Her anti-USA, pro-Perón rhetoric was beginning to have dire consequences in Latin America as well. “At the Opera Theatre in Buenos Aires,” Variety reported, “the gross declined noticeably throughout the past week.”
A projected tour fell apart. The Uruguayans didn’t want her because of her Perónist views, the Peruvians didn’t want her because she “planned to carry out racial propaganda against the United States.” Moreover, Argentina was beginning to pall, she was growing tired of playing understudy to the memory of Evita, and tired of the general, who spent his leisure chasing thirteen-year-old girls.
February 1953 found her again in Havana. Three times she had postponed her arrival there, and now her contracts with Montmartre Cabaret, the National Casino, and CMQ-Television (which had signed her for two weeks at fourteen thousand dollars) were canceled. “We can’t be at the mercy of her whims,” said one producer, but the truth was that her campaign against North America was making potential employers uneasy.
She settled for a couple of weeks’ work in a small neighborhood movie theater (a run-down former burlesque house), which thrilled Walter Winchell. By appearing at this “emporium of bump and grind,” he wrote, “Miss Baker has publicly acknowledged that her professional day is done.”
An audience with President Batista went badly, he refused to enroll in her crusade against America, and the next day, she was arrested. Military intelligence officers seized books and pamphlets from her rooms, took her to headquarters, and interrogated her about her Communist leanings. She said she didn’t have any. Like a criminal, she was fingerprinted and photographed with a number across her chest. She never forgot the number, 0000492, one more thorn in her martyr’s crown.
It was time to go. Spring was coming back to France, and so was Josephine, tired, angry, and empty of pocket. With creditors prowling around, Jo was getting cold feet about the transformation of Les Milandes, but the iron-willed Josephine simply hit the road again. Switzerland, Rome, then Paris for the annual Bal des Petits Lits Blancs, a charity ball to raise money for sick children. She performed with Lily Pons and came down into the audience to kiss Charlie Chaplin. Had not she and Charlie both been thrown to the lions by a wicked United States where the dollar was king?
In June, Josephine came to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “She and my wife and I walked from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace, down the Mall,” said Harry Hurford-Janes. “And she turned to us and said, ‘All this will be swept away one day.’ You know, the queen and everything. Well, it probably will, but it was strange how she admired and yet envied the royal family. For years, she sent them Christmas cards, and they were all acknowledged, and then she used to put these acknowledgments out in her apartment.”
Harry remembered going to the House of Lords with Josephine, and passing a black speaker, a Communist, haranguing the crowd in front of Hyde Park. “She went up to him and said, ‘My friend is white, I am black and white, why are you Red?’ Then she invited him to come to Les Milandes; she wanted to de-Communize him.”
Toward the end of October, in an uncharacteristic show of selflessness, she wrote to Colette Mars, who was sailing for New York to play the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel.
“Do not paralyze yourself with fear which doesn’t serve you but takes away your talent,” she advised, confessing that only the night before, she herself had been fearful, opening at the Drap d’Or, a small cabaret near the Champs-Élysées. (It was the best she could get now, she was considered to be washed up.) Stage fright, she told Colette, “is allowed to me because I’m much older than you.”
Thelma Carpenter was working in a club not far from the Drap d’Or, and she saw Josephine often. “She didn’t know how to be happy,” Thelma says, “but I could make her laugh, I entertained her. Before Christmas, she took me to the Galeries Lafayette. She wanted to buy Jo something.
“Now, she’d had husbands before, but Jo was gay, every queen in town knew him. And he was in the country, at Les Milandes, with his lover. When you’d call on the phone, the lover would answer and say he was “Madame Bakaire.”
“We go in the men’s department, and we’re trying on dressing gowns, trying to decide what would look best on Jo, and she says, ‘What should we give my wife-in-law?’ and I say I would give him poison, and she laughs. I think she saw she was in a ludicrous situation, but she came from that old school that said a woman’s gotta have a man, any kind of man. And maybe a regular man would have wanted too much of her, I don’t think she cared that much about sex. Anyway, she had done so much for herself, she was a man.
