Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  “Her bathroom was covered with gold-leafed tiles; when she needed money, she would have them taken off the walls and sent to the bank as collateral.”

  She thought she was achieving what she had first plotted with Le Corbusier, her “little village with little houses, little trees, little roads for people to be happy,” but when she was in residence, not everyone was happy. Subconsciously, she re-created the conditions of her childhood, turning herself into Mrs. Kaiser of dreaded memory, rousing her victims at dawn.

  “During the day, a twelve-year-old girl from the neighborhood tended Josephine’s sheep,” says Georges Malaury. “Evenings, she worked in the kitchen, washing dishes, cleaning the stove. Josephine would keep her till 11 P.M., midnight, it was dark, we had no lighted roads, and the child’s mother worried. Every night, she would come to pick up her daughter, and wait outside.

  “Josephine didn’t like that, so one night she goes out and says to the mother, ‘What are you doing here?’ and the mother says, ‘I came to pick up my daughter,’ and Josephine hits her. They fought, rolling on the ground, Josephine screaming. It was unpleasant, we heard it across the road.”

  “Josephine was terrible,” says Henri Chapin. “She left us independent contractors in peace, but her maids ran when they saw her coming. She would have them carry things from the basement to the roof, from the roof to the basement, just to keep them busy. And she didn’t sleep, day and night she kept running, she had a terrible vitality.

  “When she started the adoptions, Jo Bouillon would tell me, ‘Dis donc, I’m a father again of I don’t know what.’ She used those adoptions as weapons for her racial fight. At the beginning, she put billboards along the road saying COME SEE LES MILANDES AND ITS RAINBOW TRIBE. The people all around protested, ‘You don’t show little children like monkeys,’ so she had the billboards taken down.”

  Even the children’s nurses were driven mercilessly. Here are excerpts of a letter to a touring Josephine from one nanny: “I have been eight days at Les Milandes, and have not yet found time to unpack. . . . On top of my duties as nurse-assistant, I am a maid of all trades, washing, cleaning, scouring, cooking. Is this included in the job description, and if so, what is the pay? And when during twenty-four hours is the time permitted for rest?”

  “The personnel went filing past for years,” says Jacqueline Abtey. “Josephine engaged them like musical acts, wherever she was, and months later, when she was back for a short visit at Les Milandes, she would have forgotten she’d hired them, or she would discover they were no good for the job. It was turmoil, in one year I counted over two hundred nurses. This was bad for the children, they would get attached to a girl and cry when she left, but you could not reason with Josephine. The nursery was badly kept, the odor of pipi on the mattresses was almost as bad as the monkey house.”

  “People in the village were worried for their children,” Georges Malaury told me. “And they were worried for these children of Josephine when she was away, because Josephine’s life had become their life, Josephine’s worries became their worries. Jo would seduce young men, and a few families blackmailed Josephine. Most of these boys were working at the château, and suddenly their pay would be a bit higher. For young kids, that place was a sex palace.”

  Like the rampant ivy on the château walls, sex ran amok at Les Milandes. “Josephine’s brother-in-law, Elmo, would say he was going to get some grass for the rabbits,” Georges says, “and he would be with a girl, and suddenly he would see his wife, Margaret, running, looking for him. He would jump over a wall and be working next to my father at the anvil when Margaret arrived breathless, a revolver in her hand.”

  Richard Martin behaved even more recklessly than Elmo. He loved France, loved “bein’ able to walk down the street with a white woman and not bein’ scared of gettin’ hanged.” When he wasn’t working on the farm, or running Les Milandes’ gas station, he was chasing girls. He impregnated one—Josephine sent her to Switzerland for an abortion—and he also fathered a baby boy by a sweetheart in Bordeaux.

  “Phone calls would come to the château,” Jacqueline Abtey says. “Richard was drunk, in delirium, there would be knives, fistfights with the local farmers, running after women until somebody called the police. It was a circus.

