Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  In short order, fourteen of the fifteen monkeys went to the big ménagerie in the sky. Josephine had carried the last survivor to Prince Rainier and begged him to care for it in his zoo, but even there, it didn’t live. To save fifteen monkeys from the place where God had put them, my second mother, filled with goodwill and ignorance, took them away and killed every one of them.

  “When Pelé died,” my brother Noël says, “Maman kept him in her arms for hours, cradling him as if she could bring him back to life.”

  Chapter 42

  A PLAN TO MAKE THREE MILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICA

  “She knew how to profit from her friends”

  Alfred Biolek, a Munich-based producer, recalls her appearance on his television show, Nightclub.

  “When she started her second song, she walked among the tables, and there was a young man sitting at one of them, and she leaned toward him and touched his shoulder while she was singing. And he started swinging his body to the rhythm of the song, so she kind of had to swing with him. And when there was a little pause in her song, she just looked at him, and said, ‘Too late.’ He was a young blond boy, and the swinging was like flirting, you know. And she said, ‘Too late.’ It was wonderful.”

  In many ways, it was too late for the family as well. Their closeness was an illusion. Moïse had come back from Israel an outsider who didn’t know where he belonged. He now had “complexes,” as Josephine put it in a heartbroken letter to Harry Hurford-Janes.

  Worse still, she told Harry, Jean-Claude No. 1 had become a bigot, talking like Adolf Hitler. Even in Africa, he instructed his black mother, he would know that he was superior, “for the blacks are lazy, dirty . . . without any intelligence. . . .”

  The shock had been terrible, Josephine confided to Harry. “Jean-Claude is racist.”

  I asked Jean-Claude about this episode. Had he really made such an ugly speech? “I don’t remember,” he said. “But if I said it, it must have been out of spite. I knew I could push that button, I knew how to provoke her.”

  That was the year, Akio says, “that my mother went to see the pope to demonstrate that what she had accomplished was a success. Not only had she gathered races together, but religions, that was what we children represented. She had asked for an audience in order to show that she had been ecumenical before the Church had.

  “We had a private audience with the Holy Father, and as we left, he gave us key rings with the Vatican seal.”

  All through 1971, Josephine was scrabbling for bookings; there was never enough money. If you had given her one million dollars at 9 A.M. by 4 P.M., she would have been in front of the métro entrance, begging for a token—and getting it from somebody.

  “I met her again in Spain,” says George Reich (with whom she’d had her differences in Paris Mes Amours). “She was broken down, but she still had the magic, because she was a monstre sacré. The owner of the theater where my company was playing took pity on her and asked me to put her in our show for a week. I had to lend her costumes, wigs, her music scores were terrible, it was sad. She was trying to do the Charleston, all that bullshit. She came and asked me, ‘Do you have any feathers?’ She and Mistinguett had been the queens of feathers, and now nothing was left, she was like a bag lady, it was a shame.”

  Some who loved her didn’t see the shame of it. “Her makeup then was as outrageous as a drag queen’s,” says Coccinelle, the most famous transsexual in France. “She did not care, it was funny, marvelous. Once, knowing I was in the audience, she stopped the orchestra. ‘Ah, my daughter is here among us, big applause for my daughter Coccinelle.’ On her day off, she would cook couscous for our company, we were her children du spectacle.”

  Her phone calls to me in Berlin were incessant. I knew she wanted me, like a kind of minor-league Pepito, to travel with her, take care of her. She would send pathetic notes from all over: “If you could come and see me in Eindhoven, it would give me great pleasure,” and sign them, “Your little Mother and your brothers and sisters.”

  I hatched a plan. First, I took a wonderful theater, the Hochschule für Musik, for one night only. Under the patronage of Mayor Schutz, I would organize another benefit for my orphans and the Rainbow Tribe. It would be an all-star event, Josephine backed up by the singing and dancing Kessler twins, Alice and Ellen, the pride of Germany.

