Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  “Josephine stopped and said hello,” O’Brian remembers. “Winchell told her he liked her ponytail.” She and her friends were seated, drinks were served, but no food arrived. After an hour or so, a furious Josephine went to the phone and called Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, to charge that the Stork Club was practicing racial discrimination.

  Here are the fleshed-out bones of the plot. Roger Rico, a bass with the Paris Opéra, had come to this country to take over the role of the French planter, Emil de Becque, when Ezio Pinza left South Pacific. Rico was offended by suggestions that, since his parents had owned plantations in Algeria, this was typecasting. He felt he was being called a colonialist, and was sensitive to charges of racial exploitation. He wanted to take Josephine—they had known each other for years—to the Stork Club, but asked a friend if it could be done without incident. The friend laughed. “She is an actress, you can perfectly well take her.”

  Bessie Buchanan—the one-time chorus girl who would become the first black woman elected to the New York State Assembly—also insisted there would be no problem. “You are French, Josephine.” But Thelma Carpenter, stopping by the Roxy that night, suspected Bessie’s motives. “Josephine had done her last show, she was sitting with a hat on her head, naked except for a Hermès scarf tied around her belly like an apron (it covered the scars from her operations) and she said she was going to the Stork Club. I told her not to take Bessie, I said, ‘It’s trouble.’ ”

  Charlie Buchanan thought so too, he blamed Bessie for all that followed. “She plotted everything,” he told me, after Bessie’s death. “I spent over four hundred thousand dollars on my wife’s political ambitions, just so I could have some peace.”

  Paul Bass: “Yes, my sister-in-law Bessie was ambitious. She used Joe and her fame to get where she wanted, up in politics.”

  Hycie Curtis (a dancer and longtime friend of Bessie’s): “Bessie could sell herself. Even in show business, she couldn’t do a damn thing, but she always got a spot. I figure Bessie gave Josephine bad advice. She knew what would happen.”

  Jo Attles: “Josephine shouldn’t have done what she did because she just came here to visit, make some money, get out. She shouldn’t have come back here and get treated like a secondhand somebody. But her one dream after the war was maybe to come and make a slight dent in America. ‘Let me put my foot in Hollywood. Or my face.’ ”

  The singer Dick Campbell was a Bessie loyalist. Acknowledging that she might have used Josephine to further her own goals, he still admired her. “I think Bessie wanted to go to the Stork Club and break down the discrimination there. Josephine gave her the opportunity.”

  “We were at Walter’s table, number fifty, a banquette,” says Yvonne O’Brian. “Josephine was more in the middle of the room. She had on a blue satin dress, and she looked beautiful. She and her friends were drinking champagne, there was no incident. In a place like that—crowded after theater—it takes a while to get food orders on the table. Perhaps there was a delay but I don’t think it was on purpose, because Sherman Billingsley wouldn’t discriminate against a celebrity. Celebrities were his life.”

  Right, says her husband. “Josephine Baker was the star of a show on Broadway, and Winchell liked her. Billingsley would never have done anything against her in front of Walter.”

  Be that as it may, says Solange Rico, “When my husband called the waiters, they acted as if they didn’t hear him. Finally, he obliged a waiter to come, and the waiter said, ‘There is no steak left.’ Then my husband asked for crab cakes. None of them were left either. ‘Very well,’ said my husband, ‘we are going to order something else.’ But the waiter was already gone.”

  This was when Josephine got up and went to the phone. Roger Rico went with her. Again, they passed Winchell’s table. “How nice,” Winchell said to the O’Brians. “They’re going to dance.” (You couldn’t dance in the Cub Room, you had to go to the big room next door where a rumba band alternated with a more conventional orchestra.)

  Winchell and the O’Brians left the club to go to work—they were bound for a special late screening of The Desert Fox at the Rivoli—while Josephine was calling Walter White. “When she came back to the table,” Mrs. Rico says, “the waiter was serving the steak, but she didn’t want it anymore, she wanted to go.”

  Bill Harbach, a television director who was in the Cub Room that night, remembers hearing loud voices coming from Josephine’s table. “Mr. Rico was screaming, ‘This is outrageous,’ and a big discussion was going on.”

