“She never missed a performance, she never missed an entrance, she was a workaholic. Josephine, Marlene, Edith—I have known them all. They were beasts, beasts of the stage, that’s all. It doesn’t exist anymore. They were the last of the last, they knew how to walk onstage and give you shivers.
“Paris Mes Amours was supposed to run three months, but Josephine was such a success we stayed for eight, and then left the Olympia to go on tour.”
The theater program carried ads for Les Milandes, (“Capital of World Brotherhood”) and ads showing the Rainbow Tribe drinking Pschitt, an orangeade (“now my nine children have adopted Pschitt, making it a world drink”), and ads showing them wearing “soft, non-shrinkable, color-fast” terry-cloth robes by Boussac, a company that promised SATISFACTION OR YOUR MONEY BACK. There were also pictures of a glittering Josephine bending to the rhinestone-covered mike in her right hand. She changed with the times. Borrowing from the art of Clara Smith, she had worked with a handkerchief, and she had worked with an electric guitar before electric guitars were common. Now she had mastered the microphone, using it as a weapon of seduction, voice and machine fusing into a single instrument.
Bill Taub was impressed all over again. Throughout the summer, Josephine held meetings with the producer who had once tried to put her in jail. It was a recurring pattern, she would sue you or you would sue her, but all would be forgiven the minute there was some mutual advantage in a new deal.
No other American producer was willing to touch her, but Taub believed a smart man could still make money presenting Josephine Baker back home. Although, visiting Les Milandes in September, he may have had second thoughts, because she had also invited Premier Khrushchev to be a houseguest. Fortunately, the premier couldn’t make it. Despite her apparent tolerance for godless communists, Taub signed her to two “exclusive” contracts.
Oddly enough, I got to meet Khrushchev that same year. But more important, I got to see Josephine onstage for the first time. I had been in Paris for twenty months when the headlines announced that she was coming back to the Olympia in Paris Mes Amours. It was thrilling. I had loved her voice on the radio, I had poured out my soul to her while she sat with a towel around her head in the Hôtel Scribe, and ever after, I was sure that when she sang, it was for me, to give me courage and bring me luck at work, so I could get big tips and be able to send money to my mother.
Now I bought a ticket to go and see my very first stage show at the Olympia, one block from the Scribe.
I didn’t know you were supposed to tip the usher, and when I sat down, she said, very loud, “Still a farmer, that one!” which embarrassed me. But once the lights went down and the music started, I was lost. I remember nothing but the number where Josephine, dressed like a gypsy, sang “Give Me Your Hand.” I thought of my village, and the gypsies coming, women brightly dressed, barefooted children, dark-haired men; they would park their caravans at the edge of the fields, and make fires in the grass, and cook, and we would smell the strange odors. At night, I dreamed they would take me away with them.
Wearing her fortune-teller’s costume, Josephine took me—and the rest of the audience—away with her. Coming down into the first row, capturing a man’s hand, she teasingly told his future: “Monsieur, I see you have lost your hair, but Madame is happy because I also see love in your heart, and big success will come to you.”
In my trance, it was my hand she was holding. She was my heroine; I had seen the headlines about her fight for human dignity, her fight for her children, she represented everything I wished my real mother was. I wanted my mother to be assertive, not quiet or embarrassed, I wanted her to fight my father, curse, rather than stand there with her pain written on her face.
Josephine was different. And when she sang, I knew I would follow wherever she led. I wanted to go backstage; after all, less than two years ago, this woman had promised to be my second mother, but there were so many people around that I grew shy, and left.
Now about Khrushchev. The day he came to Paris, I was working as a parking boy at a chic restaurant, Pavillon Dauphine, where the Soviet leader was to lunch with four hundred businessmen. We all had to go through metal detectors and get badges, there were cops with guns in the trees on the Bois de Boulogne, it was exciting.
