Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  “There were great numbers of tourists, you had to wait on line as though you were visiting Fontainebleau, and we saw the children behind a large window. It was like the monkey rock at the Vincennes Zoo, with the children staring back at us from the other side of the window.

  “The atmosphere was bad. You felt it. If it had been sincere, authentic, good for the children, I think the people all around would have said, ‘Did you see how they live together, all the races, how wonderful it is?’ But people were outraged.

  “I am an artist, I don’t pay attention to critics. When you innovate, you always have critics, but those children were totally uprooted, used for photos, articles, their private lives compromised.

  “Les Milandes was like her farewell performance at the Olympia. At first you cry, Bravo! Then you scratch a little, and find hidden motives. When children were at stake—and not all of them were orphans, she adopted children who still had parents—then I was turned off, and she could not take me for a ride anymore.”

  Josephine continued to act out the drama of a star going out of business. She had, Jo reported, piled her old wardrobe trunks in front of the château “along with the costumes she knew she would never wear again. ‘Take whatever you want,’ she urged the villagers who picked through what had been such an intimate part of her life. The clothes that remained, my Josephine, always thirsty for symbols, set on fire. Then, joining hands with our sons and the village children, she led them through the steps of a farandole.”

  Good thing she held a few gowns back, because the very next month, she was touring Italy.

  In June 1956, Princess Grace and Prince Rainier came home to Monaco after their honeymoon. The same issue of Paris Match that carried pictures of their return also featured snapshots of Josephine and Jo Bouillon and their six tiny sons arriving at the wedding of Josephine’s brother Richard to the postmistress of Les Milandes. “In marrying a man of color,” said the bride, Marie-Louise Daziniere, “I am making myself happy, but I also think I am helping Madame Josephine, who does so much to bring races together.”

  Five minutes before the wedding, Richard was baptized. “I said to myself, ‘To be safe in the eyes of God, I’m going to baptize him,’ ” Abbé Tournebise told the Malaurys. “Because with Josephine you never know what to believe.”

  Wise priest.

  As one of the witnesses at the wedding, Josephine signed her name “Josephine Baker, ex-artist.” Next thing anyone knew, the ex-artist was off again. Or on again, depending on how you looked at it. Flying from Paris to Rome, she took three of her little boys with her. On the same flight, Line Renaud, the music-hall headliner, observed that Josephine could use even an airplane as a stage.

  “She suddenly marched through the cabin like the Olympic flame bearer, holding in her hands a chamber pot, and headed for the toilet. The other passengers’ mouths fell open. She reappeared carrying the now-empty pot at the end of her fingers, like an old wig, and smiling, wanting everyone to approve her dedication as a mother. People didn’t know whether to laugh or to give her an ovation.”

  By December, Josephine was back in North Africa, where she had once been so happy, and so sick. Now wars of independence raged there. In Algeria, the entire population of a town called Palestro was massacred, but two babies—a boy and a girl—were found alive, hidden behind some bushes. Josephine got permission from the authorities to adopt the infants, both six months old.

  Jo was beside himself. She had promised to stop gathering children, she had promised they would not adopt a girl—“Our children have no blood relationship,” he had said, “if we add a daughter to our collection of sons, we’ll be asking for trouble”—and here she was, both vows broken.

  The girl, Jeanne, renamed Marianne, was decreed a Catholic.

  The boy, Jacques, renamed Brahim, was decreed a Muslim.

  In June 1957, all eight children were finally—and legally—adopted in a judgment handed down by a civil court in Sarlat. All name changes requested by Josephine were granted. “Since it seems that the return of the children to their parents is not foreseen,” said the court, “the adoption is recommended.”

  At the time, the oldest was not yet five.

  Koffi was the ninth baby, born in Senegal. Josephine had visited an Ivory Coast village and been presented with this infant. She claimed that he—as the thirteenth child in his family—would have been sacrificed if she hadn’t taken him. She asked President Houphouet-Boigny to act as godfather.

