The Many Faces of Josephine Baker

by Peggy Caravantes

  Josephine was initially shocked by the costume. She refused to appear in such a revealing outfit and she demanded to go back to the United States. In response, Jacques Charles told her she must perform one night before she could go home. Sobbing and sniffling, Josephine started to practice, and after that, she made no more requests to return to the United States. She later recalled the occasion: “The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience … I had to execute a dance rather … savage. I came on stage and … a frenzy took possession of me … seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced!”

  During this time, Josephine also posed in the studio of Paul Colin, the artist commissioned to create posters for the Revue Nègre. He had seen Josephine dance in rehearsal and he believed she had a beautiful, flexible body that would be perfect for a poster.

  The red-and-black posters of Josephine went up all over Paris. By the time Revue Nègre opened at midnight on October 2, 1925, excited patrons shoved aside the security guards to find seats. An air of anticipation permeated the theater as the performance began before a packed house. When the curtain opened, a musician playing a clarinet wandered across the stage. By the time the last notes faded, all of the cast, except Josephine, was onstage in front of a Mississippi River levee set.

  With lips painted large in the style of blackface comedy and dressed in a torn shirt and ragged shorts, Josephine waddled from behind the curtain with her knees bent and spread apart. Extremely short hair plastered to her head emphasized her puffed-out cheeks and her crossed eyes. At first silence greeted her entrance on the stage. Gradually, the audience began to laugh, shout, tap their feet, and whistle. The sounds elated Josephine—the audience liked her. She left the stage with the noise echoing around her, only to be greeted by an irate director who said: “This isn’t New York. In France they whistle when they don’t like the act.”

  Josephine appeared in several more scenes before the wild danse sauvage began. She and the muscular Joe Alex entered the stage with him carrying her on his back, her legs wrapped around him. He gradually lowered her to the floor, where she began a frenetic shaking of her body. She moved her stomach, rotated her hips, and shook her rump. Never had Parisians seen such action on a stage. Audience reactions varied, with some people returning to see the show multiple times while others stomped out after the first few minutes, slamming the doors, and calling the show a disgrace.

  PAUL COLIN

  Josephine Baker had known Paul Colin only a few hours before he was commissioned to design a poster for her role in the Revue Nègre. She was not accustomed to posing for portraits, especially not while nude, so when Colin indicated that she should remove her clothes, she refused. Undeterred, he sat down and began to sketch. Josephine could not sit still, so he drew her in motion. Gradually, as his calmness soothed her, she found herself in only her slip. A few more turns around the room, and she was nude The resulting poster launched both of their careers.

  Over Paul’s career, he created 1,200 posters in both color and black and white, as well as 700 stage and film sets. In 1927 he produced a book filled with colorful lithographs called Le Tumulte Noir, or The Black Tumult, which became one of his most important works. During World War II, Paul created patriotic posters, but his most famous poster remained Josephine in her banana skirt. During the time Josephine and Paul worked together, the two established a close relationship, and it is widely believed that he was one of her many lovers Paul Colin died on June 18, 1985, at the age of 92.

  Josephine clowns with a clarinet, surrounded by French musicians, at age 19. She also played the saxophone, having learned to do so while traveling around the United States on the black vaudeville circuit. © Bettmann/CORBIS

  When asked what she most remembered about her first performance in France, Josephine thought for a moment and replied, “Well, last night after the show was over, the theater was turned into a big restaurant…. And for the first time in my life, I was invited to sit at a table and eat with white people.” That evening Josephine made an entrance into the supper party area on the arm of Paul Colin, who had chosen her ice-blue designer dress. After that night he continued as her escort and also gave her frequent fashion advice. Josephine became a celebrity in Paris and changed the spelling of her name to the French Joséphine. Everywhere she went, dressed in the height of fashion, reporters vied for interviews with her. Strangers stopped her on the street, seeking her autograph, but at that time she could barely write her name.

