Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  October 18: Since Jo and Josephine could agree on almost nothing, the court made several decisions for them. Jo would be permitted to stay in the Maury house, personal souvenirs would be divided, and the children awarded to Josephine. Jo could visit them on Thursdays (not a school day in France) and two Sundays a month, but in Josephine’s absence, Carrie was named their guardian. If you enjoy paradox, consider this woman who, in order to follow a pair of laughing eyes, had, time after time, forsaken her own maternal duties. Now she was being appointed by law to cluck over chicks who weren’t even hers.

  The day the bank sent a sheriff to attach the furniture, Josephine met him at the front door and slapped his face. With the imprint of her fingers on his cheek, he struggled for control. “Madame Baker, one day you will pay dearly for that.”

  She slapped strangers, and she slapped people she knew. Once, when the melons in the fields were overripe—customers in her restaurants were not ordering melon—she told the head gardener that he and his men should eat the fruit before it rotted. Two days later, she came into the kitchen where the grounds crew was having lunch, shrieked, “What! You are eating my melons!” and slapped the head gardener in the face. To the delight of his assistants, he rose and slapped her back.

  Artie Martin says his imperious aunt thought of herself as a monarch. “She liked me because I had been a military man. ‘You know how to rule people,’ she kept telling me. She didn’t say manage, she said rule.”

  Somehow, even after her scene with the sheriff, her lawyers were able to reassure the bank, as they would several more times before the end, but the situation remained ugly.

  Jo’s inquiring about Carrie’s failing health evoked a diatribe from Josephine. “He is like a murderer drawn to the scene of his crime.” He had, she said, created “a kingdom of immorality, only a red light is missing.”

  Sweden, Germany, Holland, Denmark. Crowds everywhere, and Dop commended her on refilling Les Milandes’ coffers. “We were able to pay November expenses and salaries, and even a million francs of our debt to the bank.” But he was concerned about her health. “Take care of yourself.”

  She was as concerned as he. “I’m everywhere but at home, and daily in a situation that makes me tremble, my mother sick, my children separated from me.”

  Still, she hatched grandiose schemes. To tap into the pilgrim trade (Lourdes would be memorializing its hundredth anniversary in 1959), Josephine was already planning a huge celebration of her own. She would have a monument to many gods built on a hill; there would be a Christ, a Buddha, a Moses, a Mohammed, and a voodoo god, each thirty-five feet tall.

  From Berlin, she wrote Dop that her opening was sold out. “I had been afraid because some newspapers carried terrible stories. They said that since the separation, we had divided the children, the white stayed with Monsieur Bouillon, and the black with me.”

  She also said she was recording a song for a film in Berlin, and would get one million francs for it. “I’m deeply grateful to God. . . . I’m going on stage now, it is the last show, I’m tired. Good night. Kiss my little ones.”

  Two weeks later, she sent Dop an obituary of Jean Lion, holder of the Légion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre, the Croix de la Libération, dead in Paris of the Asian flu. Dop would see, she predicted, that Lion “is quite a different personality from Monsieur Bouillon.” She spoke of the fallen hero in the present tense. “The dead,” she said, “are always part of the family.”

  On December 18, great joy. She had been informed that she too would be given the Légion d’Honneur. “It is moral support to think that France loves me so much.” On the same line, she wrote, “Save electricity.”

  And she kept on making speeches. In a church in Frankfurt, she talked about her children. “They belong to you just as much as they belong to me. You have the same responsibility as I have to take care of them.”

  Listen up, world. Josephine is willing to share her burden with you.

  Christmas Eve in Germany, she went to midnight Mass and wondered if somewhere Jo was praying. “And begging God to forgive him all the bad he has done.” A theater director in Stockholm paid for airline tickets so the children and a nurse could come spend January with her. She told the authorities she was removing the children from school for health reasons. “The snow is very good for them.”

  And while on the subject of health, she was going to send some polio vaccine for Dop’s children—“It is very safe.” She thanked the lawyer for news that Carrie’s morale had improved—“As you say so well, we have only one mother”—and then got down to business. “I cannot believe that we cannot have peace at Les Milandes when the staff have no worries but to eat well, sleep, and do their work. . . . I have to close my eyes for now but I will get rid of all of them.”

