Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Raise your arms in triumph like de Gaulle, it will chase the blues away, it will win cheers from an audience, even an audience of one.

  Fidel Castro was celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of his revolution, and the Baker-Bouillons spent several weeks as his guests. “Mother gave three concerts for Castro,” Jari says.

  Jean-Claude pieces out his brother’s memories. “First we arrived in a splendid villa on the ocean. And I remember enormous insects like tarantulas, even inside the house. There was strong sentiment against Yankees. Everywhere in Havana you could see huge posters, some one hundred and fifty feet high, showing Americans torturing the Cuban people. But there were only American cars, or the remains of American cars. Not one was whole.

  “We saw Castro three times. He indulged in speeches that flowed like a river, running on for four, five, six hours under the glaring sun. And we would be under the presidential dais listening. But we understood next to nothing—he spoke in Spanish—so we sat there stoically, sweat dripping.”

  “Without anything to drink, not even a glass of water,” Jari adds.

  The night before the Baker-Bouillon family left Cuba, Castro came to the beach house he had loaned them. “He kissed us,” Jean-Claude says. “We had to call him ‘Tio Fidel,’ Uncle Fidel. All of Mother’s friends were ‘Uncle.’ Like Claude Menier, the son of the chocolate family—he was an elderly gentleman, very soft-spoken, one of his arms paralyzed, stiff, twisted, like a tree branch, with snakes coiled around it. He had pythons, boas, and we called him ‘Uncle Petit.’ He had white hair, Castro had black hair, a black beard, and he always wore a military uniform. He was very impressive.”

  “The children were thrilled,” said Josephine, “they knew him from television.”

  At the end of August, the family left for Argentina. “We went to our father,” Jari says. “We hadn’t seen him for a long time. It was la recherche du père, we wanted to see how he lived, worked. Mother left us with him and again went back to perform.”

  Josephine herself had avoided the press during her brief stopover in Buenos Aires, though one reporter had cornered her long enough to ask why she had gone to Cuba. “Please forgive me for not discussing my trip to Havana,” she said. “I have a tremendous headache.”

  She continued to need more help than anyone could supply, even though big businessmen with heavy pockets and soft hearts went on trying to rescue her. Early in 1967, the owner of the famed Club Méditerranée, who had fallen in love with Josephine’s “inner radiance,” came up with a solution. “We proposed,” says Gilbert Trigano, “that Josephine keep the château for her personal use, and we would manage the rest of the property and deal with the people who came from all over the world. But she wanted to do it her way, and that was impossible.”

  Still, if you had chanced to visit her en famille in the summer of ’67, you would not have believed there was anything amiss in her world. Harry Hurford-Janes, who hadn’t been to Les Milandes in twenty-one years, spent several days there during that August, and made notes.

  “I entered the château by the side door leading directly into a large kitchen boasting an enormous refrigerator with glass doors, a dingy little sink, an armoire painted cream and yellow. A long table was laid for about eighteen (for breakfast it seemed).

  “I was glancing around when a door burst open and a little lady of about sixty darts in, hair scraped up on top, in a woollen dressing gown. She greets me warmly . . . reveals that she was a journalist for thirty years, and had taken a domestic job at Les Milandes two weeks ago but did not think she would last much longer. Throughout my stay she was in a state of exhaustion. ‘Très fatiguée, M’sieur,’ she would say, putting her palm to her forehead every time we met.”

  Harry was also greeted by Moïse (“dark and good-looking”), who said Josephine was expected home from Copenhagen late that night, and by Jari (“fair and Finnish”) who took his bags upstairs.

  Passing Josephine’s bedroom, with the bed once owned by Marie-Antoinette, gilded and hung with curtains of blue silk, he felt himself flooded with memories of a cold winter night in 1946 when he had sat by the fire in this house “while Josephine knitted and we talked of her possible marriage to the Menier chocolate heir, who was delicate and whose family disapproved of his infatuation. In her mind then, it was a toss-up between the invalid and Jo Bouillon. It all came back to me vividly, the long conversations, ‘You are my brother, you are like a rock. But you see’ (as if that explained it) ‘you are an Englishman.’ ”

  During that week, Harry was not the only guest. There was another Englishman known as Monsieur Jack. And a Spanish lady. And a German author who photographed the monkeys and drew Josephine’s wrath. “It is like a studio!” she shouted. Belgians, Swiss, French people arrived and departed. Josephine cooked lunch, and monitored lunch.