  Joséphine decided to move from the hotel where the cast stayed to the smaller Hotel Fournet, where she could indulge her love of animals. Animals interested her, she said, because “they are as simple and as uncomplicated as babies.” Joséphine purchased a parakeet, a parrot, two baby rabbits, and a pink pig she named Albert. None of the animals were house-trained and her apartment soon smelled like a barnyard. Visitors had difficulty finding a safe place to sit.

  When Joséphine heard that snake was the newest fashion in Paris, she did not realize the term referred to snakeskin and not live reptiles. She purchased a real snake that she named Kiki and wore it as a necklace with her favorite black velvet dress. The snake stayed quiet because it was warm, but when she started to dance, he woke up and stuck out his tongue. Joséphine laughed. “No one wanted to dance with me anymore. Everybody was frightened. I had been noticed, that is what I wanted.”

  Press clippings about her piled up, some positive, some not so. Theater critic Henri Jeanson wrote, “As beautiful as the night. Joséphine Baker is the dream, the clown, the great sensation of the evening.” Critic Robert de Flers, on the other hand, called her performance “lamentable transatlantic exhibitionism.” Joséphine put the reviews into a notebook and studied them to begin learning French. At first, all she recognized was the name of the show, names of cast members, and her own name. She struggled to learn other words, not realizing that the journalistic style of writing was not typical of the kind of language used in ordinary conversation.

  Paul Derval, director of the music hall known as Folies Bergère, saw one of Joséphine’s performances and invited her to join his show the following season. Without telling Caroline Reagan, she signed a contract to appear in a show entitled La Folie du Jour. The Revue continued playing to sold-out crowds for 10 weeks, although initially they had been scheduled for only two. At the end of November, the show moved to a smaller theater, and the crowds became a trickle as Parisians sought the next sensation.

  Caroline Reagan was not troubled by the smaller attendance because she had already planned for the cast to tour Europe. For the first time in her life, Joséphine did not want to leave a place. She confessed, “I had plotted to leave St. Louis. I had longed to leave New York; I yearned to remain in Paris. I loved everything about the city. It moved me as profoundly as a man moves a woman. Why must I take trains and boats that would carry me far from the friendly faces, the misty Seine.”

  Despite her reluctance, she left with the cast for Brussels in mid-December. No one in the show yet knew that she had signed a contract to perform at the Folies Bergère in mid-March. The Revue Nègre appeared for a week in Brussels at the Cirque Royal, where King Albert of Belgium watched one show. It was Josephine’s first time appearing before royalty. From Brussels, the cast moved to the Nelson-Theater in Berlin, where they opened on New Year’s Eve. Joséphine loved Berlin, and the people of Berlin loved her. So many people wanted to see the show that there was only one ticket price, and people drew seat numbers from a jar as they entered the theater.

  One night, the famous German theater and film director Max Reinhardt was in the audience. After the show, he invited Joséphine to become a student at his acting school. She turned him down because of her commitment to the Folies Bergère show, but she continued to think about the offer. At a party, a Frenchman told her he was looking forward to seeing her at the Folies. She said, “Don’t count on it.” The man, a friend of Paul Derval, told the Folies director what Joséphine had said. Derval was stunned.
He had already invested money in multiple sets, a cast of 500 performers, 1,200 costumes, and had commissioned music for the $500,000 show in which Joséphine would appear.

  He could not afford to lose his investment, so he sent an agent to Berlin to confront Joséphine. The enormous amount of money that had already been spent on the show did not impress her as much as learning that Irving Berlin would be one of the music’s composers. She wanted to perform Berlin’s tunes, so she agreed to honor the contract. But remembering her childhood poverty and thus never missing an opportunity to make money, Joséphine told the agent, “If you want me to leave Berlin, it will cost an extra 400 francs ($100 in US dollars) a show.” Her full salary would be more than $5,000 a month. Derval had no choice but to agree. All that remained for Joséphine to do was to tell Caroline Reagan she was leaving the show.

