In the number, Josephine played a bird pursued by hunters. They caught her, tore off her wings, and left her helpless on the ground. (Her crippled state would move theatergoers to tears.) There followed a scene about a Vietnamese girl, mistress of a Frenchman, and in it, Josephine sang “La Petite Tonkinoise” while wearing a gilded costume. “J’ai Deux Amours” then made its appearance in a sketch called “Ounawa” where Josephine, a native in an African forest, flirted with the white Pierre Meyer. Until Meyer got his walking papers, anyway. Josephine considered her real costar a cheetah.
The cheetah, called Chiquita (he was male, in spite of his name), had been ordered from Hamburg. “It will be marvelous publicity,” Varna told Josephine. “You can take him everywhere with you.” She did, she even took him home.
The poster made by Zig for Paris Qui Remue features a naked Josephine, bracelets up her left arm, an avalanche of feathers falling down her body, two strings of pearls curling across her hips. Chiquita sits on his hind legs like a tame dog, offering Josephine a bouquet.
Eugene Jenkins, an American musician, recalls seeing Josephine with Chiquita “about eleven o’clock one morning on the Champs-Élysées. And all of a sudden there were about a thousand people around her. Another time I saw her in Montmartre, she had been to a boulangerie, and she was standing in the street—she always had that kind of pouting thing, you know what I mean?—and all these people were saying, ‘Madame Baker, Madame Baker.’ She could just stand still and command, a loaf of bread under her arm.”
The Casino’s theater program was filled with ads for products endorsed by Josephine. Pepito had taken over all her business, everything was now in his name so she would be lawsuit-proof, and the money rolled in. The chocolates she ate were made by Marquise de Sévigné, she was dressed by Maison Jane, her liquor was supplied by Cherry Jacky, her car was a Delage, her radio a Vitus. The secret of her coiffure was Le Bakerfix, a pomade to slick down hair. Over time, lending her name to this cream would bring her more cash than anything but her stage appearances.
As opening night approached, she grew tense. The dress rehearsal was a mess—“One of the chorus girls sprained an ankle, a costume in the ‘Electricity’ number short-circuited, Chiquita chewed a hole in a dancer’s trousers, and the wind machine broke down.”
And then it was upon her, September 26, 1930, and her fears proved to have been groundless. “I could hear the drums of the applause, I cried, ‘Thank you, thank you—’ ”
In the wings, Varna waited. “But no, my little one,” he said as she came off. “You are not a street singer. . . . You don’t thank people that way, you bow to the left, then to the right, with grace and dignity.”
The critics were as thrilled as the civilians. “She left us a négresse, droll and primitive, she comes back a great artist.” “The beautiful savage has learned to discipline her instincts. . . . Her singing, like a wounded bird, transported the crowd. . . .” (Over and over, we hear the bird comparison; it was to good effect that Josephine had studied Florence Mills and Yvonne Printemps, imitating their light, bright voices.)
Only Janet Flanner confessed regret at the pilgrim’s progress. “She has, alas, almost become a little lady. Her caramel-colored body . . . has become thinned, trained, almost civilized. Her voice . . . is still a magic flute that hasn’t yet heard of Mozart—though even that, one fears, will come with time. There is a rumor that she wants to sing refined ballads; one is surprised that she doesn’t want to play Othello. On that lovely animal visage lies now a sad look, not of captivity, but of dawning intelligence.”
That intelligence focused more and more on craft. “With a song,” she said, “you can fill a big stage. It doesn’t mean you have to wriggle like a frog. . . . I wanted to sing on my knees, alone, downstage, at the Casino de Paris. I won. But the pose must be true, nothing is good when it is artificial. The public asks to hear the beating of your heart between the notes.”
Before the opening, Josephine had sent Varna her own good-luck charm, the nail with Dyer Jones’s hair twisted around it. Varna, she said, “set me loose, but guided me, he gave me confidence.”
He also fretted about her free-wheeling private life, and implored Marcel Sauvage to have a talk with her.
