Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Jari says it wasn’t so. “We never read those newspapers, Mother did not show them to us. But we knew something was happening, because now she wanted us to sleep in her room with her. Marianne would share her bed and we boys would bring our mattresses and sleep on the floor.

  “She tried to reassure us that everything was fine. If the king of Morocco had invited her to visit, she would say, ‘We are going to move to Morocco. Or to Algeria. We will live in the desert and start all over again.’ To her, the desert meant purity, no contact with materialistic society.

  “She liked to see us playing in her costumes, she directed us as if we were performing in a serious show. We swam in the dresses, walked like ducks in her shoes, and laughed, we were all clowns, it was such fun.”

  In Paris, a committee formed by Bruno Coquatrix and full of famous Baker enthusiasts—François Mauriac, André Maurois, Gilbert Becaud, Brigitte Bardot—tried to convince Josephine she should sell her castle, “house her children more modestly,” and put any money from well-wishers into a trust fund.

  She was not ready to give up. On June 1, she called a press conference. She sat at a big table on which there were four lighted candles, because, she said, the lights had been cut off. The rest of the grand salon was dim, and Josephine, wearing her by now famous heavy horn-rimmed glasses, looked serious. Begging the reporters to help, she blamed everyone but herself for her plight. “If everyone had done what was needed, I would not be in the situation I am in today.”

  She attacked:

  • The media. Hadn’t some journalists suggested that she was a publicity hound? And left her (even though she had created a village of brotherhood) to fight alone?

  • The husband. “When I married Jo Bouillon it was to have a family . . . and one day he told me, since I’m the one who wanted those children, I had to keep them.” Though he had sold his private life to the press, she had too much dignity to do the same. “I keep my humiliation for myself.”

  • The neighbors. “They try to hurt me in a thousand ways.” Shop owners and contractors charged her too much, jealous people took down the signs to Les Milandes, refused to give tourists directions, telling them “we were closed,” and subjected Josephine to insults and dirty words.

  • The utility companies. “We have been without light or telephone for the past ten days, although I am the one who twenty years ago brought light and running water to Les Milandes. Now only the two houses that do not belong to me have light, all the rest of my village is dark.”

  • The people who brought lawsuits against her. “Every time I’m sued, it costs me so much, and as soon as I’m finished with one suit, the next one is waiting. I know I’m making the lawyers of Sarlat rich.”

  Now she asked for money to save Les Milandes “once and for all. But this time, I scream, Help me!” She ended with a sigh. “In two days, my son Brahim will be eight. The same day, I will be fifty-eight. I think of my eleven children, the littlest one is four. I would not like them to lose their home.”

  Who could condemn such a woman? And if anyone dared, would he not be speaking against brotherhood and a better world? Josephine’s powers of persuasion were so compelling that not one of those ordinarily cynical journalists had thought to test her story by flicking a light switch.

  In fact, the director of the electric company, fearing that Josephine would use the press conference to make him look bad, had restored her electricity at two that afternoon. Everyone spent the afternoon in the dark, while the poor aging star who had given so much to so many convinced them she was being ill-used by heartless tycoons. “To her it was a game,” said Leon Burg.

  But now the game was a race against time. In less than a week, by court order, all the furnishings—from the pots and pans to the farm implements—of Les Milandes were to be auctioned off. Josephine remained sanguine. “There are plenty of kindhearted people in France. They’re the ones who will save me, not the businessmen.”

  In the end, it was Brigitte Bardot who saved her. On Friday, June 5, Bardot went on television and made an impassioned appeal for Josephine Baker, whom she had never met. “I’m asking you to help,” she said. “You know that Tuesday, Les Milandes will be sold and this woman and her eleven children will be homeless.”

  Listening in a café in Castelnaud, Josephine wept.

  After Bardot’s plea, money poured in. Akio told me that Pope Paul VI sent money from his personal account, and Zsa Zsa Gabor contributed twenty thousand dollars. (“I had met Josephine on a TV show,” Zsa Zsa says. “She was an old lady then, but still fabulous. We had dinner and she talked about the castle and the children, and explained to me her ideal, and I was very moved. I thought, ‘This is wonderful, children all mixed, not just one race.’ When Stephen Papich called and told me how bad off she was financially, I was happy to be able to help her.”)