  “Can you imagine what the local people had to endure? Elmo was kind; Margaret was different. She despised the local people, found them dirty. She really practiced racism against the Dordogne people—she, who to them was an intruder!

  “As for Josephine’s mother, she mostly stayed in her room. She had a profile like an eagle, she was very black, tall, slim, and her eyes could flash lightning. The poor woman did not speak French—she was the only one of Josephine’s family to live at the château, the others had their own little houses. There was a tension between Josephine and her mother. Carrie would never come to the table for dinner, you saw her nowhere, and at the end she was bedridden.”

  Richard too spoke of the tension between Josephine and Carrie. “My mother said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, Josephine doesn’t seem to love us anymore. Everything she do is contrary.’ Mama told me Josephine said, ‘I don’t understand you people.’ Oh, that turned me against Josephine. ‘You people.’ Like we were animals.”

  Even so, in any fight between Josephine and Jo, Carrie took her daughter’s side. One night, husband and wife were battling so noisily that Carrie came to investigate. Jo was up against the wall, his eyes puffy, and he yelled, “Look what your daughter did to me, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to jump out the window.” Carrie walked to the window, opened it, and shouted, “Jump.”

  It was in September 1954 that Josephine brought Jari home from Finland, the third member of the Rainbow Tribe. (“He was very cute,” says Ginette. “Again, she just appeared at the hotel with him. I don’t know how or where she got him.”) Six months after that, she found Luis in Colombia. She’d given Luis’s parents money, but when she got back to France, she discovered they were demanding another thirty-five hundred dollars to let her keep him. “Josephine,” said her lawyer, “you are not adopting him, you are buying him.”

  Luis was the first of the children to be baptized a Catholic, and the first black child. Now Jo felt it was time to call a halt, complaining to his wife that their financial situation was precarious. “Josephine’s eyes blazed. Surely one more mouth to feed couldn’t matter.”

  “All those children were her biggest mistake,” says Jacqueline Abtey. “To make her point, she could have taken a black and a white and been done with it. But she always needed a big scene, and when she reached menopause, and she had no real man around her, she went totally into politics, and adopting children, she became the Universal Mother. I think the menopause worked on her psyche; some women pass through it calmly, some are unhinged.”

  Still, until the whole operation unraveled some years later, Josephine seemed to be the only one who didn’t worry. She kept hiring and firing, ordering and reordering, going her imperious way.

  “She had a chauffeur named Maurice whom she used shamefully,” Jacqueline says. “He would go pick up the trout, the chicken, the vegetables for the restaurant. He would make fifty trips a day, and at 2 A.M., she would decide to go to Paris. It is a six- or seven-hour trip from Les Milandes to Paris, and when they got there, he would wait around while she bought some gloves, some perfume, and then bring her back again. He would see the madness, but he loved her and she knew it, and she could squeeze him, exploit him.”

  The question of whether or not she exploited the children is still being argued among those who knew her. When the youngsters were indoors, they could be observed through a picture window. They were washed, reprimanded, fed in full view of anyone willing to pay an extra five francs for the spectacle, and the cameras never stopped. Josephine told her lawyer not to report this income. (While she cheated the government, her accountants cheated her. They were keeping two sets of books at Les Milandes, and Josephine knew it, Richard said, “b
ut she didn’t do nothing.”)

  Her most steadfast defender, Yvette Malaury, denies that Josephine “pushed” her brood in front of the public. “It was just that some people had traveled ten hours to get here, and if Josephine wasn’t home—she was away so much—they wanted to see the children.”

  But Richard thought the tourists—even the bad-mannered ones—were being swindled by his sister. “Josephine overcharged, she just wanted them to come with their pocketbooks.”

  “To visit the château,” Jari remembers, “the people would come through the big iron gate, and in the courtyard there was a chain with a sign that said FORBIDDEN TO PASS, and we would be on the château side and the visitors on the other, and Maman would push us out a little, so the people could see us. Never during the week, only on Sundays.