“I remember asking her about Germany because I knew she’d been in Berlin in the twenties. ‘We worked with no clothes on,’ she said, ‘so to keep us warm, they gave us cocaine. It was wide open in Berlin, it was a wicked city.’ ”
Suddenly, it added up. Everything Count Harry Kessler had confided to his diary: Josephine rolling naked on a floor, Josephine dancing for hours “without any sign of fatigue.”
“Pebbles to make my tired body gay.” It’s a line from the old melodrama The Shanghai Gesture, uttered by a character called Mother Goddamn. She is recounting the sufferings inflicted on her as a young girl in a brothel. “But,” she says, “I survived.”
White powder to make cold blood run hot. But Josephine survived. Long enough to grow tired of men. They were deceivers ever; the older they got, the more they used young girls as shields against age, and dropped them without pity. She had collected many grievances against the male sex, starting with her abandonment by the man who had fathered her and left her a child of bad luck.
I can identify with that, because I too was conceived as a child of bad luck. I can hear the villagers whispering behind my mother’s back, “Pauvre Luce, elle a pas eu de chance.”
Josephine could no longer conquer with the laughter of her croupe, nor as a war hero either. Her uniform had been consigned to the closets of Time, the soldiers who had dreamed of her had gone home to their sweethearts.
Her growing distrust and contempt for men—with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle—caused her to offer ever more insults to her hapless husband. Because it was in the fifties—nobody can remember the exact year—that she took as her companion a gorilla.
Maryse Bouillon: “She called him Bubu. He was as tall as a thirteen-year-old boy, it was frightful, everyone feared him.”
Yvette Malaury: “She dressed him like a man, with trousers, a shirt, and tie. Yes, like a man. And she and the gorilla would walk down the street together, occasionally making appearances at the guinguette. People would say, ‘It’s a scandal!’ She had become fond of that gorilla. When Jo Bouillon came back and tried to enter her bedroom, she told him, ‘I don’t need you anymore.’ ”
Georges Malaury: “He was a beautiful animal but people were afraid of him. And let me tell you, man to man, he had a big tool.”
Georgette Malaury (Georges’s sister): “Josephine did not treat him like an animal, but like a human being. He was jealous of anyone approaching her. In the end, she had to have him shot. She could have given him to a zoo, but she was always hasty.”
Eli Mercier: “He became wild, and escaped in the park. They killed him in the park.”
Incidentally, Bubu was the name of one of Josephine’s partners in the 1930s casino show Paris Qui Remue. An M. Maccio, dressed as a gorilla, stood next to Josephine as she sang “J’ai Deux Amours.”
In February 1954, Josephine went to Denmark and played a second-rate Copenhagen nightclub called the Harlem. She also lectured in the National Museum, under the auspices of a French organization called LICA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme), in the National Museum on “Why I Fight Racial Discrimination.”
“There is good and evil in all people,” she told her audience, adding that they must wonder why she was “joining the crusade for the freedom of humanity, instead of satisfying myself with my theater life, where doors are opened freely, where people are alwa
ys friendly, and where there are few disappointments and obstacles.”
A definition of theater life not recognizable to most performers, but let it go. She talked about South Africa, Japan (where, she claimed, whites discriminated against the Japanese), Germany, where the “innocent babies of colored American soldiers who had been stationed there and white German girls . . . had already created a problem.” It was against the background of this problem, she said, that she had decided “to adopt my five little boys.” (Nowhere else have I found any record of Josephine’s giving this reason for going into the Mother business.)
But mostly, she talked about the United States: how the actor Canada Lee was hounded to his death, how a Burmese judge was turned away by a restaurant in Washington, D.C., how two colored people in the South were killed because they used a toilet reserved for whites.
She said three-quarters of the world was composed of colored people, “and these peoples are uniting. . . . I am afraid of revenge, because nothing is more horrible than revenge which has its roots in hatred.”
On the face of it, there wasn’t much in the lecture that a human being with an ordinary amount of goodwill could fault, but the Danish foreign minister, a Mr. Hansen, was taken to task by the American ambassador for having extended formal hospitality to someone promoting “anti-Americanism in Denmark.”
