Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  With Pepito, Zito, and the Sawadas, she went to the French Casino to see a revue imported from the Folies-Bergère, and staged by Jacques Charles. She also went to the Cotton Club, where the Nicholas Brothers were appearing. “Harold and I had heard she was the toast of Paris,” Fayard Nicholas said. “And we were going to be in the Follies with her, so we went and introduced ourselves.”

  The Nicholas Brothers were fixtures at the Cotton Club, they had been there when Ethel Waters introduced “Stormy Weather,” they had worked with Duke Ellington and Lena Home and all those gorgeous showgirls. “Most of the showgirls,” Fayard said, “were real tall, almost six feet, and light brown, teasin’ brown, they called it.”

  But most of the audience was lily-white, especially the ones in the good seats. So when Fayard caught sight of Josephine up front, he was surprised. “It was the first time I had seen a black seated at ringside. This was one of the most famous clubs in America, and it was in Harlem, where mostly black people lived, but they couldn’t come to see these shows. Except for maybe Bill Robinson, or the Jones brothers from Chicago. But even those people they would sit them on the side, see? So when I saw Josephine Baker sittin’ ringside, I said, ‘Wow! it must be because she is a French citizen.’ ”

  Josephine appeared as a guest star on The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, was introduced to the radio audience by the crooner Rudy Vallee, and somewhere along the line, met Joe Louis, who invited her home for dinner. “His young wife is charming,” she commented. “Joe is calm, silent. He gives an impression of strength that—I don’t know why—reassures and comforts me.”

  October passed. Sixteen thousand Italians gathered in Madison Square Garden to rally for Mussolini, Haile Selassie was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, and Josephine found a photographer who made her happy. His name was Murray Korman, and he lit her so she looked white. She had hundreds of copies made to send to friends in France.

  “My dear Carlos,” she wrote to Carlo Rim (she continued to add an s to his name), “you see me as I am here. But be assured, if I want to make a telephone call in the street, I’m still a négresse.”

  Rim said the pictures made him sad. In them, she sported “a light complexion. . . . You do not recognize her.”

  She promised she would be back when the show was over, “and I will find again my France, and my freedom.”

  Finally, rehearsals began. Through what Pepito called a curious twist of destiny, the Follies would be playing the Winter Garden, in the same building that had housed the Plantation, where Josephine had worked as a chorus girl.

  Now her days were filled with new dances, new songs by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin. Vincente Minnelli (then twenty-eight years old and responsible for scenery and costumes) told me, “Josephine kept asking the count how she should express herself. She didn’t like what we did with her. I made her a beautiful gold dress for the ‘Maharanee’ number, and Balanchine staged a great dance called ‘5 A.M.’ for her.

  “Everybody would come at the same time and ask for changes—‘I can’t dance in that dress,’ ‘The lighting is too strong’—and I don’t know how I did not become crazy.”

  Josephine felt the same. In Paris, she had been able to call the shots, have her own way. She had come to New York with French gowns, furs, jewels, expecting to wear them in the show. The Shuberts said no.

  “In Paris,” she said, “rehearsing is a pleasure, in New York it is a matter of discipline. . . . People who do not have to work in the same scene have never seen each other. . . . I rehearsed without seeing anyone but the pianist and the dancing master. . . .

  “Finally, one morning the director appeared in the auditorium. He was John Murray Anderson. . . . He watched me dance, then shook his head, saying, ‘We must change everything.’ I was in despair, then he explained, and I discovered he was paying me a compliment. . . .

  “ ‘You are different, Josephine, you are from Paris—it’s stupid to let you sing Harlem songs. You must give us something new, something Parisian.’ ”

  Unhappy, she decided to give herself something Parisian. She wired Maurice Bataille, asking him to come to New York. The two had been friends—never lovers—since La Revue Nègre, though Maurice told me that the jealous Pepito had never liked him. “Once he came backstage when Josephine was appearing at the Casino de Paris, and he chased me down the hall waving a pair of scissors and yelling that he was going to put out my eyes!”