  “We could not understand her spirit of brotherhood. She would tell us, ‘You have clothes, other poor little children need some,’ and she would send money to buy new clothes to those poor children. Sometimes we would tell her, ‘But my trousers are too tight’—we were outgrowing everything—but she made us keep wearing our too-short pants with the let-down cuffs. We liked her spirit of helping others, but we resented the way she was doing it. Still, we could say nothing, she would have accused us of being selfish.”

  Eli Mercier doesn’t blame Josephine for what she did to the children or the tourists, but for what she did to the farm. Eli, the boy who had first opened the château gate to her, had come back from the war to work at Les Milandes as a tenant farmer. “We had been there forever, we knew the land, the seasons, what the earth could take and what she could give, but Josephine wanted it her way. You know, there are no miracles with farming. And in those days we came out better than today. The oxen, the horses, were better than the machines. With the animals you had the compost, the fertilizer, you were closer to nature and happier. Josephine wanted to revolutionize all that with modern techniques. It was pure madness.

  “At 5 A.M., she would get up to show the farmers and the gardeners she could work better than they. She had them plant vegetables in October. They warned that a frost would arrive in a couple of weeks and kill everything, but she didn’t listen, and when the frost came, she shrugged and said, ‘You would have been happy if we’d had fresh tomatoes for Christmas.’ She was half crazy most of the time, and often tipsy because she would eat a jar full of cherries in alcohol; once she started, she could not stop.

  “My wife and I couldn’t take it, we decided to leave. I told Jo and Josephine, ‘Don’t worry for me, one day I will be the rich one, and you will be poor.’ ”

  To replace Eli, Georges Malaury says, “Josephine had someone come from Alsace to be head farmer. She paid him four hundred thousand francs a year, when she could have had any good farmer from here for eighty thousand.”

  “She was no administrator,” Leon Burg concurred. “And she had lost all sense of money. She would sign a contract for rose trees, and then refuse to pay the nurserymen because they had used her name for publicity. When a package arrived COD from Paris—it contained a coat of feathers, a stage costume—she screamed that the mailman was trying to rob her, and she locked the Abbé Tournebise out of the chapel when he asked for the money she had taken from the poor box. He said, ‘The money belongs to the priest of the village.’ Josephine answered, ‘The priest, c’est moi!’ ”

  Josephine and Jo, says Eli Mercier, used to fight in the streets of Castelnaud. “She would scream, ‘Faggot!’ he would yell, ‘Dyke!’ They weren’t hiding anything. Jo would come to our house with another man, their arms linked, Josephine would find happiness with a girl from a Paris ballet company.

  “During the big tourist season, they had corridas with cows, they had dog races, they put on wonderful cabaret shows. Jo was capable, but he could do nothing, she put sticks in his wheels. But can you imagine, in the good times, two thousand cars would come in a day?”

  Even the American consul general in Bordeaux appeared to be impressed with what Josephine was trying to do at Les Milandes. “It seems that Josephine and Jo set themselves up as idealists in that they pursue an effort to destroy racial hatred and prejudice,” he reported to the State Department in Washington. “They are highly considered throughout the country, and Josephine herself allegedly plays the role of a fairy queen with great success.”

  In the summer of 1955, beginning to sense at last that it was not prudent of her to keep expressing her contempt for the United States government, Josephine wrote the French consul in New York, assuring him that she was not a Communist, but a victim of the cold war, and asked him to help her win an audience with President Eisenhower. Despite her dire predictions of what would happen if Eisenhower were elected, she wished “to present him in person with my respects.” (She did meet him, but not until later.)

  Her four-year-old damage suit against Walter Winchell had recently been dismissed—she’d skipped a court appearance—but by November, she was once again embroiled in a legal fight far from home. She was arrested in Quebec, and her costumes seized, at the behest of William Taub, who had been waiting to nab her ever since 1952, when, he charged, she had run out on her contract with him. Frantic, Jo Bouillon borrowed the five thousand dollars for bail money from friends.

  Two more children, both French-born, arrived just before Christmas.