  In mid-January, she received a letter from Mohamed Menebhi. He had loved her, sheltered her, and now he was in trouble. (Liberation had brought changes in the fortunes of many powerful Moroccan families. Palaces and lands were taken from those known to have sided with the French.) “I hope you have not forgotten our friendship,” Mohamed wrote, “and the bad hour that comes to everyone as it has to me. I have no friends but you and Jacques. Could you lend me the sum of three hundred thousand francs for a year?”

  Josephine forwarded the request to Jacques. “This is from Mohammed, begging for money. I didn’t give it to him, but I invited him and his family to come to Les Milandes. . . . Write him if you wish.”

  Jacques sent Mohamed five hundred thousand francs. It was a debt he and Josephine owed.

  Pressures mounted on Josephine. Not only must she tour to make money, but she must also go back to Les Milandes at least once a month, she told Dop, “because of Jo’s accusations that I have abandoned the children for a new career. So this month, I lost 3,250,000 francs in bookings.” Besides money, the children were costing her peace of mind. There had been rumors of child abuse inflicted by various nurses, and Jo was talking of suing for custody. But she had heard he was planning to return to his old job as musical director at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and since “this place is known for catering to homosexuals, it will be a help in our fight to keep the children.”

  She also decreed that none of her brood were to spend time in Paris with their father because “Monsieur Bouillon does not have the necessary female personnel to take good care of the children.” (Jo fought back, contending that he, at least, had not put the children on show for the public to gape at.)

  The war accelerated.

  Dop was instructed to get rid of the “Joe and Jo” ashtrays and order others: ten children in native costumes holding hands in a circle. “We must add the tenth, because when I go to South America, I will get a little Indian.”

  But the situation had become impossible to sustain. She was on the road, Carrie was sick, and finally, Josephine announced a reconciliation with Jo. For the second time, she gave a wedding banquet. This one was held at the Chartreuse.

  “I was invited,” Eli Mercier says. “There were famous people from Paris, Josephine was dressed in blue, the wine was extraordinary, a king could not have done it better. She had the gold glasses, gold plates, gold tablecloths.”

  It was the end of April, plans for the summer had to be firmed up. She wrote Arthur Prevost telling him that “for religious reasons,” she had called off the divorce, and imploring him to give Les Milandes some publicity in his paper. “We are near Lourdes, Lascaux, Bordeaux . . . we are in the center of pre-history, the Middle Ages, Cro-Magnon man.”

  Then she went off to tour Poland with a young Norwegian pianist named Tor Hultin. (If the Western world was tiring of Josephine, a new market had opened for her behind the Iron Curtain.) Tor Hultin remembers that every night before her last song, she made a speech. “She spoke of human values, respect for liberty, and the whole theater, four thousand people, would stand up and scream.

  “She and I visited the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and later, during lunch with the minister of culture,
Josephine was asked her impressions of the camp. She said it was the most inhuman thing that ever existed in the world. Then she bent to the minister across the table and said in a loud voice, ‘And where are your camps today, Monsieur le Ministre?’ I almost choked. Back at the hotel, I said, ‘Josephine, I want to see my wife and children again, you are going to have us arrested.’ Don’t forget we were there in 1958, the worst time in Polish history.

  “She turned to me with that special look of hers, strange, half laughing, half serious. ‘There is no one who dares to touch me!’ ”

  How many times we have heard that.

  “Josephine was interested in everything,” Tor said. “At one press conference, she told foreign journalists that the biggest problem with black people in America was their lack of confidence. ‘They pity themselves,’ she said. ‘That will not help them.’ She was also concerned about South Africa (‘The white man there doesn’t understand he is sitting on a bomb’) and the Indians in South America.

  “I was with her in Caracas when she adopted—or I should say, kidnapped—little Mara. We met a wonderful Indian woman who was in the government, and Josephine said she wanted to adopt an Indian child, and this woman took us to Maracaibo. It was a one-hour flight, and then we went with a jeep for three days visiting Indian camps, sleeping in tents. The Indians were poor, a lot of sick people and children.