  According to her nephew Artie, Josephine brought Koffi home “in a shoebox. Without the cover.” (While serving in the American army in Germany, Artie—one of Richard’s sons by his first wife—had married a girl named Janie, and the couple was then living and working at Les Milandes.)

  Janie Martin remembers Koffi’s being kidnapped by Josephine’s guenon, a long-tailed female monkey. “She took Koffi from his cradle—he was still a little baby—and ran away with him, to the park, and the nurses were searching everywhere for him.”

  (Sometimes, there were as many as thirty monkeys at Les Milandes, and they were often trouble. Some were rabid and died in their cages, some escaped. Once, Yvette Malaury says, “a monkey stole a six-week-old baby, the daughter of an employee. He had rabies, and the little one died, and the monkey had to be killed, and, can you believe, the police were not even called.”)

  Now Arthur Prevost, Josephine’s journalist friend from Canada, arrived to view with his own eyes the mecca of world brotherhood. “I went to the nursery on the top floor, and Josephine was holding Koffi in her arms, I was carrying Marianne, and a nurse was playing with a third child. How crazy to have little children barely able to walk using those stairs, they could fall and be badly hurt. For food, for play, they had to go up and down, it was not practical.”

  Prevost walked in the rain with Josephine and the children in yellow slickers, and when they came back, “Josephine took us into a room. A woman was lying in bed. I said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ and Josephine said, ‘It doesn’t matter. That’s my mother. We always have the children undress in front of her.’ ”

  I think this was just another scene in the love-hate play acted out by Josephine and Carrie, Josephine showing her mother, “Look how good I am with my children, you were never there when we went to bed cold and hungry.”

  Even though Josephine repeated Carrie’s pattern of neglect (Carrie had gone off with lovers, Josephine went on the road), it troubled her, “because my babies are growing up and will forget me.” Once, coming home at night after a long absence, she rushed to the nursery, turned on the lights, woke the sleeping children, and, arms outstretched, cried, “My little darlings, where is Mother?” As one, the children stood up in their beds, turned their backs on Josephine, and pointed to the wall where a large picture of her in full makeup and theater regalia was hanging. “There is Mother!” they chorused.

  “In adopting all those children and taking them from their natural environments,” Arthur Prevost said, “Josephine had done something dangerous. . . . Even animals—like the bears in Canada, or the poor wild animals in zoos—are disoriented when you take them from their natural places. But Josephine thought her love could cure everything.

  “She took me around her kingdom, I visited the museum of her life, the Jorama—there were fourteen stations like the stations of the cross. All the figures had faces and hands of wax, and were life-size. There was a worried little girl wandering along the Mississippi, there was Josephine dancing for her sisters and brother in the basement, Josephine kneeling to be blessed by the pope, Josephine as a sublieutenant in the war, Josephine and Jo at their wedding, Josephine and the children walking up a hill toward a giant cross. [This one could also be bought as a plate in the gift shop.]

  “I asked Jo Bouillon what Les Milandes would be in fifty years. He said, ‘It may be the last island of peace in a jungle where everyone will devour everyone.’

  “ ‘What about your careers?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Me,’ Jo said, ‘I
have no career left, and I’m happy that way.’

  “ ‘Me,’ said Josephine, ‘I now sing only for my children.’ ”

  One week later, Jo was served with legal papers. Josephine didn’t want to be Mrs. Bouillon anymore.

  Chapter 35

  MORE COMEBACKS, MORE BABIES, MORE LOSSES

  “In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been”

  THE HEART-RENDING DRAMA OF JOE AND JO, THOSE 50-YEAR-OLDS WITH BIG HEARTS, trumpeted one headline. The divorce announcement made worldwide news. From Japan, Miki Sawada urged Josephine to go slowly. “I remember your husband took such tender care of the children, and they had confidence in him. Abandoned by their natural parents, if they lose a second time, it is too cruel.”

  Arthur Prevost also begged for reassurance—“Tell me it is not true”—and Jo Bouillon wrote back, deploring “the disarray in which I find myself. I have worked for eight years to try to realize my wife’s dream.”

