Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  After reviewing a military and civilian parade, General de Gaulle addressed the crowd. “For one thousand five hundred years, we have been France, and for one thousand five hundred years, the fatherland has stayed alive in her pain and in her glory. The present trial is not over, but now, from far away, the worst drama of our history is drawing to a close.”

  Friday, August 13, there was a great gala at L’Opéra d’Alger. “Everyone knew de Gaulle would attend, and Giraud too,” said Raymond Boucher, then an officer in the French navy. “It promised tension. Many artists would be present, some who had escaped occupied France. Josephine Baker was expected, and it was the first I had heard about her since the reports of her death. I was part of General de Gaulle’s guard, and it was a thunderous coup for us to have Josephine Baker to draw the people.

  “Sometime during the show, a list of French artists who were considered collaborators was read aloud. I remember the names of Chevalier and Danielle Darrieux being disparaged, and it made me sad about Danielle, I have to confess I was a little bit in love with her. You could feel hatred in the theater, but when Josephine appeared, everybody stood up, people were crying; she was a symbol.

  “The high-ranking Americans supported Giraud, but when they saw Josephine on the side of de Gaulle, she authenticated, a little bit, the Free French.

  “Giraud did not show up that night.”

  Five hours before the performance, Jacques Abtey says, “Josephine got the idea to have a great tricolor flag falling from the ceiling of the Opéra, with an immense cross of Lorraine sewn on it. Odette Merlin helped her find fabric, and Josephine took it to the mother superior of a convent, who mobilized the nuns to sew the flag.”

  She made her first entrance dressed in a long white gown, sang “J’ai Deux Amours,” and halfway through strangled on the words. “I can’t,” she said, pointing toward the box where de Gaulle was seated. “He is there.”

  Soon, she was there too. During the intermission, she was invited to join the general. “He introduced me to Madame de Gaulle,” she wrote later. “He seated me next to her, in his own seat. I can still see Madame de Gaulle . . . discreet and simple, in her grey lisle stockings, her little flat shoes. She called me, so kindly, ‘Nasty little Gaulliste.’ General de Gaulle is a great, tall man. . . . I like when you have to raise your head to look at a man. . . .”

  “He gave her,” says Jacques Abtey, “a tiny cross of Lorraine, gold, very beautiful, designed by Cartier.” He laughs, because this story brings back another memory. “When Josephine and I first worked together, she gave me a military I.D. bracelet in pure silver, with my name on it. Misspelled. Inside, she’d had engraved PFQA: Plus fort que l’amour. Stronger than love. I told her, ‘Listen, you cannot want me to wear that with my name on it, I’m a spy.’ She took it back and said she would have Cartier erase the name. I never saw it again.”

  When the “Marseillaise” was played, ending the evening, the huge flag and its red cross of Lorraine was unfurled; it fell eighteen feet, while the audience screamed.

  It took the United States and Britain until August 24 to recognize the French Committee for National Liberation, and five days later, General de Gaulle was finally acknowledged by the British, the Americans, and the Russians as “Chief of the Resistance.”

  The rest of the year, Josephine was back on the road, driving herself relentlessly for the troops. “I wanted them to take away a vision of Paris, a breath of France.” With her on this tour went Jacques, Fred Rey, and Mohamed, who was recruited because his name could open doors in the Arab world. The four traveled the Middle East in two jeeps.

  Rey recalled driving along while Josephine, in her army overcoat and helmet, bent over her knitting. “The blazing heat of day, the cold nights, sand fleas . . . the desert strewn with the twisted remains of tanks . . . In that cruel landscape we took turns keeping watch at night to ward off the scavengers who preyed on corpses and would have preyed on us as well.”

  In Jerusalem, the troupe checked into the King David Hotel. Josephine was thrilled by the city. “Here you breathe God’s presence,” she said. She went to the Wailing Wall, and keened along with the old men. “Before leaving Judea,” she said, “the last thing I saw was the house of Mary Magdalene, the great sinner.”