  Caroline was furious. Even in later years, Joséphine showed no sympathy for the situation in which she had left Caroline. Instead, she saw herself as the aggrieved one. “I felt like kicking everyone in sight. Why couldn’t people leave me alone?” With her star gone, the producer had to cancel the rest of the tour. After paying the cast members and providing passage for those who wanted to return to the United States, Reagan found herself $10,000 in debt. She started to sue Joséphine for that amount, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  Years later Joséphine told a reporter that she returned to Paris with trepidation. “I never recognized my having taken Paris by storm. I have never recognized, felt, nor understood that I was successful.” Full of such misgivings, she returned to the city of her earlier triumphs to begin rehearsals for La Folie du Jour.

  4

  La Folie du Jour

  THE YEAR 1926 WAS A PERFECT TIME for Joséphine to perform at the Folies Bergère music hall. Europe was recovering from the horrors of World War I, and people wanted more and more entertainment. In the evenings, the new three-story theater that housed the Folies held packed audiences. During the day, activity flourished. Craftsmen of all kinds worked in the building’s basement. From makeup artists and costume designers to carpenters and electricians, everyone concentrated on producing a vibrant show. Seamstresses added miles of sequins to the multiple costumes made from over 30 miles of fabric that could stretch from New York to Boston. In the performance area, musicians practiced in the orchestra pit while builders constructed collapsible stairs and three-dimensional sets onstage.

  The performances at the Folies included a wide variety of songs, sketches, acrobats, jugglers, and mimes. Joséphine, the star of the show, along with the rest of the huge cast, rehearsed around the clock for six weeks, preparing for the opening night of La Folie du Jour. As always, a superstitious Derval had selected a title with exactly 13 letters because the one time he veered from the pattern, the show flopped. In the entrance to the theater hung huge animated color posters of Joséphine, and for the first time her name appeared in lights on the marquee.

  THE FOLIES BERGÈRE

  The first music hall in Paris, the Folies Bergère, opened on May 2, 1869. Fashioned after music halls in London, it drew aristocrats and royal families from all over Europe. While seated at tables, patrons observed a mix of operettas, comic opera, popular songs, and gymnastics. However, such shows did not impress Parisians. Not until 1886, when new management featured chorus girls in scanty, revealing costumes—and later, bare-breasted women—did it become the city’s hot spot.

  The word folies is a synonym for theaters. At the time, tradition dictated that Paris theaters take their name from their location. Bergère was a street near the theater, so the structure became the Folies Bergère. Around the time of World War I, a new owner, Paul Derval, took over. His shows featured fancy costumes and fabulous sets along with nude or practically nude dancing women. The shows also included vaudeville, operettas, ballet, acrobats, jugglers, tightrope walkers, and magicians. Many 20th-century stars got their start at the Folies.

  In rehearsals, Josephine’s high energy level inspired the workers and the other actors to push themselves to their limits. However, her wild and unpredictable mood swings puzzled and irritated the cast and crew. She could go from uncontrollable sobbing to unrestrained enthusiasm and back again in a matter of minutes.

  Poster from La Folie du Jour staged in Paris in 1926.

  © Leonard de Selva/Corbis

  Adding to the emotional stress of working with Joséphine was her constant tardiness. Often the stage manager found himself standing on a corner outside the theater searching for Joséphine’s car mere minutes before the curtain rose. The orchestra prepared extra songs just in case Joséphine was late, and sometimes the director changed the order of the acts while they awaited Joséphine’s arrival. Derval recalled one instance when she burst in after slamming the stage door: “A hat went flying, a fur coat was flung to the floor. Leaving a trail of clothes, shoes, and underwear, Joséphine Baker tore past me en route to her dressing room.”

  Once she arrived at the dressing room, there was no guarantee of better behavior. One evening when she was due onstage, the stage manager came to get her. When she did not answer his knocks on her door, he kicked the door open only to find a naked Joséphine sitting on the floor and eating lobster with her fingers. She exasperated the seamstresses, often walking out as they knelt to pin in a hem. “I don’t have the calling to be a pincushion,” she told them.

