Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  She never lost her humor; when a priest came to give her last rites, placing his crucifix across her chest, she laughed. “Not yet, Father.” Doctors, nurses, strangers, were always stopping by to see her. (I often wonder if her many relapses were due to the fact that she was seldom quiet except when she was unconscious.) Even her ex-husband, Jean Lion, appeared. He had been fighting in Tunisia with the French army—he would eventually receive the Croix de Guerre—and Josephine put on jewels and makeup to look beautiful for him.

  The sickroom served as a perfect cover. What could be more natural than for American diplomats to come pay their respects to an American-born artist? And to meet, at her bedside, Moroccan leaders? And to discuss German intentions toward Morocco? And the Free French invasion of Syria? And when the Americans might land in North Africa?

  On December 7, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, crippling the American fleet. On December 10, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. On December 13, Hungary and Bulgaria did the same.

  Christmas 1941 was not festive, but Jacques tried to spread cheer, bringing to Josephine’s room a tiny tree and dressing it with little candles, red, yellow, green.

  She was beginning to feel stronger, and one day he took her for a carriage ride. Muffled in a fur blanket, only her hands outside, she put one of them on his. “Look how beautiful your color is,” she said. It distressed him, as it had distressed Ralph Cooper on that long-ago summer afternoon. “She hated the color of her skin so much, it made me feel terrible for her.”

  But even as Josephine continued to suffer over her blackness, her life, as compared to the lives of some of her old acquaintances, was charmed. In occupied Holland, Evelyn Anderson was interned by the Nazis, then sent to Germany. “I was dancing with my partner Harry Watkins at the Zuid,” Evelyn recalls. “It was a cabaret in the Hague, and when the Germans came, Harry said, ‘If you see a dark cloud passing by, you’ll know it’s me running.’ ”

  He couldn’t run fast enough. He was deported. “And the man that used to own the Zuid, he was Jewish, and they sent him away, and Papa Toby that ran the pension where I lived, they took him away too, and then they came and got my friend Ida Johnson and her two children and myself.”

  Ida’s husband, Freddy, an American pianist, had been taken first. “The Germans told him they were picking up all American men regardless, black or white,” Ida said, “and all he could take was a toothbrush.”

  Marilyn Johnson, Ida’s then sixteen-year-old daughter, remembers saying goodbye to her father at the train station. “We were crying, he was very calm, but he was frightened. He said, ‘I don’t know whether I’m going to see you all again, but keep a stiff upper lip, and if I get a chance, I’ll write.’ ”

  “When the Germans first occupied Holland,” Ida says, “we would lie in bed at night and hear the footsteps of the soldiers taking the Jewish people away. They came in the middle of the night. The only reason they tolerated us was because a lot of Germans had never seen any black people. They’d rub you to see if the color came off you.”

  Ida, her daughters, and Evelyn were soon removed to another camp in Holland. “They were killing Jews there,” Marilyn says. “I saw men kicked to death by German boots with the metal spikes. They did not fight back, and I couldn’t understand. My mother used to worry because I believed in speaking my mind. If I saw an old man, a skeleton with cheeks and eyes sunken, and the Germans were kicking him, I would yell, ‘Stop it!’ and my mother would grab me and pull me aside with a hand over my mouth.

  “I’ll never forget it. Kicking an old person until he died. And these were young, most of the German soldiers, fourteen, fifteen. I talked to one of them once, he was crying and saying, ‘I miss my mother, I’m afraid.’ ”

  Later, in Germany, Evelyn and the Johnsons were held in a convent in Liebenhau.

  In 1942, the world was exploding. Americans fought at Bataan, Midway, Guadalcanal; Germans slogged through Russia, reaching all the way to Stalingrad; the British beat Rommel at El Alamein.

  But all continued calm at the Comte clinic. On the arm of her devoted nurse, Marie Rochas, Josephine was now able to walk in Parc Murdoch. Mohamed Menebhi brought her lemon chicken. Jean Gabriel Domergue (who had painted her portrait for the cover of the Folies-Bergère program in 1936) came to visit and was horrified to see she had lost fifty pounds. “Ah,” he said, “your beautiful buttocks have disappeared.” A crowd of locusts flew in through the window, and when Marie tried to stamp on them, Josephine screamed and called her a murderess. An American vice-consul named Bartlett stopped by to say how happy Washington was with the material Captain Abtey had been supplying.

