“In Paris, she took us in a limousine to Madame Arthur’s place, famous for its female impersonators. We sat down and then Marlene Dietrich walks out of one door, Mistinguett walks out of another door, Josephine out of a third. I had to keep checking to see she was still sitting with us, that’s how much that man looked like her, sounded like her, held the microphone the way she held it.
“Later, she took us to stay at Les Milandes. We saw it all, the animals, the grounds, the beautiful château. We met the children, we sat in the bakery/ice cream place where Josephine’s sister worked, and just talked. I mean, what can you do in Les Milandes except talk? But Josephine kept traveling back and forth to Paris and leaving us there to swim or play checkers or watch the children being tutored.”
(In his book, Remembering Josephine, Stephen Papich wrote that the tutors hired by Madame “usually fled in a few weeks.” A tutor brought in to teach Hebrew to Moïse took off after commenting to Stephen, “Mr. Papich, I think that woman is mad, don’t you?”)
“She was fixated on getting an artificial snow maker so she could make money all year round,” says Don Dellair, “she was trying to convince the people around her that it would be formidable. There were tourists that summer, but not many.”
And some of those were not entirely pleased. In August, Josephine got a letter from a countess who had been staying at the Chartreuse for two weeks. “Many times,” this lady complained, “I could not sit in the drawing room because all the armchairs were occupied by a cook or a dishwasher or a waiter.”
Josephine’s bombardment of lawyer Dop continued apace. In August, she had “just learned from a trustworthy source” that Jo Bouillon was in Cannes spending a fortune “on hustlers.” She enclosed a check for five hundred francs, explaining, “I could not do better this month.”
I’m sad, reading that. It’s high season on the Riviera, in Deauville, all the places where once they would have crowded into clubs to see her, now few came, her husband preferred other company, “and as you know, I do real acrobatics to be able to pay for it all.”
By September, she was beginning to face the truth, Les Milandes was falling apart. “One employee called me a liar and threw me out of the place, and I own it.”
From a cabaret in Milan, she fumed about fines levied against her (“I don’t need more fines!”) and about the fact that five of her calves were missing (“I want them back!”). It turned out the calves had been sold—three of them were tubercular—and she became a philosopher. “Like all women in my case, I ask nothing. I accept life as it is.”
For twenty minutes. By November, she was demanding “support for myself and the children. . . . if Jo Bouillon refuses to be reasonable, I am ready for war with open knives. . . .”
In December, she came to final terms with Jo. For fourteen million francs, he sold the Maury house and land back to her, dissolved the Jo Bouillon company, turned over all papers and powers. He would get a down payment, and the rest sent to him in monthly installments. “I bought all of it,” Josephine mourned. “Now I have to buy it all again.”
Two months later, in her diary, another wail of anguish. “I don’t know how or where I’m going. . . . I have only a few thousand francs left. . . . I feel so alone and think of the way Christ was abandoned. But I also realize how hard it must be to live with people like me.”
Marc Vromet-Buchet, a family friend who was acting as Josephine’s secretary, said local merchants, “tired of IOUs, had slammed their doors in her face. Since she had few visitors now, the family lived in her office and the kitchen, where a log fire burned. We roasted chestnuts in the ashes. It was an incredibly rustic life.”
She could no longer pay insurance for employees on the farm or in the restaurants, and there were twenty lawsuits pending against her. No big contracts were forthcoming either, though in many countries, cabaret and theater owners would book her for a week or two between bigger attractions. They felt sorry for her; pity that she had solicited—and yet despised—had replaced professional respect.
Booked to play Nice for two weeks, she showed up at the apartment of the Abteys, who spent six months a year on the Riviera. “She came in a cab with two of the kids,” Jacqueline says, “and she told me, ‘You pay the taxi.’ By the time I got back to the apartment, she and the kids had raided the fridge, it was absolutely empty, they had not eaten for days.
“When there was no money, she would open cans to feed them, and she could not buy bananas anymore for the monkeys. There were sometimes thirty monkeys, some as tall as people, they cost a fortune, and they were starving.”