  “There were cries from her,” said Harry, “of ‘Sit up straight, Brahim!’ . . . ‘Don’t bolt your food!’ all in French, with despairing glances at her guests (‘You see what a handful I have!’).”

  Also present at this chaotic repast was an unfortunate tutor newly arrived from Lebanon to teach the children Arabic. “The older boys asked if they could swim after lunch,” Harry recalled, “and Josephine said they would have to wait. ‘Five children in France have died through bathing too soon after meals!’ At this point, the Lebanese professor said it was perfectly in order for the children to bathe as soon as they wished after the meal—it was fish, being Friday—as they would have digested their food by the time they reached the pool.

  “Josephine, furious at this reversal of her orders . . . reminded Monsieur that he had been engaged as a schoolmaster, not a doctor. I knew he was doomed, and this was shortly confirmed to me by J. B., who told me he would never have done, as he was ‘playing with himself,’ with his hands in his pockets. . . . He would leave first thing in the morning.”

  The Spanish lady was concerned about the turnover in staff, she said Margaret was the only one with any authority, “that J. B. was always flying off for engagements and the children ran riot.” This the children were happy to demonstrate by fusing the lights, slamming the doors, seizing Ping-Pong paddles from each other, hitting at the monkeys as they jumped from branch to branch of a tree. But they redeemed themselves by putting on a pantomime that enchanted their mother. “She covered her mouth to stifle her laugh,” observed Harry. “She slapped people on the shoulder as if to say, ‘Isn’t it killing?’ Between times, she was adjusting costumes, controlling the volume of the amplifier, falling into her seat beside Margaret, convulsed with laughter.”

  Every family in France received a monthly stipend for each child; Josephine, with twelve children, got 1,305 francs. In addition, large families got a 75 percent deduction on railroad fares, so when Josephine traveled now, she took the train. And one of the places she traveled to was Le Vésinet. She wanted to buy a house and live there again, she told the mayor, “because there I have known happiness.”

  She thought going back would change her luck, but Blanche Guignery says nobody in the village wanted to help. “They were avoiding her. Poor Josephine, here she was on the straw, just as my husband had sadly predicted.”

  Still, you aren’t on the straw if you don’t know it. Josephine continued making plans. Her latest idea was for a College of Brotherhood to be built at Les Milandes. “We can save Les Milandes and help the world at the same time! . . . Students will learn that all creeds, like all people, are essentially one. And when they have mastered that lesson, they’ll go home and preach it to their people.”

  Drunk with grandiosity, she solicited blueprints from architects, and never paid a penny for any of them.

  In January 1968, the American consulate in Paris refused her a four-day visa to come to New York. She believed it was because she had joined the March on Washington and visited Cuba. She wrote to Bobby Kennedy, and he called the State Department, which put her papers through. Kennedy also sent her a wire saying, I AM HAPPY TO INFORM YOU
THAT YOUR REQUEST FOR A VISA HAS BEEN GRANTED AND YOU WILL HAVE IT ON MONDAY. (His office did mention that the delay had had nothing to do with Cuba, or civil rights, it was just that Josephine hadn’t filled out the forms correctly.)

  Now in possession of a visa, she went to Chicago to speak at a meeting of the West Side Organization on behalf of Martin Luther King (who didn’t appear), then came right back to France, where the roof was leaking all over her Oriental rugs. Les Milandes was still in jeopardy, and once again, a powerful tycoon tried to save Josephine.

  Sylvain Floirat, a kind of French William Paley, owner of the powerful radio station Europe 1, made her an offer she should not have refused. He said he would pay all her debts, 146 million francs, and then, though she would no longer own Les Milandes, she could stay there as long as she lived. She said she had to think about it, and never got in touch with him again.