  In August, Maurice Chevalier appeared, but Josephine refused to see him. “He is a great artist,” she said, “but a very small man.” (She would later accuse him publicly of being a Nazi collaborator.)

  Back in Paris, Chevalier, his pride wounded, made up a story that spread like a brushfire: the dying Josephine had clung to him, saying, “Maurice, do not abandon me.” The German-controlled French press printed that she had syphilis, and Josephine wrote to the Guignerys at Le Vésinet. “Thank God all those reports are big lies, I ask myself why people amuse themselves with such ugly stories, and I beg you to tell our friends not to pay any attention to them.”

  She wrote to the Rivollets as well. “She sent us postcards telling us alarming news,” said André, “with gynecological details and a total lack of modesty. The post-office employee blushed.”

  In October, she found a stray cat, for whom she knit a sweater. “It is God who sent him to me,” she said. Vice-Consul Bartlett was called home, but before he left, he told Jacques and Josephine, “It won’t be long now, we are coming in considerable strength.”

  They came on November 8, a huge force of Americans and British disembarking in Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, from five hundred warships and cargo ships under air support from Gibraltar. Once the Allied troops landed, Hitler and Mussolini hastened to occupy all of France, there was no Free Zone anymore.

  Because the political situation was so bizarre—“Marshal Pétain,” wrote Louis Snyder, “immediately ordered resistance and broke off relations with the United States”—French troops fought Americans in the streets of Casablanca.

  “The Americans arrived on land where the French flag was flying,” said Jacques Abtey bitterly, “and they were welcomed by machine-gun fire.” Abtey resolved to report to American headquarters—he hoped to be received by General Patton, but this did not happen—and Josephine wanted to go with him, but he said no. He drove from the French sector to the American sector in a borrowed ambulance, flying the flag of the Red Cross, and all along the roads, he passed dead soldiers. “The first I found was Senegalese, he died as a servant of Hitler, not knowing the French had used him. After that, two Frenchmen . . . then the first American. Death had not disfigured his adolescent face. He was lying with his arms crossed over his chest. . . . I turned my head away, I was ashamed to be French.”

  Three days later, all was sunny again, there was a military parade with troops—American, French, Moroccan—marching through Casablanca. “A reconciliation,” Jacques called it. Later, he and members of Paillole’s group went to Josephine’s room and drank champagne. “We raised our glasses to America, to England, and to our eternal France.”

  Nineteen months after she had arrived there, Josephine was discharged from the clinic (Dr. Comte never gave her a bill) and returned to Marrakesh. This time, Mohamed Menebhi took her into his own palace, where she could be better cared for.

  Now rumors of her dying turned into rumors of her death. The Chicago Defender had her breathing her last “in the city hospital at Casablanca, Portugal [sic]. . . . By her side . . . was her estranged Italian husband.”

  And in an obituary written by the black American poet Langston Hughes, Josephine was called “as much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers who fall today in Africa fighting his armies. The Aryans drove Josephine away from her beloved Paris. At her dea
th, she was again just a little colored girl from St. Louis who didn’t rate in Fascist Europe.”

  “When I saw in a newspaper that my sister had died,” Margaret told me, “I ran home and tore upstairs to Mama’s place. She was sitting in a chair, staring out the window. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘Tumpy’s dead.’ ”

  Slowly, Carrie turned and shook her head. “Tumpy ain’t dead,” she said.

  Freda J. McDonald? The only baby picture of Josephine Baker. But is it authentic? “Is that you, Mother?” (Courtesy Jacques Abtey)

  Eddie Carson, one of Carrie’s lovers and believed by some to be Josephine’s father—but she knew better. (Courtesy Richard Martin, Jr.)

  This sign was typical in Josephine’s youth and she saw it when she helped out at the Cooper’s laundry in St. Louis. It would fuel her rage. (John Vachon, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL)

  A wistful Josephine McDonald Martín Wells before she left St. Louis in 1921—with her lady lover, Clara Smith.

  Clara Smith, billed as the South’s “favorite coon shouter.” Josephine could not have found a better singing coach. (Courtesy Frank Driggs)

  Booker Washington Theatre: the incubator of Josephine’s dreams. What she learned there, she could not have learned anyplace else.