  Georges Debot, covering the event for the French press, came to rehearsal. The director said he’d told the Kesslers that Madame Baker would like to rehearse, but they’d said, ‘We are not yet finished.’ Josephine smiled. ‘Leave them alone, the little ones, they still need rehearsals.’ ”

  To introduce my two mothers, I had no rehearsal. My mother and my sister Marie Jo had come for the big show, and were staying at my apartment. Entering with Josephine, I said with a flourish, “Mother, this is Mother.” My birth mother was diffident—“Oh, merci, Madame, for what you are doing for my Jean-Claude.” Josephine poured on the snake oil—“Mais non, you gave me an angel, call me Sister . . .”

  I left them, and went back to the theater.

  “Josephine was marvelous,” Marie Jo told me later. “She talked about the troubles she was having with Marianne and her oldest boys. We talked about my two-year-old, Agathe, and we discussed giving birth. She asked me to squeeze six lemons in warm water for her, she said it was full of vitamins, and that’s why she had such a figure.”

  She was sharing a dressing room with Romy Haag, a beautiful transvestite stripper. “I was embarrassed to undress in front of her,” Romy said. “ ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘When I started in Paris, I was naked on the stage.’

  “To me, she looked like a nice old lady, she just undressed and started putting on some stockings. I finished my makeup, looked at her again, and would you believe it? She was still putting on stockings. I don’t know, she must have pulled on something like ten pairs.”

  I hadn’t had time to go back and see her until just before the Kesslers wound up their routine. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was in a tiny miniskirt. “Oh, sainted Mary,” I said, “that’s shorter than the skirts the Kesslers are wearing. Where did you find it?” “In the bottom of my suitcase,” she said. Alvero and the orchestra were already playing her introduction, and when she sailed out, and the audience saw those legs, they went wild. She was telling them, you thought the old one couldn’t follow those beautiful girls, that youth is everything, well, friends, that’s your problem. Watch this.

  They did. A reporter from Die Welt swore he heard somebody say, “She’s the greatest medical wonder since Adenauer.” She toyed with the spectators—“My right leg is thirty-three, and my left leg is thirty-three, if you want to know my age, you do the addition, I’m too tired”—and when it was time for her to go down into the house, she called, “Jean-Claude, come help Mother, I’m too old to do the stairs alone.”

  At the end, there was a magic moment. Remember now that people trying to escape from East Berlin were still being shot to death, and here was Josephine, down among the elegant audience, saying how terrible it was for brothers to be separated. Then, flattening her back against a side wall of the theater, she began to sing.

  I ran to the electrician and had him turn off all the lights except for the pink one on her face; in the darkness, the wall behind her disappeared, as the Berlin wall would not do for another eighteen years. The song over, she sank to her knees, imploring, “Oh God, give peace to the world.”

  Does it sound hackneyed, sentimental, old-fashioned? It was all of those. It was also theatrically effective, thrilling everyone but the Kessler twins.

  “The Kesslers were spectacular too,” says Georges Debot, “but she overshadowed them.”

  “Our mother was crying,” says Marie Jo, “when Josephine asked you to come and take a bow with her, and said to the people, ‘A big round of applause for my Jean-Claude!’ The theater became a big living room, the people members of a family, you felt good in your soul.”

  “Your own mother was a good mother,” sa
id my cousin Jacqueline, “but she loved you in silence, she was missing that warmth Josephine had so much of. Josephine had to touch, to express her feelings. I’m sure that even in sad moments she knew how to find a little bit of happiness, enough to let her start again.”

  At the reception afterward—we had it in the Pimm’s Club—Georges Debot found the scene amusing. “I saw Françoise Sagan totally drunk, but then, she never said that she disliked alcohol. I went to say hello. She answered me, ‘What are you doing in Moscow?’

  “She was looking with her gloomy eyes at Josephine, surrounded by the most beautiful men offering her little gifts, like the Virgin at Lourdes. Josephine, with a glass of beer in her hands, was not displeased.”

  Next day, we had a party at my place because Josephine wanted to follow the German elections. “I will always keep in my memory,” says Georges, “the picture of that extraordinary personage down on all fours, ass in the air, in front of the TV set. She drove everyone crazy, no one could talk, and she was drinking that dreadful concoction of lemon, sugar, and warm water.”