  On February 16, her creditors finally forced the sale of the estate for ninety-nine million francs, but one dissatisfied lender—he thought Les Milandes should have brought more—used a loophole in the law to have the sale annulled, and rescheduled. Another auction would take place on May 3.

  It was a reprieve for Josephine, who was working more than ever, mostly in cabarets. They were perfect for someone who wanted to avoid paying taxes, since the owners were often willing to give a performer money under the table. In St. Moritz, jet-setters, expecting a beaten-down creature, were shocked by her confidence as she took possession of the stage. Now there were no new designer clothes, but only Marie Spiers making miracles with sleeves from an old Dior, a skirt from an old Balenciaga.

  Though Josephine begged for sympathy from the press and in her speeches, onstage she laughed, reminisced about past splendors, looked like a winner. The empress of Iran, Farrah Diba, vacationing with her children, was so moved she sent a gift of money and a beautiful carpet.

  The newspapers followed Josephine’s every move. From France-Soir: “She will once again run through the world trying to find before May 3 the millions she needs. The children will go back to school, little Stellina will stay with Aunt Margaret, and only the screams of the peacocks will disturb the silence of Les Milandes. The storm passes over the children’s heads, they don’t know what is at risk.”

  Josephine said she realized people might wonder what she had done “with all the money they gave me, especially in 1963, after the plea from Brigitte Bardot. . . . Well, my employees have stolen from me, and suppliers abused my confidence. And then I was not always there, I was singing, working. . . . In my absence, not nice things happened. . . . People said all my sheep had died, but we never found the bodies. . . . I have been abused. . . .”

  If the French press was sympathetic, some foreign publications were not. Constanze, a West German weekly, sent a reporter to the château, and he accused Josephine of having degraded the idea of brotherhood. “ ‘They don’t give me milk for my children,’ she will cry to the world, and she expects the world to come to her rescue. . . . For years, her farewells only prepared you for her comebacks. Of course she comes back because she needs money for her children and wants you to admire this poor good hard-working mother who allows herself no rest. . . .

  “I was there when Josephine received her mail. She went to her desk and with a letter opener, she opened them, took out the money, the bills of ten francs, fifty marks, and did not even read the letters, she just counted the money.

  “I dared to ask her one question: What will happen to all those letters? She said they would be given to her lawyer. . . .‘Les Milandes must not die! Here my children should find a secure existence.’ ”

  The reporter was not swayed. “The grass,” he said, “is already growing over Les Milandes.”

  The grass may have been growing, but the water was not flowing. The day it was cut off, Josephine came to Paris, and that night, she and Marie Spiers went to a movie. “As soon as it started,” Marie says, “Josephine fell asleep and began to snore. The people around us were upset, but I didn’t wake her, I knew she needed the rest.

  “Afterward, she wanted to go eat something at the Café de la Paix. She told me how in the old days her suitors would take her there, how glamorous it was, but we could not afford the second-floor dining room, so we ate downstairs. Curious, I asked her, ‘How do you all wash with no water?’ She laughed. ‘We fill a basin with water from the Malaurys,’ and then she went through the whole process, miming everyone’s washing.

  “I felt uncomfortable, heads were turning, they had read the news in the morning paper about her water being turned off, and here she’s laughing at the Café de la Paix!”

  Laughter turned to tears on April 4, when Martin Luther King was killed. That spring of 1968 was terrible. Two months after King’s death, Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated, and student unrest (which would lead to riots in the streets of Paris) was already building when Bruno Coquatrix, Josephine’s own Don Quixote of the Olympia, grabbed his lance and went into battle. First, he booked the lady into his theater for a fortnight in early April, then, with the record company Pathé-Marconi, he produced a record called S.O.S. The World’s Children.

  He also sent the photographer Hugues Vassal and the journalist Yves Le Roux to get new pictures of Josephine’s children, since the S.O.S. crusade was for them. “She would be paid,” Vassal says. “It was a decent way for our newspaper to help them.” “She was happy to see us. She was panicked by what was happening at Les Milandes, but she knew the number of readers she could reach through France-Dimanche, and that lifted her morale.”