“I too was upset by her sexual adventures,” Marcel told me. “I loved her like a brother, and I knew it was not good for her reputation to leave the theater, cross the street, and go to a cheap hotel with some man, in full view of everyone. Pepito was unhappy too, not only nursing his personal chagrin, but worrying about Josephine’s image.
“Because she was often lonely in Le Beau Chêne, she would ask my wife, Paulette, and me to come and stay for a few days. The chauffeur would bring her home early in the morning, the maid would give her a bath, she would get into her beautiful bed and ask Paulette to hold her hand and tell her a fairy tale until she went to sleep. That beautiful bed, she told us, had belonged to Marie-Antoinette. ‘Marie-Antoinette slept in it with Louis XIV!’ Her enthusiasm was not matched by her knowledge of history. Louis XIV died in 1715, Marie-Antoinette, who married Louis XVI, was not born until 1755.
“One day at Beau Chêne, thinking about what Varna had requested of me, I decided to beg her to be more discreet.
“She listened. Then, in a firm voice, she said, ‘Marcel, you may be the writer of my life, but my life belongs to me.’ ”
Sauvage recalled one afternoon at Le Beau Chêne when many invited guests—including the novelist Erich Maria Remarque—had arrived to find no sign of their hostess. “Everyone was waiting in the salon, and she was still in bed. I went to get her. ‘I can’t get up,’ she said, ‘I’m tired. They should wait, and if they’re hungry, they should eat.’ She had her childish caprices. She was a child.”
Despite the warnings of Varna and Sauvage, Josephine continued to take her pleasure where she found it, often not bothering to go across the street at all. Bobby Mitchell said she and a handsome stage manager at the Casino used to have sex right in the wings. “She had a lot of time off in the last act, and she used to come down in a wrapper, and this English guy had four assistants to run things, so he and Josephine would stand there in the curve of the curtain, and nobody could see them, and afterward, she’d go upstairs and get all glamorous for her big entrance in the finale.
“She had a big thing with a friend of Chaliapin, the opera singer. It lasted about six weeks, then he went somewhere and that was the end of him. He was a big blond Russian, and Josephine took one look and that was that. She liked the big dick, she used to tell you that. Somebody said, ‘Josephine, it isn’t what you have, it’s how you use it,’ and she said, ‘If you don’t have it, you can’t use it.’ ”
And Pepito? “Aside from his impeccable manners around women, there was nothing unique about him,” Bobby said. “But you know, she saw him with his pants off, and we didn’t. Maybe that’s what it was all about.”
When André Rivollet first came to Beau Chêne to interview Josephine for a newspaper, he did not know he would one day collaborate with her on yet another Baker autobiography. It was December 1930, and everything was white. “The Christmas tree is white, the floor is white . . . even the chandelier has snow.” In the branches of the tree, a hidden phonograph plays a record, the words describe “Josephine, charming and divine,” and Josephine dances. “Suddenly the door opens, and Monsieur Abatino, the star’s manager, appears. He is dancing too, and on top of his jacket, he is wearing the famous banana belt. Josephine protests. ‘Pepito, you should not mock the tools of my work.’ ”
On the dining room table there is lace, cut crystal, and Josephine is regaling Rivollet with lies about what a good cook she is. “Do you like turkey boiled with oysters?”
Then she opens the door, and in rush a lot of little dogs, and Chiquita. “Poor Chiquita,” says Josephine, “he has to be happy with a pigeon, it is the closest he can come to the flesh of lovely chorus girls.” (Chiquita also liked to go to the movies. “Especially,” Josephine said, “t
hose jungle pictures.”)
Rivollet tells of the drawings and paintings on the walls, every one of Josephine, of the statues and dolls in her likeness, of “her pure line that inspires artists like Calder, whose first wire sculpture was of Josephine.
“She takes down a photograph and croons to it. It is a picture of her when she was a baby, she is moved, she whispers, ‘Pretty little baby, I love you’ . . . and Josephine rocks the black child she once was.”
