Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  Newly decorated with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre with palm, Josephine stands at attention with Commandant Cournal at Les Milandes, August 1961. (France-Dimanche)

  Josephine and daughter Stellina with Golda Meir in Israel, 1974. (UPI)

  Carrie McDonald Martin Hudson gets a kiss from her first-born child backstage at the Folies-Bergère, 1949. (Courtesy Maryse Bouillon)

  The self-crowned Universal Mother choreographing her dance of world brotherhood. Josephine holds in her arms Brahim and Marianne while looking down on Moise, Luis, Jean-Claude, Akio, Jari, and Janot. (Reporters Associés)

  The Rainbow Tribe “protected” from the outside world but still on display at Les Milandes, the “Capital of Universal Brotherhood.” (Courtesy Arthur Prevost)

  Lunch, en famille, in the kitchen of the château with the two “uncles,” Monsieur Marc and Monsieur Rey. Aunt Margaret is seated in front of the large American refrigerator. (France-Dimanche)

  “A poor old lady alone in the rain.” A dream comes to an end. (Paris Match)

  Luce Tronville, my natural mother. The virginal convent girl with the perpetually sad face and full heart.

  Eleven-year-old “Yan-Yan” with my sisters, Marie-Jo, Marie-Annick, and Martine in St. Symphorien, 1954.

  Josephine loved this faunlike portrait of me—and my natural mother was ashamed of it.

  Bal à Tout Coeur, Cannes, 1973. At far left, that’s me in mod dress, Rama (Margaret’s daughter), a beaming mother, Marianne, Luis, and Janot. (Courtesy Hörzu)

  I can almost hear her say once again, “Il faut, il faut!” “One must always do better!” (Ludwig Binder)

  Josephine with her benefactors, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. (Robert de Hoe, courtesy Photo Archive of S.A.S., the Prince of Monaco)

  Escorting “Maman” backstage at the Pimm’s Club, my discotheque in Berlin, 1970. (Erika Rabau)

  Au revoir, but not adieu! At La Madeleine, France mourns—but Josephine is still the Queen of Paris. (Above: Pellepam—SIPA Press; right: UPI)

  Chapter 28

  REDISCOVERING HER RACE

  “My people, my people, I have abandoned them!”

  The first time Josephine read a report of her own death, she was more than five thousand miles from St. Louis, lying on a chaise among the flowering trees that perfumed the roof of Mohamed Menebhi’s palace. It made her laugh. In an interview for The Afro-American, she told Ollie Stewart, “There has been a slight error, I’m much too busy to die.” She said this, he reported, with “a gay smile and a French accent . . . her face uplifted toward the eternal snows of the nearby Atlas peaks.” She also asked Stewart to help her find Carrie, through his newspaper. She said she hadn’t been able to reach her since the outbreak of the war. “I cannot locate my mother. I know she still lives in St. Louis, but where?”

  (Josephine hadn’t been in touch with Richard, either, but then, he himself had been gone from St. Louis. “My father was drafted into the U.S. Navy,” his son Artie says. “He went to Great Lakes, Illinois, and I hate to say it, but with six kids in the family, that was the best thing that happened to us, when the money started coming in. The war did quite a lot for black people.”)

  Two weeks after Josephine talked to Ollie Stewart, her appeal was answered; his newspaper ran the headline AFRO FINDS JO BAKER’S MOTHER. It hadn’t been all that hard. “Mrs. Carrie Hudson-Martin” [sic], said the story, was “living at 4324 Garfield Avenue rear, this city.”

  All was well, and Josephine spent the last weeks of her convalescence not only enjoying the luxuries provided by Mohamed, but beguiling his three daughters.

  “I was Josephine’s favorite,” says Hagdousch, who was then sixteen years old. “I loved her like a big sister. She had her own quarters, and my father invited her every day to his table. She lived in a different world from the other women, my father’s wives and concubines.

  “She would play with the children of the house, help feed them, put them to bed. Once she wanted to adopt a little child of one of the servants, but she had a relapse of her intestinal problem, and had to be transported to the hospital at two o’clock in the morning. My mother said, ‘Thank God that happened,’ and went right away to get the child so Josephine wouldn’t take her.

