Other old friends—Maude Russell, Alberta Hunter—were in the caravan too, but Bessie was the one acting proprietary. “Like she was Josephine’s mother,” says Maude. “I mean, we all came up together, Bessie Allison was dancing for ten cents with anybody at the Savoy, and then honey, as soon as the owner married her, her butt went up on her back.”
At the Golden Gate Ballroom, Ralph Bunche, a recent Nobel peace prize–winner, presented Josephine with an award for her work against prejudice in the theater, and the French consul was so impressed he went home and wrote a long letter back to the Foreign Ministry. He said Josephine was a heroine. Not only had she broken the color bar in Miami (“a colored artist dared, and the whites surrendered”), but she had reminded people that she was a French citizen, and “in our country racial problems do not exist.”
During Dr. Bunche’s tribute to her, Josephine sat on the stage wearing a yellow chiffon Dior dress. In spite of the heat, she looked, Maude says, “cool as a cucumber. We acted as hostesses, Fredi Washington and me and Little Shep, and then all of the Shuffle Along girls came up to the stage and Noble Sissle introduced us, and they played ‘Bandana Days,’ and we did a little step and got off. Then Josephine got up and said, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to be back in my native America, I wish my mother, a poor washwoman from St. Louis, could see this,’ and I thought to myself, she’s lying.”
The brass bands, the handshakes, the luncheon, the cocktail party, the ball, Josephine sailed through the whole day, stopping only to change clothes from time to time.
The night ended at the Savoy Ballroom. Bessie had invited a few friends to her husband’s place, and Charlie Buchanan told me that at one point a bouncer came in looking alarmed. A black man at the door was waving a piece of paper and claiming to be Josephine’s husband. “If you don’t believe me, here is our marriage license.”
“I felt sorry for him,” Charlie said, “but I sent the guard to chase him away.” Was it Willie Wells, surfacing after so many years? Was it the elusive Billy Baker?
By June, Josephine was playing Hartford, Connecticut. (It was the very week General de Gaulle chose to visit Les Milandes. He was out of government for the moment—he would call those years away from politics his “crossing of the desert”—and his trip to the château was noted only by the neighbors. “He came on June 3,” Georges Malaury remembers. “And everybody was asking, ‘Who is that tall guy?’ ”)
Georges Simenon traveled to Hartford from nearby Lakeville, where he was then living with his second wife, Denise, and later, Josephine and Jo paid the Simenons a return visit. “She came after a show on Saturday and she left on Sunday,” says Dolores James, then seventeen, and nanny to Simenon’s children. “He told me, ‘You must be here to meet this person, she’s very famous and you look just like her,’ and he went on to explain how this lady went to Europe and was accepted, and color made no difference. And I said, ‘Well, it does here.’ In Lakeville, there are black families, but we are of no importance.
“He was giving me a chance, he was saying, ‘Here is someone you can be like,’ and when I finally saw her, when she walked into the living room and started speaking French, I said, ‘I don’t believe this lady.’ At nineteen, she had gone to France, and at seventeen, I was afraid to leave Lakeville. She had complete control over people, she could snap her fingers and everybody jumped. I loved it, because most of my own people were the opposite. White people snapped their fingers and we jumped. And Josephine wasn’t light-skinned, she wasn’t passing. She was black.”
If the young girl harbored any reservations about her new idol, they sprang from the way Josephine dealt with Jo Bouillon. “He was a delightful man,” Dolores says, “but he seemed to be so small next to her. I was confused, here I was, a young black girl, wanting to idolize this powerful black image, yet resenting the way she treated her husband. Like at the dinner table, all the emotion and the eye contact was between her and Simenon. Like Jo Bouillon and Mrs. Simenon did not exist. Are you supposed to treat someone like that because you’re a star? I don’t know, I’m not a star. But why? He was a human being.
“That Sunday, I went upstairs, and she was standing in her bedroom, nude. It’s nice when you’re close to fifty and you can say, ‘Look at me, I look better than you, and you’re seventeen.’ She was not at all ashamed, I was the one that went, ‘Oh, excuse me!’ Jo Bouillon was there too, and it was strange. I always felt as a black person, you’re there, but you’re not noticed. Here’s a white person, and it’s reversed, he’s not there. I was trying to take it in, trying to understand how an individual as big as she was could step on someone she slept with, who made love to her.”