  “In one camp, we saw a little boy, maybe eighteen months old. They had made a hole in the sand, and he was lying in it. He looked like those pictures of concentration-camp children, big belly, skin and bones, he couldn’t walk.

  “Josephine wanted to take him, and the parents were happy, they had nine or ten other children, so she gave them some money and we left. I carried the little boy on the plane, and suddenly Josephine said to me, ‘His name shall be Mara, for a big Indian chief.’

  “When we got back to the airport in Caracas, a man in uniform came walking toward us, he looked like a general, and he seemed angry. I said to Josephine, ‘That man speaks a lot, but I do not understand Spanish.’

  “ ‘He wants my autograph,’ she said.

  “ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I think he’s a policeman.’

  “Suddenly a car came, and we were taken to jail. Josephine screamed for the French ambassador, but we were held for twenty-four hours. The French ambassador was there when we were released, and the ‘general’ came to apologize, and would you believe it, Josephine spat in his face. He didn’t move. He spoke bad English but he kept saying, ‘Excuse me, it was a mistake.’ They thought we had stolen an Indian baby.”

  Arriving at the airport in Paris, Josephine was met by Paulette Coquatrix. Mara, the chosen descendant of Chief Maracaibo, was not happy, he was screeching. “Take care of him,” Josephine begged Paulette, “I can’t stop him.”

  Paulette accepted the baby and, leaving Josephine behind to deal with the press, whisked him off to the Coquatrix apartment. “He still hadn’t stopped screaming, so I decided to change him. To my stupefaction, his skin came off with the diaper. Josephine had forgotten to change him, his poor bottom was absolutely raw. Josephine loved children, but did not know how to take care of them.”

  Aside from Mara’s bottom, things were looking good. Preparations for Paris Mes Amours were already in the works (Josephine would make her Paris comeback at the Olympia, the same theater where she had made her farewell appearance), and Jo was home again. When he walked in, Josephine accosted him. “Do you know what Akio wants for Christmas?” “Yes,” he said, “a violin.” “No,” she said. “He told me he wanted for Daddy and Mommy to be more together.”

  It was like the old days, an immense tree glittering next to the chimney in the salon, a mountain of toys in front of it. The whole family, Margaret, Elmo, Richard and Artie and their wives, shared a Christmas feast of oysters, turkey and chestnuts, bûche de Noël. Tor Hultin, his wife, and two young daughters joined them. “It was fantastic,” Tor says. “Josephine had invited all the children of the village and her employees and their families. There were presents for everyone. The children were playing with Gigolo, Margaret’s chimpanzee, tall as a four-year-old child and dressed in a sailor uniform, and I played Christmas songs on the beautiful grand piano that once belonged to Franz Liszt.”

  Carrie did not leave her bed. There is a picture of her taken that day, lying against white pillows, her eyes far away. Is she homesick? Does she think of Arthur Martin? Tony Hudson? Willie Mae? Does she have a premonition that this will be her last Christmas?

  After the holidays, Josephine took to the road again. On January 8, Charles de Gaulle became president of the Republic. On January 12, Carrie died. Josephine was in Istanbul, but did not come home. Dop had wired condolences, and she responded, “Your telegram did me good. . . . I’m completely upset.” Maybe she was, at that. Once she had told Jo, “You’re never sure about your father, but you know you came out of your mother’s belly.”

  At first, Carrie’s body rested in a borrowed niche in the Malaury family’s vault, to the disapproval of Georges’s grandmother. “I do not want to spend eternity next to a négresse,” the old lady kept saying. “If you do not remove her from my vault, I will curse you from the beyond.”

  In time, the removal was accomplished.

  André Rivollet said Carrie had quit her home in America “for truffle country; now she rests forever next to an Italian count she never knew.” (Or, rather, next to his heart. According to Maryse Bouillon, it was Jo who had suggested that Pepito’s body, after having lain in the basement of a church for twelve years, should be moved to Les Milandes for a proper burial. But this was not dramatic enough for Josephine; she decided that she would bring back only his heart. Which she had put into a heart-shaped coffin and consigned to a grave, while the servants crossed themselves and remarked on how kind she was.)