  Upon demanding the check, Rico was told that Mr. Billingsley never permitted celebrities to pay. “Until tonight, you have always taken my money,” cried Rico, throwing thirty dollars on the table and stalking away.

  As for Josephine, French citizen, she had become Marianne, the symbol of liberté, égalité, fraternité. When she was done phoning Walter White, she phoned Billy Rowe, a black deputy police commissioner. Then she and Bessie made straight for Walter White’s apartment, where they recited their grievances—not only had Josephine been barbarously handled, but Walter Winchell had sat by and let it happen. (Interestingly, there was no mention of an insult to Bessie, who chose not to make her own African heritage an issue. It was like the old joke “Let’s you and him fight.”)

  Still steaming when they left the Whites, Bessie propelled Josephine to Chandler’s restaurant, from which Barry Gray, known as a liberal, broadcast a late-night radio talk-and-music show. The women arrived too late to get on the air—Gray signed off at 3 A.M.—but he offered them a rain check. “Come back another time, and bring your lawyer.”

  By then, Josephine was out of control. “She came into my room at the hotel,” says Shirley Woolf, “and she was yelling about Winchell. I said, ‘Look how much good he has done for you, did you want him to hit his friend Billingsley in the head?’ I said I wouldn’t go to a place where my people weren’t wanted, and she said, ‘Darling, your people would buy the place.’

  “While I had always disliked Winchell, I explained that the worst thing she could do was attack him. I said, ‘He writes every day, he’s on the air every week.’ ‘Oh, but darling,’ she said, ‘I am much bigger than he is.’ Her ego by this time was beyond belief. You could not hold her back!”

  Winchell was still sleeping when his phone rang at noon the next day. It was his secretary in a tizzy. People were calling from all over town to find out what had happened at the Stork Club. Had Josephine Baker been treated shamefully? A telegram from Walter White inquired why Winchell hadn’t come to Josephine’s rescue. Winchell was horrified. More feared than loved, he was entirely capable of nasty behavior, but this time, he was innocent. He had not even been in the room when the big scene played out. “I am appalled,” he later wrote, “at the agony and embarrassment caused Josephine Baker and her friends at the Stork Club. But I am equally appalled at the efforts to involve me in an incident in which I had no part.”

  There was also a rumor that Grace Kelly had been in the Stork Club that night, and had failed to champion Josephine. As he had defended Winchell, O’Brian defended Kelly. “If she’d been there, I would have seen her. I was a kind of godfather to Grace.”

  Now a council of war took place in Josephine’s dressing room between shows at the Roxy. Present were Josephine, Curt Weinberg (Josephine’s press agent), Bessie Buchanan, Solange Rico, Ted Poston (a black reporter for the New York Post), Henry Lee Moon from the NAACP, Ned Schuyler, Shirley Woolf, and a second lawyer Schuyler had called in.

  Bessie wanted to picket the Stork Club. The lawyers said if Josephine picketed, she could be sued and her salary attached. Moon phoned Thurgood Marshall (then special counsel to the NAACP) who said yes, Josephine was liable to a suit, but he wished she would picket anyway.

  Solange Rico was asked by Moon if Winchell had tried to ease Josephine’s humiliation. She confessed that Winchell hadn’t known about it. “He left before we did.”

  Moon didn’t care. “It’s time we got after him an
yhow.”

  The drama grew uglier, bad for everyone it touched. Billingsley was threatened with the revocation of his liquor license; state and city examiners were all over him like a rash. True, the ex-bootlegger who screamed at employees, “If I catch you bastards stealing a cup of coffee, you can get your asses out of here,” was not a sweetheart. And besides that, he was nosey. “Under every table in the Cub Room was a mike,” said Tony Butrico, one of the bartenders. “What you said could be heard in the offices upstairs.”

  (I wonder if everything Josephine said at the table that night was taped by Mr. Billingsley and passed on to Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover. In any case, it appears that the FBI chief was not interested in Baker v. Stork Club. When Walter White wired him to ask if he would make public a statement of disapproval “regarding gratuitous refusal of service to Miss Josephine Baker,” Hoover scribbled across the wire, “No answer required, I don’t consider this to be any of my business.”)

