Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  “Monsieur Derval couldn’t do enough for his star,” said Josephine. “He told me to buy anything I pleased and charge it to him. I spent hours at the dressmaker’s. . . . I was manicured, pedicured. . . . ‘Perfect,’ I murmured, inspecting myself in the mirror. What a revenge for an ugly duckling!”

  Other men were as openhanded as M. Derval. “M. Donnet gave me a cabriolet . . . totally upholstered in snakeskin. A dream of snakeskin, an indigestion of snakeskin.”

  Once she had opened in the Folies, Josephine again began moonlighting, working two and three jobs. In the afternoons, she went to Le Jardin des Acacias, a club that featured tea dancing, and there she performed for gigolos and lonely ladies. At night, after the Folies, she entertained in a cabaret called L’Abbaye de Theleme, though she found it hard to dance “between tables in the midst of wild people who devour you with their eyes. After midnight, everybody is wild in Montmartre.”

  She put in eighteen-hour days, and the stories she told depended on her mood at any given moment. Though she had remade her body through exercise, she denied being athletic. “I don’t train, I never rehearse, I am no machine.”

  She said, “I want neither to whiten myself nor to blacken myself,” though she spent hours bleaching her skin.

  “Joe wanted at any price to become white,” said dancer Harry Watkins. “She would fill her bathtub with goat’s milk, Eau de Javel (which is like Clorox), lemon, honey, and hot water, then plunge into it. In the process, she would burn her pussy.”

  Observing his star growing paler before his eyes, Paul Derval screamed, but all he got for his trouble was a scratchy throat. Josephine delighted in torturing the boss. “How many times,” he asked rhetorically, “did the conductor stand, baton poised, at the second when she should have made her entrance, while the stage manager yelled up the stairs, ‘What the hell is she doing?’

  “ ‘Dressing!’

  “ ‘What do you mean, dressing? She doesn’t wear a stitch in this scene!’ ”

  At that time, a man named Marcel Ballot was her favorite lover and “protector.” Young and good-looking, he made cars, and he moved Josephine away from the Parc Monceau to number 77 Champs-Élysées. “He set me up in an apartment I called my marble palace. . . . In the middle of the apartment there was a marble swimming pool which took two months to build. It cost a fortune, this pool.” Josephine advised everyone to swim every day. “Animals who live on the ground will never be as elegant as fishes.”

  The “marble palace” had interiors by Paul Poiret, the Venetian bed “of an ancient doge,” Oriental tapestries. Lalique was commissioned to create sculptures of Josephine, one as tall as she. When Marcel Ballot came to visit, she said, “He always brought a surprise: white mice with tiny pink noses, parrots who ate the curtains, and finally a miniature monkey who loved to snuggle against my shoulder.”

  The story had a sad ending: Marcel died of appendicitis, and his death left Josephine lonely, but strange as it may sound, I think she was destined to be lonely in Paris. It wasn’t that anyone was unkind to her, but during those first years abroad, she was always on the qui vive, feeling she had to pass tests in how to speak, how to eat, how to dress. Love seemed less of a problem, but when love was over, the loneliness came again.

  Even the heady sensation of being the center of attention at parties began to pall. “People chattered or else crushed to stare at me: I was intimidated.” She remembered behaving “nastily,” drinking champagne and refusing to come into a garden where everyone was waiting for her. “I ran away after midnight, like Cinderella. . . . I got the reputation of being insufferable, surly.”

  Two months after she opened at the Folies-Bergère, Josephine’s domination of the revue scene was threatened by Florence Mills’s arrival as one of the stars—Johnny Hudgins was the other—of Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1926; From Dixie to Paris. Since the success in Europe of Chocolate Kiddies and La Revue Nègre, producers like Leslie had found a new market, and so had black American performers.

  Edith Wilson, who sang jazz and blues in Blackbirds, was one of those performers. “Rhythm,” she said. “That was it. Over there in Europe they didn’t have that rhythm. . . . We had some boys that did all kinds of steps—taps, kicks, and all sorts of things. . . . The dancing always stopped the show. This was the show the Prince of Wales used to come to all the time. . . . I used to do a number onstage and he’d do it right along with me. He’d be in the box—they had curtains you could draw so you couldn’t see in from the side—and he’d be dancing right along with the show. He used to have himself a ball!”