  August 1922, in Boston with Shuffle Along, looking like schoolgirls in their cotton dresses: second from left is Josephine; next to her are Ruth Walker, Mamie Lewis, Evelyn Sheppard (“Little Shep”), and her brother, Willie. No one remembers the identity of the man at left or the little girl.

  The Honeysuckles on bended knee in Shuffle Along: “The preacher will be waiting when the knot am tied.” A smiling Josephine is fifth from left. (Courtesy Robert Kimball, Sissle-Blake Archives)

  A sartorially splendid Josephine, long before Paris fashion claimed her. This photo was inscribed to Mr. and Mrs. Eubie Blake. (Courtesy Robert Kimball)

  The entire company of Shuffle Along: Josephine is down front, second from right, a standout in taffeta and ruffled skirts—always a scene-stealer.

  Program from the Plantation Cafe. Inset: Josephine clowns at Revere Beach, 1924, with Howard Nelson (center), violin, and Edgar Campbell, clarinet. (Courtesy Marion Cumbo)

  Plantation Cafe, on the boardwalk, Atlantic City. (Courtesy Johnny Hudgins)

  At the curtain call of Chocolate Dandies (1924), in the arms of Johnny Hudgins while Lew Payton looks on. “To be funny then, colored comedians had to cork up,” said Hudgins. (Courtesy Robert Kimball)

  The great Florence Mills, the first black to headline the New York Palace Theatre, 1925. Josephine loved her, even when reviewers compared them—to her disadvantage: Josephine “. . . is a rat who kicks with so much spirit! The other is an island bird.” (Courtesy Joe Attles)

  Maude Russell, the “slim princess” of the T.O.B.A. (Tough on Black Asses) circuit. Beautiful, talented, and unfailingly honest. “You learned a lot in those days, baby.” (Courtesy Maude Russell)

  A random search in an old thrift shop brought this precious discovery: the Berengaria passenger list of Wednesday, September 16, 1925. The very date of Josephine’s departure for Paris—and destiny.

  Josephine (foreground) looking like an urchin on the deck of the Berengaria during a mine alert, September 18.

  1) Mabel Hopkins

  2) Josephine Baker

  3) “Jack,” an actor on his way to England

  4) Spencer Williams

  5) Maud de Forrest

  6) Bea Foote

  7) Marguerite Ricks (Courtesy Claude Hopkins)

  September 22, 1925. “Bonjour, Paris!” La Revue Nègre in all its elegance at the Gare Saint-Lazare. (Courtesy Claude Hopkins)

  The calm before the storm. Josephine and Joe Alex rehearsing “La Danse de Sauvage.” “Barbaric . . . naughty . . . a return to the customs of the dark ages,” a critic would say. (Courtesy Claude Hopkins)

  The famous banana costume from the 1926 Folies-Bergère. Many will claim to have invented it, but only Josephine would dare to strategically fashion herself a substitute phallus. (Roger-Viollet)

  Imitating Johnny Hudgins in blackface, Folies-Bergère, 1927.

  In the 1926 Folies-Bergère after emerging from her famous Crystal Ball. She never tired of looking at herself in a mirror. (Courtesy Shubert Archive)

  A rare photo of Josephine flahing. The tigress is in her element, but who is she stalking this time? (Roger-Viollet)

  Parodying the greate Pavlova. She never liked ballerinas on point. “They look like silly little birds . . . dreadful.” (Studio Piaz)

  In 1932 at the Casino de Paris, singing “Si J’Etais Blanche” (“If I Were White”). She hated being black, but she never forgave whites for the racial injustices she had suffered at home. (Studio Piaz)

  Do you have a light? Cross-dressing at the Casino de Paris. (Studio Piaz)

  The “Electric” Fairy: Celebrating the modern convenience of electricity, Casino de Paris, 1930. (Roger-Viollet)

  A 1927 Folies-Bergère pose inscribed to her friend Mildred Hudgins, whom she had first met in Philadelphia in 1921. Not all memories of home were bad. (Walery-Paris)

  In Offenbach’s La Creole, 1934. Her introduction to the “legitimate” theater. “Now I spoke French,” she claimed, “at the side of strictly French actors.” (Studio Piaz)

  First flying lesson with instructor Demay, 1935.