  In her own letter to Arthur, Josephine described herself and Jo as “only two spokes in the immense turning wheel that is life; the axle is the children. To ensure their happiness and their future, I must say nothing.”

  But when it came to her divorce suit, she found her tongue. Some crimes of which she accused her husband:

  • He had manifested no affection for her.

  • He had not fulfilled his marital duties.

  • He thought she was good only for earning money.

  Still, she was afraid the divorce might cost her the children. Pierre Dop, her lawyer, assured her the adoptions would stand up in court, but she continued to be anxious. If she died, “Jo would certainly get the children . . . and my fortune, and Les Milandes would find itself with all that gang and their immoral behavior. I want the children to bear my name as well as his. . . . He never wanted those children, that’s why at first he didn’t want to legalize the situation. . . .”

  In the beginning, Jo had sent Abbé Tournebise to Josephine to argue against the divorce, but she stood firm. “I’m doing what God tells me to do.”

  She talked directly to her Maker, giving herself absolution. The abbé had grown used to it. “In my head, I used to ask God to forgive me when I saw Josephine walking up to the altar to take Communion on Sunday,” he said. “She hadn’t been to confession, but there she was, head bent under a black lace mantilla, as if in a trance.”

  Once, in an act of generosity to her fellow worshipers, she had replaced the old statues in the chapel, and asked the abbé to bless the new ones. He walked from one stone figure to another until he found himself confronting an unfamiliar saint. Suddenly he recognized her—it was Josephine gazing down on the earth below with a beatific smile. Screaming “Blasphemy!” the abbé threw the châtelaine out of her chapel. She retaliated by complaining about him to her friend the pope, but had her statue moved into the open air. (Time magazine reported the “fabrication of a startling memorial to herself,” and described a statuary group “depicting La Baker in ancient saintly wraps, arms outstretched in benediction over kneeling figures of seven kiddies of various races. . . .”)

  Observation by Josephine to lawyer Dop, after she met Jo wandering the halls: “He seemed to avoid me.”

  Why not, considering that she had cast him out? But it worried her that he would sign no papers. Although she owned the land, all commercial enterprises on that land were listed as belonging to the Société Jo Bouillon & Co.; Josephine could not operate them without his permission.

  Now bank directors arrived. “If I renounce the divorce,” Josephine wrote Dop, “they are willing to wait for the twenty-nine million I owe them, if not, they want the money now.”

  Wait three months, suggested the judge before whom Jo and Josephine appeared. Think about reconciliation.

  So they must muddle through the summer, and try to keep everything running, even if it wasn’t running well. On the one hand, Josephine trusted no one—after a party at the château, she would wash the priceless gold knives and forks, the china, and store them in a cupboard to which she had the only key. On the other hand, her suspicious nature did not prevent her being fleeced; she was not as shrewd as the peasants around her.

  From the start, the union of Joe and Jo had been a strange one: Josephine out to prove she could ensnare any man she chose, no matter that his appetite led him down another path; Jo up against a tornado.

  “Jo was good to Josephine’s family,” says Janie Martin, Artie’s German-born bride. “Jo is the one who suggested putting the little house where Margaret lived in Margaret’s name, ‘so if you die, your sister will have something.’ ” (In fact, says Jacqueline Abtey, “Jo Bouillon is the one who had wanted her family to come over. Josephine told Jacques and me, ‘I would never have invited them, they should have stayed in America.’ ” Once in France, it turned out they had to sing for their supper; Josephine put them to work as soon as they arrived. Margaret opened a pastry shop—the tourists loved her pies; Elmo rented out canoes on the Dordogne; and Richard took charge of the Esso station at the entrance to the park.)

  During her war with her husband, Josephine buried lawyer Dop in details. “The situation is becoming more and more difficult. A waiter came and asked me for glasses with the “Joe and Jo” engraving on them for the hotels and restaurants. When I refused, he was extremely vulgar toward me. Another worker told me his boss was Monsieur Bouillon, not me. . . . How can people treat me with so little respect?”