  No matter how unlovely Billingsley’s habits, many believed the Stork Club was being unfairly singled out. In 1951, most New York establishments practiced discrimination, although the great Pierre Franey says Le Pavillon, where he was chef, put out the red carpet for Josephine. “My boss, Henri Soulé, was honored by her visit, she got the best table and we prepared special dishes.”

  After the incident at the Stork Club, the prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson came to the Roxy to talk to Josephine. He was Winchell’s friend, and, according to Stanley Kay, “Josephine asked him, ‘Why are you here?’ He said, ‘Because I love you, and I don’t want you to make trouble. Walter is too powerful, he can kill your career.’ ”

  In 1991, reading that Winchell’s private papers were going to be auctioned, I phoned in a bid. I bought his files on Josephine for $648.86, surprised there was so little interest in what had been a cause célèbre.

  I have also seen Josephine Baker files supplied to Winchell by the FBI, and some of the material seemed to me so childish I began to wonder about the agency’s ability to protect America. Josephine had performed during May Day demonstrations in Paris. She had said she hated the United States “except for the money she can earn here.” It was rumored of her early years in France that she had been “promiscuous in her sex relations with both men and women” and “would do anything to further her career.”

  Among Winchell’s personal papers, there are memos expressing his outrage. “After all I did for her!” was scrawled across one scrap of paper.

  To Herman Klurfeld, one of his ghostwriters, he expressed bafflement. “If she was discriminated against, why didn’t she tell me? She knows I’m one of her fans, and I thought she was one of my friends.”

  No more. Now he would show her she had chosen the wrong enemy. He swung into action, digging up a sixteen-year-old story from the Associated Press quoting Josephine’s praise for Mussolini in his war against Ethiopia. “I am willing to recruit a Negro army to help Italy . . . to travel around the world to convince my brothers Mussolini is their friend.”

  Astonishingly, though Josephine had indeed offered to raise an army for the Italian dictator, she took herself to Lucien le Lievre, a French-born lawyer with a respected Wall Street firm, and told him she wanted to sue Walter Winchell. “She was in a fighting mood,” says le Lievre. “I thought she might have a good case for defamation, and I sent her to Arthur Garfield Hays, a great litigator and author in the field of civil rights.”

  But a woman screaming “Shame on America!” while brandishing a French passport alarmed and embarrassed the French government, which sent an envoy from its embassy in Washington to baby-sit Josephine. His mission was not easy. “Josephine was dangerous,” he said, “because she was sharp, personally ambitious, and she did not know the difference between what could be done and what could not be done.”

  She announced that she was going to continue to fight “this horrible thing,” even if she were deported.

  Winchell, who by then thought she ought to be deported, went on with his campaign to reestablish his liberal credentials and tarnish hers. His column was filled with tributes to himself. A man named Larry Steele wrote to say, “The vast majority of Negroes know that in you we have a friend.” And Valaida Snow, the Sissle and Blake star of Josephine’s early days, wrote to thank Winchell for the part he’d played in making her recent engagement at Café Society a success. “It was the most important step in my career.”

  People seeking Winchell’s favor and people who just enjoyed a good feud offered observations. George Schuyler, New York editor of the black Pittsburgh Courier, denounced Josephine for “successfully hornswoggling the colored brethren into accepting her as a group heroine and champion.” He said she was being used by “fellow travelers and crypto Communists,” and had repudiated them only once, “when she protested that she had been fleeced by the Reds on Willie McGee’s funeral expenses.”

  Winchell’s attacks redoubled. He reprinted some of the poison Josephine had spewed in her last book with Marcel Sauvage, including the observation that the Negroes of Harlem were “victims of the Jews.”

  By now, Winchell was feeling so aggrieved that he couldn’t walk away from the battle. Josephine also was in too deep to drop it. Her show had closed at the Roxy, but before she left town, she called on Katherine Yarborough, whom she’d known since Shuffle Along. “I was living on Fifth Avenue,” Yarborough says, “and Bessie Buchanan had told her I had powerful Jewish friends. She wanted me to bring my friends to her defense. She seemed destroyed.”