“Foolishly,” says Shirley Woolf, “Ned had given Josephine a contract where she agreed to work twenty-eight days a month if he had the work for her. But even if he didn’t, she got eighty-five hundred dollars a week. Ned was a sporty man. He thought nothing of chartering a plane to go somewhere, but on the road, Josephine didn’t want to fly.”
She was forty-five years old, and there were days when she was bone weary. On June 10, she wrote to Donald Wyatt that “the four and five shows a day are too much for me,” and reproached him for not having been to see her. “Why don’t you like me any more?”
Donald was not the most important person in Josephine’s life, but he was her conscience. He had brought her together with the black soldiers for whom she was a lodestone, comforted her when she mourned that, for twenty years, she had turned her back on her people. “I think,” he says, “she had come to realize that a performer’s acclaim fades when the curtain falls, and she wanted to go down in history among immortals like Lincoln and Gandhi. She wanted to convince the black community that she had not deserted the fight for equality, even though she had lived so long outside the arena.”
One can make the case that Josephine was no Sojourner Truth, slave-born, God-driven (“Children, I talk to God and God talks to me!”), traveling the country, braving the fury of mobs to preach abolition and women’s rights. But who was? One can make the case that Josephine had grabbed at the chance to live in a country that offered her honors and rewards. But who would not have? And though the civil rights movement began without her, she came to it fairly early. After all, it wasn’t until 1958 that Arkansas schools were desegregated, and here she was pushing for integration in 1951.
Josephine was a public person, and she made public scenes, in hotel lobbies and restaurants and trains and waiting rooms and sometimes, even, from the stage. When Willie McGee, convicted of rape in Mississippi, was executed, she paid for his funeral, and talked to her audience about his death. “They have killed one of my people,” she said, adding that a part of every American Negro “died a little with him.”
“We were in the Paradise Theatre in Detroit that day,” says Stanley Kay, who was playing drums for her on the road. “And she came down from her dressing room and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Sweets,’ to Sweets Edison, but she never said anything to the rest of us. Finally, I went up and knocked at her door and said, ‘Josephine, I’m white, but I didn’t execute Willie McGee.’ ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I was upset, please forgive me.’
“Between shows, she liked to watch the movie, so she would put a robe on, and go to a box—from backstage, you can get to the boxes—and sometimes when we were traveling by train, I would get off in a station and buy hot dogs or ribs or ham hocks and a six-pack of beer, and we’d have supper together, and we’d talk. I asked her about being with royalty, talking with kings; it was like she was telling me about Cinderella, and I was eight years old.
“I didn’t think she was the best singer in the world, or the best dancer, she was what we call a shake dancer, but she could put it all together, she knew how to get the audience to come to her.”
On that tour, a gangster friend of Ned Schuyler’s was traveling with the company. “His name was Tony,” says Shirley Woolf. “He was avoiding the police. Somewhere between Evanston and Chicago, I was talking to him in th
e train corridor when a dining-car waiter came up and said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, I was married to Josephine Baker.’ Tony opened the door to Josephine’s compartment and shouted, ‘Hey, Joe, one of your husbands is outside.’
“She refused to come out. She could see him through the glass panel, and she said, ‘I don’t know that man.’ He meant as much to Josephine as a grain of sand. When she said goodbye to someone, she meant goodbye, not à bientôt.”
By this time, Shirley was managing every detail of Josephine’s daily life, so it was inevitable that they would clash. It happened in Washington, D.C. “On the first of July,” says Shirley, “she was working in an armory, seventy-five hundred seats, and we were sold out. That afternoon, she went off with some people from the NAACP, and I said, ‘Joe, you have to be at the armory by seven,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I’ll meet you back at the hotel at six.’ Well, she marched in at quarter to eight, and I said, ‘Where’ve you been?’ and she said, ‘Darling, one of your people insulted me.’