  Blackbirds opened at the Théâtre-Restaurant des Ambassadeurs (in a roofed-over garden, with tables around the stage on three sides). The first night, a gala special was scheduled for 12 A.M., so the working show people of Paris could come. Josephine drifted in half an hour late, accompanied by eight white men in tails.

  “We had to hold the curtain for her,” Johnny Hudgins said. “She was wearing this white ermine floor-length coat, and a black velvet evening gown with a hood around her face, it made her look almost white. She got the best table, right down front, it was decorated with a model of a ship lighted by hundreds of little bulbs.”

  After the performance, Josephine went backstage. Florence Mills’s dressing room was at the end of a corridor, Johnny’s close by. He had opened his door and was waiting. Josephine glanced in but didn’t stop, she went straight to Florence. “Ain’t never asked for me,” Johnny said, fifty years later. “To this day, it hurts my heart.”

  Back in St. Louis, the Martin family’s hearts were hurting too. They hadn’t heard a word from Josephine since she’d gone abroad. Then, “about six months after she left,” her brother Richard said, “she wrote and told us she was in France and everything was going very good. Then she started sending money. Three hundred dollars a month for the next ten years. She would write, but she wouldn’t send pictures, only money. Now we knew about her success, one newspaper said she was the richest Negro woman in the world. The family was proud. She bought a baby grand piano for my little sister, paid fifteen hundred dollars for it. She was a very good daughter and sister.”

  She could also be a very good friend. She loved Florence Mills, even when reviews comparing the two of them were not always favorable to her. “You take a coconut with its fiber, its crust, its lumps,” said one critic, “and then you take an ivory ball with its paleness, its smoothness, its caress for the eyes. That’s the difference between Josephine Baker and Florence Mills. One is a rat who kicks, with so much spirit! The other is an island bird.”

  A rat! A lumpy coconut! But it was only one man’s opinion; Paris remained loyal to its lady of the bananas. And now Josephine had a playmate from home. Bessie de Saussure had abandoned the Club Basha (“Bechet was gone, so the business had dropped”) and shown up in Paris. “When we came to Europe,” she told me, “we didn’t look at black men, and the black men didn’t look at us anymore. We all went with the white people. You know, darling, I was too white to be black, and too black to be white. That was the problem of my life, and I must have had a lot of talent to have survived it.”

  Bessie stayed at Josephine’s apartment, and the two tooled around the city “looking at babies. We wanted children so bad, and we went to doctor after doctor, but if something’s wrong, you can’t have a baby. We’d say one day we’re going to adopt some. Joe did, too. Believe me, she couldn’t stop.

  “One afternoon, we went to a club called Joe Zelli’s Royal Box in Montmartre. They had gigolos there, and we danced with them. Zelli’s is where Josephine met Pepito.”

  The French people wanted to learn the Charleston, the American girls wanted to learn the tango. “So we hired Pepito to give us private lessons. We liked him and Josephine invited him to escort us to a chic party given by some Rothschilds. Pepito said he did not have tails, so we gave him money to buy them. When we went to pick him up for the party, Joe and I looked at each other. This was not a new tailcoat, it was an old o
ne, very worn. We said nothing, but we knew he had taken us for a ride.”

  Ride or not, Josephine was smitten. “And that’s how it started,” Bessie said.

  Chapter 19

  ENTER PEPITO

  “He used to beat the hell out of her”

  It’s easy to forget how young they were. Josephine had just turned twenty around the time Pepito came into her life.

  His real name was Giuseppe Abatino, he was born November 10, 1898, the fourth and last child of Sicilian parents. His father was an infantry colonel, his mother a well-educated woman whose family had some means. Pepito spoke not only Italian but good French, English, and German, and Josephine thought he looked like her idol, Adolphe Menjou, with “eyes at once gay and serious behind his monocle, his mouth ironic but tender.” He had served as a second lieutenant in the Italian army, he had worked in Rome as a minor bureaucrat, and he was in Paris on holiday, visiting his cousin Zito, a gifted caricaturist and a friend of Josephine’s.