Suddenly, a motorcade arrived, and I, in my dark trousers and white jacket, opened a car door and bowed, tipping my cap. Khrushchev stepped out, smiling. He kissed me, and turned me toward the reporters. “Oh, my little one, what a shame you are a servant in this capitalist country, if you were in my country you would be at school.” A translator dutifully repeated this for the press; the premier had turned me into a prop.
His arm around me, he led me into the dining room, sat me down, asked me what I wanted to eat. When he’d had enough of me and turned to talk to the businessmen, I ran back outside. I was a star. Reporters weren’t allowed inside, and one of them offered me a hundred new francs to go back, listen, “and come out and tell me what he says.”
I moved back through the guards, Khrushchev spoke, I listened to as much as I thought I could remember, then ran outside and told the guy. Other reporters cornered me and I did the same for them. I made five hundred dollars that day, and was on the evening news, but I had to work, and I didn’t see myself.
With the success of Paris Mes Amours came new business for Les Milandes. Not only tourists but performers and politicians showed up, and everyone who appeared on the premises was invited to join Les Amis des Milandes and pay yearly dues for the privilege of helping World Brotherhood. “Josephine,” Leon Burg told me, “was now attracting more visitors than the stone cave at Lascaux with its drawings by Cro-Magnon man.”
And she was once again happy with a lady lover. “Josephine and a famous and flamboyant Mexican actress were inseparable during the run of Paris Mes Amours,” says Maryse Bouillon.
Sunday nights, after her last show, Josephine left for the country. “Maurice, her chauffeur, would be waiting,” says Paulette Coquatrix, “and sometimes I would go with her. At the château, the first thing she would do is clean. Poor Jo would be trying to sleep, but she would check behind everything! Me, I was always wondering what would happen to all those children. It made me sick. Josephine thought she was a good mother, she would go away and work for them, so they had all the comforts, but they needed something else.
“My feeling is, if she had adopted two or three, she could have made them happy, but she had so many. One you can take into your arms, or two, but you cannot take twelve.
“Josephine was a superb bird, and she had plenty of heart, but she went wrong all her life because she wanted to compensate for what she had missed, give it to others. And nobody could explain to her that it was not possible.
“All day long at Les Milandes, she ran everywhere giving orders. She insisted that the electric lines be buried underground, so as not to destroy the look of the countryside with ugly poles, she worked out themes for each of the rooms at the Chartreuse (one was the Revolution Room, all in red, white, and blue), I never saw her go to bed.
“It is not attacking her to say she used people. Most artists do that. Maybe it’s not only the law of show business but the law of all people with talent.”
One night during the run of Paris Mes Amours—it was in November, and cold—a tramp on the street found a live baby boy in a garbage can and took him to the police.
“As soon as we saw that story in the newspapers,” Paulette says, “we decided not to say a word to Josephine. But after the show, she was in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower, and a journalist ran up and said, ‘Josephine, what do you think about that poor little boy?’
“Well, she couldn’t be stopped. She insisted on going to the hospital, she fell in love with the little boy, and he became her eleventh child. Since it was so close to Christmas, she called him Noël, though the nurses had given him the name of André.”
In January, Noël was christened by Abbé Tournebise; Josephine looked happy, Jo did not
. He felt hopeless. “My attempts to salvage Les Milandes and our marriage had clearly failed.”
He decided to return to Paris. “Since we can’t seem to agree,” he said, “I think it’s best I leave, Josephine. I wish you luck . . . but I refuse to divorce until all the children are of age.”
Despite her renascence at the Olympia, Josephine was losing ground. One by one, the people she depended on—except for Margaret—had left her. Carrie was gone, Jo was gone (again), Richard was gone, and Artie had taken his family home to America.
“Les Milandes could have been a big success,” Artie says. “Jo Bouillon was good for the place. But my aunt would reproach him if he bought a magazine for two francs, while she was buying feathered costumes for millions. She was brutal with the help, not paying them for two or three months, screaming at them, so how could you expect them to love her? And that’s what she wanted, to be loved.
