Singer and dancer Joséphine Baker poses with daisies in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies program.
© John Springer Collection/CORBIS
ZIEGFELD FOLLIES
The first Ziegfeld Follies, put on in July 1907, was a lavish production designed after the Folies Bergère of Paris. The show, featuring a chorus line of 50 beautiful women, opened at Jardin de Paris, a rooftop garden above the New York Theater. The Ziegfeld Follies launched the careers of many wellknown names from the 1900s—performer Eddie Cantor, black comedian Bert Williams, comedienne Fanny Brice, actor Will Rogers, composer Irving Berlin, and actress Billie Burke, later known for her role as the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz.
Showgirls who went on to become stars in their own right included Barbara Stanwyck, Paulette Goddard, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The show also presented the first run of popular songs like “Ol’ Man River” and “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” The Follies were an annual production from 1909 to 1931, except for three years in the late 1920s. The end of the Follies productions was closely followed by the death of their creator, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., on July 22, 1932. The next year, his widow revived the Follies, and periodic shows were presented until 1957.
The three headed to Hotel St. Moritz where Pepito had made reservations. But when they tried to register, the manager informed them that Joséphine could not stay there because of her race: he feared her presence might offend the hotel’s Southern guests. The usually devoted Pepito remained at the St. Moritz and left Joséphine to travel around the city with Mrs. Sawada, looking for another hotel willing to house an African American woman. Pepito’s abandonment of Joséphine while she found a place to stay signaled the breakdown of their relationship. After she was refused accommodations everywhere she inquired, Joséphine accepted the Sawadas’ offer to stay in their studio. Upon arriving, she sank to the floor and huddled in a corner where she wept and wept in humiliation. Miki could not believe this was the same woman she had seen in Europe, standing triumphant on the stage as the audience showered her with flowers.
After recovering from her initial upset, Joséphine settled into the studio. While she waited for the Follies rehearsals to begin, she traveled to Chicago to meet her husband, Willie Baker, with whom she had had no direct contact. She initiated divorce proceedings in 1928, but they were cancelled for lack of activity. One time during their separation, she had written inviting him to visit her in France; he declined. Willie seemed willing to wait for her return. Now, after 16 years of marriage, Joséphine arranged for their divorce. Willie offered no objections and even said he would take her back if she later wanted him.
From Chicago, Joséphine went to St. Louis to visit her family, which by now was much smaller due to the deaths of her sister Willie Mae, Grandma McDonald, and her stepfather, Arthur Martin. Joséphine spent five days with her family. “She just slept and ate, that’s all,” said her brother Richard. “She slept with our grandmother, who was surrounded by monkeys and parakeets.” Joséphine’s young nephew further revealed, “My grandmother’s apartment was on the second floor, and you had to go downstairs to the outdoor toilet. Joséphine Baker had to go outside! She had to ask me to get her a basin of water so she could wash up because there was no bathroom.”
While in St. Louis, Joséphine took her mother to look for a house in the best neighborhood occupied by blacks. Carrie found a white stone cottage she liked but refused to accept her daughter’s offer to pay $20,000 in cash for it. Carrie couldn’t believe anyone legitimately had that much money.
Joséphine returned to New York to begin practice for the Ziegfeld Follies. There was such a huge cast that rehearsals were held in four different theaters. Joséphine saw only those acts that practiced in her theater, and those in other theaters did not see her until the show went on the road to Philadelphia before its formal opening in New York. She had been told she would have equal billing with the Follies star, Fanny Brice, but Joséphine participated in only three acts compared to Fanny’s seven. Audiences and newspaper reporters did not like Joséphine’s performance, including exotic dances and a difficult song that covered two octaves. She was the only one of the stars the critics panned.
The New York performances opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 20, 1936. On the ground floor, the building housed the Plantation Theater Restaurant, where Joséphine had worked as a teenager and where Caroline Reagan had first hired her to go to France. When the New York Follies opened, Joséphine received criticism similar to that on the road. The main complaint was that she could not be heard in the huge Garden. One New York Times critic claimed,
After her cyclonic career abroad, Joséphine Baker has become a celebrity who offers her presence instead of her talent…. Her singing voice is only a squeak in the dark and her dancing is only the pain of an artist. Miss Baker has refined her talent until there is nothing left of it.
To offset these negative attacks, Pepito hired people to sit among the theater audience and clap wildly whenever Joséphine appeared on the stage. The diversion did not fool the audience or columnist Walter Winchell, with whom she was destined to cross swords in the future. He wrote, “Critics aren’t fooled by noise.”
The Follies experience was the worst failure of Joséphine’s career. As she often did when things did not go well, Joséphine blamed Pepito. She chastised him for not arranging more favorable contract terms so that she would have better roles, better billing, and a more prominent place in the show. This was all Pepito could take. He was ill and decided to return to France. Neither of them was aware he was dying of cancer, so he left Joséphine on her own in the United States.