  When, after this vacation, he went home, Josephine pined. “Why couldn’t I fall in love with an orphan?”

  She threw herself into her work, and M. Derval complimented her on the new vigor of the banana dance. “It’s good for an artist to suffer,” he said.

  Then, one night, Pepito reappeared. “I can’t live without you, you’re looking at your new manager.”

  She thought it was a terrific idea. “At last I had someone to help me fight my battles.”

  Opinions of the liaison varied. “Josephine died a lady who knew about books and paintings,” Bricktop said. “Pepito taught her everything. And the first thing he taught her was that she shouldn’t talk to me. Because the first time she came in my place with him, I said, ‘Joe, what are you doing with that guy? He can’t even buy a beer.’ ”

  According to Christina Scotto, Pepito’s sister, when Pepito met Josephine, “she was a little savage. She did not know how to behave at table, she ate with her hands.” (Signora Scotto also confided to a friend that “in bed with Josephine, you can’t promise, you have to deliver.”)

  Arthur Briggs, a black Grenada-born trumpet player, told me flatly that Pepito was “no good. He’d go to tea dances and dance with ladies and they’d tip him between fifty and one hundred francs. In those days, you could live two weeks on one hundred francs. We all knew what Pepito was, but Josephine fell in love with him, it was just one of those things.”

  A lady who didn’t want to be identified except as “Mrs. G.,” and who was well acquainted with Pepito, recalled that he dressed “with style, but in a showy way, bright colors, pomade, diamond rings. He spoke French with an Italian accent, and he most certainly came to Paris to seek his fortune by making love to aristocratic grandes dames.

  “I do not know what kind of an interest he had in Josephine at first, whether romantic, physical, or material. In any case, he endeavored to educate her, and to teach her proper manners. This was not easy, since she lived by whims. She could be jealous, tender, passionate. She would scratch him, bite him, and beg forgiveness on her knees.

  “Pepito managed her affairs in a sensible manner. He always appeared calm, and checked the outbursts of his protégée. They complemented each other.”

  Barely five foot six inches tall in his elevator shoes, Pepito understood the need for illusion. He hired a real countess, a down-on-her-luck blueblood, to give Josephine lessons in how to speak, how to behave at table (she drank from a finger bowl the first time one was set before her).

  By October, Blackbirds had moved to London, and with Florence Mills no longer on the scene, Josephine was once again the biggest black star in Paris. She had switched her after-hours allegiance to a club called L’Impérial Souper, on rue Pigalle. The owners renamed it Josephine Baker’s Impérial, and she signed a year’s contract with them. Two months later, she and Pepito decided she should go into business for herself, and on December 10, she marched one block away, to rue Fontaine, and opened Chez Joséphine. It was financed by one of her protectors, a Dr. Gaston Prieur.

  Since she took with her half the staff of the Impérial, and most of the customers, the owners sued. Already a veteran of legal skirmishes, Josephine was unfazed. “I get lawsuits occasionally, you understand?” (People like Caroline Reagan and Paul Poiret understood all too well. Once Josephine began to make big money, Poiret thought she should pay for the clothes he made her. She didn’t agree, she said he was lucky to have her wearing his designs all over town. Deep in debt, Poiret took her to court and lost. It was not in Josephine’s character to pay unless you sued her; even then, you could seldom collect.)

  In any case, Chez Joséphine flourished, with Josephine dancing there from midnight till dawn “in front of a full room, before a brass band while the high-society ladies play tennis with racquets and paper balls above champagne bottles, and between dances Josephine feeds her goat, Toutoute.”

  “I never had so much fun,” said Josephine. “I joke, I stroke the heads of bald men . . . I make fat ladies dance.”

  A correspondent for Le Soir painted a word picture of the club: “Midnight. Naked shoulders . . . Blue chandeliers pour a soft light . . . to the slow dying of the jazz. . . . The flesh is sad. . . . A world exhausted . . . Suddenly a shiver goes through the sold-out room . . . Josephine Baker has just made her entrance. Simple, quick, amiable, she slides between the tables . . . gives away confetti . . . she stops, pulls a beard, laughs. . . . Joy, absent until now, has returned. . . .