  “We were vagabonds of the road in the service of France,” Jacques says, and indeed, Josephine not only entertained, she preached the word of de Gaulle. At the Grand Hotel in Beirut, she auctioned off her gold cross of Lorraine and raised three hundred thousand francs for the Resistance.

  But when the tour was done, Josephine, back in Algiers, found she was in trouble. She had gone from pillar to army post reproaching ambassadors and generals who—she felt—were not ardent enough in their support of de Gaulle, warning them if they weren’t sensitive to the aspirations of native populations, France would lose its influence.

  Her outspokenness—“Sometimes we struck, we never retreated,” says Jacques—had resulted in complaints to the Foreign Ministry that she was playing politics instead of sticking to show business. (Truthfully, she didn’t see much difference, both were dog-eat-dog enterprises.)

  Even some Free French thought she did their cause more harm than good. They called her and Jacques adventurers and their “intelligence mission in the Middle East” ridiculous. “Are you really arrogant enough to think you can do better than the professionals we have in those places?”

  Taken aback, Josephine still had no regrets. “I have had several close calls in enemy air raids,” she told a correspondent for an American newspaper, “and sometimes I’m bone tired, sometimes I don’t feel well, but whenever I’m tempted to chuck it all and hie myself off to some quiet nook, I remember France, my race and my resolve and I gain fresh strength to carry on.”

  She said this resolve had been born on the day she read how the Germans were welcoming all visitors to Paris “with the exception of Jews and dark-skinned people.” After that, she would sometimes wake from a dream that “crowds of Germans and other prejudiced nationalities were breaking down my door to grab me. . . . When soldiers applaud me, I like to believe they will never acquire a hatred for colored people because of the cheer I have brought them. I may be foolish, but it’s the way I feel.”

  While she was singing, Paul Poiret was dying. The man who had changed the history of fashion, interior design, theatrical costuming, who had been one of Josephine’s first French friends, was now old, poor, largely forgotten, yet his spirit still blazed.

  “The winter of 1943–4 in wartime Paris was dire,” wrote Palmer White. “But Poiret had work to do. . . . Rain, snow, sleet or shine, he would be painting outside in the city he loved, grey, hushed and invaded though it might be. He did not see the Nazi flags, the soldiers of the Occupation, and the German signs in the car-less streets.”

  Ankles swollen, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, his heart failed; he gave up the struggle on April 28. The funeral took place May 1. Once, Palmer White said, “fifty articles would have been written about him, in May 1944 only two appeared. In Beaux-Arts the reporter wrote: ‘On that May morning, in the sun-drenched, ravaged capital, I would have liked to see, weeping over his grave, one beautiful young woman, a passerby, a Parisienne.’ ”

  General René Bouscat, commander in chief of the French Air Forces, had invited Josephine to stay with him and his family in Algiers, and though Jean and Odette had offered a suite at the St. George, Josephine knew it was better to live with the big boss who could protect her from her enemies. Like Miki Sawada before her, Bouscat’s wife, Blanche, became “my little sister.”

  D day arrived in June, and under the aegis of Bouscat, Josephine flew to Corsica to sing in the service of Free France. As her plane approached the coast, its motors died, and the pilot had to land in the sea. Nothing suffered but Josephine’s costumes, soaked in salt water.

  Josephine and Jacques were surprised to be welcomed to the island by Gianviti, their old friend from the homeless shelter on rue du Chevalere
t. He was now director of the Corsican police force, appointed by de Gaulle. (Everybody but Josephine and Jacques seemed to be reaping rewards for their loyalty to Le Grand Charles.) Gianviti showed the visitors two antiaircraft guns named “Josephine” and “J’ai Deux Amours.” They had shot down six German planes.

  After June 6, it seemed as if every French person in Algeria had been a fervent Gaullist from the beginning, and all of them were claiming victory and trying to snag seats on the first plane to Paris. Jacques, who had been gone for a short time, returned to Algiers to find Josephine “absolutely changed. ‘I think I’m going to give up show business,’ she said. ‘I’m going to retire to a convent.’ ‘Bravo,’ I said. She looked at me; she was not amused.”