Meanwhile, Pepito tends to the bigger picture. Knowing that journalists like Rivollet have been instrumental in Josephine’s rise, Pepito publishes a small book called Josephine Baker As Seen by the French Press. It carries a dedication to the authors “who have made me what I have become,” and contains 103 snippets of prose, pictures, and testimonials like that of Guido da Varona, who writes, “To the woman the color of night, with the eyes of dawn.”
Pepito also launches into print with the novel Mon Sang dans Tes Veines (My Blood in Your Veins), written by him and a Monsieur de La Camara, and based on a story Josephine once heard and vows is true. It tells of Joan, a black girl who saves the dying white man she loves by giving him a transfusion of her blood. (A black girl’s sacrificing for a white man is the plot of every movie Josephine made.) As soon as the man’s fiancée learns of the transfusion, she abandons him, sneering, “You have become a white Negro.”
The book didn’t sell. “Nobody was interested in that story of mixed blood,” Josephine admitted.
In May 1931, she was named Queen of the Exposition Coloniale Internationale. Protestors complained that she was American, not French, but nobody paid them any attention. I think of Carrie McDonald at that long ago World’s Fair in St. Louis unable to buy a cup of water, and here was her daughter at another fair, pulling a cheetah on a solid-gold leash and being offered a conqueror’s welcome.
If it was ironic that a black American had been chosen to represent the French colonial empire—Tunisia, Madagascar, the French Congo, Indochina, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, Niger, Chad, spreading across some 4.84 million square miles, and inhabited by 100 million people—it seems equally incongruous to us today that a celebration of colonialism should have drawn enthusiastic crowds. There were pavilions dedicated to the glory of imperialist Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Portugal. Even the United States was represented, since it held sway over Alaska, the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines; the American display was complete with a re-creation of George Washington’s house at Mount Vernon. (Palestine also participated in the fair, but “unofficially,” whatever that meant.)
The minister of the colonies, André Demanson, advised visitors to the exposition not to laugh “at things or people you do not understand at first sight,” and told them they would leave the grounds better people for having “enriched your spirit, enlarged the knowledge of your human family . . . and magnificently enlarged your personality.”
That same year, Miki Sawada, granddaughter of the founder of Mitsubishi, came into Josephine’s life. Miki was married to a diplomat, but fascinated by artists. One day, at the home of a beautiful Russian émigrée whose salon was the talk of Paris, she overheard Josephine “standing in the midst of a group, telling about her visits to the poor quarters of Paris. She would go every two or three months to visit the underprivileged.
“I suddenly had the urge to tell her I wanted to go with her. She did not believe her ears. ‘You will be shocked when you see how these poor people live. Why don’t you keep the beautiful image of Paris as you know it?’
“I persisted. ‘I want to know everything about this city, I want to see who inhabits the shadows.’
“Three weeks later, a call came from her house in the suburbs, and soon I was being driven by her through the streets of Paris to the slums. We arrived at this six-story walkup. On every balcony and window, laundry was draped. Josephine parked and honked her horn several times. All of a sudden the windows were full of small faces, and then they came rushing down like bees out of a hive. Josephine unloaded the boxes in the back of the car, dividing them up among the women who had now appeared. Each package was tied with a different-colored ribbon to identify the contents—medicine, clothes, food, toys.
“The sight of Josephine picking up the little ones, stroking their heads, made tears come to my eyes. This was not done for effect, or for an audience.”
After that, Miki often brought her small kimono-clad daughter Emi to Beau Chêne. “Josephine would kiss me and throw me in the air and let me play with the little monkeys,” Emi says. “I remember all the lovely blond ladies on the terrace.”
On these afternoons, Emi would make her way into the salon and overturn a big Lalique cup filled with colored stones. They were rubies, emeralds, sapphires (from what princes? what captains of industry?), but Josephine only laughed as the child scattered the jewels.
She had earned them, which didn’t mean she had to take them seriously.
Paris Qui Remue ran thirteen months, and one night, Noble Sissle came backstage. He had been all over Europe and South America, he and Josephine just missing each other everywhere. Now he wondered if she’d be interested in doing a new version of Shuffle Along. She said no thanks.