  “She dances. . . . Then suddenly remembering she is the owner of a bistro, she forces a customer to dance with her, and then another, until everybody is on the floor. Then she goes to the kitchen to get her chef to dance.”

  The chef, Freddy, was as much a fixture of Chez Joséphine as Albert the pig. “I have an American chef six foot two who is a formidable Negro,” Josephine said, “with his white chef’s hat and his Russian rabbit eyes.”

  It was a totem of a rich and careless age, this temple of the Black Venus, where businessmen mingled with the avant-garde, and an Indian maharanee won a Charleston contest dancing with the sixteen-year-old Aga Khan. “I want people to shake off their worries the way a dog shakes off his fleas,” announced Josephine.

  The place, Marcel Sauvage recalled, “was open twenty-four hours a day. Josephine asked me to help—‘You will arrange everything during the day, because during the night I have given the job to Sim.’ ”

  Neither Sauvage nor Georges Simenon (who signed his early writings “Sim”) was paid for his efforts, and even so, Josephine was a demanding boss. “It took too much time from my work as a journalist, so I left,” Marcel said. “Sim did too, but there was a flirt between him and Josephine.”

  Simenon’s ex-wife Régine (nicknamed Tigy) put it more bluntly. “Of course Simenon was Josephine’s lover. I have learnt it since but I was ignorant at the time.”

  Claiming, toward the end of his life, to have made love to ten thousand women, Simenon shared with Josephine a reputation for voracious sexual appetite. In 1984, during the course of a New York Times interview, the eighty-year-old Simenon said Josephine had been one of his great loves. “We were ready to marry, but I was very poor at this time . . . and I did not want to be Mr. Baker. So I went for six months to a small island . . . to forget.”

  He took his long-suffering wife with him. Simenon and Josephine remained friends; they understood each other. But I keep wondering about Pepito. What did he understand? Nobody faulted him as a manager, but friends found it hard to accept his hanging around while Josephine’s other lovers came and went. It was as if, seeing he could not be the only man in her bed, he decided to be her alter ego, make her the most famous entertainer in the world.

  As Christmas of 1926 drew near, her childhood was much on Josephine’s mind. She had not forgotten Tumpy searching through the trash of rich white families to find a headless doll she could fix for her sisters. And now, amazingly, a Josephine Baker doll, the rage among children in France and Harlem that year, was sharing one of
the Christmas windows of the Galeries Lafayette with Santa Claus and the Virgin Mary.

  To celebrate the holiday, Josephine gave a party at the Folies-Bergère for the children of Paris policemen. “I had a fir tree in the theatre, tiny candles, glass eggs, cakes, toys. I had had this dream . . . to be a young black Christmas mother. That day, I had more joy than all those children.”

  She was doing too much. The Folies, the cabaret, the benefits, the lovers, the lessons in singing and walking and French conversation. “I was exhausted. They dunned taxes on me, I didn’t understand anything.”

  Still, she couldn’t stop. She loved being loved, she loved knowing accomplished people; it made her feel safe. “She was the one who introduced me to Pirandello,” Marcel Sauvage said. “She called him Papa. Colette came to Chez Joséphine too.” (Josephine saved a letter from Colette. It read in part, “Take my tender wishes on this old paper I have kept for so long it is yellow. Today these sentimental papers please only sensitive hearts, children, and poets. This is why I give it to you. . . .”)

  The night Josephine went to the Rothschild party with Bessie and Pepito, she had stared at the house, ablaze with lights, spotted dogs lying on the lawns, and asked, “Is it a hotel? Do you think they rent rooms here?”

  Now she knew better.

  Endlessly ambitious for his Galatea, Pepito was busy sending potential backers a prototype of Josephine Baker’s Magazine. The publication never got off the ground, but if it had, Simenon was set to be editor, with Pepito and Josephine the “producers.” They would print pictures of the famous at play, caricatures by Zito, pieces about art and cooking, and Josephine’s opinions. She offered a sample column called “J’aime.”