It was part inspirational and part boot-licking, as she attempted to bind herself and her family ever more tightly to the rulers of Monaco.
The little villa in Roquebrune that looked out over the bay of Cap Martin was far from the paradise that she proclaimed it. With four bedrooms, two baths, twelve children, it was crowded, and the mostly adolescent tribe was no longer manageable.
Perhaps it never had been. The children grew up with chaos the only thing they could be sure of. “Life was somewhat more normal when we moved from Les Milandes to Paris,” Brahim recalls, “and Roquebrune was even better. There were palm trees and the swimming pool at the Sporting Club (as guests of the princess), but it was the beginning of another time; the older boys were growing up and there were unbelievable fights. That was when my mother started to say, ‘No long hair, no bell-bottoms, no flowered shirts.’ ”
It wasn’t easy to assert one’s individuality in the teeth of Josephine’s decrees. “Bell-bottoms are for homosexuals,” she would announce. “Most of her friends were homosexual,” Brahim says, “but if we opposed her, her reaction was to slap us or scold us. ‘One does not argue with parents, one respects them.’
“One time we called her because she was on TV, she was dancing the Charleston, half naked, and she came and turned off the set. She was furious. We thought we could make a point that she had broken all the fashion rules so why couldn’t we be a little bit free. ‘What about you, Mother, in the days when you greased your hair and wore bananas?’
“Luis was the first to rebel. He refused to get rid of his flowered shirts, and she did not know what to do. Luis was one of the taller ones, one of the stronger ones, and while he did not quite put it that way, what he meant was, ‘Try and force me, I am no longer a kid.’
“That’s when my mother called Maguy Chauvin’s husband, and asked him to come over and play the father role. Later on, she would ask Brialy to do the same. Even you, Jean-Claude, had to go through it. But we were too much to handle, ten rowdy boys in two bedrooms, it stank in there.
“Actually, it was eight boys, because Akio slept downstairs, and Jari had already moved to Argentina. The reason for Jari’s being sent away was that my mother had found him and a friend in a bathtub, fondling each other.
“She sent him straight to our father. She told Uncle and Auntie she was afraid he would ‘contaminate’ us, and we would all become homosexuals.”
“I remember the scene very well,” says Jean-Claude. “It was the night [Neil] Armstrong walked on the moon. Mother gathered us together, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Elmo were there too, and it was like a court-martial.
“She said, ‘Here it is. Your brother is not like you.’ She had always told us we were all the same, all equal, now she was saying the opposite, and we did not understand.
“She rendered justice her way, there was nothing you could say. And poor Jari was there with his head bent.”
Jari, that most amiable of boys, says he never felt betrayed or rejected. “I am what I am, I thought it would be easier to grow up around Daddy. He was rational, we were friends. He taught me to be careful; he said in the gay community relationships are short, men are always after novelty. He helped me, and so did my brothers and sisters. They never reproached me for being homosexual.”
“With her own friends,” says Brahim, “my mother gave the impression of having a good time, laughing, but with us, she did not want to appear frivolous. When we played her records, she would say, ‘Children, you can listen to them when I am not around.’ She tried to hide her artistic side from us. She wanted us to remember her as a respectable mother.”
I thought of what Kenza had said, that it was a shame the children never knew the real Josephine. They found Jo Bouillon more “normal,” which further upset her. Jo had come for the family’s first Christmas at Roquebrune. “He asked us what we wanted,” Brahim says, “and we wanted bicycles or mopeds, which my mother refused to give us—she was afraid we would hurt ourselves—and he bought them.
“She did not say anything on Christmas day, but five or six days later, Luis did not give her a kiss before breakfast, and she slapped his face.
“My father said, ‘Josephine, this is Christmas vacation, do not start a fight,’ but they argued, and he left two days later. As soon as he was gone, she took all the bikes and mopeds back to the store.