“When people read in the newspapers that Josephine needed money,” says Yvette Malaury, “they would come and give it to some employee, and most of the time it ended up in that employee’s pocket.”
On August 18, 1961, she got a boost; she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, which had been a long time in coming. Sixteen years earlier, she had written Donald Wyatt that she expected to be decorated at Les Invalides “when I am stronger”; now it was finally coming to pass.
But it wasn’t as grand as her fantasies had suggested. For one thing, it didn’t take place at Les Invalides; for another, General de Gaulle was not there (she had asked him, but he said he did not personally decorate anyone) and neither were any of the other top diplomats or military men of France. From Bordeaux had come the consuls of Spain, Morocco, the United States, Italy, and Finland; there were a baroness, a French actress (Gaby Morlay), a few colonels and commandants, but except for General Vallin, none of her old brothers in arms were at her side.
At exactly 12:15 P.M., General Vallin and various other officials dropped out of the sky over Les Milandes in two helicopters. One of the officials was a black man. Seeing him, the four-and-a-half-year-old Koffi ran up to Commandant Cournal. “Are you my Daddy?” he asked. A band played the “Marseillaise,” and Josephine, in her threadbare uniform (she had filled in the worn places with ink, proving that an old show business horse knows how to improvise), stood at attention.
The courtyard of the château teemed with press, tourists, neighbors, dignitaries from the Dordogne, a few friends from Paris, the children in their best clothes, holding bouquets. (Jo Bouillon was not there. Tracked down by reporters, he was diplomatic; he said he’d had a previous engagement.) General Vallin pinned to Josephine’s jacket the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre with palm, and spoke of her wartime services to France and her peacetime role as “moral educator.”
Tears streaming down her face, Josephine responded: “I am happy that this ceremony could take place here at Les Milandes because this is where I first heard the general say all was not lost. . . . I am proud to be French because this is the only place in the world where I can realize my dream.”
Holding in one hand a message sent by de Gaulle, she circulated among the guests. “You will see, everything will go well now,” she said. “I will keep Les Milandes. No one can do anything against me, I have the baraka.” She had learned the word in Morocco; it meant she had an angel sitting on her shoulder.
Her euphoria was brief. When lawyer Dop had the temerity to ask payment for his faithful service, she gave him the gate. “I don’t know how I can keep working with you, since one always has debts to his lawyer, as business keeps going.” Six months later, she begged him to come back. “Only the old friends like you can I trust.”
In the summer of 1962, she decided to put on a production of L’Arlésienne, the Bizet opera, in her backyard. Seeking encouragement, she paid a surprise call on Jo Bouillon in his new apartment near Paris. For all the world as though they were still the best of friends and she had not accused him of every crime but serial murder, she cross-examined him. Did he think her plan could work? He said of course. The heroine of L’Arlésienne was a dedicated mother, just like Josephine. The tourists would love it.
She had already made up her mind to do it in any case, not with an orchestra, which cost money, but in playback. “But suppose my lips move whe
n they shouldn’t?”
After the first performance, she wrote to Jo that the audience had been wild about it, some had wept.
Now Bruno Coquatrix, a normally wily man, in an apparent lapse of sanity, agreed to move the production to the Olympia. There the cast—except for Josephine—would do their songs and dialogue live.
“But Josephine could not remember her lines,” says Paulette Coquatrix. “Since she was incapable of staying in sync with the record, her performance was one of the most comic things I have ever seen on the stage. The public as always adored her, they laughed and at the same time made excuses. ‘It must be the man who’s running the machine.’ Even the press was kind.”
But she knew. The blow of another failure, one she could ill afford, was compounded by her increasing sense that the center was not holding. While the younger children were still at home, attending the local public school, Akio, Jari, Luis, and Jean-Claude were now at boarding school in Switzerland. It was the right thing, but she missed them.
When she got the phone call with the worst news of all—Les Milandes had been seized by creditors, and would be sold at auction on June 7, 1963—she was playing in Copenhagen. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “Fifteen years of fight, hope, and suffering.”
