Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  We were booked for four nights. She had missed the first, only a few people showed up on the second, and the third day, Jack Jordan disappeared, taking with him the last five thousand dollars in the box office. I convinced Josephine to play the show anyway. “If Jack isn’t here tomorrow, we can keep the costumes in lieu of salary.” (Poor Jack had already paid for those costumes twice, but I was shameless.)

  Only the tap dancer, dear Gene Bell, who was seventy-one years old in 1992, remembered San Francisco as a good time. “They gave us each a large dressing room stocked with liquor, and our names were written in gold on the doors.

  “Josephine with the two dogs, and on the bicycle with rhinestones on her leather jacket—it was a killer show!”

  It was a killer show, all right, it nearly killed Jack Jordan. He was still missing when we closed on Sunday. I had hired a security guard to watch Josephine’s costumes. Even Yvonne Stoney was not allowed into the dressing room.

  “San Francisco was a disaster,” Yvonne says. “I felt so bad about it because Jack and Howard had struggled to bring her over. I mean, when she came to Carnegie Hall, she didn’t have anything, they had to practically buy her underwear, and from the reception she got there, I thought she would kiss their feet, but she treated them like dirt.”

  It had been a long time since she’d kissed a man’s feet. Yvonne remembers her saying, “Men fuck you and that’s the end of it, they use you and abuse you and once they get what they want, they keep walking. I did all that when I was young, I don’t need it anymore.”

  Josephine, says Yvonne, “was a shrewd businesswoman, she always came out on top. I remember after Carnegie Hall, she had me pack fifty-three thousand dollars in a paper bag, and then a shower cap, so she could hide it in her pocketbook, and not have to pay taxes on it. In San Francisco, she confiscated each costume as she took it off, before she walked out on us.”

  In time, Yvonne forgave me for double-crossing Jack. “You had to be on her side, you were her son.”

  A friend who was a director of Swissair loaned us a station wagon, and we sneaked the costumes to the airport. They were sent to Paris under the name of Jean-Claude Rouzaud. Josephine could show any nosy officials that she was traveling with nothing but her makeup and Moustique.

  She and I were parting once again. “You were right,” I told her. “I am going to stay in America.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “But don’t go to Hollywood, go to New York. If you make it there, you won’t need me or old Europe. And try to find us a theater for around Christmas. I am the Universal Mother, we do a family show, and mothers will come and bring their children, it will sell out.”

  She could take your breath away. She stranded companies, audiences, managers, and drifted onto a plane that would take her someplace else without a care for the mess she left behind.

  I went straight back to New York, and this time, Peter Brown had an idea for me. “I’ve booked the Palace for two weeks around New Year’s Eve. Go to Nelle Nugent, she’s Jimmy Nederlander’s right hand, and tell her I’m willing to give you my option.”

  I put on my gray mink coat, very European, and go out into the snow. I take a taxi to the Palace, and beard Nelle Nugent in her office. I’m on a holy crusade to bring joy to New York, this dreadful city without human feeling. “Madame,” I say, “my mother and I just finished a triumphal tour in America, we are free, and we would like the theater Peter Brown has been kind enough to offer us—”

  “Triumphal tour?” says Nelle Nugent. “What the hell are you talking about? We lost seventy-five thousand dollars on your show in Detroit!”

  I gape. I’m from France, I don’t know the Nederlanders own the Fisher Theatre in Detroit.

  She throws me out. I’m back in the snow again. I see the people in Times Square, the faces of all those monsters, I’m in a foreign land, trying to make myself understood in a language I don’t speak well.

  Suddenly I remember a restaurant called Le Mistral to which I’ve been with Josephine. I go there and request an audience with Jean Larriaga, the grand seigneur of the place. He appears, a short Frenchman, leads me to the bar, listens to my woes. “We went bankrupt, the producer abandoned us, Mother went back to France, she wants me to find a theater for Christmas because we need money . . .”

  Next thing I know, he’s put me at a table to have lunch with six other people, and a woman is asking me about my brothers and sisters, and how old the youngest is. I tell her Stellina is ten. “How nice,” she says, and turns to the man next to her. “Jimmy, you must bring Josephine for Christmas, she has a little daughter the same age as our Christina.”