  “For a full week, Josephine went around Algiers dressed as a nun,” says Odette. “She was tired of sickness, travel, performing, and political intrigue. Also, Jacques was no longer the great flame he had been when they arrived in 1941, and she had been forced to accept the fact that she could not bear children.”

  “I believe she sincerely thought of entering the order,” Jacques says. “We were sad for her, it showed she was not happy in her skin, but one week was enough. She exchanged her nun’s robes for her fatigue uniform; she had been made a sublieutenant, and was very proud.”

  On August 25, Paris was liberated, and on October 2, along with a whole unit of air force women, Josephine left Algeria for France on a Liberty ship. She came aboard hiding a new dog in her coat; it was forbidden to take pets with you. The dog’s name was Mitraillette (French for machine gun; when it peed, it made a staccato sound, ra-ta-ta-ra-ta-ta).

  One day on deck, air force officer Catherine Egger, struck by a whiff of some half-remembered fragrance, looked around, and recognized Josephine. “I went to her and asked what perfume she was wearing. ‘Arpège from Lanvin,’ she said. We fell into each other’s arms; before the war, it had been my perfume too. We were soul sisters.”

  Catherine Egger took a picture of her soul sister, and in 1982, after watching a TV tribute to Josephine that I had presented on cable television, she sent me the photograph.

  Trembling, I hold the snapshot. Josephine is laughing, and again, I can hear her saying, “You! You always want to know about me, and when I am no longer here, you will discover the truth and write my book.” And I see myself shaking my head. “Ah, Mother, you are crazy.”

  Chapter 29

  JOSEPHINE, HEROINE OF THE RESISTANCE

  “That German cow in my blue satin sheets!”

  If Hitler hadn’t cast out blacks along with Jews, might Josephine have stayed on in Paris entertaining the conquerors throughout the occupation?

  It’s possible, but history doesn’t disclose its alternatives, and anyway, some have greatness thrust upon them. She came back a heroine of the Resistance, untainted. Few who had remained behind could claim as much. During the four years she was gone, Pétain’s “collaboration with honor” had been seized on by many who were willing to accommodate the Nazis, so long as they could continue their own lives.

  On August 17, 1944, German forces were retreating before the Allied armies. “In the rue Lafayette,” wrote a journalist, “. . . monocled generals sped past like shining torpedoes, accompanied by elegantly dressed blondes.”

  On the nineteenth, the insurrection had begun. Posters exhorted citizens to revolt, people sang the “Marseillaise,” hidden guns were dug up, barricades built. To redeem their honor, citizens fought (behind ramparts made of dug-up cobblestones, old cars, sandbags, and trunks of chopped-down chestnut trees) in support of General Philippe Leclerc’s Second Free French Armored Division. General Leclerc had also asked for—and got—help from two American battalions of field artillery as he moved through Paris.

  After six days, the fighting ended. Germans were coming up out of the subways with their hands in the air, and General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris (who had ignored Hitler’s orders to blow up bridges and monuments), signed a cease-fire agreement.

  Three months later, François Mauriac wrote that the city’s deliverance by the Parisians was “the thing in the world we had least imagined. . . . A too cruel contrast existed between the . . . risks of the small number who led the underground fighting, and the apparent indifference of the man on the street, the tradespeople, the sharks of the black market. . . . The resistance was a deaf struggle, carried on in the darkness where men suffered and died alone. . . .”

  A new struggle posed new questions. “What was to be done about the searing shame of it all?” asked David Pryce-Jones in Paris in the Third Reich, “. . . about the damage to the nation by its loyal serving of foreign interests and its complicity in genocide as well?”

  Through an accident of fate—“I didn’t choose this moment, moments always choose me”—Josephine had escaped the violence that accompanied the liberation. And when she returned from North Africa, she was, according to Alain Romans (a fellow worker for de Gaulle), “more French than Louis XVI. I said to her, ‘It was very nice of you to save France for us, Josephine.’ ”

  Traveling to Paris from Marseille in an old Cadillac, she observed that half the windows of a passing train had been blown away, replaced by wood, and all along the route were bombed-out villages.

