Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  At each stop, Josephine would announce to the recipients of her largesse, “You see, the Free French and General de Gaulle are not forgetting you.”

  “What I did not know then,” Jacques says, “is that she had put her jewels in pawn to be able to do all that.”

  Though sometimes she got a little of her own back. When Jacques told her he’d been given one hundred thousand francs to establish a mission in Morocco, Josephine seemed pleased. “ ‘For once,’ she said, ‘they have been a little bit generous. Listen, would you be kind enough to lend me that money for forty-eight hours?’

  “I said of course, but after two or three days, I was going crazy, I barely knew the colonel who had advanced me the money. Then Josephine said she was not going to return it. ‘I have done enough for France. She can do this much for me.’ ”

  “With the winding down of the war, and the restoration of Josephine’s health,” says Donald Wyatt, “came an overriding ambition to fight her way back to the top.”

  “Poor brave girl,” said André Malraux. “She was saying it is easier to make a comeback than to become a star in the first place.”

  But her ambition did not make her turn away from the soldiers who loved her. The War Ministry had been pleased to issue an order for Josephine and a troupe of forty to follow the French First Army through the liberated countries, and she was preparing for the adventure. “She came direct to my salon,” Jean Clement reported. “ ‘You have to do my hair, chéri.’ ”

  Clement’s shop on rue Clement-Marot was flourishing. In 1942, in the midst of an electricity shortage, Mistinguett had taken him to the flea market, and they had bought three generators and put them in his basement. “We had six bicyclists (two shifts of three) with their wheels attached to the generators, pedaling to make electricity for the hair dryers. I paid them good money, they had been racers in the Tour de France, and the chic women would go down to the basement and thank them and give them champagne, rare bottles the pedalers would sell on the black market. La Miss and the pedalers, they gave me my start.”

  Once Josephine was properly coiffed, Odette Merlin took her to Balenciaga to order gowns. Then Josephine turned her attention to finding a musical conductor to tour with her. A good one, she told Jacques, because “I can’t take risks anymore, I have been too sick, it’s too hard on me.”

  Enter Jo Bouillon, handsome, a prodigy in a family of prodigies. He had won first prize in violin at the Paris Conservatory, but fell in love with jazz, turning from classical music to show business. Before the war, he’d had his own orchestra.

  “In 1940,” Pierre Guillermin told me, laughing, “Jo and I were sent south with the 255th Infantry, and courageously, we defended the French Riviera! I was musical director of our regiment, Jo played violin, we did free concerts for the boys. Then Jo started his orchestra again, and I was the pianist. By the end of the occupation, we had to work for the Germans or they would have sent us to a labor camp.”

  Part of that work consisted of a daily broadcast over the Nazicontrolled Radio-Paris. (The French laughed behind their hands, and said, “Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,” which translates as “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris is German.”)

  Result: Jo, accused of having been a collaborator, was facing “purification” at the hands of a purge committee. He was also facing a challenge from Josephine, who indicated that, through association with her, he could be shriven.

  She found him rehearsing for a radio show. “I told him it was a matter of his dropping everything and following me. . . . I was facing my responsibilities, he should face his.” She said he would be donating his services.

  Complications arose at once. Besides performing, Sublieutenant Baker was producing the show, and while she and Bouillon and the other singers and comedians might be willing to work free, Jo’s musicians were not.

  Josephine was undaunted. To pay their salaries, she pawned jewels and mortgaged the building on avenue Bugeaud. The tour went forward. “She was a woman with a human intelligence, and an animal instinct,” says Pierre Guillermin. “Traveling, she always wore her uniform. Paris was liberated, but the war was not over.”

  Jo Bouillon was amazed by her fortitude throughout a bitter winter. “The barracks in which we put on our show were sometimes too small to contain all the troops, and Josephine wanted to sing for everyone. ‘Throw up a stage outside,’ she’d order. ‘But it’s too cold, Madame, the men are hardened to this kind of weather, they’re soldiers, but it’s not fair to you.’ ‘I’m a soldier too,’ she’d retort, and sing outdoors for an hour at a time.”