  Even the porters at Kennedy Airport took up a collection. After the phones at Les Milandes were reconnected, wire services flashed the news as though, one reporter said, “it were a national emergency.” The auction was postponed. (From Buenos Aires, Jo offered the press his view of the situation. “Unfortunately, I’m not able to give my wife a large gift like Brigitte Bardot. I lost my personal fortune in Les Milandes. . . .”)

  Now Josephine’s spirits were lifted not only by the rescue of her property, but by the arrival of a baby girl. Born June 18, 1964, at a clinic in Paris, the child of a Moroccan mother, Stellina became the twelfth member of the Rainbow Tribe.

  But since the personnel at Les Milandes had been drastically reduced—no longer could Josephine afford to hire and fire nurses at will—Margaret took the baby to her house. For the next four years, Rama would have a little sister.

  Chapter 38

  UNCLE FIDEL, AND LAST GASPS AT LES MILANDES

  “I know God will not abandon me”

  Life is over for me, now I give myself totally to the children,” Josephine told Marie Spiers. And certainly she believed it when she said it.

  Years later, Marie, who loved her, and forgave her her trespasses, was still living in the chic Trocadéro section of Paris in an apartment filled with Baker memorabilia. There were exquisite Art Deco silver statuettes of Josephine in many poses, and there were photographs: Josephine in the Folies-Bergère, with the bananas, the picture she would never show the children . . . Josephine with Pepito, looking happy on the boat to Brazil . . . Josephine and a Cambridge rowing machine. She beat the health craze by generations. “Now I have three loves,” she said in the ad, “my country, Paris, and my Cambridge.”

  On a clothing dummy, there was even an old costume, red velvet with wide cuffs of black fox and a black fox muff, the velvet so heavy with jewels you could sense the weight without picking it up. “Her stage clothes were like the armor of soldiers in the Middle Ages,” Marie says.

  It was after Josephine hit the downward slope that she and Marie became really close. When Josephine’s older children were sent off to various schools, Marie was asked to take them in on weekends. “She sent me so many they had to sleep in my hallway, I had them from Saturday to Sunday evening. I have spent a lot of sleepless nights.

  “When I first went to Les Milandes, I thought Josephine was bringing them up very well. It’s just that with her, everything was overdone, the punishment was overdone, the love was overdone, the makeup was overdone. I think Marianne was the most difficult, she was very rebellious.”

  Marianne had been placed in a boarding school surrounded by a high brick wall, lost in the forest of St. Germain. Children whose parents held the Legion of Honor could go there free, and on Sundays, the mothers—many of them widows of military officers—would visit, dressed in black. But most Sundays, Josephine was not available, and then Marie Spiers or Blanche Guignery would play Maman.

  With three of the boys also away (at St. Nicholas school), weekending in Paris or a suburb like Le Vésinet was more practical than trying to get home to Les Milandes, all those hours away.

  “We had the h
ouse full of them,” says Madame Guignery. “Once we even had the princess from Morocco.” (She’s talking about Kenza.) “They had to sleep on mattresses on the floor, Josephine said it would be good for their backs.”

  Marianne was the one who told Marie Spiers, “I hate my mother!” “Can you imagine that?” asks the shocked Marie. “And it was Marianne who would come to my boutique and steal a skirt. One time she escaped me with a boyfriend, and next day, a lady brought her back to my apartment. Being one month older than Josephine, I wasn’t getting any younger—and it was hard on me, trying to watch over those children. One day, one of the boys stole my radio and went to sell it in the subway. Later, he came back furious, and threw the radio on the floor. ‘I could not find anyone to buy it!’ To tell the truth, sometimes I was afraid of them.

  “And I couldn’t tell Josephine any of this, she was somewhere around the world, we didn’t know where. The children resented that, too, but she was working to pay all those bills.”