  “In the beginning, she used to take us with her to visit the souk, but afterwards, she liked to go by herself.”

  At the market of Djemaa el Fna, Josephine, dressed Moroccan-style, except for a face veil, wandered among snake charmers with their flat-headed cobras, and mingled with crowds listening to storytellers. Vendors hawked snails and oranges, there were baby falcons for sale, and rugs and leather, and everywhere the smells of curry, lemon, mint. She was Cinderella, with a clock that never struck midnight.

  In 1990, I visited Fadila Menebhi, the eldest of Mohamed’s daughters. She was living with a cot, a lamp, a radio, no flush toilet, in the ruins of what had been Josephine’s wing of Mohamed’s palace. But Fadila was merry, her eyes that had seen so much of splendor still danced in these dilapidated surroundings. “Tata Joe,” she said, offering a photograph of Josephine covered in white fox and feathers. “We called her Tata—it means Auntie—because she was part of our family.”

  In January 1943, the Allied chiefs were holding meetings in a suburb of Casablanca, at the Anfa Hotel, but General de Gaulle was not happy, because Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt wanted him to merge his Free French forces (fighting the Battle of North Africa, even as the politicians wrangled) with the forces of the Imperial Council, another Resistance group headed by General Henri Giraud.

  Roosevelt asked if de Gaulle would be willing to shake Giraud’s hand “before the camera” (the photo op is older than we think) and de Gaulle answered, “I shall do that for you.” It was the only time during the entire conference that he permitted himself to speak English.

  A scant month later, Josephine found herself in the Anfa Hotel. It happened when Sidney Williams, a black American Red Cross official, having heard she was in Marrakesh, phoned and asked for her help. He was in charge of opening a service club—the Liberty Club—for blacks; the army at that time still practiced segregation. (“For me, as for many French and Moroccan men,” said Jacques Abtey, “it was a surprise to find that skin color continued to be so important in the country of freedom and equality. We had thought racial prejudice existed only on the other side of the Siegfried line.” President Harry Truman was to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.)

  Josephine entertained at the opening of the Liberty Club. “She was sick,” said Donald Wyatt, an associate of Sidney Williams, “but she came.” Black himself, Major Wyatt met Josephine for the first time that night.

  It was twenty years since she had performed for an all-black audience. Seeing those boys out front, time fell away, she was in Philadelphia at the Standard. Makeup could not disguise the gauntness of her face, her skinny legs shook under her long dress, but when she sang, the response of the black soldiers was so wild that she cried.

  After her performances at the Liberty Club, General Mark Clark invited her to a reception at the Anfa Hotel. Flanked by Mohamed Menebhi and Moulay Larbi, she made a grand entrance into a room filled with top brass, American and English, including generals Patton, Anderson, Alexander, and Cunningham. “That night Josephine was reborn to life,” Jacques Abtey said. “Her life as a star.” But the day’s activities took their toll; on being introduced to General Patton, she fainted in his arms.

  Next evening, having been invited by Mohamed, Donald Wyatt came to dinner at the Menebhi palace. He remembers every detail of his first Moroccan meal. The old female servant bringing basin, soap, and water to guests seated on pillows around a low table, the women of the household gathered on the balcony, hidden by shadows, “looking down on us. Mohamed explained to me that in this society, women’s purpose was to serve and give men pleasure and children. But Josephine did not come under these restrictions.”

  Wyatt was fascinated by his host. “
Mohamed’s father had served as ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mohamed’s mother was a black concubine. Mohamed was darker than Josephine or I, witty and well-educated; I think he put himself in debt to win Josephine’s affections, building a costly addition to his palace for her.”

  In time, Donald Wyatt, Jacques Abtey, and Mohamed Menebhi became such fast friends that they referred to themselves as the Three Musketeers, and, during the same period, Donald forged a brother-sister connection with Josephine.