  Now Maurice took a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, and his long-deferred affair with Josephine began. But not at the Carlton. “We spent our first night of love,” he says, “in a room in Harlem that Josephine’s friend Bessie Buchanan provided for us. While making love, we suddenly stopped and laughed at the silliness of the situation.” (During his stay in New York, Maurice told me that Josephine said she still missed Marcel Ballot. “He was my greatest love.”)

  “But,” Maurice said, “we had a fabulous time. We were guests of Father Divine (a black minister whose background was a mystery); Josephine knew every place in Harlem, even some very risqué ones.

  “On Halloween, we went as the guests of Bessie Buchanan to a drag ball at the Savoy Ballroom.” (By now, Bessie Allison, Josephine’s friend since Tan Town Topics, was married to Charles Buchanan, one of the Savoy’s owners.) There was a contest for best costume, and black men wearing crinolines and Madame Pompadour wigs paraded in front of the judges, some tripping over their long dresses. It was funny to go to the men’s room, Maurice says, and see the “ladies” standing at the pissoirs holding up their gowns.

  In the Ziegfeld Follies, Josephine had only three numbers to Fanny Brice’s seven, and for the “Conga,” which she insisted was “a real tribal dance,” she was rigged out in a grotesque version of the banana belt, studded not with bananas but with sharp pointed cones that looked like porcupine quills. The matching bra also sported the ugly, menacing spikes. She had proved she could sing in La Créole, she had proved she could move audiences with “J’ai Deux Amours,” she did not want to start all over again in a costume that might bring her ridicule. Even her body was different now, she was too thin; she had been ill and lost weight in Tunisia while filming Princesse Tam-Tam. But this time, the decisions were not hers to make.

  “Maharanee,” the sketch about a night at a Paris racetrack, frustrated her too. “She had on this beautiful white gown with furs,” Fayard Nicholas said. “And she was singing and dancing with these white men in top hats and tails and masks, but they never touched her. One day, we were in the theater lobby, my brother and I, getting ready to go rehearse, and I saw her, and she was crying.

  “I said, ‘Josephine, what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘These people here, they don’t want black people to touch white people.’ She said, ‘They’re trying to make me act like the people in those movies, like a maid or something.’

  “And she couldn’t do that. She was French now.”

  Josephine’s old friend, the French-born soprano Lily Pons, then enjoying a professional triumph in New York, was upset. “I feel so bad the way they treat you in your own country,” she told Josephine.

  Still, some black people thought Josephine wasn’t acting any better than the whites she was complaining about. She was accused of “going snooty,” of having refused to receive Ethel Waters, who had called to pay her “professional respects.” One reporter wrote that Harlem was “laughing up its collective sleeve at the rebuffs Josephine has received in her attempts to crash bigtime Manhattan society because of her countess title. Shoulders cold enough to freeze a polar bear are reputed to have been turned in her direction. While Josephine ritzes her own people, she in turn is being ritzed by those she most wants to accept her.”

  Maurice Bataille had gone home by December 30, when the Ziegfeld Follies, 1936 edition, finally opened at the Boston Opera House. The Amsterdam News said Harlem was waiting to see how Josephine would be received by the white public, because she had already got “some very unsavory notices about her arrival on these shores. Her appeara
nce at the opera recently caused a mild furore. Those present contend she was the most bejeweled woman that evening.”

  She’d come a long way from St. Louis; La Belle Otero would have been proud of her disciple.

  The scenery didn’t make it to the theater in time for opening night, many of the sketches were cut at the last moment, and Josephine’s notices were mixed. One critic said she “won” the audience, another found her hard to hear. “She wasn’t a true hit,” Fayard Nicholas said.

  She wasn’t a hit with her costars either. “To tell the truth, none of them were friendly with her,” Fayard says. “Bob Hope was neutral, he never had much to say one way or the other about Josephine Baker. It was the women, catty and talkin’ behind her back, sayin’ who does she think she is? They forgot she was a bigger star than all of them.”

  The comedienne Eve Arden seems to have been an exception. She shared Josephine’s love for animals, and spent time in Josephine’s dressing room playing with “these beautiful little puppies. Josephine was darling to me. I used to watch the number she did with the boys in masks. It was fascinating, she was an exceptional dancer, and she sang pretty well, as I remember. But I guess she was ahead of her time.”