  I was exhausted just working my way through the blizzard of papers. Where did she find the strength? Running around the world performing, coming back to this or that hotel room and firing off ten, twenty letters a night, sinking herself in potatoes, tobacco, cows, nurses, children, paintings, contracts. Even for a woman who never slept, the output was prodigious. Why didn’t she make herself sick with all those fulminations? Maybe because she only wrote them, she didn’t have to read them.

  “She attacks me on all sides,” Jo told a friend. “She has no confidence in me, but she wants me to stay. Even if I was the big boss, I could not live in a desert; I would want to put in the personnel I thought would be good for the place, but she claims my people are thieves . . . pederasts.”

  Josephine pawned her jewels (one more time), sold the avenue Bugeaud house in Paris, and wrote a fairy tale. The Rainbow Tribe, illustrated by Piet Worm, is beautiful. The cover shows a little black one-eyed hen looking up at eight children sitting in a tree. On the title page are the words “This book was made in Les Milandes, where Kott-Kott found her happiness.” Kott-Kott, the hen, travels the world searching for her lost eye, and comes to rest in a place where no one laughs at her anymore; this was Josephine’s tribute to Willie Mae. She was convinced that some rich producer would want to make a movie of it, and her money worries would be over.

  It never happened.

  Part of the problem was Josephine’s own inconsistency. When a respected Austrian producer offered her a picture deal, she said no, she could not permit her children to be exploited. (The producer was too polite to mention the gaping tourists outside the windows.)

  No sooner had she got off her high horse than she was writing to the cultural attaché at the American embassy in Paris. Could he put her in touch with “an American film company like Walt Disney”? A movie about Les Milandes and the children and universal brotherhood was crying to be made, but it must be made “by a very big company with a lot of authority. . . . I will give the world rights to this company, but of course they have to pay me. . . .”

  Broke though she was, Josephine could not stop spending. She ordered ten walk-in refrigerators from America, and was shocked to find one of them being used as a chicken coop. Told they couldn’t be made to work on French electrical current, she was appalled. “There is racism even in kitchen equipment, it has to stop. The Japanese are much more intelligent, you will see, they will inundate markets all over the world with machines that can run without discrimination.”

  She was right, but how did she know?

&n
bsp; September 24, 1957: With school desegregation being threatened by white mobs, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine black students on their way to Central High. Shortly thereafter, Arthur Prevost wrote a newspaper piece headlined NO LITTLE ROCK IN DORDOGNE. There were pictures of Luis and Akio in class in Castelnaud, along with a statement from Josephine: “No incidents when my little ones went to school for the first time, no matter what the color of their skins.”

  Her little ones may not have been discriminated against, but they were certainly confused by the life they led. Between club dates, a speech on brotherhood, and a visit to a doctor, Josephine would squeeze in a few days at Les Milandes, where she fought with, fired, cajoled her employees, then turned her ferocious attentions on the children. Guilty for having been gone so much, jealous of whatever affection they might have developed for anyone but her, she focused like a laser.

  “Sometimes when she arrived home from the road,” Jari says, “there would be a reunion around the kitchen table. She would take us, one by one, on her knees. But we were in a hurry to get down, it was embarrassing, too much love, a bit exaggerated. What she could not give us while she was away, she wanted to give us all at once. It was tout ou rien, then she would leave, and our normal life would start again. Our father would go away too, but when he came back, it was more normal. He cared about our work at school, he was there to answer questions.”

  Still, during Josephine’s short stays at Les Milandes, the public was fed a picture of domestic bliss. On a Sunday afternoon, Josephine, Carrie, and the children could be seen in the front row of the audience as Jo conducted the grand orchestra of Sarlat, or there might be a conference about racism led by Josephine, while movie cameras rolled and flashbulbs exploded. “It was terrible,” says my brother Jean-Claude, “because we always had to keep our eyes open while the lights were blazing into them.”