  “Having seen the almost miraculous impact she’d made on the audience,” he says, “it occurred to me she might be willing to help in my work with black soldiers. She now believed she had been allowed to continue to live because she was destined to be the instrument of change in international affairs. Her doctor still wanted her to take it easy, but even if she didn’t sing, I realized she would be wonderful just talking to groups of men. A lot of the black troops were angry because they’d been trained to fight and then when they got to Casablanca, they’d been sent to unload ships along with the Moroccan stevedores.

  “She agreed to go with me. VD was rampant in our camps, the medics lectured on the risk of syphilis if the soldiers kept patronizing prostitutes, the chaplains preached abstinence, but it took Josephine to get through to the men. ‘I want you to look at me,’ she said, ‘as your mother, your sister, your sweetheart. I’m your family. You are going around exposing yourselves to these diseased girls and you can’t miss getting sick. As for getting mad because of race prejudice, wait till the war is over. I will come back to the States and join in the fight to break down segregation, but let’s win the war first.’

  “They cheered. Even Josephine wasn’t enough of a hypnotist to keep them celibate for the duration of their stay in Morocco, but the VD rate did go down.”

  Meeting those boys from home was a shock to Josephine. “In order to further her own ambitions, she had pushed out of her mind the lot of black people,” Donald says. “Now she was being very dramatic—‘My people, oh! my people, I have abandoned them!’ ”

  She, who had been accused by so many blacks of turning her back on them, was suddenly reborn. A life of service beckoned, Georges Guignery’s prediction that she would wind up broke seemed to charm her. “This time, I’m really on the straw,” she said. “But isn’t it magnificent?”

  To be sure, her idea of destitution included life in a palace, forty-eight trunks full of clothes (twenty-eight had grown to forty-eight because every time she came back from Spain or Portugal or Les Milandes, more clothes came with her), and any number of precious stones stashed with Ahmed Ben Bashir in Spanish Morocco. (“She entrusted my father with a significant amount of high-quality jewelry,” says Bachir Ben Bachir, “including a big collection of gold and diamond men’s pocket watches on gold chains. She was shrewd enough to know it was better to have it on neutral ground during the war.”)

  At Mohamed’s palace, old theatrical costumes were taken out of garment bags and remade; it wasn’t just that Josephine was thinner, but moths had eaten holes in some of her finery. By May, she began to tour American military camps with Fred Rey. Fred had been interned in Morocco (bounced from the Foreign Legion because he was Austrian-born, and so considered an enemy of France) but Jacques Abtey pulled strings, and Josephine had her dancing partner restored to her. Although now she too appeared to consider him an enemy. “That little bastard,” she said, “he oils his body before we go on, and I slip all over him.”

  Sometimes, en route from one concert to another, she made it back to Algiers for a day or two. During one of these breathers, she fell in love with the infant son of Odette and Jean Merlin. Holding him, Josephine wept, then marched off to a lawyer’s office, where she named mother and child the beneficiaries of her will.

  It made Odette uncomfortable. “In time of war, you never knew what might happen, and I barely knew Josephine, certainly not well enough to be her beneficiary.”

  Back on the road in Oran, Jacques Abtey says, “Josephine had a good black orchestra backing her up, and at the end of every show, she would sing three anthems, the ‘Marseillaise,’ ‘God Save the Queen,’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ in which she would be joined by the audience.

  “This one night, German planes flew over and started shooting. There was a crackling and sputtering, and the theater—it was just a stage set up outside—was plunged into darkness. Josephine used the unexpected intermission to help herself to the supper the American army had set out in a tent. The sky was lighted by fire, everyone flat on the ground, and finally, things became so violent she was obliged to throw herself down like everyone else.”

  Later, thinking about it, she laughed. “Me, belly down, among soldiers from Texas, Missouri, and Ohio in my 1900 Paris dress, must have been an irresistibly funny sight. Mostly because I kept on eating my ice cream.”

  A week later, in Marrakesh, Josephine, Moulay Larbi, and Mohamed were dinner guests at the American consulate, and Josephine was given the seat of honor, at the right hand of Robert Murphy, President Roosevelt’s official envoy. Subsequently, Mohamed decided to give a party in his palace to promote racial harmony. There would be French, English, and American intelligence officers, and Donald Wyatt was asked if he could produce some army brass who were black.