  At 4 P.M., she demanded that I call Willy Brandt in Bonn. I didn’t get through, but an assistant promised to relay her message—“Don’t worry, you’ll be reelected!” Still, she insisted on sending a telegram.

  That night, I took Josephine to my old workplace, the Kleist Casino. She entered the packed gay club like a queen visiting her subjects. We sat by the dance floor and every couple that passed threw kisses, and Josephine, with a motherly smile, would throw kisses back. Suddenly, two burly moustached guys stopped in front of us and gave each other a French kiss. “Oh!” exclaimed Josephine, “Look at the little darlings, how adorable they are!”

  Her Berlin notices were raves. “The Black Venus is back,” said Der Abend. “Rainstorm of applause for Josephine,” said Die Welt. I made the papers too, billed as “Josephine Baker’s thirteenth child, a well-kept secret.”

  Josephine went home happy, but a few weeks later, was again in the hospital. She blamed this on sixteen-year-old Marianne, who had fallen “headlong in love” with a nineteen-year-old boy. Marianne had been staying out, Josephine wrote Harry Hurford-Janes, “until five o’clock in the morning. . . . The shock was so hard I had a heart attack. . . .”

  A month later, she felt well enough to take Mara to Venezuela, where he met his grandparents. “His grandfather is an Indian chief,” Josephine told Marie Spiers. “That was a wonderful experience for him and me.”

  It’s possible it wasn’t such a wonderful experience for the fourteen-year-old Mara. Josephine led him into a swarm of strangers who badgered her for money, and who spoke in a dialect Mara did not understand. Then she asked him, “Do you want to remain with your people?”

  “I looked her square in the eye,” Mara recalled. “ ‘When you brought me to France, I was sick, wasn’t I? Thanks to you I’m alive. Why would I want to leave you?’ ”

  Meanwhile, Jack Jordan had come back into her life. He and his partner, Howard Sanders, were convinced they could bring Josephine in triumph again to Carnegie Hall. Josephine, always willing to forgive the shortcomings of a producer so long as she didn’t have a more important producer lined up, finally said yes.

  In New York, having won his heart’s desire, Jack panicked—what if nobody came to the show?—and hired an army of boys to hand out flyers in gay bars and restaurants all over the city. Jack was a man like Willy Loman, “out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.” Already, he had borrowed seven thousand dollars from Bricktop to bring Josephine over.

  Before the opening at Carnegie Hall, on Josephine’s sixty-seventh birthday, there was a press conference at the Plaza, and a reporter brought up the idea of Josephine’s playing herself in a movie. She laughed. “Josephine Baker is too old to play Josephine Baker.”

  On Tuesday, June 5, the audience—among them, Eubie Blake and Miki Sawada—stirred in their seats as an old lady wearing house slippers crept onstage from the wings. She moved painfully on her arthritic feet toward a standing mike. Some people were stunned. This was the famous Josephine Baker?

  The old lady reached the mike. “My name is Bricktop,” she said, going on to give Josephine a lovely introduction. (“Much too long,” Josephine told me later.)

  “And when I said, ‘Now here she is,’ ” Bricktop recalled, “I saw a theater shake.”

  Yvonne Stoney had first worked as a dresser for Josephine at Carnegie Hall ten years before. “It was one of the most fascinating jobs I ever had, because she made most of her changes in front of the audience’s eyes, and they were not aware of it. She would be talking to them, and have one arm behind the proscenium, and I am pulling off her glove, and I am under her dress taking off one shoe and putting another shoe on, and she never left the stage.”

  Now Yvonne was helping Josephine again, on an opening night when the stage was covered with roses thrown by admirers. “I would say six inches deep, I had never seen anything like it. And when Josephine walked on, they would not let her open her mouth, every time she started, the applause rolled in. I was standing in the wings waiting for her to come and get the top part of her headdress taken off, and as she leaned against the piano, I could see her trembling. I went and got Jack.

  “She came off after the first segment, and we got her into the dressing room, and she was turning blue. The last pill she was supposed to have taken was still there in the ashtray, and I gave it to her. It was like a metamorphosis. When she went back onstage, she was fine.”

