and put her head on the block on the last beat, and the executioner raised his hand with the axe, and pang—blackout!

  “Then her soul rose to heaven, and the glass windows were lit by blue light, and she sang ‘Ave Maria.’ ”

  The voice, wrote Janet Flanner, was still “as sweet . . . as a woodwind instrument.” (What Flanner gave with one hand, she took back with the other, saying that at the beginning of her Paris career, Josephine had “looked Harlem; then she graduated to Creole; she has now been transmuted into Tonkinese, or something Eastern, with pagoda headdresses beneath which her oval face looks like temple sculpture. Her show consists principally of her changing her costumes, which are magnificent.” Flanner also pointed out that Josephine, as the headless Mary, went on to sing Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” though it hadn’t been written until two hundred years after Mary’s death. What’s more, she sang it in Latin.)

  No nit-picking from Noël Coward, though. He confided to his diary that Josephine was “wonderful as Mary Stuart in a miles long white satin train.” Carrie, too, finally saw her hardheaded firstborn child, Freda J. McDonald, on the stage. Carrie was so agitated she had a nosebleed.

  She came backstage wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a black feathered hat, and the photographers were waiting to shoot mother and daughter kissing. Carrie was more unpredictable than that. “It was good,” she said to Josephine, wiping tears from her eyes. “But you’re lucky I didn’t have a cane. I would have come around and smacked you and all those young girls who don’t have enough clothes on!”

  In New York, the powerful newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote of Josephine’s most recent triumph. “Fans report that she is again the toast of Paree, where a new type of lighting makes her decades younger.”

  But it wasn’t her youth anymore, now it was her art that pleased the customers. Her pure sweet voice rising to heaven so moved people that they began to applaud before she was done singing. Again, she had gambled and won.

  She wrote to Donald Wyatt that Mohamed and Moulay Larbi were in Paris. “We talk for hours, hurry and come so we can be together as a big family. I’m still packing them in every night. Marian Anderson, Katherine Dunham, great, great success here, really our people are adored in France, what a contrast from America.”

  In May, there were posters all over Paris advertising Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker, Josephine’s third—and final—collaboration with Marcel Sauvage. This volume not only brought her life up to date, but reprinted the six articles she had done for France-Soir. In these pieces, she had once again been hard on her native country, insisting that most Americans would like to see signs on their houses saying, NO JEWS, NO DOGS, NO NIGGERS.

  She said Americans had killed their souls, theirs was “a world of lost people, it is only money that counts.”

  She said, “You know I do not like what makes life theatrical, I’m not a novelist, it’s hard for me to invent, I don’t know how to lie.” Four lies in a row.

  Her resentment of light-skinned blacks, the high yellows she had envied and hated when she started out, was here in print. “Twelve thousand white Negroes with blue eyes are born every year in the USA, they are the most terrible adversaries of the blacks. I am on the side of the ‘niggers.’ I take no glory from it . . . I didn’t choose it.”

  In this book, she also permitted herself a diatribe against American Jews. Interspersed with lines like “I have been married to a Jew
, I have nothing to reproach him with,” and her expressed admiration for Israelis in Jerusalem “looking like prophets with long curls” was her complaint that “blacks cannot work on Broadway without the intervention of Jews.” As for boxers managed by Jews, “many of them don’t receive a tenth of what they make for their broken noses.”

  But Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker was in French; what American was going to read it? And anyhow, Josephine was a fabulist, you couldn’t hold her to strict account as you could a tailor who measured slipcovers.

  The Folies closed for the month of August—it was traditional—but Josephine and Jo didn’t stop working, they began another tour. They didn’t stop fighting, either. Jean Clement, who went along to do Josephine’s hair, had a ringside seat. “She was jealous of the boys around him. They had a big battle in Switzerland, and Jo left, and Pierre Spiers, a respected conductor, came to replace him.”

  Josephine and Pierre Spiers became friends right away—he was the one who brought her voice down, he said, “You are too old now for that little bird voice”—and to surprise him, she sent for his wife and three-year-old son, Gérard.

  “The night we arrived,” says Marie Spiers, “little Gérard walked onstage with a big bouquet for Josephine. Pierre, in the orchestra pit, could not believe his eyes. And then Josephine picked up Gérard and threw him to his father. ‘Pierre, here is your son.’ I almost fainted, seeing my baby flying through the air.

  “Josephine adored Gérard; she even asked Pierre if she could adopt him. ‘I will be a good mother to him,’ she said, ‘and you and Marie can come to visit.’ ‘You are crazy,’ Pierre said.”

  “On the tour,” says Jean Clement, “Josephine had taken a little basset hound because the dog could bark ‘J’ai Deux Amours.’ So here we go with that dog, and Josephine made him sing the song all the time and people were laughing in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Egypt.”