  I deduce that this man is in show business, and give him the same spiel I’d tried on Nelle Nugent, adding only that Nelle Nugent has thrown me out of her office. He is baffled. “Don’t you know who I am?” he says. “I’m Jimmy Nederlander. I own the Palace.”

  Chapter 44

  JOSEPHINE IS SICK BUT WON’T ADMIT IT

  “It was her last chance to reconquer Paris”

  Forty-five minutes later, we were in his office, and it was Nelle Nugent’s turn to gape. (Only recently, she told me that when I came back to the Palace with her boss, she thought, “How could this guy find Jimmy Nederlander so fast? I can’t find him myself!”)

  Mr. Nederlander had me call Josephine. “I’m not talking to you,” she said. “You’re a traitor.” I said Mr. Nederlander was booking her into the Palace, wasn’t it wonderful? and he took the phone. “Miss Baker, your son is the fastest talker I ever met. I want you here tomorrow.”

  Impossible. She couldn’t leave the children, she was booked for the ball at Versailles, but her Jean-Claude knew everything, he could get the press releases started. Mr. Nederlander agreed, yet I was worried. Why was I a traitor? Back at Peter Brown’s, I called Marie Spiers and asked what was going on.

  After San Francisco, Josephine had gone to spend a few days with Marie in Paris, and Marie had confronted her with a copy of France-Dimanche. “You’re hiding something from me.” The newspaper featured pictures of Josephine and Bob Brady (“twenty years younger, and an American millionaire”), along with a story about the “shadow” over their happiness. I was quoted as saying, “Maman is not divorced from Jo Bouillon,” something I did not even know.

  Josephine swore to Marie that there was nothing to the story. Again, it was “I don’t know that man.” She was going to appear at the Versailles ball after all (I had convinced Jean-Louis Barrault to approach her directly—he told her, “France needs you”), and since I had been invited too, I decided to fly to Paris for a couple of days. I could attend the party and, while in town, clear up the France-Dimanche mystery.

  Upon my arrival, the first thing I did was get a copy of the “interview” I was supposed to have given. It was nothing but a blown-up version of the item from Suzy’s column that had already appeared in London’s Daily Mail and France-Soir. Although the editor of France-Dimanche was willing to clear me, Josephine refused to speak to him. She went to Versailles without me—she’d got my invitation canceled (“I don’t know that person”)—and stole the show from Liza Minnelli and Nureyev, and I went back to America.

  By mid-November, the Palace contract was in Joseph Bessone’s office. Josephine was to be paid thirty thousand dollars for her week’s work, she was to open on New Year’s Eve, and to be in New York five days earlier “for publicity purposes.”

  Now to my surprise, her nephew, Richard, Jr., took my place as whipping boy. “Aunt Tumpy used to tell me her children are bastards and giving her trouble, they don’t have her blood, whereas I do, so she trusts me.”

  In December, Josephine wrote to Bob Brady about their “marriage,” now three months old. “I too regret not having took [sic] the communion that beautiful and special day. . . .” She also told him that since I had talked to a “scandal newspaper,” the family had written me off. “Not one of us wishes to see him again, he is a very bad boy. . . .”

  I soon learned that w
as not the way the children felt at all. “I was surprised,” Jean-Claude said. “She’d had you on a pedestal, and I said to myself, ‘It cannot be, she used him and now she is discarding him.’ Anyway, I felt a lot of affection for you, and you know, at the time, we were so fed up with her we had almost lost interest in her welfare.”

  Jari offered reassurance too. “For me,” he said, “you were the brother who had logic, and who helped us a lot.”

  Josephine opened at the Palace on New Year’s Eve. That morning, it rained. The journalist Dotson Rader, working for Esquire, covered the final rehearsal. Briefly, he spoke with Richard, who confided that “Madame Aunt” had never had a face-lift. When he saw her, Rader believed it. Her cheeks, he said, “like errant sand dunes invading an oasis, encroached sadly on her mouth when she was not smiling.”