  She was somewhere around the world, they didn’t know where. Africa was one of the places she went in 1965: Guinea, Mali, Ghana, with Kenza as her companion. (Kenza had become a little sister to Josephine and a big sister to the children. She remembers being with them and watching western movies on TV. “When the cowboys attacked, only Mara would scream and support the Indians. At the end, he would be in tears. ‘It is always the same, the cowboys win and my people are the losers.’ ”

  Josephine had been asked to Africa, Kenza says, “by all these presidents. She was preparing some speech to explain what she was doing—the children, the peace of the world, whatever—and the heat was so unbearable the first place we landed that she couldn’t talk.

  “We were a couple of days in the capital of Guinea, and then the president invited us up to the mountains where the climate was fantastic. He arranged a flight for us.

  “We went to the airport and there was a German plane, with the swastika on it. Josephine was shocked. ‘Look at that!’ The Africans didn’t know what she was talking about, I think maybe Germany had sold them some old planes, and this one had not been painted over. She refused to get on it. ‘I can’t believe they wanted to put me in a Nazi plane!’ We had to wait three hours before another plane came.”

  A quick trip to Kenza’s homeland brought an audience with King Hassan II. “It was in Fez,” Kenza says. “The king was very nice to her, he gave her a piece of property outside Marrakesh, and money for Les Milandes.”

  The check was large enough so she could forestall the next foreclosure, which was slated to take place on November 5. The king also promised her twenty thousand dollars a year to take care of the children, and arranged for her to do a singing tour of Morocco. He offered not the dry crust of pity, but a chance to shine again as an artist.

  With the blessings of His Majesty, and Pierre Spiers conducting the orchestra, she played Rabat and Casablanca, blooming under the applause. The king had known that for a star the bravas were as necessary as the dollars. After a performance in Marrakesh, she went off with Mohamed Menebhi to relive the war years. When she came back to the Hôtel Mamounia at 6 A.M., Pierre Spiers was frantic. “It’s all right,” she told him gently, “I was with an old friend.”

  On August 30, 1965, Eddie Carson died. His obituary in The St. Louis Argus called him the father of “entertainer Josephine Baker.” If the old man—he was seventy-nine—knew the secret of Josephine’s real parentage, he took it to his grave.

  Josephine did not send flowers.

  She welcomed in the new year with Fidel Castro. He had invited her to the first Tricontinental Conference celebrating “the solidarity of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and Cuba,” and Josephine pronounced herself ready to sing and dance for the delegates. “I wanted to see the Cuban revolution with my own eyes,” she said. “Generally I don’t believe what newspapermen say.”

  Her comments made their way into her FBI file (which would eventually grow to almost a thousand pages).

  Home again, she told the children she had a wonderful surprise. “Uncle Fidel has invited us all to spend a month’s vacation in Cuba next summer.”

  First a wonderful surprise, then a bad one. Josephine was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Intestinal blockage again. Kenza remembers putting cold compresses on her stomach. “It was better than the hot-water bottles she used before.”

  Jo Bouillon flew back from Argentina, and Akio, Jari, and Luis were given a day off from school to go and meet him. Akio asked Jo to stay in France. “Nothing’s gone right since you left, Papa.”

  The newspapers loved it, Josephine and Jo together again, twelve children had got their father back; only Josephine, gazing at the family crowding around her hospital bed, was half amused. “How sweet of you to come,” she said, “but I’m not dying yet.”

  Two weeks later, Jo paid Josephine’s hospital bill, and went back to his restaurant in Buenos Aires.

  In April, Josephine was well enough to travel to Dakar for the first International Festival of Negro Arts. Mercer Cook, by then American ambassador to Senegal, gave a small dinner party that included among the guests Katherine Dunham and Langston Hughes. (The writer Arna Bontemps had suggested to Hughes that he was “the ideal person” to do a biography of Josephine. “. . . The warm element of controversy combined with the warm element of sex and no strings and the French flavor! This could be your first best seller. . . .”)