  Joséphine further irritated Derval with the menagerie of animals she kept at the theater. She considered every kind of animal her friend and claimed her pets would never let her down as so many people had. “I tell them everything, my joys, my hurts,” said Joséphine, who had rabbits nesting in the wardrobes, white mice in the drawers, and cats, dogs, and birds everywhere. A baby tiger and a boa constrictor completed the odd mixture.

  On the stage for La Folie du Jour, Joséphine first appeared in a jungle scene. Dressed only in a skirt of 16 rubber bananas placed vertically and attached to a cloth girdle, she entered the stage walking backward on her hands and bare feet with her legs and arms held stiff. Then she stretched her arms back like the wings of a giant bird and moved along a fallen tree trunk. A young white explorer slept on the riverbank. In the background drums beat a wild rhythm. Joséphine began to dance. With every movement of her flexible body, the bananas swayed up and down, often looking as if, in the frenzy, they would fly away. The audience screamed, stomped, and catcalled. For the rest of her life, Joséphine was largely remembered for her dance in the banana skirt.

  To emphasize his star’s energetic personality, Derval needed a spectacular way to bring her onstage at the end of the show. He decided to place her in a huge egg-shaped iron cage that was painted gold and entwined with roses. Steel cables held the egg suspended above the stage until it descended from the rafters and reached the stage floor. A gate opened to reveal a mirror on which Joséphine lay. She was nude except for a skirt of silk fringes and a feather necklace. Rising slowly and seductively, she began to dance on the mirror. Lights reflected from the mirror and threw shadow images all over the theater. When the dance concluded, the egg closed and the cables started to pull it back up. Then one night, something went awry. One of the cables jammed and caused the cage to tilt. Trapped on the slippery mirror, Joséphine began to slide out of the dangling cage, 45 feet above the orchestra. Somehow, she grabbed the edge of the mirror and managed to hold on until stagehands rescued her.

  As a whole the show received criticism for being too extravagant, but Joséphine received only accolades. Her new, more glamorous image brought praise, and poet e.e. cummings, writing for Vanity Fair, marveled at the change in her persona from her role in The Chocolate Dandies, when she appeared as a “tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner” to become the most beautiful star on the Parisian stage.

  By autumn, Joséphine’s name was everywhere in Paris as she endorsed cocktails, swimsuits, perfumes, creams, and pomades to slick down hair and achieve he
r plastered look. The hair product, called Bakerfix, was a best seller for the next 30 years and brought her more cash than anything but her stage appearances. Dolls clad in banana skirts sold by the thousands.

  Money rolled in, and Joséphine enjoyed only the best, most expensive French products—chocolates made by the Marquise de Sévigné and clothing made by her own dressmaker, Maison Jane. Her luxury car was a Delage and her radio a Vitus. Her Charleston dancing inspired the fashion world, and skirts became shorter to accommodate the dance’s movements.

  Her lateness aside, Joséphine was popular with the show’s cast, and on June 3, 1926, they threw a 20th birthday party for her. They showered her with gifts—perfume, scarves, bracelets, and a puppy. Despite this show of friendship, Joséphine was lonely and began to party away most nights. “After the show at the Folies, I began appearing at various cabarets, where I danced the Charleston until the wee hours…. At dawn I would head home.” Between the Folies and her moonlighting, she worked 18-hour days.

  One of her favorite cabarets was owned by a short black woman named Ada Smith, who had nicknamed herself “Brick-top” because of the red dye in her hair. Pale-skinned and slightly plump, she had a nice voice and a warm personality that attracted crowds to her place. Joséphine struck up a friendship with Bricktop, who became both a mentor and a lover to the younger woman. Their relationship lasted for the rest of their lives.

  Joséphine with spider monkey Binki, rescued from a pet store in Rio de Janeiro. © Bettmann/CORBIS

  Then Joséphine met Marcel Ballot, the wealthy owner of a large automobile company. They began an affair, and he lavished presents upon her, including the construction of a marble swimming pool in the middle of her apartment. Whenever he came to visit, he always brought an animal surprise: white mice, parrots, and a miniature monkey.