“One of my people? Some NAACP members had convinced her to go into a segregated dining room and order a Coca-Cola, and the waiter had said, ‘We don’t serve Negroes at the tables,’ and she said, ‘I want to speak to your boss.’
“The boss’s name was Schwartz, and she said to him, ‘Mr. Schwartz, I fought for your people in Israel, and you won’t serve me a Coca-Cola.’ She told me this story, and announced, ‘I’m not going on tonight.’ I said, ‘There’s a bus strike and a cab strike in Washington, and there are seventy-five hundred people waiting for you who had to double up in cars, and you’re not going to show up at the armory?’ She said, ‘No, I’m not, darling.’ In the end, she went and she played, but she was horrible to the audience. ‘Here we are in the capital of your country, and you wouldn’t serve me a Coca-Cola,’ she told them, and she went on like that.
“Next morning, we get up. We have to catch a plane. She’s opening in California July 4. She’s sitting in the bathtub and she says, ‘I don’t fly.’ I say, ‘You have to fly. The Fourth of July is a very important holiday, it’s like Bastille Day in France.’ She says, ‘I don’t care, I’m not an American.’ I say, ‘Please, you promised, get dry,’ and I give her a robe, and she takes her hand and slaps me across the face.
“When I get up off the floor, I say, ‘How dare you?’ and she says, ‘Darling, I love you like a mother.’ Of course she got on the plane, but not until she ate my heart out.”
She had canceled an appearance in Atlanta after being turned down by three hotels there and warned that she couldn’t bring Ginette—“People told her I would have to black up. ‘If you want to keep your wardrobe mistress, she will have to dye her skin’ ”—and now there was a backlash against her new activism. She’d had threatening letters, and at the RKO Hillstreet Theater in Los Angeles, she was greeted by a man shouting, “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” The audience froze as Josephine walked to the stage apron and looked out. “I am back where I came from,” she said. “And you—where do you come from?” She got an ovation.
Encouraged, she went out and made a citizen’s arrest in a country where she was no longer a citizen. She challenged a Dallas corset salesman who had uttered insults “directed not at me as a person but at my race.”
“I was having dinner in the Biltmore Grill with Frankie Laine,” says Shirley Woolf. “Josephine had just walked in, and this Dallas character said, ‘I didn’t know they allowed niggers in here.’ So we all went down to the police station, and she filed a complaint.
“They kept the corset salesman in jail overnight, and the judge fined him a hundred dollars and made him apologize, so she got great satisfaction. I didn’t see anything so great about it, but listen, I was the one who had to get up at six o’clock in the morning to go to court at eight.”
“We played a big benefit in California,” says Stanley Kay, “and all the Hollywood stars came out, and they talked, they were rude. I said, ‘Gee, Joe, I feel bad,’ and she said, ‘They didn’t come to see me, they came to see one another, it’s all right, I don’t care.’ ”
While in Los Angeles, Josephine came face-to-face with a bit of her youth. “I’d just got married,” says Caroline Reagan’s daughter, Sophie Reagan-Herr, “and I was living in Santa Monica, and these beautiful announcements had been in all the papers that Josephine was coming to Los Angeles.
“I didn’t know whether she had bad memories of me because of my mother, but one morning I phoned her hotel and woke her up. ‘Oh, my little Sophie,’ she said, ‘why don’t you come to the show?’ The warmth coming across the telephone was wonderful, so we went to the theater—my husband, my little stepson, and I—and she had left us seats in the front row. She had an act that, I see now, looking at pictures of La Revue Nègre, was a sort of remembrance. She had a wheelbarrow full of vegetables, and she picked up a small cabbage and threw it to me. It was a pun—in France, my little cabbage, mon petit chou, is a love name.”
In San Francisco, where she played the Golden Gate Theater, Josephine had a reunion with Thelma Carpenter. “She had noticed,” says Thelma, “the city didn’t have any colored bus drivers, so one morning, she drags me down to the bus depot, and finds the man in charge of hiring. Why, she wants to know, could so many Negroes qualify to drive trucks in the army, ‘but cannot qualify to drive your city buses?’ He denies there’s any policy of discrimination. So here stands Madame Bakaire, red scarf tied around her head, ain’t got the makeup on, ain’t got the ponytail on, and after he gets through talking, she says, ‘Monsieur, you’re a nasty little man,’ and we walk out.