  The troupe moved from Boston to Philadelphia, opening at the Forrest on January 14. I wonder what Josephine thought, being back in the city where she had met Billy Baker. She certainly did not appear to be interested in rehashing old times. The Philadelphia Tribune put it in a headline—JOE BAKER HIDES FROM TOWN WHERE SHE MADE HER START—and went on to say, “Although the artist . . . got her start in Philadelphia in the colored district, no one would have known it from the way she very frigidly ignored the existence of such a place. Attempts to contact her were fruitless. . . .

  “About the same time as the Ziegfeld Follies arrived in Philadelphia, there appeared an interview in which Miss Baker said that her father was Spanish, and her mother half Indian, which left the other half colored. This she said in denying that she was colored, or anything near colored.”

  Still, the paper forgave her. “It might seem that in Europe where color isn’t the handicap it is here, Miss Baker does not mind being known as a Negro, but over here it is something else again. And who can blame her?”

  The Tribune also printed excerpts from the Curt Riess series “written” by Josephine for Paris-Soir. Her version of the past four months, headlined HARLEM, 1936, was not weighted down with facts. When she traveled in New York, she traveled in a Rolls, but never mind, she put herself in the subway for the sake of a good story. She got on at Times Square, wearing, she said, “an old dress, a poor little hat, almost the same clothes as I wore ten years ago, before I left America. Now, with a pounding heart, I find myself back again. This young girl that no one recognizes, who is being taken away by this river of human beings, it’s me, Josephine Baker.”

  She tells us that by the time she gets to 110th Street, there are nothing but black faces around her, and that fifteen blocks farther on, 125th Street is “the entertainment center, the Montmartre of Harlem.”

  Even uptown, she can’t get a room. “Harlem is against me. Why? I want to know.”

  Eventually, she finds a place willing to take her in, and she wants us to believe that she stays there for three days. “For three days, they have been looking for me. Manager, theater director, journalists, friends call everywhere. ‘Where is Josephine?’ ”

  She has rented “a modest room,” she sings all day long, the landlady hears her, suggests she head for the Apollo to try her luck on Amateur Night. She takes the advice. The theater is packed, and backstage, the real amateurs wait their turns. “The audience is tough. If they don’t like you in ten seconds, they start ringing cowbells and twirling noisemakers. . . . Suddenly, Ralph Cooper, the Master of Ceremonies, a young, good looking, charming black man, calls out in a strong voice, ‘Gracie Walker.’ Nobody answers. The audience starts to get restless. Ralph looks at his list, ready to call the next name, when suddenly I remember—Gracie Walker, it’s me.

  “I jump on stage shaking, that stagefright is ridiculous and I know it, after all, it’s not the first time I’ve appeared in front of the public.”

  At last, a word of truth. The Ralph Cooper she describes as though she’d never seen him before is the boyfriend she left behind when she went to Paris, and now she sings a sad song and moves every heart. “My voice shook and strangled in my throat . . . a kind of miracle starts, people are listening to me. . . . I see myself 14 years old arriving in Harlem when I wanted to become a dancer.”

  She told in Paris-Soir about her recent rehearsals at the Winter Garden too, about running upstairs to the supper club that had been the Plantation when she had played there ten years ago. “Now coming back as a star, standing in the dark, I look at the little Josephine of those days, and ask myself, ‘Have I ever been as happy as I was then?’ ”

  No word in those articles of her cool reception in Boston. “The curtain rose. . . . I was acclaimed, but I don’t want to think about it. I think already of Paris, of Le Vésinet, my animals . . . the boulevards so dear to me, the little cafés and restaurants where I will find my friends again . . . the very old man who sells the newspapers on the Place Clichy across from my dressing room at the Casino de Paris. The blue sky above the Champs-Élysées, the Seine, I cry a little. Just a little bit.”

  Josephine’s effusions were romantic, but rehearsals were real, and the company had to keep rehearsing even while they were playing, because John Murray Anderson was not yet satisfied. “We were changing, always changing,” says Fayard Nicholas, “my goodness, every town we went to.”