“My father came back two or three times, but my mother was afraid we would become more attached to him, since he was rational, sensible, very French, Cartesian, whereas one could say that she was very American and extreme. At Les Milandes, she had given us an allowance, and when the public school principal told her we had more money than the other children and that wasn’t good, overnight we had no allowance at all. We couldn’t even buy chewing gum, and if you tried to beg or borrow, people would say, ‘You’re the son of Josephine Baker, you have a castle,’ so some of us started to steal.
“We all did our share, and so we were all punished. You can’t imagine how many times, since almost every day, someone would break a window, and we would be asked, ‘Who did it?’ and no one would say. In a way, this impressed my mother. ‘They are so united they will not give each other up,’ she told a friend. ‘That pleases me even if their upbringing is not an absolute success.’
“I think she must have had mixed feelings toward us when we became teenagers, and the older ones started telling her, ‘No one can hit us anymore, especially not your male friends.’ She was losing ground, she stood in front of us in her robe, like a grandmother confronting seventeen-year-old boys. One day, she just gave up. Overnight, we were given total freedom, even Noël, who was only twelve or thirteen.”
Josephine was plagued not only by her inability to control the children, but by the bills that followed her to Villa Maryvonne. She still owed social security for the employees at Les Milandes, she still owed taxes, she had to keep working. That spring, she wrote Harry Hurford-Janes and his wife, Peggy, asking them to take some of the boys for the summer. “Be careful before you answer,” she warned, “because they eat a lot.”
Josephine said she wanted her “four devils”—Akio, Jean-Claude, Luis, Mara—to become “real English gentlemen.” (Moïse, another troublemaker, had already been sent to Israel to work on a kibbutz.)
In August, an AP reporter came to Villa Maryvonne to interview Josephine, and she confessed to having reservations about the Black Power movement.
“I suppose,” she said, “if I go back to the States, they’ll say I’m an Uncle Tom. But I would ask the young boys and girls of color what they would do with the white boys and girls who believe in the right ideals. . . . The last time I was in Chicago, a Negro boy told me he wanted to kill all the white people. . . .”
The reporter went away and filed his piece. The star declared afterward that she had not intended to denigrate Black Power, it was just that those words gave her “an impression of separation among human beings instead of unity . . . for years we of another generation felt humiliated when our brothers were called black or nigger. . . .”
She wrote this in a letter that included her most recent—troubled—musings on children. “Very few of us understand our children,” she said. “We . . . have perhaps made great mistakes in bringing them up. . . . Neglect, bad teaching at home, bad manners, the wrong influences, too much freedom, too much money, drugs, too many fine clothes, cars . . . Many parents are . . . slowly realizing that they should say, ‘It’s my fault. . . .’ ”
On November 11, 1970, Charles de Gaulle died.
“France has become a widow,” President Pompidou declared, and Josephine, weeping, asked Marie Spiers to send a heart-shaped wreath of white roses with a banner saying “From Josephine and her Tribe.”
“All that concerns the Resistance and General de Gaulle is like a sword that pierces my heart,” she said, in a letter to the conservator of the Jean Moulin Centre. “When we refer to those years, 1939–45, we evoke a name . . . joined to that era the way the links of a chain
are welded together.”
In Berlin, I had been calling friends, asking them to help get Josephine work. All advised me to forget it. “She’s playing dates in little bars, how do you expect anyone to present her in a leading theater?”
It was true, she was taking any kind of job. A summer tour in Italy had gone well? She would call me, reproach in her voice that I had not been able to stimulate the same enthusiasm for her in Germany, while neglecting to say the producer of the Italian tour hadn’t paid her.
But then she would have Stellina send me a drawing—it was addressed to “janclode de berlin” and bore the legend “I love you very much”—or have Marianne write, saying, “Dear Big Brother, Maman tells us how kind you are.” How could I turn away?
Early in December, the Pimm’s Club would celebrate its third anniversary, and I was going to put on a charity show to help orphans in Berlin and Israel. I decided to star Josephine, who expressed her delight on paper. “My dear little Jean-Claude No. 2, thank you for what you are doing for me . . . And for abandoned children in Berlin and Israel. You know my little Moïse has been in a kibbutz there for the past six months, but I’m going to have him come back because there is an epidemic of cholera. . . .”