  “Josephine was quiet during dinner,” Mercer Cook told me. “And when she left, in that beautiful voice of hers, she just said, ‘Au revoir, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur.’ I kissed her hand, tears in my eyes. I felt she was so proud of what I had achieved. We both knew the long way we had come from La Revue Nègre, when I was spending my nights at the theater translating her love letters.”

  Josephine’s brother Richard had also come back into her life. He now had three children—Patrick, Guylaine, and Alain, all born out of wedlock, whom Josephine had never seen. “I was three years old when my father married my mother,” Guylaine says. “Before that, we were never invited to Les Milandes. Afterward, Aunt Josephine relented.

  “Sometimes my mother would dress us in our Sunday clothes, and Aunt Josephine would come pick us up in her big car, and we would be so excited, we would jump all over the upholstery while my mother was telling us to sit properly.

  “ ‘Let them be, let them be,’ Aunt Josephine would say. ‘This is my blood, these are my children.’ ‘Non, Madame Josephine,’ my mother would say, ‘these are my children.’

  “We loved the ride up to the château, and we played in the park at Les Milandes with our cousins. There were fights and kisses—I remember Marianne was very haughty—and at four o’clock, we had delicious ice cream and cake in the kitchen. Otherwise, we were never allowed inside.

  “At some point, Aunt Josephine told my parents they had to give her one of their children. ‘It doesn’t matter which one.’ She said she had adopted many children, but it was not the same. ‘My brother’s children have my blood.’

  “My father refused, and my mother said, ‘Even if I had fifty, I would not give one away.’ Aunt Josephine said, ‘You can have more children, me, I cannot have any, and you would not miss one.’ From that day forward, she wanted nothing to do with my family, we didn’t exist for her. Only once, she sent my father a signed picture of her with her long ponytail, not even a note with it. We children did not miss her, we barely knew her, but when she appeared on TV, my father would ask us not to make noise. That was the way he followed his sister’s life, through newspaper articles and her TV appearances. He would be sad after he saw her like that, he would say absolutely nothing.

  “From Sarlat, we went to live at Baillargues, four hundred miles from Les Milandes. We never saw Aunt Josephine again.

  “Of my grandmother Carrie’s three children, my father is the only one who found happiness; he was generous, amusing, he liked to have a good time. He would invite us to play cards with him, and the winner could
have a sip of beer. He would dance with us, we played horse on his back.

  “We were lucky children, we had the love of two parents, my father was good in his skin, he never spoke about color or discrimination. In his half-French, half-English, he used to tell us about Tumpy—that’s what they called Aunt Josephine back home. He said once he and she and Aunt Margaret stole a pack of cigarettes and sneaked under a bed and lit up and Grandma smelled the smoke and found them. She made them smoke the whole pack. ‘We were sick for the whole day,’ my father said. He still laughed when he told us that story.

  “He said the family was poor, but never missed a meal. He was upset with Josephine that she wrote books telling how they were starving. ‘I don’t know why she does that, it’s not the truth, we had good food.’ He always told us about the chicken my grandmother Carrie would cook.

  “Everyone adored my father. He would walk through the town, and you would hear, ‘Bonjour, Richard,’ ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Martin,’ from everyone. My father was not famous, but on the day of his death, we did not know where to put the flowers.”

  In July 1966, Josephine and the Rainbow Tribe set out for Cuba, and a visit with Uncle Fidel. Before they left, Stephane Grappelli paid a call at Les Milandes. Grappelli, who had played in the thirties with Django Reinhardt at Bricktop’s, was a friend of Jo Bouillon. “We both played the violin,” he explains simply. “Josephine took me all over the property, and when we came back to a salon on the second floor, we had a bottle of champagne. We started to talk, and I could feel she was trying to pump me about Jo, what he was doing and so forth.

  “For an hour, we spoke of him. The bottle was empty when I left. She said she hoped the next time we met, it would be with Jo. Her eyes were filled with tears, she was incredibly quiet for a woman so vibrant onstage.

  “She accompanied me to my car, and I must have turned back fifteen times to wave goodbye. Then I had to face front because the road was winding, and my last look was through the rearview mirror. She was still standing there. Suddenly, I saw her raise her arms like an eagle unfolding his wings.”