  At the Olympia, the house sold out every night, and the S.O.S. record moved briskly. On it, Josephine sang “J’ai Deux Amours,” “Dans Mon Village,” a new hit, “Merci pour Les Milandes,” and also “Hello, Dolly,” because she intended to do the show with Bruno next year. “I realize I’m sixty-two, but Dolly was no spring chicken either,” she told reporters. One of them, throwing journalistic objectivity to the winds, ended his piece with a rallying cry: “One can find the S.O.S. record at the Olympia or any record shop. If you love Josephine, you know what you have to do!”

  They did it. They did it all over Europe. “It’s the little people who are helping to see me through,” Josephine told the journalist Jacqueline Cartier. Bruno Coquatrix also bought newspaper space for an open letter to his star. “It is pure chance,” he said, “but once more at a critical moment in your life we find you at the Olympia. . . . And once more, it is formidable! You never sang so well, you never were so dynamic! . . . One had to have been twenty years old several times in one’s life in order to be able to express such youth and humanity!”

  He ended this loving testimonial by thanking her “for being what you are: the greatest. I kiss you.”

  The French press could not get enough of Josephine stories. France-Dimanche ran a shot of the star emerging from a faint, and said her friends were worried about her being back on the Paris stage, “a hard test for a sixty-two-year-old.” The headline posed a question: WILL HER HEART STILL HOLD?

  It did, along with her voice and her legs.

  She finished her fortnight at the Olympia (she’d be back soon; when Coquatrix realized two weeks could not accommodate all the people who wanted to see her, he arranged for her return on May 15) and set out for Scandinavia. Before she left, she went to Paulette Coquatrix. “All goes well,” she said. “Thanks to you and Bruno, Les Milandes are saved.” “Careful, Josephine,” said the more realistic Paulette. “You think you are the queen there, but you will never be a queen to those farmers.”

  “We went to talk to the people Josephine owed money,” Vassal said. “There were two kinds. Some were like creditors since Molière’s time, grumpy, wanting to dispossess her because her property was valuable; well run, it could have made a lot of money. Then there were the others who were tender toward her, unhappy to see that no one could really help her, half admiring what she had done, even though there was more than a touch of folly in it.”

  That made me th
ink of something Eli Mercier had told me. “Here we do not have bad memories of her,” he said. “She made all of us a lot of money, and the unpaid bills—grocery bills, gasoline bills—are past, it is not serious. When the children were hungry, the poor ones, we had pity.”

  From Sweden, Pierre Spiers wrote to Marie. “Every night, I take the money from Josephine. Tell the Fetiveaus they will be reimbursed when we return.” (Dr. Fétiveau, owner of a private clinic near Paris, had helped out with a loan.)

  On May 3, Pierre and Josephine were killing time in her hotel room in Göteborg. “Josephine was not too worried,” Pierre said. “She kept saying, ‘I know God will not abandon me.’ ”

  She had been able to convince herself that the Bergerac tribunal, sitting that day in the Sarlat courthouse, would not put Les Milandes up for sale at 2 P.M., that Bruno Coquatrix would be there and in some way be able to stave off her creditors. Every hour that passed made her more confident.

  The phone rang at last. She picked up the receiver and heard the voice of a stranger. “I’m really sorry,” the man said, “but my paper wants to do a big piece on the sad news. What was your first reaction to the sale of Les Milandes?”

  It was finally over. She had lost.

  Chapter 39

  DOWN AND ALMOST OUT IN PARIS

  “What happened to all that money?”

  Gabriel Bureau, the lawyer in charge of the sale, says there was nothing irregular about the proceedings. “Bruno Coquatrix was there, checkbook in hand; his funds were insufficient. He begged the creditors to give Josephine one more extension. But she had received a lot of donations. What happened to all that money? I didn’t see it come, I didn’t see it go. The afternoon of the auction, few people showed up.”