Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Back home again, in a better—or at least a more high-minded—mood, she wrote to Martin Luther King:

  Dear Doctor,

  I was so happy to have been united with all of you on our great historical day.

  I repeat that you are really a great, great leader and if you need me I will always be at your disposition because we have come a long way but still have a way to go that will take unite—unite—[sic] so don’t forget I will always be one of your sincere boosters.

  Your great admirer and sister in battle, Josephine.

  Earlier that summer, Jo Bouillon had left France. He told France Dimanche he was going to open a restaurant in Buenos Aires. “It is hard to tear apart one’s heart and start again at fifty-six, but I hold nothing against Josephine.”

  “She broke his career,” says the pianist Freddy Daniel. “He never walked by her side, always behind her.”

  When Josephine returned from the March on Washington, Freddy was already working at Les Milandes. At Josephine’s insistence, he had been in residence since June 15. “The personnel in her office were dazed when I showed up. I asked, ‘Where is Madame?’ but they weren’t sure, they thought maybe Copenhagen. A few rare clients were boring themselves at the Chartreuse, and I asked the staff to help me get the piano from the guinguette to the salon of the Chartreuse so I could entertain. Then I asked them to help me fix the roof of the guinguette—it was straw, and during the winter, rats had nested in it, half of it was falling on the floor—and to clean up the kitchen, where I discovered dirty dishes that had been there since New Year’s Eve. They refused.

  “As soon as Josephine arrived, she started to scream because I had had the piano brought up to the salon. Then she said, ‘Ah, but I’m happy you’re here.’

  “I told her the staff had refused to do anything I’d asked. ‘They said, Madame did not give the orders.’

  “ ‘They were right,’ she said. ‘If Madame did not give the orders, they did not have to do it.’

  “Then she told me, ‘Come, we are going to do the cleaning.’ I said no. ‘Josephine, I came here to supervise your cabaret, play the piano, watch over the bar so they don’t steal too much from you, but I do not do dishes.’

  “ ‘Well,’ she says, ‘if Monsieur feels he’s too big to do the dishes, I, Josephine Baker, will do them.’ And she spent the whole day, alone, cleaning up. Nobody on the staff came to help her, it made me sick.”

  Four years earlier, when Josephine’s success at the Olympia with Paris Mes Amours had brought record crowds to Les Milandes, Freddy had spent a happier summer there. The shows he and Jo had put on then were good—“We had Louis Armstrong, Jacques Brel, as well as Les Petits Rats of the Paris Opéra in the open-air theater. But when I came back in 1963, Jo had left, and Josephine still had 105 people on her payroll. We were always waiting for money coming from Stockholm, Munich, or Berlin, wherever she could get a booking to try to cover the expenses at Les Milandes. We had a very poor season, only on weekends we had a few customers.

  “The staff didn’t care anymore, they stole from her, they had sex everywhere. There were a few nurses trying to take care of the children, I must say without great competence. Those children needed affection, and they would ask me to tuck them in at night. ‘Uncle Freddy, Uncle Freddy, come put us to bed . . .’

  “Sometimes Josephine would go to Paris and buy things at the Galeries Lafayette or Le Printemps. Then the chauffeur drove her home—they drove most of the night—and she would arrive at Les Milandes around 6 or 7 A.M. All the children had to be waked up and dressed in their best, waiting for her at the bottom of the château’s staircase.

  “But most of the time she would go directly to the guinguette or the Chartreuse with new sets of tablecloths and napkins and matching candles. She would have the tables changed three times—not one or two tables, no, she wanted to see the effect in the whole place—with each different-colored set, and then she would exclaim, ‘But it is adorable!’ or, ‘No, it doesn’t work, put the blue here and light the candle.’

  “Meanwhile, it was 10 A.M., and the children were still waiting up at the château, so they rolled in the dust, fighting each other. They got so filthy you wouldn’t want to touch them with a barge pole. Quick, we would try to clean them up so Josephine would not see them in that state.