  Carrie left her son Richard her Bible. In its pages, he found a small picture of Tony Hudson.

  “Josephine’s mother was lonely,” says Leon Burg. “She is buried here in the little cemetery of Les Milandes, with Jo Bouillon’s father, Pepito’s heart, and the little girl of Arthur and Janie Martin. My wife and I go sometimes to put some flowers on the right side of the cemetery where they lie. We put white flowers for the baby. The wood crosses fell long ago, you have to look under the leaves to find them.”

  The children missed Carrie. “I know she adored us,” Jari says. “When Mother got angry and sent us upstairs without dinner, Granny would sneak us food.”

  As a member of the family, Jo’s niece, Maryse Bouillon, had seen some of the darker side of life in the château. She was on the scene when Carrie, Margaret, and Elmo arrived from St. Louis, and describes Carrie as “imposing, a grande dame. She and my grandparents used to take long walks together, and they talked, she in American, they in French, and they understood each other perfectly.”

  Maryse says she never saw any affection between Josephine and Carrie—“Carrie was a kind of prisoner there”—and she wasn’t surprised that Josephine was away when Carrie died. “She was always away when people died, she was away for my grandfather, for my grandmother, for her own mother, for the little girl, Artie’s little girl. Josephine was never there, never.”

  Margaret was the person most crushed by the loss of Carrie—“I had lived with Mama all my life”—and the next time Josephine came home, she brought her sister a child, her own answer to any life crisis. Born in Belgium, the little girl’s name was Anna Balla Rama Castelluccio. Margaret called her Rama.

  Paris Mes Amours, Jo Bouillon said, was going to be billed “as a rescue operation.” In fact, Bruno Coquatrix was spending a fortune on new costumes, and Paulette had brought in André Levasseur, a talented young designer, to work with Josephine. “She would stand for three hours having fittings, and not complain,” Paulette says. “Once, I stood in for her, and the clothes were so heavy they made me giddy. I had not realized you could walk in anything that heavy.

  “For us, and for Josephine, this show was a very big
risk.” (George Reich, who choreographed Paris Mes Amours, puts it more bluntly. “In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been, Coquatrix took a big chance.”)

  For the run of the show, Josephine had rented a little studio at 4 rue Saint-Roch. Harold Nicholas was in Paris, and she asked Bruno to hire him. “I did a Caribbean number with her,” Nicholas says. “We had fun, I will always cherish the memory.”

  George Reich’s memories of Josephine were less sweet. Reich not only choreographed Paris Mes Amours, he used dancers from his own company—Ballets Ho!—to support, as he put it, “the old star in a new sauce.”

  A handsome blond American, he was just back from Hollywood, where he had worked on Daddy Long Legs with Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire. “I was thrilled to meet Josephine, but she asked me to partner her in a piece—‘Antinea’s Snack’—and I couldn’t find the time. I was already dancing in four numbers, besides choreographing the show, and working in TV. I explained the situation, and Coquatrix understood, but Josephine took my explanation as an insult, and used it for publicity. She dragged out the old story—Reich is white, he refused to dance with a black lady.

  “She finally did the number with one of my dancers, he was a beautiful boy, it was a very sexy scene. After the reviews came in, and it was a triumph for everyone, she apologized.

  “She was so tired by then with all her problems. She would arrive ten minutes before the show, and everything would be ready. False lashes, wigs, makeup, the wardrobe mistress waiting with the costume in her hands. Josephine would take three steps to the right, and the costume had to be there, three steps to the left, and Ginette would slap the wig on her head. She was like a doll, you wound her up and she went. If there was any change, she was screwed up. She would make her entrance with not a second to spare.

  “Each day was a miracle. Between numbers, she would put her head on her makeup table and fall asleep for a minute or two, and they would wake her up for the next number, and she would crawl backstage, still asleep, but when the music started, she would go on and be incredible.