  One of the changes in Philadelphia had been the moving of the “Conga” number from the second act to the first. A newspaper columnist named Peter Stirling who went around to the Forrest found himself watching a rehearsal of this switch. He liked Josephine, her small true voice, her vitality, so he offered her some advice. “I mentioned that I thought it was a mistake for Miss Baker to use a fast jungle dance as her opening number. It was shooting the works before the audience had been won.

  “ ‘I have been telling everyone that,’ she moaned. ‘But they won’t listen to me. . . . Maybe if you mentioned it in your column, it would help.’ ”

  It didn’t. The “Conga” number remained in act one. But another piece of news came out of Stirling’s interview with Josephine. She said she didn’t want to discuss her husband. “That is something I feel need not be a part of professional life.” This, about the man who had built and was still running the Josephine Baker empire, from Bakerfix on. The count, she told Stirling, “has gone back to France now.” (Curt Reiss told me that Pepito left New York when Josephine refused to pay the hotel bill at the St. Moritz.)

  Miki Sawada blamed the rift between Josephine and Pepito on “racial discrimination in the United States.” It was clear that Josephine’s dependence on Pepito had wound down, their connection—long, symbiotic, sometimes fond, sometimes violent—was coming apart.

  “There was a rumor,” said Miki Sawada, “that when they split up, Josephine gave him five hundred thousand dollars.”

  Chapter 24

  TRASHED BY CRITICS, ENVIED BY PEERS

  “My God, how does it feel to be a big star?”

  The one in Philadelphia who would have been most proud of her, who had encouraged her from the start, was gone. Pa Baker had disappeared without a trace. Now Josephine had her name in lights, he wasn’t there to see it.

  In any event, the notices would have made him angry, they were even more harsh than they had been in Boston: “Josephine Baker seemed only ordinary, if agile. . . .” She had been transformed “into a French cabaret performer. Spotted in three numbers, she appears in an exotic dance, ‘La Conga,’ in the most abbreviated attire possible, poses as a wealthy woman at the races at Longchamp, and finally, in clinging cloth of gold sings, in a high, thin, reedy voice, a most lamentable song.”

  George Balanchine, her friend since the day he came calling at Bea
u Chêne, was sympathetic. “Thank God, when I first began to choreograph in Paris, I didn’t speak French. Fifty years later, somebody read me my reviews. If I’d read them in the twenties, I would have gone back home to Russia.”

  As though the critical savagery weren’t crushing enough, the Philadelphia Tribune ran a piece suggesting that Josephine might be “released from the current ‘Ziegfeld Follies’ because she failed to click. . . .”

  That very same day, the Tribune had featured a front-page story about Marian Anderson, a native of south Philadelphia. Her concert at the Academy of Music marked Miss Anderson’s “triumphal return” from abroad. And it could not have escaped Josephine’s notice that while she was being scorned for her foreign airs and graces, Marian Anderson was being praised for hers. “Continental Europe has remodeled her in more delicate, more alluring lines, and has given her the high privilege of charm,” said the Trib.

  The newly married Donald Wyatt, then an official of the National Urban League, took his bride, Marian, to the Forrest to see Josephine (whom he would later meet in North Africa). “We had heard about her, so we went. In a number called ‘5 A.M.,’ the Balanchine choreography was great, and Josephine was great. But the audience, mostly white, was unable to accept the public adoration of a black woman by four handsome young white men.

  “Most blacks didn’t like it any better, but as a sociologist, I felt this is where we needed to be going, to the point where there would be an interracial performance accepted by both sides for its artistic value.

  “At the end of the number, the boys lifted her into the air and ran off the stage with her, and there was total silence. Nobody clapped. Then the tempo of the music picked up, and the Nicholas brothers made their entrance tap-dancing like mad, and everybody was relieved, and burst into a tremendous wave of applause.”

  Josephine returned to New York unhappy. Gossip was rife that a feud between her and Fanny Brice was the reason. Despite its temperamental leading ladies, the show pulled itself together and opened on January 30. New York critics Percy Hammond, John Mason Brown, Burns Mantle, and Brooks Atkinson were stylish writers who loved the theater, but weren’t shy about panning performers who disappointed them. Josephine was so riddled with their arrows she could have posed as Saint Sebastian.