  He sketched for his magazine a painful picture of a woman in the twilight of her days, wandering, distracted, working from some deep recess of will; when the body said no, the mind said no, and only the spirit insisted.

  She ran out of breath. She forgot the name of her new dresser, and could not remember her lyrics, Rader reported. “Richard, sensing her confusion, brought her a cardboard schedule listing her songs and conversation. She had trouble reading it. She went on, leaning back, her sunglasses catching the stage lights . . . into another medley, and again she forgot the words . . . ‘Smile when you’re blah blah blah . . . and then I came back to New York and Billy Brice . . .’

  “She had forgotten Fanny Brice.”

  Tommy Tune, the dancer/choreographer/actor, was at that opening. “I’d never seen Josephine, and it was not only New Year’s Eve, but my night off from a show called Seesaw, so I went. There were many old European people in the audience, and this black guy dressed in a turban ran down the aisles passing out roses, and he said, ‘Throw these to Josephine when she comes on, she will love it.’

  “And Josephine started on and stopped and said, ‘I can’t step on all these beautiful roses,’ and I thought, ‘My God, how sensitive, how wonderful. And then somebody came out and sort of cleared her a path.

  “My favorite moment in the show was when she sat down on the stage and started to recall this dance that George Balanchine had done for her. He’d said, ‘Josephine, I see you with four men,’ and she’d said, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s too many men for me . . .’ And she just drifted off into this reverie. The piano player was playing soft music, and she went away from us, into some memory we were not a part of. She was so at home on the stage she just went off. And then you could see her thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m here at the Palace, what am I doing, talking about Balanchine and those four men, I must go on with the show.’

  “You could see her return to reality, it was one of the great magic moments I ever experienced in a theater.”

  At the Palace, Dany Revel was her pianist, one of the fixed points in her changing world. He had known her since 1959, played for her in Paris Mes Amours. It was Dany who had come with her to the Regal in Chicago. “With her, many times I got tears in my eyes, and that’s why I forgave her everything.

  “In her own way, she was looking for perfection. She once stopped in the middle of the street and said, ‘You understand, Dany, in life one can always do better.’ To survive a long time, a hardness is needed. She dared to cut people out of her life, she tired everyone.”

  The New York Times’s Howard Thompson raved about the show at the Palace, saying Josephine still had “luscious, honeyed tones in the middle register and hearty top ones belted out when she chooses. . . .”

  Now Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders filed a $1.5-million damage suit against her, charging breach of contract in San Francisco. But in the teeth of lawsuits, she was unregenerate. After the last show at the Palace, she stole the costumes again. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Richard, Jr., says. “She heard someone’s coming with a warrant to take her costumes, and she calls up my brother Artie, and he brings his truck from Long Island. A sheriff came backstage later, but the costumes were gone. I said to Aunt Tumpy later, ‘You are the biggest crook in the world!’ ”

  As with Thelma Carpenter’s “biggest gyp on the Nile,” there is a certain amount of admiration in the description.

  “From the Palace,” Dany Revel says, “we went to the Raffles Club. I thought that was a step down, it was a private club, not ideal.”

  In the three weeks between her closing at the Palace and her opening at Raffles, she flew to Cuernavaca, and Bob Brady. But something went wrong between them. My own theory is that she discovered he was not so rich as she had believed. In any case, during the afternoon of January 15, she wrote a farewell note on paper with his letterhead, Casa de la Torre, and begged a favor. “One night, I was very ill, and you stayed near me, please do this again tonight. I only have pure thoughts, I probably will not come here again, so I would like to be near you one more night.”

  She calls him “my husband,” tells him to throw himself into his painting and not drink too much, and announces her intention to sneak away “like a thief in the early morning . . . I won’t be able to say goodbye.”

  Josephine is being so dishonest. She had started the game with him before our trip to Mexico—“He is gay,” she had told me, “but a great host.” Meaning, there would be free food, free beds, good company, nice parties. And when she’s had enough, she’s gone.