  She looked ageless, people said, in the skin-colored sequined body stocking, a huge headdress of pink ostrich plumes on her head. “How do you like my Eiffel Tower?” she asked, patting the feathers. They liked her Eiffel Tower, and they liked her. At the end, each person in the theater lit a match, and sang “Happy birthday, dear Josephine.”

  Somebody once said that Josephine spent the last two years of her life in redemption. Certainly during that brief stay in New York, she tried to mend some fences. Caroline Reagan’s grandson Arthur remembers his family’s being invited to Carnegie Hall.

  “Out of the clear blue. I was eleven years old, and sitting in the front row, and this woman is dedicating the show to my grandmother and my mother, and we all have to get up and go onstage with her.”

  In another spate of reconciliation, Josephine invited herself to stay at her nephew’s house on Long Island. “I need some peace, the old arm is getting tired.” Artie drove her to the theater each night and picked her up after the show. “She’d come home and fix her famous spaghetti,” Janie Martin says. “Two o’clock in the morning, she’d eat a plate of spaghetti.”

  “She let me know I was her blood,” says Vertel, the daughter of Artie and Janie, who was sixteen at the time. “She didn’t act like a big shot.”

  Donald Wyatt came to the opening-night party. “I was shocked when Josephine walked into the Plaza,” he told me. “I could see how much she’d aged.”

  The New York critics didn’t agree. “A body any thirty-year-old could proudly take to a beach resort,” said the Post’s man, Edmund Newton, while Howard Kissel, of Women’s Wear Daily, called her voice warm “and, when she wants it to be, velvety, and always bright and joyful.” Booked for four days, she could have played for four years, to judge from the crowds mobbing the box office. This was not lost on Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders, who were already planning for next fall—a sixteen-city tour and a movie.

  She phoned me the minute she got home to Roquebrune. “I’m so happy,” she said, “I’m sorry you weren’t there, but we go back in September, and you will come with me. I’m taking the children to Copenhagen, why don’t you join us?”

  I went sooner than I’d planned, because in Copenhagen, she suffered a stroke. At Rigshospitalet, I was directed to the ninth floor. On the black and white plastic tiles, a little girl was playing hopscotch. Nearby, some big boys and a teenaged girl leaned against the wall.

  From talking to them on the phone, reading their letters, seeing thei
r pictures, I felt I knew them. I went to Stellina, who had stopped jumping in order to check on who was getting off the elevator. “I’m Jean-Claude, your brother from Berlin,” I said, and we kissed. I was meeting the children at last, but my happiness was shadowed.

  None of them had been allowed into Josephine’s room, and when I saw her, I understood why. She lay in a large white metal-framed bed, looking small and lifeless. The left side of her face was twisted, her head was bald except for a few curly white hairs. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed with difficulty; there were so many tubes in her nose, arms, chest, it was like a science fiction movie.

  The staff were relieved I had arrived, the children were without supervision and reporters had been hounding them. I said I would take them with me, and a nurse promised to call if Josephine’s condition worsened during the night. As we left, I spoke to the reporters who were waiting outside; I told them Miss Baker was doing well.

  I took the children to a restaurant. We were almost in mourning, certainly in shock, trying to reassure each other, when out of the blue, flashbulbs erupted, bombarding and blinding us. I was shocked. This is what it is to be the children of someone famous, I thought. The children were not shocked, they were used to it.

  Next morning, astonishingly, I found Josephine awake and reading telegrams. She smiled when she saw me, and handed me one of them: DEAR JOSEPHINE, WE ARE PRAYING FOR YOUR RECOVERY. It was from some Jehovah’s Witnesses. “When I was fighting with God, who wanted me back, I told him I still have so much to accomplish here on earth, and the prayers of the Witnesses were added to mine, and God listened to them. That’s why I’m still here today.”

  She was weak, and spoke slowly. “You’ve met your brothers and sisters?” “Yes, Mother, I love them.” “I knew you would,” she said. Suddenly, she turned practical. “How did you hear I was in the hospital?”

  I said it was on the news. “Oh my God,” she said, “the Americans are going to cancel the fall tour, no one will book me if they know I have had a stroke, you must call a press conference and deny it, say I fell on some stairs.”