  “Life was chaotic, full of ups and downs. Josephine wanted me to teach the children piano, all together in the same room; she had no idea how you learn to play piano.

  “It was the same as with the Hebrew lessons. Once, while Josephine was away, a young woman arrived from Jerusalem to teach Hebrew to the children. I told her, ‘Some of them are eleven years old, some are one, they cannot all learn Hebrew at the same time.’ It did not last long; when Josephine got home, she put a mop in the girl’s hand and asked her to clean the big stone staircase of the château. The girl refused, and was fired.”

  It was not just their education that was chaotic, the children’s medical care was eccentric too. “When one of us caught a childhood disease—measles, mumps,” says Jari, “Mother would put us all in the same room so we would all catch it, and be done with it.”

  That was the year—1963—that Josephine, who was fifty-seven, told everyone she was sixty-four. “It is good that I make myself older,” she explained to Line Renaud, who followed her into the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. “Then they find me formidable for my age.” She also gave Renaud a piece of advice. “Don’t get involved in politics, it cost me too much.”

  On the rare occasions when she was home, she was beginning to avoid her fans. “One day,” Freddy says, “two buses arrived, full of schoolteachers. They had paid in advance—Josephine gave them a group price—and it was understood that she would welcome them at 4 P.M., and sing. As always, I was the buffer between her and her guests. When she did not appear, I called the château. After thirty minutes, she came to the phone. ‘What do you want?’

  “I told her, ‘Listen, Josephine, if you do not come down, I will come up and get you and drag you here by the skin of your backside. I don’t want to get screamed at for what you’re doing.’ Then I sent the barmaid’s husband to pick her up. Ten minutes later, she arrived. From far away, I could see her sitting next to the driver in his open jeep, her face the face of her worst days, looking 112 years old. But as she came closer, she put on a wide smile, and by the time she arrived in front of the cabaret, she looked ecstatic. ‘Oh, my dear friends, you came, how happy I am that you made this detour to visit me, come, you will see the children, venez, venez . . .’

  “The children were down by the pool, and a little girl, not a member of the Rainbow Tribe, had just come out of the water. It was a very hot day, but Josephine hurled herself toward the child, wrapped her in a towel, and screamed, ‘Who is the assassin who wants to kill this infant? Can’t you see she is going to catch a cold because her hair is wet?’ And she dried that child in the sun, while the teachers murmured, ‘She is a saint.’

  “By now she would travel with old suitcases and cartons held together with pieces of string. I would take her to the airport and ask the porters to take care of her bags, and they would say, ‘That is Josephine Baker’s luggage?’

  “At Les Milandes, she wore dirty work clothes and didn’t try to hide that she had almost no hair. Not only had she burnt it off too many times, but wearing those heavy wigs that the hair cannot breathe under also makes you bald. Mistinguett was the same.”

  October 11, 1963. Edith Piaf died at seven o’clock in the morning. Jean Cocteau, who heard the news at noon, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. From New York, where she had come to do a benefit performance at Carnegie Hall (proceeds to go to the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLS, and “Miss Baker’s International Children’s Camp”), Josephine paid her old friends tribute. “Now that they are gone, there is a kind of emptiness that cannot be filled.”

  That night, she conquered Carnegie Hall. Her press representative had wired Walter Winchell an invitation, saying Jos
ephine held “no animosity, hopes you don’t either, and feels that perhaps her past views were premature.” Winchell wrote across the telegram, “After all the lies she told! Wow,” and gave it to his secretary to file.

  At that benefit performance, she showed it all, furs, jewels, feathers, the great heavy wigs. Her quick wit was also in evidence. When a woman in the audience put opera glasses to her eyes, Josephine stopped singing. “Madame,” she cried, “don’t peer at me through those silly things! Hold on to your illusions!”