“She wanted me to call her ‘Mother’; I said no, ‘You are my aunt, not my mother.’ If she arrived home at 5 A.M., she still expected people to line up along the streets to greet her. It didn’t matter that they were sleeping, they had to show thankfulness for all she was providing. She should have stuck to show business, everything she did was theater.
“She had lured my father from St. Louis promising him everything. ‘You will have a gas station, a house, you will be happy.’ By the time I went home, he had already left.”
Josephine’s estrangement from Richard was her own doing. His marriage to the postmistress had been unhappy, and he’d fallen in love with a young woman of Sarlat named Marie-Louise Yvonne Marchive. The first Marie-Louise refused to give him a divorce, the second Marie-Louise was pregnant with his child. Josephine disapproved. She who had never cared what anybody said, who had lived exactly as she liked, lectured him about the immorality of his situation. She drove him away, her handsome, merry brother. Her only brother.
Chapter 36
TWENTY LAWSUITS AND THE LEGIOM OE HONOR
“I can’t take care of six hundred acres and eleven children”
In February 1960, Josephine wrote to Dwight Eisenhower:
MR. PRESIDENT OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MAISON BLANCHE
WASHINGTON (U.S.A.)
Mister PRESIDENT,
Very soon I will be coming back home and a thought keeps coming back to my memory (you can take a man out the country [sic] but you canot [sic] take the country out of the man); so here I come and happy I am to come!
My husband Jo Bouillon and our tribe of eleven children from the four corners of the world greet you and Mrs. EISENHOWER.
She signed this effusion Josephine Baker Bouillon, and someone on the Eisenhower staff filed it with a notation that no reply was necessary.
Josephine also tried to make amends to America through Art Buch-wald’s column in Paris. “I was misquoted in South America,” she said. “I never said anything down there that I didn’t say in the United States. I did say America wasn’t a free country because of the way they treated Negroes, but I think things have improved a lot since then. . . . I’m not mad at Winchell, I believe in love and brotherhood.” So much did she long to be recognized as a pillar of world brotherhood that she had become involved in Freemasonry—the name of the lodge she joined was New Jerusalem—even though, according to one of her fellow Masons, “She was too busy to regularly attend our meetings.” (“Josephine was very Catholic,” says Jacques Abtey, “and the Masons were often denounced by the Catholic church. When I told her that, she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know.’ ”)
Bill Taub, as good as his word, came through, booking The Fabulous Josephine Baker (an English-language version of Paris Mes Amours) into Chicago’s Regal Theatre. It opened there in March, but the Regal was not Josephine’s idea of a proper milieu. She objected, said Taub, “to appearing in a colored theater.” And business was bad. “Perhaps due to freezing weather.”
Don Dellair (he sang in the show, his partner, Tommy Wonder, danced) remembers it differently. “Josephine couldn’t finish a song, the predominantly black audiences stomped and screamed and yelled until she had to tell them, ‘Wait, there’s more, I assure you.’
“Every time we came out of the stage entrance, there were fans waiting, they gave us fried chicken—‘Please take this, I cooked it especially for you’—and I thought, gee, that’s never happened to us before. The adoration they gave to Josephine was something to behold. I was thrilled.”
In April, The Fabulous Josephine Baker was to play the Huntington Hartford Theatre in Los Angeles, but the star still had time enough to fly east for a couple of personal appearances. She went to a ball given by the National Urban League at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, and pressed the singer Charles Aznavour into service as her escort. He was staying at the Roosevelt anyway. “I’m this little white guy,” he says. “She’s the queen. I had never seen such an elegant black gathering.” Marian Anderson was there and Josephine knelt to kiss her hand, while everyone applauded.
Then came a reception for President de Gaulle at the French embassy in Washington (the general and his wife were enjoying an eight-day tour of the United States), and at the embassy party, Josephine finally met President Eisenhower. She wore her military uniform, partly hidden under a mink jacket. “She borrowed it on consignment from Revillon,” said Bill Taub, “and never returned it.”