To compensate for the failure onstage, Joséphine opened Chez Joséphine, a nightclub on East 54th Street in New York. Every night when the Follies ended at 10:30 PM, she went to Chez Joséphine, where she performed the kind of acts with which she was comfortable. On opening night, she held a little pig and fed it using a baby bottle. To the delight of her audiences, she sang in both French and English. The smaller room fit her light voice, and this time the press was kinder to her. In May, Joséphine’s fortune turned. The lead Follies star, Fanny Brice, became ill, and the show shut down until she could recover. Cast members had the choice of receiving a stipend and waiting for the show’s reopening, or they could cancel their contract. Joséphine chose the latter—she was free. In later years she refused to talk about her experience with the Follies, one of the main disappointments in her life.
Deep sadness greeted her that spring when she received word that Pepito had died due to kidney cancer. In his will he left everything to Joséphine. Knowing her reckless spending habits, he told a friend she would need every penny of it.
A Frenchman saved Joséphine from despair. One night before the Follies closed, Paul Derval, the producer at the Folies Bergère, came to visit her in her dressing room. He told her Paris planned another colonial exposition in 1937 and that the Folies would be playing while all the tourists were in town. He invited her to star in his new revue called En Super Folies. After Paul made the offer, Joséphine screamed when he started to sit down on a white satin chair. He thought she was getting ready to demand more money, but actually she didn’t want him to sit on her Chihuahua.
Although performing in the Folie would be a step backward in her career, Joséphine needed a job. Pepito was no longer around to arrange contracts for her, plus she missed his companionship. She was lonely and longed for a husband and a family. She had known many Frenchmen who were willing to be her lover, but none wanted to marry her. Then she met Jean Lion. The 27-year-old sugar broker was wealthy, handsome, and athletic. He was also Jewish, an ethnic group persecuted in the 1930s. Unlike many other Frenchmen, he had already dealt with prejudice, and was undeterred by Joséphine’s skin color. He was enthralled by Joséphine and pursued her with an intensive courtship. On her 31st birthday, he wrote:
Cheríe, I am not going to speak of love here because you know how I feel about you. But I do want to express my happiness at havin
g been with you today along with dear friends and some of my family, who I know would be happy to become part of yours … I hope for many more birthdays together. All of them perhaps? From your Jean, with all his love.
Jean greatly exaggerated his parents’ desire to form a relationship with Joséphine. In fact, his parents and most of his friends were horrified at the thought of a marriage between the two. Yet Jean ignored their objections because he believed Joséphine’s popularity would be an asset to his budding political career. The two married five months later on November 30, 1937, in the village where Jean’s parents lived. By that time, his parents had reluctantly accepted Joséphine as their new daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, Joséphine renounced her American citizenship and became a French citizen with the vows she took.
The couple lived at Le Beau Chêne but seldom saw each other since his business schedule and her Folies performances did not coincide. Her dearest wish was to have a baby, and 14 months after the couple wed, Joséphine became pregnant. Just as with her first pregnancy, she began to knit baby clothes. When she had a miscarriage, the clothes disappeared. Not long after that, and primarily due to their long periods apart from each other, she and Jean separated. However, their divorce was not granted until 1941, which meant that in the interim, Joséphine was a member of two groups—blacks and Jews—who were persecuted by the Nazis as World War II spread throughout Europe.
During this period of separation and divorce, Joséphine met Frida Kahlo, a talented Mexican painter who had come to Paris in 1939 for an exhibition of her art, mostly self-portraits. The two were introduced at a nightclub after Joséphine sang and were immediately attracted to each other. Both were strong, talented women who did not let public opinion sway their actions. Both had overcome hardships in their youth. Frida had polio, and at age 18, she had been in a horrible car accident resulting in injuries that required her to stay in bed for over a year. As they shared life stories, they also revealed that they were bisexual. Eventually, the two women became lovers.
At the Casino de Paris, Henri Varna had plans to feature Joséphine in a new revue that had a Brazilian setting. But Henri’s plans for the revue were put on hold when France and Britain declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939, following Germany’s attack on Poland, with whom France had a defense agreement. The French expected the Germans to try to cross their borders immediately and placed soldiers all along the Maginot Line, a vast fortification spread along the French-German border. Nine months passed, and nothing happened. People began to call it the “phony war,” and the bored troops longed for entertainment. With the declaration of war, Henri decided it was no longer appropriate to present the new revue and sought a program to replace it. The result was Paris/London, a two-part show filled with singing and dancing, and starring Joséphine and Maurice Chevalier, a 51-year-old French actor.
Before the show opened at the Casino, Henri decided to try it out with performances for the soldiers.
Joséphine singing for British troops on leave from combat during World War II. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Maurice insisted that he be the last to perform—a position reserved for the star of a show. Joséphine gave in with little argument and went first. But she was so popular with the young men that they called her back for encore after encore. When Maurice got to perform, there was time for only a few numbers because the soldiers had to observe curfew. He was furious and threatened to leave the show. Although he stayed, he warned Joséphine that rivals could be dangerous. When later asked about Maurice, her only response was, “He is a great artist but a small man.” Back at the Casino, they agreed on an intermission that would divide the show exactly in half to avoid any future conflicts.