  I was a tiny child during the war, and I still remember a night when the Germans rode motorcycles around our house while my mother shook and held me and my little sister Marie Jo close to her in her big bed. As I grew up, my love for my mother was mixed with a kind of contempt because I thought she was so passive, so unlike the bold Josephine. It was only after her death that I learned how she had traveled between the occupied and unoccupied zones, smuggling messages for the underground, defiantly wearing a yellow Star of David on her coat, though she wasn’t Jewish.

  I wonder if she’d ever met Jean Moulin, a legendary leader of the underground who fell into the hands of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.

  Christian Pineau, another Resistance fighter, recalled the day a German officer brought a man from his cell to the prison courtyard. “To my horror, I recognized Moulin. . . . There was a bad bluish wound on his left temple. A light rattle escaped his swollen lips. . . . Barbie gave him a piece of paper to write down the names of other resistants. Weak and bleeding, Moulin took it, and after a few seconds gave it back. . . . On the paper . . . was a caricature of Barbie. Jean Moulin died of torture, but never gave a name.”

  Long afterward, in front of the Panthéon, André Malraux, then French minister of culture, paid homage to this hero. “More than twenty years have passed,” he said, “since Jean Moulin became leader of the people of the night. . . . Young people, think of this man, of the poor misshapen face of his last day, of his lips that never talked. That day, his was the face of France.”

  In October of 1944, Josephine arrived in Paris. “She stopped traffic,” Buddy Smith told me. Smith, a black American soldier and musician, said there were “a million people up and down the Champs to see her when she came in. It was a glorious day, as big as the day they liberated Paris. She was in a big Daumier, and that car could only crawl about three miles an hour, so many people were out there. She was in the back, with all the flowers—people were throwing these flowers.”

  Despite her triumphant return, Josephine’s satisfaction at being back in France was mixed with irritation. Le Beau Chêne, though still in good condition, had been occupied first by Germans, and now by Americans, while her apartment on avenue Bugeaud had been allocated to Jean Gabin, who was sharing it with his current lover, Marlene Dietrich. Josephine felt possessive not only about the apartment, but about Gabin, who had played her brother in Zou Zou. “When I think that German cow is sleeping in my blue satin sheets!” she raved.

  Many stars who had fought a less honorable war than Gabin or Josephine were having to face the consequences of their behavior. Women accused of nothing worse than sleeping with German soldiers—“horizontal collaboration”—had their heads shaved and their foreheads marked
with swastikas before they were marched through the streets.

  Brought up before a Governmental Commission for the Purge of Entertainment, the actress Arletty was asked how a great French artist could have had a German lover. “With your talent!” said the judge.

  “My talent belongs to France,” said Arletty, “my ass is international.” She received a reprimand.

  In the case of Chevalier, he was able to show he had sung only once in Germany, at a prison camp, on condition that ten French prisoners of war be set free. His name was cleared.

  Josephine, her own wartime conduct above reproach, had different problems. On Christmas leave, Jacques Abtey arrived in Paris and was informed by the concierge at the Carlton Hotel that Miss Baker had left for the market at 4 A.M. (Not being able to move the “German cow” out of her apartment, she was billeted at the Carlton, which had been requisitioned by the military.)

  “The concierge told me,” Jacques says, “that for the past two days, she’d been buying meat and vegetables. I thought, I’ll be damned, has she become a chef? Indeed, I found her at Les Halles, laced tightly into her big blue uniform coat—she had replaced the French air force buttons with English ones, don’t ask me why—and she was gesticulating among the butchers.

  “ ‘Jacques,’ she screamed as soon as she saw me, ‘you came at the right moment,’ and she put at least ten bulky packages in my arms. ‘Take these to that gray Citroën.’

  “She had gathered two hundred kilos of veal for needy old people, one ton of vegetables, and one ton of coal. The coal she had discovered in the basement of her building on avenue Bugeaud, and taken away under the strong protest of her tenants. ‘You are rich,’ she had said to them. ‘You can buy some more on the black market. This coal belongs to me, my super bought it with rent money.’ ”