(Taub was as exotic a figure as Josephine. In 1979, he wrote a book called Forces of Power, and he described himself as a man who had lived “in the shadows of some of the most extraordinary dramas of recent history.” Among his assertions: President Eisenhower had told him he didn’t want to die and leave the presidency to Richard Nixon. JFK had discussed Marilyn Monroe’s death with him. He’d raised bail for Jimmy Hoffa. In his spare time, he managed some stage and movie stars.)
Variety’s response to the Los Angeles production of The Fabulous Josephine Baker was lukewarm. The show business paper praised Josephine’s figure, clothes, and choice of music (she opened and closed with a song called “Oh Say, I Love the USA”) but added, “Some of her confidences to spectators are inclined to be tiresome.”
No matter. Movie stars turned out in impressive numbers. One theatergoer told me he watched Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe emerge from a limousine, the wet red imprint of Marilyn’s lipstick all over Montand’s neck. (Eight years earlier, Josephine, the aging sex goddess who was playing Ciro’s on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, had first met Marilyn, the eager sex goddess in training. Taub claimed he’d introduced them, and that Marilyn had dreamed of going to Paris to become “a woman of culture and sophistication under Josephine’s tutelage.”)
Having gone ten rounds with Josephine—and lost—in the fifties, it is hard to understand why Bill Taub came back for more of the same in the sixties, but he did. With the same result. In Paris, he had advanced Josephine fifty thousand dollars; she never gave him a receipt. Then she had demanded another eight thousand dollars before she would come to the United States at all.
Later, she denied that Taub had done anything for her. Stephen Papich, who directed the show at the Hartford, knew better. Taub, he says, had fought to get Josephine entry permits: “He opened the doors of the United States to her.”
Even so, Bill Taub and Josephine Baker were not destined to make beautiful music together. By the middle of the second week in Los Angeles, it was all over, Josephine had walked out on her contract, and Taub had filed yet another suit against her. He said she owed him $157,000. Miss Baker was not cowed. “This is nothing,” she told reporters. “I was in the Resistance.”
She, along with Stephen Papich and the rest of the company, had fled to San Francisco, where they were playing the Alcazar. A rumor spread that Taub was sending someone to attach her costumes, so every night after the final curtain, Josephine’s wardrobe, even headdresses, were put on ropes and pulled into the fly space high over the Alcazar stage. A search party invading her dressing room wouldn’t be able to find so much as
a paillette.
Fearful of Taub’s long arm, Josephine requested an interview with the FBI. During that session, “she volunteered that she had never been a Communist and was pleased by the treatment she had received in the United States.” Except for the treatment she had got from William Taub. She was in San Francisco “to publicize her château in France for the tourist trade.”
Then she and the cast took off for Montreal and a club called the Faisan Bleu. There a bunch of French-speaking detectives grabbed her and Papich and took them to jail.
“The owner of the Faisan Bleu gave us seventy-five hundred dollars to ransom Josephine,” Don Dellair remembers. “When we got to the jail, there were paparazzi all over, click, click, click, and Josephine was furious because she had been searched. ‘The trouble here is that they don’t understand perfect French,’ she said, ‘so they don’t know what I’m saying.’
“When we get back to the club, it’s way past the appointed showtime, and Josephine goes directly onto the stage, and says, ‘I have just come from jail, sorry I’m late, thank you for waiting.’ And she does the show in her street clothes. They adored her, they screamed, ‘Josephine! Josephine!’ ”
Josephine had told her friend Arthur Prevost, the Montreal newspaperman, that she wanted to go to High Mass at 10 A.M. on Sunday, and he took her to St. Martin’s Church. “After the Mass,” he recalled, “people went to get autographs, and would you believe it, she signed their prayer books.”
When she finally appeared in a Montreal courtroom, she denounced producer Taub as “a bad man” and was so convincing that the judge issued a warrant for Taub’s arrest. “I heard it with my own ears,” says Don Dellair. “The judge said, ‘If this man ever steps foot into Canada, he will be arrested.’ Then Josephine told Tommy and me, ‘I have had it with this place, you are coming to France.’
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