  His letters to her were destroyed—after a fight with Richard, Jr., fearing blackmail, she burned them—and since he died before I could talk to him, we don’t have his side of the story. But it seems to me he wasn’t treated much better than I, though he did get a fond notice of dismissal.

  People who didn’t love her, who treated her as a business proposition, got a better deal. With Jimmy Nederlander, she showed up on time, she talked to the press, she signed autographs.

  At Raffles, there was no Jimmy Nederlander to temper Josephine’s whims, and little structure of any kind, so the show was pretty much a mess. The club, in the basement of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, was doing no business.

  “And everybody was serving her with subpoenas,” Richard, Jr., marvels. “I said, ‘Aunt Tumpy, stop signing those autographs, you gonna sign one, we gonna go to jail.’

  “We were living at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South, and Aunt Tumpy was cooking rice all the time. And we had sweet rolls so stale we had to put water on them to soften them. She had been making thousands of dollars a night at the Palace—she would go to Armani and buy clothes, she bought that teacup puppy, Fifi, that cost five hundred dollars—and we were living in poverty.”

  Florence Dixon recalls those winter afternoons through a rosy haze. “We would sit on the floor of her apartment at the Navarro, and Josephine would put out pictures of the kids, and pictures of the Christmas dinner, with Sister there. I was spellbound.

  “She didn’t want anybody to know about her medical condition. We used to go to a lab and have her blood tested. She was supposed to send reports back to her doctor in France, but I don’t think she ever did.”

  “Aunt Tumpy was very suspicious,” Richard, Jr., says. “At the Navarro, she suddenly got the idea that terrorists were going to attack us, and suddenly I was moving trunks from one hotel room to another. She was suspicious of you, too, Jean-Claude. She said, ‘He is scandalous, he is using my name, after all I have done for him, like he was a son of mine. Do you know, he tried to sing in my show?’ ”

  I had finally made the acquaintance of Richard, Jr., outside of Raffles. Loving his father, I was happy to meet him, and we had a brief, friendly conversation. He told me of his troubles. “All the time at the Palace, and now at Raffles, she’s complaining, ‘Jean-Claude wouldn’t do things that way,’ and I’ve been saying, ‘Why don’t you get him back if he’s so great?’ ”

  He thought I should make peace with his aunt. I said no. “She’d have to ask my pardon on her knees.”

  I thought I was out of her life, but I wasn’t. The manag
er at Raffles had made me welcome—I found out later that Josephine had told him to take care of me—and I went there almost every night, and stood at the bar. It was an exercise in masochism. She wasn’t happy with the way the maître d’ introduced her, and one night she reprimanded him in front of the audience. “That’s it!” he said to me. “From now on, she can introduce herself!”

  She never approached me and I didn’t go to her, but a mutual friend, Jocelyne Jocya, was determined to effect a reconciliation, and prevailed on both of us to show up at the Village Gate where she—Jocelyne—was singing. “I have arranged everything for Sunday, Josephine’s day off,” she told me. “I have reserved a front table, you will arrive first, then she will come with Bessie Buchanan and Florence Dixon. The champagne is on ice.”

  Still, I fought with myself. If I gave in, Josephine would once again be getting away with murder. “She wanted to dominate, and make you afraid at the same time,” Jacqueline Abtey had said. “When I discovered that, I knew it was time to leave her.” Not being as smart as Jacqueline Abtey, I came to the Village Gate, sat at the table down in front, and waited. At midnight, I got up and went home.

  Jocelyne says Josephine arrived a few minutes afterward, and was sad that I’d left. But she never called:

  In April, with Richard, Jr., she went west to appear at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a weekend. “I thought, my aunt, the big star,” Richard, Jr., says, “and then we went into that ballroom and it was empty. Only a few people came, Nina Simone, Lou Rawls’s mother, Eartha Kitt, Diana Ross.

  “Diana Ross is sitting there with her friends, and Aunt Tumpy goes up to her and cups Diana Ross’s face in her hands, and kisses her on both cheeks.”

  Diana Ross has told me a less tender version of the face-cupping story. “Josephine came, stood in front of me, put her fingers into my hair, and pulled hard,” she says. “I guess she wanted to see if I was wearing a wig.”