I built a tent over the parking lot, put down red carpet, installed gold chairs and an antique sofa for the mayor and his wife; I knew the mayor’s presence would appeal to Josephine, she was crazy about titles, even if the title holder was an ex-dictator or an unfrocked priest.
I met her at the airport, still accompanied by her cardboard satchels. Why didn’t she use the leather cases I had given her? Because a saint who lived for brotherhood did not require such ostentatious luggage.
But she didn’t mind getting into my Mercedes.
My cousin Jacqueline Angonin (Nadette’s sister) had offered to act as Josephine’s dresser. “She was double my age, but marvelous,” Jacqueline says. “Oh, that body. I will never forget her arms. I tied her into a wide rubber cinch that laced in back; she kept saying, ‘Tighter, tighter.’
“She needed that show life, she lived off it, when she hit the stage, she exploded.”
The night of the gala, Josephine waited in the Pimm’s Club kitchen while I introduced “the Universal Mother, my mother, our mother.” On her way to the stage, people grabbed at her hands. Her dress was daring, a kind of fishnet in gold, loosely draped, and she had glued sequins under her eyes to cover the bags; it was, I thought, a gorgeous act of bravado.
After the cheers died down, she told the audience she had overheard two girls talking in the kitchen. “One said, ‘You know, Jean-Claude’s mother is here.’
“ ‘Oh? Who is that?’
“ ‘Josephine Baker.’
“ ‘Well yes, but who is that?’
“ ‘I don’t know. I can only tell you my parents always talk about their parents’ honeymoon trip to Paris when they went to the Folies-Bergère, where Josephine Baker was dancing naked with a girdle of bananas. . . .’ ”
She paused. “Well, little girls, it is already three generations . . . but during all those years, I have been happy . . . because I love people . . . because I need people . . .”
Behind her, the violins began as she started to sing “People.” She brought the room to tears.
I was almost in tears for quite a different reason. Right before her entrance, noting the TV camera and lights, she had stopped short. “What is that?” I told her it was the crew from the TV news show, she had rehearsed for them that afternoon, and even asked that they bring lavender gels through which to shoot her. Her face set in hard lines. “If they want to film me, I want five hundred marks before I go on.”
I was panicked, she was balking, and the TV people were leaving, outraged. (They refused to let me pay her out of my own pocket.) It was beginning to be clear to me why no big producers were fighting to present the famous Josephine Baker. And yet, she was wonderful. At the end of the show, she called me onstage to take a bow with her. Later, we held a press conference at my apartment, and Josephine talked about her children. She produced an old wallet full of pictures; to my dismay, she had to peer at the back of each photograph to remind herself of the child’s name and age. As she spoke to the reporters, she held on her lap Marcel-Roger Cicero, the two-year-old son of Eugene Cicero, the show’s pianist. “Children are the most wonderful gift on earth,” she said.
She also told us that Marshal Tito had given her an island in the Adriatic. Not long ago, it had housed criminals, but soon it would be the site of the College of Brotherhood. (Some of the children had gone with her to check it out. “It was only rocks,” Brahim says, “nothing but rocks. She began climbing around, pointing—‘This will be the sports center, here the club, here the office . . .’ When we left, Tito gave each of us a watch.”)
Recently, I interviewed Rajko Medenica, Tito’s doctor, who had given the Yugoslav leader cellular therapy shots believed to slow the aging process. “Tito was a bon vivant,” the doctor said, “and for him, your mother was one of the greatest figures of the artistic world. She visited him on Brioni, his favorite island, and he asked me to come there. He said, ‘I would like for this lady to stay exactly as she is now.’ I can’t remember how many times I gave her injections.”