  On her twenty-first birthday, she got her driver’s license.

  Infectious joie de vivre draws a crowd on the streets of Paris, 1926.

  From left to right, Mildred Hudgins, “Count” Pepito, and a friend celebrate with a pensive Josephine at Chez Josephine, her boîte in Montmartre.

  On St. Catherine’s Day, when unmarried French girls don hats and search for husbands, she played the innocent virgin with designer Paul Poiret and his models. (Courtesy Christiane Otte)

  A blooming Josephine, inscribed to her friend Miki Sawada. (Courtesy Emi Sawada-Kamiya)

  A prickly version of the banana costume in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1935. Her return home was less than triumphant.

  Josephine and her pet baby pig. She had a lifelong love of animals, from the exotic to the domestic.

  The temptress in New York. She loved the photographer, Murray Korman, because he lit her so that she looked white.

  On the train to Bordeaux, 1939, with husband, Jean Lion, and secretary. Josephine, chic and radiant, plays to her adoring crowd.

  The star in war-torn France, knitting scarves for the soldiers at Les Milandes with Madame Bataille and her niece, July 1940. (Maurice Bataille)

  Arriving in Paris from a South American tour, 1939, with friends and a menagerie of chattering souvenirs.

  PALACE FRIENDS . . .

  Thami el Glaoui, pasha of Marrakesh. (Courtesy Abdessadeq el Glaoui)

  Ahmed Ben Bachir. (Courtesy Bachir Ben Bachir)

  Mohamed Menebhi. (Courtesy Medhi Lamghari-Menebhi)

  Casablanca, 1943, with Jacques Abtey and a friend. (Donald Wyatt)

  Rehearsing before the opening of the Liberty Club, a Red Cross facility for black soldiers. Casablanca, February 1943. (Donald Wyatt)

  With Major Donald Wyatt and friend. (Courtesy Donald Wyatt)

  Richard Alexander Martin, who looked much like his half sister, Josephine, on duty during the war, in Great Lakes, Illinois. (Courtesy Richard Martin, Sr.)

  Sublieutenant Josephine Baker on her way back from North Africa to a newly liberated Paris on a Liberty ship, October 2, 1944. Air Force officer Catherine Egger snapped the photo.

  An invitation to the Rialto, Casablanca.

  Soirée de Gala, starring Josephine and Frederic Rey.

  Josephine is decorated with the Medal of Resistance on her sickbed in Paris. De Gaulle himself wrote to congratulate her and wish her a speedy recovery. “I would like to be upright to receive a medal from France,” she said. (France-Dimanche)

  Avenue Bugeaud. she owned the building. (France-Dimanche)

  Le Beau Chêne, Josephine’s v
illa at Le Vésinet.

  Les Milandes in all its imposing splendor. (Paris Match)

  At Place Josephine, the star in stone as the Virgin Mary blessing the tourists. (Arthur Prevost)

  A tableau from the Jorama, a wax museum at Les Milandes: “Saint” Josephine with her husband, Jo Bouillon, being blessed by Pope Pius XII. (Courtesy Arthur Prevost)

  Josephine with her glittering friends—Jean Cocteau, Mistinguett, Katherine Dunham, Jean Marais, and a dancer—at the opening of Dunham’s dance company, Paris, 1949. (Courtesy Katherine Dunham)

  Josephine charming students at Fisk University in Nashville, 1947. (Courtesy Donald Wyatt)

  Creating a furor in 1951 Havana with yet another new look with the help of hairdresser Jean Clement. (Courtesy Jean Clement)

  Powdering her legs backstage in Cuba, a rare private moment getting ready for the public. (Courtesy Julio sendin)

  Coccinelle, the most famous transsexual of France, with Marlene Dietrich. To Josephine, Coccinelle was always “my daughter” and Dietrich was always “that German cow.” (Courtesy Coccinelle)

  “Thank God for making men like Perón,” said Josephine, here pictured in Buenos Aires, 1952, with her hero. (Courtesy Koffi and Diane Bouillon)

  Members of the Rainbow Tribe with “Uncle Fidel,” Havana, 1966. (Courtesy Jarry Bouillon-Baker)