After he left, Pepito sat, champagne untouched, “twisting his glass.” He was, as usual, jealous. He said he wondered why Josephine hadn’t married “a person of color.” Josephine shrugged. “It’s the person I care about, not the color.” She knew how much she owed Pepito, but she was weary of his sulking (no matter how justified), and felt smothered by his refusal to distinguish between himself and her. “Pepito always says ‘we.’ We are going to sing at the gala, we caused a stir at the art show.”
In October 1931, Mistinguett came back to the Casino with Paris Qui Brille (Paris that Shines), and Josephine and Pepito went to Brussels. Madame Buechels, who took care of their laundry, loved the star as an artist, but didn’t care for her as a customer. “She was odious when it came to her laundry, especially the shirts she wore with her smoking jacket and her top hat.” (Josephine often performed in a tuxedo.) “The girls had to re-starch and re-iron her shirts until they satisfied her, she was very demanding.”
Was she making white people pay for the humiliations of her childhood, for the signs that had said WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY?
Josephine was not only appearing onstage in Brussels, she and Pepito were negotiating a franchise for Bakerfix, building a business empire. The star was also doing a bit of personal business on the side. Albert de Raikem, whose family bought the hair-oil franchise for Belgium, told me it was well known that a night with Josephine cost thirty-three thousand Belgian francs, and the waiting list was long.
For a couple of years, Mistinguett and Josephine kept trading places on the stage of the Casino. Thirteen months after it opened, Miss’s Paris Qui Brille closed, and Josephine came back in La Joie de Paris. The program named Josephine “the soul of jazz,” promised “22 colored boys,” and listed Joe Hayman, Evelyn Anderson’s old flame, as one of the alto sax players. The poster for the new production, made by Paul Colin, showed three naked, dancing Josephines, one black, one green, one fuchsia.
She was feeling happy, in love again. His name was Jacques Pills; he had been “discovered” in Mistinguett’s show and Varna asked him to stay on. Pills was a very good singer, dancer, lover. “Nature,” Jean Sablon told me, “had given him a very dependable object.”
Having heard of Pierre Meyer’s impolitic refusal to sleep with the star, Jacques Pills was not going to make the same mistake. When he was invited across the street to the Hotel du Casino, he went; if he and Josephine were more than thirty minutes late for work, Varna would send an emissary straight to the hotel.
In love or not, Josephine didn’t put all her eggs in one basket. Jean Clement, the hairdresser who first worked with her during La Joie de Paris, saw the men come and go. “Backstage, the rich ones waited for her, and of course when she came in the next day, she would be wearing a fabulous new piece of
jewelry.”
And why not? “All men are businessmen,” she said.
“But she was discreet,” Jean Clement told me. “Elle faisait ses coups en douce. She conducted her business on the quiet.”
As for Pepito, since he could not control Josephine’s love life, he concentrated harder than ever on her career. “He was too proud and intelligent to allow his passion for me to become a defeat,” she said. “He drove himself tirelessly, planning, plotting, manipulating. . . . He even set up a publishing operation to print my songs.”
Pepito’s name was mentioned seven times in the Joie de Paris program, along with a list of Josephine’s hit records. She sang one of these—“If I Were White”—in the show, while wearing a blond wig. A portion of the lyrics, roughly translated, went: “As a child, I admired the pale complexion of blond dolls. . . . Crushed with grief, I said to myself, ‘Ah, if I were white, what happiness, if my thighs and my hips would change color.’ ”
Still, by the end of the song, she was conceding that whiteness was not all. “Me, it is the flame of my heart that colors me.”
This number enraged Nancy Cunard. The British aristocrat, who spent her adult life fighting for equality for blacks, blamed “ignorant” French critics for toning down Josephine’s spirit and bringing it “into line with the revolting standard of national taste.”
The blond wig didn’t bother Josephine, it was her own hair that drove her crazy. “It was very curly,” says Jean Clement. “This made her desperate. I used the Bakerfix. She wanted so much to have straight natural hair. She told me her father was Spanish, she would say, ‘What a calamity that I have my mother’s hair, if I’d had my father’s hair it would have been marvelous.’
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