“Only a queen would do that. I used to call her the biggest gyp on the Nile, because who was the gyp on the Nile but Cleopatra?
“Ned and Shirley nurtured her, babied her, took care of her, there was nothing she wanted that wasn’t given to her. She was appreciated, she got her money, pay or play, she never had to worry with Ned Schuyler.”
Had Josephine dallied with her handsome, free-spending manager? No, says Shirley Woolf. “She flirted, but Ned was on the needle, he was pretty far gone. It was an interesting time, and I have no regrets. Toward the end of that summer, we went to Paris with Josephine. Ned bought me a ten-thousand-dollar wardrobe, and we stayed at the Crillon. It was all very nice for a kid from Brooklyn.
“Josephine took us to the Dervals’ house, she took me to the Folies, and introduced me as her attorney, we met the duke and duchess of Windsor. I had thought Josephine was popular in Cuba, but not like in France.”
Ned fell in love with Les Milandes, and in their heads, he and Josephine built empires, as the grand renovation continued. Under Jo Bouillon’s command, six young gardeners dressed as American sailors bent to their work. (Jo had bought the uniforms from a surplus store in Harlem.) The musical comedy spectacle of the hapless growers stooping for potatoes and lettuces, backsides in the air, straining the seams of their tight pants, had the villagers screaming with laughter. But not in front of Jo.
As always, Josephine was everywhere, challenging her guests, leading forced marches over as much of the six hundred acres as her captives were willing to slog through, pointing out wonders present and to come. “Here, we’ll have the first-class hotel, there the African huts . . .”
She couldn’t get a gambling license? Never mind, there would be gardens and bars, there would be a gas station and a heliport. “I think she was guided by her bonne étoile, her good star,” says Georgette Malaury. “I believe the souvenirs of her youth—the way black people were treated in America, her success in France—marked her. They made her strong, gave her plenty of cheek. But here at Les Milandes, she found calm, she was at the right age, she needed that stop in her life, and again, it was her bonne étoile, she always arrived at the right moment in the right place.”
Josephine, however, was not quite ready to settle down. She was like Saint Augustine imploring God for chastity, “but not yet.” After the humiliations of the Ziegfeld Follies and Paris Sings Again, she had finally sed
uced America. Copa City, the Strand, the tour—she who was a star all over the world had been recognized at last in the country of her birth. And now she was going back there for some more applause. Ned had arranged for her to open at the Roxy.
She had it in her hands, everything she wanted. And she blew it.
Chapter 32
THE FEUD WITH WALTER WINCHELL
“She broke my heart, I am a finished man”
She came to the Roxy like a hero,” says Shirley Woolf.
“Extraordinary Limited Engagement!” boasted the ads. “Ned Schuyler Presents The Exotic Rage of Paris . . . in her only New York theatre appearance this season.” It was a long way from Bob Russell’s “25 Hottest Coons in Dixie.”
For the finale at the Roxy, Jo Méhu (he staged the show) recalled that Josephine wore “a cloak made of sixty-six feet of satin, trimmed with fifty-five pounds of pink fox.” And a headdress trembling with pink bird-of-paradise feathers.
Then the feathers hit the fan.
It took a few days. At first, the audiences were perfect, the notices were perfect, Josephine was so buoyed by her reception on opening night that she announced she wasn’t going to sing “J’ai Deux Amours” anymore—“I don’t need to”—and was scolded by Sophie Tucker: “You put that song back in!” Josephine put that song back in.
On Tuesday night, October 16, along with Bessie Buchanan, Roger Rico and his wife, Solange, Josephine went to the Stork Club.
Here are the bare bones of the plot. The four arrived around midnight, and were shown into the long narrow Cub Room (reserved for VIPs) where owner Sherman Billingsley fed and flattered the famous. On the way to their table, they passed Walter Winchell, who was having supper with Jack O’Brian, the Journal-American columnist, and Mrs. O’Brian.
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