Mr. Hansen said he didn’t think Josephine wanted to injure the United States, though he had, in fact, asked her why she hadn’t included “any mention of racial discrimination in the Soviet Union,” and she’d said she preferred to talk about places she had personal knowledge of. The American ambassador replied that he doubted Josephine had personal knowledge of South Africa or Japan, both of which she had mentioned in her speech.
At least part of that would be changing very soon. Josephine was going to Japan. She had decided to seize the moment. No big contracts were coming her way, the Casino and the Folies no longer fought over her, she felt vulnerable to the future. But she always had a new plan. Enter Josephine, the Universal Mother. If young men no longer wanted her, a brood of abandoned babies would make her feel needed again. She was going to turn the world into a better place, not only by fighting from public platforms, but in her private demesne.
In the spring of 1953 she had written to Miki Sawada (who was by then running an orphanage) and ordered a child, as you would a takeout dinner. “I would like you to find for me a Japanese baby of pure race, a healthy one, two years old. I want to adopt five little two-year-old boys, a Japanese, a black from South Africa, an Indian from Peru, a Nordic child, and an Israelite; they will live together like brothers.”
No more dolls out of the garbage can for Tumpy, she would have unbroken ones, healthy, perfect. She asked for the Japanese baby’s papers to be prepared at once. “Because I want to take him away with me. I will need a little kimono, because I would like him to live in his national costume so he will not forget his ancestors and his motherland. He will, of course, be raised in France. I would also like his first name to be Japanese.”
She left Paris for Tokyo with Ginette, her wardrobe mistress, and trunkfuls of new dresses by Christian Dior.
Chapter 34
LIFE IS A CABARET AT LES MILANDES
“Jo [Bouillon] would seduce young men”
Except for fallen petals under the trees, the cherry blossoms were finished, but the azaleas, pink, white, orange, red, were coming into bloom when Miki Sawada fetched Josephine from Haneda Airport.
They drove to Oiso, a town forty miles outside of Tokyo, to the Elizabeth Sanders Home (named for an Englishwoman whose money helped start the place). It was in this villa near the sea that Miki had begun to save abandoned babies of American soldiers and Japanese girls.
Although she was born a child of privilege, Miki’s comfortable life had been shattered by the war—a son killed, her husband stigmatized as a criminal by the American army. “My father could take no job,” says Emi Sawada, “our possessions were confiscated. When we lost the war, we lost everything.”
Including the villa in Oiso. But Miki got it back. First, she won permission from occupation authorities to set up an orphanage, then she started raising money to rescue Eurasian infants.
It began, Emi told me, on a train. A package fell from an overhead luggage rack onto Miki’s head. “My mother opened it, and discovered a newborn baby boy wrapped in newspapers. He was black, a child of the occupation.”
After that, Miki Sawada started taking in children nobody wanted. The first was found in the Imperial Palace plaza in the dead of winter. “The mothers used to leave them at the door,” Emi says. “There was no help from the Japanese public, these were impure children, children of the enemy still occupying our country.”
Between 1948 and 1954, Miki welcomed more than a thousand foundlings, and struggled to find money for milk, medicine, clothing, rice. When Josephine came in 1954, it was not only to adopt a child, but to give a series of free performances for the Home. Informed by an American officer that her friend was a Communist, Miki was stunned. “I had never heard of anything so ridiculous. She owned a castle!”
Because of American displeasure with Josephine, even her costumes were held hostage. Instead of arriving in Haneda, they had been unloaded in Hong Kong. She performed her first shows in Japan wearing one of Emi’s kimonos. (Forty years later, a woman named Laura Flannery told me there had indeed been a cabal against Josephine. While a CIA employee in Tokyo, Flannery had found a file describing a scheme to destroy Josephine’s reputation. “I asked why the agency would lie about a woman trying to adopt babies, and was told she was a leftist who went around the world talking down the United States.”)