  According to the autobiography published in 1949, she even performed in Germany at the end of the war, in a camp where typhoid raged. She described the scene. “Deportees from the four corners of the world were wearing armbands with the croix de Lorraine around their thin arms. . . . I had to smile, I had to sing. Yes, songs have a soul. But the soul of songs sometimes can strangle you.” After her death, Jo Bouillon said the camp was Buchenwald, which surprised me. Josephine never named the place, or mentioned the presence of any Jewish prisoners.

  Earlier, she and Jo had done fund-raisers in Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes, Toulon, collecting two million francs for war victims, and everywhere they had gone, Josephine knew all the generals. French, British, American, and Canadian generals. “I knew Churchill too,” she told a reporter in 1973. “Just before he died, I sent him a telegram and said, I HOPE YOU WILL HAVE A HUNDRED MORE BIRTHDAYS, and he sent a telegram back saying, DON’T BE SO CRUEL, JOSEPHINE.”

  On March 28, 1945, she was in Paris, appearing in a “festival of French song and dance” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where La Revue Nègre had begun. The 18th of June Club (named for the day in 1940 when de Gaulle first broadcast to his countrymen over the BBC) had organized this benefit for the Free French forces.

  The general was in the audience, and reprinted in the theater program was a letter he had written commending “the few” who had listened to their hearts. “It is the heart that was right,” the letter said. “My companions, my friends of the 18th of June, ’40 . . . we have done something.”

  It was as though the general were speaking directly to Josephine. For this show, no titillating burlesque bumps, all was elegance; the star changed costumes nine times.

  The weeks flew past, she went to London (at Churchill’s request) to appear in a victory show, and, on May 9, the war in Europe ended. Half an hour before midnight, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender.

  Now Josephine resolved to give a lecture about her war. She went to the Folies-Bergère to enlist the aid of Michel Gyarmathy. “She told me again that her father was Jewish. ‘Like yours,’ she said. She asked me for a big green piece of fabric. She had decided to perform in a Paris auditorium, for free. ‘Alone?’ I said. She said, ‘Yes, I have a lot to tell.’

  “I went, and I could not believe it. On the bare stage, she had a long table covered with that green fabric, and a glass and a carafe of water, and a pile of notes. She came on in her blue air force uniform, wearing glasses, and when the audience applauded, she stopped them. ‘Please, we are not in a music hall, you can applaud me at the end if what I tell you pleases you.’ Then: ‘Voilà, on the day the Germans occupied that, I did this,’ and for two hours, she talked to two thousand people, and she had a triumph.

  “I asked her afterward how she had been able to make all those notes. ‘You barely know how to write.’ She said, ‘During the night, I heard a voice, as though I were Joan of Arc, and it dictated to me, and I wrote.’ I looked at her, wondering, is she talking seriously, or is she dreaming?”

  Now, with the weather softening, the trees in bud, Josephine’s thoughts turned to the Dordogne valley. She phoned Donald Wyatt. “Through the Red Cross, I had a Hillman truck at my disposal,” he says, “and she wanted to pick up things she had hidden in the farms and villages around Les Milandes at the time she left France.”

  Before the trip, Jacques Abtey, who would be
coming along, told Donald that he and Josephine were no longer lovers, and would not marry. “I am an officer, I don’t want to be Monsieur Baker.”

  “It was a shock to me,” Donald said. Then the trio set out for a weekend in Les Milandes, the Hillman piled with linens bought on the black market in Paris.

  After unloading these at the château, they went off to collect Josephine’s belongings. “In one farmhouse,” Donald reports, “we gathered up two dozen gold-rimmed goblets—given to her by the king of Denmark, she said—that had been stored in a dry well. In another, there was a set of Limoges china buried underneath floorboards. We got gold place settings from attics and secret places in walls.

  “Whenever we arrived at a new house, people would run to Josephine and kiss her, tears coursing down their cheeks. It was so strange for me to see white people bowing in front of a black person. By afternoon, the Hillman was packed to the top with articles that had been entrusted to the custody of Josephine’s faithful neighbors over the past five years.”