  Pierre Spiers, who conducted the orchestra, said the real show took place later, at a supper party given by Duke Ellington’s sister Ruth, when Josephine sang “a series of touching Negro spirituals . . . far removed from such show business bravura as the feather headdresses. . . .”

  “I asked her what kind of food she would like,” Ruth Ellington told me. “She said soul food, so my cousin Bernice fixed greens, sweet potatoes, chitlins, ham, fried chicken, peach cobbler. Josephine was wonderful. If you are black and told from the day you are born that you are inferior to the majority of people in your country, that’s enough to make you pathologically ill. But she had risen above it. That was what Duke always said, ‘Rise above it.’ ”

  At Les Milandes, in November, Josephine received a communication to warm her heart. It read:

  Dear Miss Baker,

  This is just a brief note to express my deep gratitude to you for all of your kind expressions of support. We were all inspired by your presence at the March on Washington. I am deeply moved by the fact that you would fly such a long distance to participate in that momentous event. We were further inspired that you returned to the States to do a benefit concert for the civil rights organizations. I only regret that a long standing previous commitment made it impossible for me to come to New York to witness the Carnegie Hall affair. I was pleased to learn that it was a great success.

  You are certainly doing a most dedicated service for mankind. Your genuine good will, your deep humanitarian concern, and your unswerving devotion to the cause of freedom and human dignity will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.

  The letter was signed, Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Almost every month now, Josephine flew back and forth across the ocean, planning a tour of America for the following spring. She was grabbing for the brass ring one more time; it took a catastrophe to slow her down.

  It slowed everyone down. I was living in Germany when President Kennedy was killed. I walked the ten blocks from my room to my job, and the Kurfurstendamm was deserted, like the streets you see in an American western when the bad boys come to town. Behind every window, a candle burned. The man who had claimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” was dead, and we in West Berlin felt the world had stopped.

  “I was not two days in New York when the assassination of the president happened,” Josephine wrote Jacques Abtey (who was attempting to manage Les Milandes now that Jo was gone). She proceeded to review the obsequies as though they were a Broadway spectacle. “Big success of notables who came for the funeral,” she reported, awarding first place to President de Gaulle, and second to the medal-bedecked emperor of Ethiopia. (She forgot she had once wanted to raise an army against him.) “Of course I went to Washington. There is one month’s mourning, and in any case I could not have played before because we need time to get out my publicity. . . . I’m bored, everything has stopped. . . . It is very unfortunate, this national malheur, one can do nothing against it.”

  Then: “Ask the Spanish maid to make me an embroidered belt, and see that she does it well.”

  During her engagement at the Strand twelve years before, she and Florence Dixon had become friends. It was Florence—along with a nineteen-year-old acquaintance, Elizabeth Patton—who had accompanied Josephine on the train to Washington to pay their respects to the slain president.

  “At the Union Station,” says Elizabeth Patton, “we asked a porter which way to the rotunda, and he said not to worry, if we walked across the street, we would see the people.

  “There were thousands waiting on the line, it was a crisp day, and Josephine kept saying, ‘Look at all the different kinds of people!’ There were blacks, whites, Asians, people from all over.

  “It started to get a little nippy, and there was a delicatessen nearby, so Florence stayed in line to keep our places, while Josephine and I went to get coffee. As we waited in the delicatessen, we watched a television set overhead; the police in Dallas were taking Lee Harvey Oswald from one prison to another, and as they moved him, Jack Ruby walked up and pulled out a gun and killed him. We could not believe we were standing there watching this while waiting to go and view President Kennedy’s body.

  “Josephine was distraught. ‘This is what I’m talking about, all this violence.’ Everybody in the delicatessen said the same. ‘It’s horrible, why didn’t they have more police guarding him, now we will never know if this is the man who actually killed Kennedy—’ We took the coffee and left the shop, and as we got closer to the rotunda, we saw Jacqueline Kennedy and the children coming down the steps, and they had little blue coats on, and she was all in black, and Josephine said, ‘How tragic for her, she is such a young woman to have to go through this.’