In Hiroshima, Josephine visited a peace monument. “She stopped,” Miki recalled, “at the little store in front of the Atomic Bomb Memorial Hall, and put her hand on the shoulder of an old man. It was covered with raw-looking red keloids. . . . Tears ran down her face. ‘This is unforgivable,’ she said. ‘The countries that think they have won the war have lost something precious in the process.’ ”
After twenty-three concerts, she left Japan with two orphans. “First she had a Shinto ceremony performed for them,” Emi says. “I think she wanted to show her sincerity by putting these children in the care of the old gods.”
At the ceremony, M. Martin, director of the Air Force, stood proxy for the children’s father. (Jo did not yet know he had become the lucky daddy of two little boys.)
The older child, Yamamoto Akio (who would be called Akio), had been born on July 7, 1952; the younger, Kimura Teruya Seiji (who would be called Janot), had been born on July 15, 1953. They wouldn’t be legally adopted until 1957.
“When Josephine went with Mrs. Sawada to the orphanage,” Ginette says, “I stayed in our hotel in Tokyo. When she came back, she said, ‘Look, Ginette, look at the two beautiful children I have, my first two children, I’m so happy.’ Then we started to take care of them, give them bottles, all of that. It was a new part for her. I went to the Shinto ceremony; Josephine made me the godmother of Akio.”
Both Akio and Janot had been born of white fathers, though Miki Sawada said that, during her visit to the orphanage, Josephine had spoken with—and comforted—two young women with babies fathered by blacks. “One of the mothers spent a long time with Josephine under the trees in our garden . . . and returned home looking considerably happier and with renewed courage.”
Still, Josephine had not selected for herself a baby with a black father. I don’t really know why, except that maybe, in choosing abandoned children born of white men, she was choosing the little Josephine to nurture and make whole. (She would in time adopt black children, but never an American one.)
“On our way back to France,” Ginette says, “we spent five days in Saigon. It was an eleven-hour flight from Tokyo. Josephine sang in a cabaret, and also went to military camps to entertain the French soldiers who had been wounded fighting in the infamous battle of Dien Bien Phu.”
Then it was tim
e to go home.
A stewardess aboard the Air France Constellation remembered Josephine’s asking to have the babies’ bottles warmed in the galley. “She came there to change the children. She seemed satisfied, soft.”
On May 12, the beaming new mother deplaned at Orly, a baby in each arm. What had she come back to? Les Milandes going full tilt. “Sometimes,” said Leon Burg, “a truck would be unloaded in front of the château, and its contents loaded onto smaller trucks and driven away and sold somewhere else. But Josephine would get the bill. She helped put Périgord on the world map of tourism, three hundred thousand people came that spring and summer, but the owners of restaurants and hotels in the neighboring villages worried she was going to take all their business. More than once, she had her tires slashed, until they saw there was enough for everyone.”
The place had grown without, it seemed, any rational planning at all. “You can’t believe what went on here,” says the electrician, Henri Chapin. “Josephine had an architect who made no blueprints, he drew on raw walls, and then he would leave, and when he came back, the wall had been painted or papered, and the drawings would be gone. At the Chartreuse, the chic restaurant-hotel, they had done the upstairs rooms, but forgot to allow for the pitched roof; with the roof in place, you had to crawl on hands and knees to get from one room to another. It had to be redone.
“When her employees weren’t ruining her, Josephine was ruining herself. I worked three months to build her a water pump, new motors, copper pipes from Limoges, electric cables, and then Jo Bouillon comes to me and says, ‘Stop, we are going to do something else, a water tank.’
“I quit. I said, ‘Josephine, I like you, but I don’t like what’s going on here.’ If we had been near Paris or Marseilles, we could have catered banquets, weddings, but here we were lost. La Chartreuse was too beautiful, too fragile for the country, people broke everything.”
“When she gave a dinner in the grand salon,” says Jacqueline Abtey, “she would go and take the chalice and the monstrance and other consecrated articles from the chapel and decorate the long table with them. I was shocked. And guests would sit under large silver chandeliers, and eat off blue porcelain encrusted with roses. Only four sets of that Bohemian china had ever been made, for the duke of Windsor, the king of Italy, the queen of Holland, and Josephine.
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