Maybe cellular therapy supplied her with strength for the demon housekeeping she practiced. Her last night in Berlin in my apartment, she redecorated. When I got up in the morning, I found my housekeeper sitting speechless on the sofa. The living room had been remodeled. Josephine had managed to move a couch, a big TV set, even a Biedermeier secretary. On top of the secretary, she had set a blue crystal vase holding a red plastic rose that an admirer had given her the night before. I was in shock. Still, I managed to say thanks and go to comfort the housekeeper, because Josephine had also cleaned the kitchen, which the housekeeper took as a tacit reproach.
After breakfast, she suddenly announced that she was going to go to the market because, she said, “I want to buy meat, butter, and eggs. You know, Jean-Claude, they are much better here than in France.”
“Mother, that’s crazy,” I said with a laugh. “By the time you arrive home, you will have an omelet.”
Not liking my answer, Josephine went across the hallway and woke my neighbor, Eugene Cicero (she had already fallen in love with his son). To his astonishment, she enlisted him to accompany her and off they went on a mad food-buying spree—which he ended up paying for, of course.
When they returned, I greeted her at the door dressed in a crazy new outfit I had recently bought on a trip to Carnaby Street, then the fashion center of “mod, swinging London.” I had hoped for a “bravo” from her. Instead, she sneered. “My poor darling,” she said. “Don’t you know that fashion, like life, is an endless cycle?” Then, inexplicably, she added, “Oh my God, I hope you’re not doing drugs.”
I was puzzled by her remark because I had never done drugs. I wondered if it wasn’t my outfit that had caused her snap judgment. I didn’t have much time to reflect on that, however, because suddenly she was off on one of her reveries.
“When I was with Picasso and Jeannot [Jean Cocteau], I would go to that whorehouse, and on the third floor, there was an opium tent, and poor Jean would succumb to drugs,” she recalled.
Her amazing story set off all kinds of questions in my mind. “What was the saintly Josephine doing in a whorehouse?” I wondered. And though I knew Cocteau was gay, I was dying to ask her, “Mother, did you f. . . Picasso?” But I knew that if I’d broached that subject, she would never again open up her past to me.
Rushing for the plane, she continued her lessons. “Your introduction last night was very nice,” she told me in the car. “But, don’t forget, when you are in a foreign country, you always do two things: You praise the blue sky above and the most famous person of that moment.” Then another lesson. “Jean-Claude, never be ashamed of what you are doing. But do the best. Even if you are a street cleaner, be proud of having the best-cleaned streets in the city.”
With ten thousand marks and still another new set of luggage (again, gifts from me), she left for Monte Carlo, from which she wrote to Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, explaining that she would be playing Berlin, Munich, Frankfort, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg in January, and that she and I had made this plan together.
“These five great performances are to be given to help poor children of each city and Israel, and to help me pay the rest due on my house. I do not wish another shock like the one that happened to me at the Milandes. We will need your help, tax-wise, organization-wise, publicity-wise, etc. Jean-Claude will certainly contact you either by telephone or by correspondence. Please do try to help us.”
The projected German tour was entirely in her head—it was never going to happen—which didn’t stop her from suggesting that I should contact not only Willy Brandt, but also the the jet-setting Krupp munitions heir, who lived on an allowance of nine hundred thousand dollars a year. “He is very interesting and very generous,” she said. (She had not forgotten the largesse of his father and his grandfather when she had first come to Berlin with La Revue Nègre.)
In March 1971, she was in Berlin again to perform at a gay ball. She had to work with a strange pianist who didn’t know her routine, the show was terrible, and she was angry with herself. “Next time, mon chéri, you will be in charge,” she told me as we fled the place.
Again, we talked till all hours. She was planning a tour of Brazil, but was concerned lest the Brazilian producer go broke as the Italian one had done the year before. I advised her to have the money put in escrow in Paris before she left.
Then I showed her the phonograph record I had just made. It was my first, and for the liner notes, in the time-honored tradition of show business, I had lied about everything. I claimed to have gone to Paris (after the death of my father) to study acting with Michel Simon and dancing with Roland Petit. “Do not go into show business,” said Josephine. “The artist’s life is very difficult and ugly.”
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