  Late in June, she invited Jo Bouillon to Beau Chêne. (Jacques had reclaimed it for her.) Jo was totally unprepared to find the house “flooded with light and a party in full swing. Dressed in a clinging white gown that molded her marvelous body, Josephine moved among her guests . . . Allied dignitaries, officers sporting multiple stars . . . I drew her aside. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were having a big reception?’ ‘I wanted to surprise you, Jo’. . . . She thrived on intrigue. That night she had floodlit the statues in her garden to make them stand out in the darkness; looking at them I realized that part of Josephine would always remain in the shadows.”

  The party was for Josephine’s erstwhile lover, El Glaoui, who had come to Paris on an official visit. At that time he was the Moroccan official with the closest ties to the French government, and he had paid a heavy price for this, having lost a son in the battle of Monte Cassino.

  “Josephine had sent Jacques and me to pick up girls from the Lido and the Folies-Bergère,” Donald Wyatt remembers. “At dawn, you could see couples coming out of the bushes in the park, tenderly, arm in arm. It was a big success.”

  And why not? Josephine knew how to entertain men, the men, including the Glaoui, were pleased to be entertained, the prefect of police was pleased to close off the traffic around Beau Chêne for the night, and Monsieur Guignery was pleased to do all the electrical work in the park. “It was the beginning of electric guitars, and Josephine wanted them,” says Madame Guignery. “We were not used to that sound, to the effect of loudspeakers in the trees. It was formidable.”

  Josephine in the vanguard, one more time.

  Summer came, and with it, a longing on her part to spend more time at Les Milandes. She invited Claude Menier and his mother to the château for a fortnight. (It was Claude’s older brother Jean to whom Josephine had been engaged when he was killed at the front.) “Claude had been afflicted with polio,” says Donald Wyatt, “and during the war, he developed a lung ailment. He was thin, almost emaciated.”

  “Claude Menier was a rich man, a millionaire,” says Georges Malaury’s wife, Yvette, who still lives at Les Milandes, and guides tourists through the château. “He was an artist, he held his palette in his teeth, because one arm was no good.”

  A generous suitor, Claude showered Josephine with expensive presents, and followed her to Switzerland when September came. She had decided on Switzerland as the scene of her comeback tour—in real theaters, not army camps—because while most of Europe was still bleeding, the Swiss were rich enough to buy theater tickets.

  “Since 1940,” says Jacques Abtey, “she had dedicated herself to France, now she had to think of her own future.”

  She also had to prove that she was still alive. “In Switzerland,” she said, “the newspapers were saying, ‘It is not Josephine, but a double. This one is thinner. She is not bad, but she doesn’t have the shape of Josephine.’ ”

  “She had been away all that time,” Jacques says. “She was not getting any younger, she had witnessed at first hand the games politicians played. The only positive thing in the past few months had been her association with Jo Bouillon’s orchestra. She could rely on him and his pianist, Pierre Guillermin, to make her sound good.”

  In Zurich, a theater critic wrote that reports of Josephine’s death had been premature, but the information “had some truth in it. . . . The banana dancer . . . is no more. . . . The elegant Parisienne has elegantly eliminated the Negress in herself.”

  In Lucerne, Lausanne, Berne, she held press conferences, talked of her war years, and “told us,” said one reporter, “the lessons she has learned. ‘The contact with the troops makes you more human. . . . In the old days, I studied attitudes, effects, today I try to be myself.’ ” She said she was surprised by the warm welcome of the public. “I thought they would have forgotten me.”

  Nobody forgot her. In January 1946, the French government sent her to Berlin to perform in a gala for all Allied soldiers. “I had the honor,” she said, “to represent France with Jo Bouillon and Colette Mars . . . a friend.”

  By now, Josephine had convinced herself she was in love with Jo Bouillon. The fact that he was bisexual—homosexual by preference—was of small moment to her; she had always found the difficult conquests more interesting than the easy ones. She was also very fond of Colette Mars, a talented singer, very blond, very white-skinned—the kind of looks that always attracted Josephine.

  “I too had left France in 1941,” Colette told me. “Like Josephine, I was a fervent Gaullist. I knew her when she was in Dr. Comte’s clinic; one day she was so bad off we had already ordered the floral arrangement. Then I served under her in the air force. She had done a very beautiful war. When she talked about representing France, she lit up.