As usual, a miracle happened. A group of Danish hotel men paid off her most importunate creditors. The headlines read, SAVED FROM RUIN. The hotel men had come, had seen, and had pronounced Les Milandes wonderful, it simply needed reorganizing. Josephine agreed. “I know I’m not a businesswoman, I can’t run six hundred acres of land, a château, hotels, restaurants and take care of eleven children. When those Danish men left, I had their promise that in a few weeks they would tell me what to do.”
Truthfully, many people in France were growing tired of the auctions, the farewells, the tin-cup approach to child rearing, they didn’t see why Josephine and her family needed to live in a castle with servants when their own families didn’t live that way. Besides, Josephine’s vow to be led by the conservative Danish gentlemen died with their departure. Like mad King Ludwig, her schemes grew wilder. She didn’t want local visitors, she wanted rich Americans. Next year, she would fix it so tourists weighed down with dollars could fly into Bordeaux, transfer to helicopters, and be set down in Les Milandes. She would build them a 130-room hotel. “I can die in peace,” she said. “I have won.”
It was not clear just what.
The Wyatts, who hadn’t seen her in years, came to visit with their daughter Linda, Josephine’s godchild. (Josephine had hundreds of unofficial godchildren all over the world, in addition to honorary brothers, sisters, uncles. If she liked you, you would become a member of her extended—and extended and extended—family.) She put the Wyatts in the Marie-Antoinette suite at the Chartreuse.
“At the restaurant,” Donald says, “there were waiters in tuxedos, but the place was almost empty. I remembered sadly when we first came back to reopen Les Milandes after the war, and the people were bowing, so happy ‘Madame Josephine has returned.’ Now, like the hotel, the cabaret was almost empty, though it was the high season.”
Marian Wyatt, being a mother, thought more about the children. “It was not a family. They had people to take care of them, but they did not have the love and understanding of a mother and father who were there. Oh yes, I felt sorry for them.”
Only Linda Wyatt, seventeen and on her first European trip, found no snake in the garden. To her journal, she confided, “I could stay here a lifetime . . . children of all races and nationalities being brought up as brother and sister, a famous star who is a fabulous person, a castle, two night clubs, pool, tennis court, what more could one want?”
Moulay Larbi’s daughter Kenza was another guest that summer. Not much older than Linda Wyatt, she saw Les Milandes in a less romantic light. “For Josephine, it was an abyss. De Gaulle wrote to her. ‘The Dordogne is the worst place for you to be, so come back to Paris where the people love you.’
“It’s funny, when she died, I thought about that letter. When I saw the whole Paris in the streets and crying, I thought how right he was. It’s a pity she was so stubborn and stayed in that place.
“She would tell me when someone exploited her, lied to her, but with the children, it was different, a deeper disappointment. She was not going to tell me, ‘I failed.’ She didn’t want to realize it didn’t work.
“You know, she was an artist, and it’s very difficult for these people to be constant, because their own natures are not disciplined. Children need order, security, they are not made for artists. And these children from all sorts of backgrounds, abandoned in earthquakes, abandoned in a garbage can, they were traumatized children to begin with.”
Josephine was fifty-six years old, she couldn’t remember her lines anymore, or see without her glasses; every few months, angry creditors threatened to throw her into the street, her children were without ambition (or at least the kind of ambition she understood), but she was not finished. Again she was about to rise from the ashes, and this time, the rebirth was midwifed by a young man named Jack Jordan. Back in the United States, Jack Jordan had been working to bring Josephine home for the March on Washington.
Louis Douglas’s daughter Marion remembers meeting Jordan in New York in about 1950. (Her family had migrated back to the United States in 1937.) “I was fascinated by Jack, he was stagestruck, he wanted to be somebody. He used to go to the Plaza Hotel, and this was when black people couldn’t even sneeze at the front door. Jack would get himself invited, and take me.