Around the same time that Paris/London was gaining popularity, Jacques Abtey, the 33-year-old head of military counter-intelligence in Paris, was looking for people whose lifestyles allowed them to move about freely and to gather information at the parties and receptions they attended. These people also had to be willing to work without pay. Daniel, the older brother of Joséphine’s agent, Félix Marouani (whom she hired after Pepito’s death), recommended her to Jacques. At first Jacques refused to consider Joséphine, fearing she would be like the famous double agent Mata Hari, who was also a dancer.
While Jacques wavered about what to do, the Germans moved closer to Paris, causing a mass exodus from the city in early June 1940. A few months earlier, Joséphine had rented Chateau des Milandes, a huge estate 300 miles to the south. She had prepared to flee there by storing gasoline in champagne bottles, knowing that none would be available on the road. With the Germans approaching, she loaded as many possessions as she could into her Packard and left Paris, along with her maid Paulette, a Belgian refugee couple, and three of her dogs. Their motley crew joined the line of cars, vans, bicycles, motorcycles, pushcarts, and every other kind of transport leaving Paris. Josephine did not see the city again for four years.
MATA HARI
Mats Hari, born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, grew into a spoiled young woman who married a captain 22 years her senior. Her extravagant spending marked their turbulent marriage. When they divorced, the captain notified creditors that he would no longer be responsible for her debts. Margaretha turned to seducing wealthy men to support her; one of them encouraged her to go onstage. Because of her uninhibited movements and her willingness to perform almost naked, she became a hit with Parisian audiences, and she adopted the stage name Mata Hari, meaning “eye of the day” or “dawn.”
French authorities later hired Margaretha to spy on the Germans in occupied Belgium during World War I. While there, she had an affair with a German officer. Although she claimed never to have shared any French secrets with him, her actions aroused suspicion. She was arrested and taken before a French military court. At her trial, no one produced any documents that she might have passed to the enemy, and most of the accusations against her were pure speculation. Nevertheless, the tribunal found her guilty and sentenced her to death by firing squad. On the day of her execution, 41-year-old Mata Hari refused to be tied to a stake or to wear a blindfold—instead she faced her executioners eye-to-eye as 12 soldiers raised their rifles and fired simultaneously. Despite the doubt about her guilt, her name has gone down in history as a seductive spy.
On June 14, the Germans captured Paris. They found only 700,000 people of the city’s five million population still there. Those who had remained put up no resistance. They recalled the terrible losses from World War I and believed occupation was preferable to more bloodshed. France and Germany signed an armistice dividing France into two parts: northern and southern. The Germans controlled the northern portion, and the French retained control of the southern section known as Vichy France. By July 15, most of the Parisian businesses and entertainment centers had reopened, but there were changes as the Germans took over the city. The Nazi swastika flew over the Arc de Triomphe, the monument dedicated to those who fought for France, especially in the Napoleonic Wars. Goose-stepping soldiers patrolled the Champs-Élysées, a famous avenue used for all types of French celebrations. Restaurant menus were printed in German, and the city was no longer safe for Jewish or black people, two groups whom the Germans wished to eliminate.
While Paris adjusted to the new order, Jacques Abtey decided to meet Joséphine to determine if she could act as a possible counterintelligence agent. He traveled to Chateau des Milandes, where he expected to find a sophisticated woman dressed in the height of fashion. Instead he found Joséphine wearing old clothes and walking around the grounds collecting snails to feed the ducks. After they had talked for a while, he decided she had good connections that could provide opportunities for her to learn military secrets. Joséphine told him, “France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything. They have given me their hearts, and I have given them mine. I am ready, captain, to give them my life. You can use me as you wish.”
Joséphine recognized that the Nazis were w
aging a racist war. She had waited a long time to fight against racism and was glad to join the effort against Nazi Germany. With this assurance of her love for and loyalty to France, Jacques invited her to become a spy.
Joséphine added intelligence assignments to her already busy schedule, and she entered the new role with the same energy and enthusiasm that she brought to any part she played. One of her first jobs was at a refugee center where she welcomed people fleeing from the Germans who had overtaken Belgium. In addition to welcoming the displaced, she identified spies. She became so diligent at the task that she assumed any young blond man was a German. For a while she kept Jacques busy interviewing innocent Belgians.
Jacques cautioned her that any French sympathizer could be a secret Nazi, but Joséphine shrugged off his warnings and accepted invitations to numerous diplomatic functions. Everyone knew her and wanted to see her. Her connections and enormous popularity gave her the perfect cover to collect information about German troop movements and activity at harbors and airfields. Joséphine wrote the overheard information along her arms and in the palms of her hands. She laughed off the potential danger, believing no one would suspect her of being a spy … and she was right.
While the remaining Parisians resumed their daily lives, one man refused to accept the German occupation. His name was General Charles de Gaulle, and he attempted to organize a resistance by making radio broadcasts from England, where he had fled. He begged all who could make their way to London to join him. Again, memories of the tragedies of World War I stopped most people from joining his rebellion, and only about 2 percent came. One of those people who answered de Gaulle’s call to arms was Jacques Abtey, who decided to defect from the French army and join de Gaulle’s efforts. His only problem was how to get to London from France.
The Many Faces of Josephine Baker Page 7