  “That 1946 trip from Paris to Berlin took three days, because much of the track had been blown up; every so often, we would be switched from one train to another. Josephine insisted I travel in the compartment with her and Jo Bouillon and his lover. He was charming, with clear eyes, and Jo was having a serious relationship with him, and Josephine was jealous.

  “One afternoon, she and I were sitting in the compartment while Jo and his lover talked in the corridor outside. Through the glass door, we saw Jo take his lover’s hands. Then he came back into our cabin, bent over Josephine, and kissed her on the head. Suddenly, I saw before me a fury. She got up and started kicking him—she was wearing heavy combat boots, though the war was over, she loved the game—with such energy that I huddled in a corner, holding on to the luggage rack, and poor Jo was completely petrified.

  “There were four sleeping berths in our compartment. On one side, Jo Bouillon had the top berth, his lover the lower. On the other side, Josephine was up and I was below. That night, we got into our beds, and suddenly Josephine said, ‘I’m so cold, I want to go down with Colette.’ And she scrambled down, exactly like a monkey, and lay next to me, very close. So now Jo was jealous. It is very difficult to explain everybody’s feelings. He aimed a flashlight at us and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  “I was trembling, I was very young, and Jo Bouillon’s poor friend didn’t move, and then Josephine said, ‘Enough, I want to sleep.’ It was dark, I made myself as small as possible, when suddenly Josephine took my hand and put it on her superb breast. I have to say it was very agreeable, but I did not dare to go further.”

  Upon their arrival in Berlin, Josephine took Colette on a tour. “Here was the train station, nothing left but this field. And here was the Hotel Adlon.’ Half the buildings she remembered had been razed; the gala was held in the old Palace of Justice, which was still standing.”

  For the gala, Josephine loaned Colette a white ermine cape, a diamond necklace and earrings, and a dress by Jean Dessès. “She told me, ‘I want you to be beautiful for France.’ ”

  A party raged—that’s the right word—in the stately rooms of the former palace, before, during, and after the show. France had sent champagne and cognac, and the Russ
ians got drunk.

  It was, says Donald Wyatt, “the most exclusive party I had ever attended, and the most boisterous, especially on the part of the Soviet generals who set the pace. They were big men, they guzzled tumblers of vodka, and during the dancing, they cut in whenever they saw an attractive woman. Some of them, inebriated, played a game of sliding down the long and curving balustrades of marble to the floor below.

  “The party ended in a spirit of fraternity; everyone—even the great Russian generals, Marshal Zhukov among them, who were sitting in the first row—joined Josephine in singing the ‘Marseillaise.’ ”

  The rest of the week, Josephine and her troupe worked in the quartier Napoléon, the sector of Berlin that housed the French army. “She had us perform without stopping from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.,” says Colette. “When I wanted to eat ice cream, she took it away from me. ‘You have a fragile voice, and it is very bad for your throat.’ But I never saw anyone eat ice cream like Josephine.”

  Things change, things stay the same. I think of Josephine in Mr. Dad’s shop, making a trade. Her child’s body for ice cream.

  More resonance from the past: The quartier Napoléon had been Hitler’s Olympic Village. In 1936, when the American track and field star Jesse Owens won four gold medals, Adolf Hitler refused to recognize this stupendous achievement by a black athlete. Now in the same place, young French soldiers were enjoying the songs of a black American-born artist.

  And helping her to bathe. “We traveled with a zinc tub,” Colette says, “and when she was fatigued, she would just put herself naked in that tub and the soldiers would bring warm water and pour it over her head. After that, she could start again. Soldiers asked for autographs, God only knows how many she signed. She always pushed me to the front, but nobody was asking me for autographs.”

  After Berlin, the company headed for Brussels, where they found Noble Sissle and Flournoy Miller staging a wartime version of Shuffle Along for restless American troops awaiting transport home. Sissle and Josephine had a friendly reunion. She had been fifteen years old when he rejected her, sent her weeping from the theater in Philadelphia. Now she was forty. No one had seen her cry in a long time.