  “We drove to a foster home near Paris,” Ginette says. “First we picked up Philippe, a two-year-old boy, and then in a nearby village we picked up Alain Jean-Claude, fourteen months old.” Again, Josephine renamed them according to her whim; Philippe became Jean-Claude, Alain Jean-Claude became Moïse. Having failed in an attempt to adopt a baby in Israel, she decided to fabricate her own Jewish child. She announced that Moïse would be fed only kosher food, and plunked a tiny skullcap on his head. (Moïse is French for Moses).

  “She wanted all races, all religions,” Ginette told me, “and she would give them the religion she wanted on the spot.”

  So then there were six.

  And Josephine, about to turn fifty, telephoned Bruno Coquatrix at the Olympia. “I’ve decided to give my farewell at your theater,” she told him. “I want to say goodbye to my public while I still have the physical strength.”

  Marthe Mercadier saw the show early in its two-week run. A comedienne, Marthe was shooting a picture called Jésus La Caille with Jeanne Moreau. “The press was full of Josephine’s farewell, and one night, after we finished shooting, Jeanne and I dressed up and went. We were going to be picked up afterward and taken to an elegant dinner.

  “The evening began well—when Josephine arrived onstage, a wave of warmth filled the sold-out house, we were very moved. Guards were down in front to stop people if they tried to approach her. Suddenly, a very young black man pushed through the guards, and arrived at Josephine’s feet, his clothes a bit disheveled from the struggle. He was holding a little bouquet, and he threw himself at her feet, crying, ‘Merci.’

  “The show stopped, everyone in the house was paralyzed with astonishment, and Josephine, touched at proof of such love, kept the boy with her, and sang a song to him, holding his hand. The house was in tears, the boy looked ready to faint, and Jeanne and I sobbed, mascara falling on our beautiful dresses. We didn’t care. We were in such a state by the end, our eyes swollen, no mascara left, except on our faces, that when we came out, our boyfriends were furious. They said, ‘Listen, we’re taking you home.’

  “Next day, we told everyone at the studio what we had seen, and four days later, the cameraman came to us laughing. ‘About your evening with Josephine, this boy escaped and went onstage and stopped the show?’ We said yes, it was intense, so unpredictable. Not quite, said the cameraman. ‘I went last night, and that boy is paid, he comes up at every performance with his little bouquet.’

  “Jeanne and I looked at each other, the ceiling falling on us! We had believed, and we were hurt. Then admiration took over. What an extraordinary piece of choreography! A ballet between the guards, the kid, it was fabulous.
What cheek to dare to do it every night, to be able to summon up the emotion every night. It was a little hard to swallow, but I bought it.”

  That farewell engagement in mid-April (Josephine lived to say goodbye as often as Sarah Bernhardt) was one of her most spectacular. “She had asked all the big Paris theaters to do a number in her honor, an homage to her,” says Paulette Coquatrix, wife of the Olympia’s owner. “The top French performers came from the Lido, the Casino, the Folies, they were fighting to be part of it. On closing night, after Josephine finished her last show, they went on.

  “You couldn’t move backstage, just the cancan number from the Moulin Rouge involved fifty people, the same for the other theaters, they sent scenery, costumes, everything. And Josephine had the two center seats taken out of the first row and replaced them with a big armchair, and there she sat, in a long black velvet gown, bare-shouldered, wearing a rhinestone tiara fringed with brilliants, and long glittery earrings. On her right was her dear friend General Vallin, on her left, Jo Bouillon. Everyone wore black tie.

  “The show was fabulous, no theatre owner in the world could have afforded what was offered to Josephine that night. And they all played for free.”

  Marthe Mercadier, who described Josephine to me as “a great professional,” was less impressed with her as the Universal Mother. “I found extraordinary this idea of adopting children from all over the world, trying to establish a mini United Nations around baby food. I thought maybe it could have been a solution for all of us, so one day I went to Les Milandes to see how this woman was organizing herself with that family, that litter, as they were called.