  “It seemed,” Wyatt said, “that Mohamed had some misgivings about an affair where he and the Berber musicians and dancers would be the only persons of color. I had about a week to get together this black contingent, which was no small feat, as black officers were scarce as hens’ teeth in Casablanca. In the end, there were five of us, including Sidney Williams, the Liberty Club director, and Ollie Stewart, a newspaper correspondent.”

  Jacques remembers that the party included many diplomats, Donald remembers something worse. “Drinks were served by barmen from the Mamounia Hôtel, and by the time we sat down for dinner, a couple of the younger American officers were a bit tipsy. Suddenly one of them said, ‘I never sat at a table with niggers before.’

  “Mohamed jumped up and seemed about to eject the man, but Josephine took him aside, begging him to be diplomatic. Later on, Mohamed got even. When the dancing girls came out, he handed each of them over to a black man, and finally the six of us, including Mohamed, were sandwiched between the girls, snaking round the fountain in a conga line in the center of the room, while the white officers stood looking on. The slight to them was obvious, and Josephine thought it was the cleverest thing she had ever witnessed.”

  On May 30, General de Gaulle arrived in Algiers, and in June, Josephine asked French officials if they would send her to Tunisia, where eleven thousand soldiers had been reported killed and five thousand wounded. Word came from headquarters: “They don’t need entertainment.”

  Stung by the rebuff of her adopted country, she accepted an invitation from the British. “I was asked to secure her services for the British army, that’s how I got to know her,” said Harry Hurford-Janes. “I was a second lieutenant, and I traveled throughout North Africa with her. She had been insulted by some British South Africans who were very anti-color, and she said unless I could go with her to keep those people in their place, she wouldn’t give any more performances. I found that very attractive.”

  In three weeks, they covered fifteen thousand kilometers (nine thousand miles), ranging across Tunis, Lybia, Egypt, and Josephine was moved by her encounters with the men. “They did not know that the Sicilian landing was to come so soon,” she said. “I knew it. And to see them full of enthusiasm, when so many were already marked by the sign of death . . .”

  Beirut, Damascus, Cairo. She was working with Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Noël Coward. (“She is doing a wonderful job for the troops,” Coward wrote in his diary, “and refuses to appear anywhere where admission is charged or where civilians are present.”) All went well until she clashed in a Cairo nightclub with Egypt’s King Farouk. The director of the club came to the table where Josephine sat with her date, an Englishman, and said His Majesty wo
uld like her to sing. Josephine declined. Farouk sent another minion: “It is an order, you do not refuse a king.”

  Josephine got up to dance with the Englishman. The king ordered the orchestra to stop playing. The music was finished, Josephine was not. “His Majesty should have understood,” she said sweetly, “that if I broke rules, it was only to be happy.”

  A few days later, in the name of Franco-Egyptian friendship, she participated in a royal evening. Still, she had faced down a king. He was fat, but she was tough.

  It was not only Farouk with whom Josephine locked horns in Cairo; she and Jacques Abtey also fought. “I had told her,” he says, “if she had an adventure with anyone else, she couldn’t work with me anymore. Because a woman talks when she has her head on a pillow. But she had an affair with this English guy, I could smell it.” (Despite the fact that they were allies, the French, the English, and the Americans all spied on each other.)

  Jacques describes Josephine’s Englishman as tall, handsome, and attached to the British embassy. “We were staying at Shepheard’s Hotel, and she didn’t want me to come to her room, she said ‘I have a headache.’ I went and knocked at the door. She opened it a crack—‘I don’t want to see you!’—and closed the door on my nose. I put my foot in, pushed past her, and she said, ‘You get out!’

  “The tall guy was standing next to her. She repeated, ‘Get out!’ I hit her. Pom! She fell on the floor. I said to the guy, ‘You can come here too if you’re interested.’ He didn’t move. I would not let a woman be treated that way in front of me. He left, and now Josephine was angry he had not come to her defense. She sulked for three days, but she never saw the guy again.”

  She sang in Tripoli, Tobruk, Alexandria. On July 14 (four days after the Allies invaded Sicily) Algiers, now the capital of wartime France, celebrated Bastille Day for the first time since 1939.