  “It was about four in the afternoon by the time we were allowed to go in. ‘Mon dieu,’ Josephine said, ‘look how small the casket is.’ Because the rotunda is so high-ceilinged everything beneath it looks minuscule.”

  A quick Christmas trip to France, then back to the States to rehearse Josephine Baker and Her Company. This time Josephine brought Kenza with her. “I was in Paris,” Kenza says, “and she said, ‘Come, it will be all new for you.’

  “The opening at the Brooks Atkinson was fabulous.”

  It was her first Broadway appearance in twelve years, if you didn’t count the evening at Carnegie Hall. And she was the biggest draw in town, if you didn’t count the Beatles.

  She told a reporter for The National Observer that before the March on Washington, she had always been afraid of white Americans. “I didn’t want to be around them. But now that little gnawing feeling is gone, for the first time in my life I feel free. . . . I came back wearing my Resistance uniform for the March.”

  Some, commented the interviewer, would argue that she had come back “as a beneficiary of others’ pain and blood. She returned when the hard part of the battle was over, and this is why many cannot forgive Josephine Baker. . . .”

  Many could, however. She still drew crowds. “She never had any money, and she owed money, right?” says Shirley Herz, then her press agent. “We were to open in Philadelphia, and the sheriff or somebody decided to impound her costumes, so she had Florence Dixon and me pack as many as we could in suitcases, and we went out the revolving door of the hotel just as the sheriff or whoever it was came in.

  “Her producer got the thing settled, but it was exciting, she was always one step ahead of the law. One day she called me—‘I need somebody else for the show’—and I suggested the dancers Geoffrey Holder and his wife, Carmen de Lavallade, and that’s how they got involved. When she went back to Paris, she took them with her.

  “In New York, she was living at the Navarro, and she was always having stomach pains, all she’d want was these hot towels. She was involved in politics because it was the start of the civil rights movement. The fact that she was being accepted on Broadway meant nothing, she wanted to achieve more than that.

  “She was so complex a person that nobody really knew her. She didn’t want to belong to the black world, and she didn’t really belong in the white world. Florence Dixon and Bessie Buchanan, who were around her all the time, were both very light-skinned. If Josephine had been Florence’s color, if she could have passed, she would have. Yet her fame came with being this wonderful exotic black woman.

  “She used men to achieve what she wanted—in a way, she castrated men—but she was only comfortable with women, she was surrounded by women.”

  Carmen de Lavallade says Josephine
could be incredibly generous. “Geoffrey and I were added into the show in New York, and when we got to Paris, we reopened at the Olympia. Josephine was always pushing me forward, telling me to take longer bows. She was so secure, so proud in what she did, a younger woman didn’t worry her. She knew who she was.

  “Once we went to her château right after the show. We rode for hours, got there early in the morning. She was so tired, but then all the children came in, and I will never forget Josephine, her arms around Moïse, talking to him, and sleeping at the same time. Just sort of hugging each other at the kitchen table, tired as she was, it was beautiful.”

  By the end of May 1964, Josephine was in West Germany trying to borrow four hundred thousand dollars from German banks in order to save Les Milandes. “Periodically,” said a news story, “Josephine goes back to work, but despite recent engagements in the United States and at the Olympia, which netted $60,000, she just can’t seem to make ends meet.”

  “Ideals cost a lot of money,” said Josephine. Not our money, muttered her neighbors. She had slapped one too many mailman, fought with one too many worker, she had even taken on the new priest who had replaced Abbé Tournebise when he retired. To be sure, the new priest had started the fight. When she’d popped into the Les Milandes chapel to ask if he’d like any help, he had answered abruptly, “I don’t need help from a woman when I don’t know where she got her money.” A major brawl ensued, the priest ringing the church bell for assistance as Josephine attempted to haul away a statue of Christ she had bought and paid for.

  “Every night now,” France Dimanche informed its readers, “eleven children pray to God to save their house and their mother.”