“At the time I’m talking about, he was very poor, but he would bring a piece of feather or some lace, and put it over my poor little clothes, and we would make the grand entrance at the Plaza. When we walked in, I wasn’t getting very loving looks, so I told him I didn’t want to go anymore. He said, ‘You’re never going to be anybody, because you don’t like the Plaza.’
“In 1963, he called and told me he was bringing Josephine Baker back. The March on Washington had been talked about for months before it happened. Everyone was very frightened that there was going to be bloodshed. When Jack said Josephine was coming, I forgot all about the troubles between her and my father, I forgot I wasn’t interested in Josephine, I was very excited.
“Jack had assembled a group. There was Charles Burney, chairman of ‘The Friends of Josephine Baker,’ who taught school in Harlem, and he had said, ‘We must have Josephine, this is too important, she has to be part of it.’ And there were Juanita Poirier, Sidney’s wife, and a young black woman producer named Billie Allen. These were the people who put up the money to bring Josephine over. I was just there for nostalgia. I was the link, Louis Douglas’s daughter, part of Josephine’s roots.
“We all went to the airport to meet her.”
Chapter 37
THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, AMD THE DEATH OF JFK
“I’m not the star, just another sister”
Bob Bach, a television producer, remembers flying into Washington and looking down at some of the two hundred thousand people beginning to gather. “It was August 8, muggy, with a haze hanging over the city. The plane banked over the Potomac River and the Washington Monument, and we could see crowds coming from all directions, like ants swarming toward honey. I thought, this is going to be tremendous.
“In the VIP lounge of the airport, there were a lot of big stars, and then I saw this woman in uniform, and I said, ‘My God, that’s Josephine Baker.’ And very quietly, she joined us on the bus to the Washington Monument.”
“Josephine was wearing her uniform with all her decorations,” says Marion Douglas. “She had on the Médaille de la Résistance with rosette, the Médaille de la France Libre, the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, and the Croix de Guerre. Everything. But she said, ‘I’m not the star, just another sister.’ She was so sincere that she was insincere, but I didn’t know it then.
“When we got to the place where everyone was assembling, there was a lot of anxiety, because the
word was out that the toughs were going to beat the shit out of anybody who marched. It took guts for those actors like Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando to be there, they were perfectly aware that what they were doing by their presence was protecting black people. It took courage for Josephine—for anyone—to be there.
“Jack Jordan was rushing ahead of everybody yelling, ‘Make way for a star, make way for a star,’ and I heard people turn around and say, ‘I don’t see any star, where’s the star?’ Nobody recognized Josephine. But when she got up to the platform where the cultural contingent were already sitting, Sammy Davis and Sidney Poitier, they paid obeisance. They were trying to speak this poor sad French, calling her Madame la Bakaire, trying so hard, and she knew she was back, a queen had come home. And when they called on her to speak, she was fantastic.”
“You are here on the eve of a complete victory,” Josephine told the crowd. “You can’t go wrong. The world is behind you. I’ve been following this movement for thirty years. Now that the fruit is ripe, I want to be here. You can’t put liberty at the tip of the lips and expect people not to drink it. This is the happiest day of my life.”
It was very simple, Marion says, very moving. “She spoke just a couple of minutes, that’s all anybody did, because it was all building up to Martin Luther King. But the fact is, the moment Josephine hit that podium, you knew she was a superstar. She didn’t have to work at it.
“After Martin’s speech, there was a big crunch, there were no taxis, nothing. Sammy Davis had a limo, and he told Josephine she could join him, but so many people were running after him, trying to get his autograph, he had to leave her and flee in his car. And that’s when Josephine changed. When she couldn’t get into that car with Sammy.
“Now she’s stuck with me, Jack Jordan, Billie Allen. We all went to the Sheraton to get dressed, and then we met at Mercer Cook’s house. My uncle Mercer was not yet an ambassador, and Billie Allen was with a guy in the State Department, but he still wasn’t a star, and Josephine, in the middle of the night, gets livid. ‘What am I doing at this second-rate party?’ she says. ‘I can’t hang out with Jack, he doesn’t even know how to get to a decent party!’ ”
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