  In late November, Josephine appeared in Montreal, and, attempting to salvage what she could, gave an interview to Le Petit Journal. “You know I have a tough skin,” she said. “To discourage me, they are nasty, they dig up my past, they falsify it. . . . I’m convinced that millions of people are thinking like me, even if they can’t say it out loud for fear of being martyred. I will keep on being a missionary of peace, I will keep on fighting for Americans because I don’t want them separated by prejudice.”

  Then she sent an S.O.S. to Jacques Abtey in Morocco. It was the first word he had got from her in four years: “My lawyer and I are going to attack Walter Winchell who protects the director of the Stork Club where I had my incident of discrimination. . . . Try to get the Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian and Palestinian newspapers to write about it, to publish something so you can come here with it. . . . You must bring a lot of documents about how I have fought injustice at any cost. You will say you are coming from North Africa because you have learned in the press of the insults of Winchell and Billingsley. . . .”

  At the very end of the letter, she stopped giving orders and was suddenly, unexpectedly touching. “Jo is panicked that something could happen to me. You must understand him, Jacques, if by chance the thing turns sour, Jo is no fighter like us.” In a follow-up note, she told him all businesses in New York were “in the hands of Jews. . . . It’s the same as it was in Berlin before the war, but you can’t say that. . . . When you arrive, I’ll give you a lesson.”

  December 10: Through Arthur Garfield Hays, Josephine issued a statement to the press. She was not anti-Semitic (“I married a Jew”), she had never been a fan of Mussolini (“so ridiculous it does not require comment”), and her services to the Allies had been outstanding (“My former commander, Colonel Abtey, is coming from his home in Casablanca to protest against these reflections on my war record”). In this statement, Josephine promoted Jacques from commandant to colonel.

  Almost hidden in two pages of self-justification was the line “Miss Baker accepts Walter Winchell’s statement that he was not present at the time of any discourtesy.” But, said Mr. Hays, “this is beside the point.”

  If there was a point, it was beginning to get lost.

  December 17: Josephine was in Chicago addressing a breakfast meeting of the Chicago Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress. She did not tell them all the businesses were in the hands of Jews; she told them, “We are working for the same ideal: a world without
hate.”

  December 19: Josephine opened in Harlem at the Apollo for a nine-day engagement. (It was the first time she’d played an uptown theater.) She asked Jacques to come one night, and at the theater, her new secretary, Carolyn Carruthers (a light-skinned black woman and a friend of Bessie Buchanan), led him to his seat. “Suddenly,” he recalls, “a black giant gets up, takes me in his arms, and says, ‘Thank you for what you are doing for Josephine.’ It was Paul Robeson, and he too had a lot of troubles in America.”

  December 20: The Mayor’s Committee on Unity sent His Honor, Vincent Impellitteri, its final report on the incident at the Stork Club. The committee said it had found “nothing to substantiate a charge of racial discrimination.”

  December 21: Josephine sued Winchell, the Hearst Corporation, and King Features for four hundred thousand dollars, charging defamation of character and claiming her profession and earning capacity had been impaired. That night, she and her cadre—Arthur Garfield Hays, Bessie Buchanan, Walter White, and Jacques Abtey (with an interpreter)—finally appeared on Barry Gray’s radio show. Jacques said he had traveled over three thousand miles to “defend the honor of a war heroine,” and read aloud laudatory letters from two French generals.

  In days to come, Sugar Ray Robinson would show up on Gray’s show to say Winchell was an ally of black people, and Ed Sullivan (a Daily News columnist and host of a popular Sunday-night television show) would argue that Winchell was nobody’s ally. As for Gray himself, the affair almost put him out of business. “Sponsors were intimidated by the pressure of Winchell’s friends, guests that used to come on the program were no longer appearing, I was physically attacked twice.”

  December 26: The Chicago Daily News quoted Edith Sampson, “noted Negro attorney of Chicago.” Miss Sampson had pronounced herself weary of Josephine’s bad-mouthing the United States and extolling the great race relations in France while “French colonialism is a blot on the world’s conscience.” Miss Sampson said the forty-five million blacks in France’s African colonies “suffer much more than does Miss Baker in Atlanta or New York.”