Josephine Baker
Page 56
Air France always treated Josephine not as a VIP but as a marvelous old aunt. We were baby-sat by the flight attendants, and it was like Brazil all over again. With her feet off the ground, Josephine became another person. “Mon Jean-Claude, I’m happy you’re with me,” she said, “and that you will be discovering America. It is a great country with great people.” I couldn’t believe my ears, I had thought she hated the United States, and here she was sounding like a lovesick girl.
Strictly speaking, we didn’t go straight to America, we went to Cuernavaca, where Josephine’s friend Bob Brady had been living since 1961. “When you wake up in the morning,” she said, “a servant will be at your bedside with fresh-squeezed juice on a silver tray.”
Bob Brady was a painter and tapestry designer; his house was splendid and simple at once, but Josephine found it hard to breathe in the high altitude. We got her an oxygen tank.
No sooner had we arrived than Stephen Papich flew down from Los Angeles. He was the one who had managed to get her booked into the Ahmanson Theatre. She was to open in two weeks, but the tickets were not moving, and Stephen wanted to discuss ways in which she might help save the show.
He needn’t have wasted his breath. “It’s not my problem,” she said of the poor advance sales, and though her contract promised her eighty-five hundred dollars per performance, she now wanted ten thousand dollars, and twenty thousand dollars on a matinee day. This ensured that her producers would go broke.
Being determined not to go broke herself, however, she took a step she thought would guarantee her future. In Mexico, she married Bob Brady. Not formally. Often, she gave herself absolution without the interference of a priest; why not marry the same way? It was Brady, a handsome homosexual (Josephine believed he was also very wealthy), who is said to have suggested the union. The idea suited Josephine. No sex, but plenty of money, at a time when she didn’t want the one, and craved the other.
“You are my good husband in spirit . . . without any ties,” she told Brady. “It would not work otherwise because I am a nomad from the desert . . . it will be a pure marriage without sex because sex spoils everything.” She suggested exchanging their vows “before God, and not man—in church Sunday morning alone. . . . No one must know about this . . . even we . . . must not speak about it again.”
We did indeed go to church that Sunday morning. The Mass was celebrated by Sergio Mendez Arceo, known as “The Red Bishop.” (He was a friend of Fidel Castro, and brought animals and mariachi bands into the cathedral to make the farmers feel at home.) After the service, Josephine bawled him out. “I talked about you with the Holy Father,” she said. “He wants you to stop all that nastiness.” The bishop just smiled and gave her his blessing, as she knelt to kiss his ring.
Next day, she sent me back to Los Angeles with Stephen, requesting that I keep the reporters happy until she got there. I gave interviews according to her instructions—though it wasn’t me reporters wanted to talk to. I also met Ivan Harold Browning, who had been with her in Shuffle Along and who told me about her great success in that show; he was the first of many—Bricktop, Lydia Jones, Bessie Buchanan, Alberta Hunter, Sam Wooding—whom I would find in America who would help me discover those first nineteen years of Josephine’s life, the years she had tried so hard to erase.
When she arrived from Mexico, Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders came to our suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel to see the costumes. Without changing from her slacks, she put on black satin shoes, a black fox muff, and paraded, describing the gown that went with the shoes and the muff. “Red velvet, with a train . . .”
Next, she slipped into white shoes and a white fur hat. In a trembling voice, Jack said, “Josephine, this is wonderful, but where are the dresses?”
The show was to open in four days. “Don’t worry,” she said, “they’re in Paris; it’s just that Raymonde and Catherine are waiting for their money.”
Close to apoplexy, Jack tried again. “Josephine, when you left New York last June, we gave you a check for forty thousand dollars to pay for costumes, you signed a contract.”
“Oh,” she said sweetly, “I’m so sorry. I thought it was an advance on my salary and I spent it.”
Checkmate. Jack and Howard had no funds left, and Raymonde and Catherine were not inclined to part with the clothes until they saw some dollars.
“Call your friend Michou,” Josephine instructed me. “His place is full every night, he must have lots of money.”
At that point, Michou had met Josephine twice. When I woke him—it was 5 A.M. in Paris—to ask him to pay for her costumes, he thought I was insane. Luckily, Ivan Harold Browning showed up to take Josephine off to dinner.
I advised Jack and Howard to forget the forty thousand dollars. “Find more money for the costumes, and take it out of her pay.”
Howard left for New York on the next flight. “He has friends in the Mafia,” Josephine told me (though this had no basis in fact). “He’ll get the money.”
The following morning, Josephine and I came downstairs and found a limousine waiting to take us to her press conference. “They think I’m dead,” she said, laughing. “This is not a car, it’s a hearse.”
She was equally critical of the journalists gathered to greet her. Wearing a Pauline Trigère dress and cape of brown and white homespun tweed, she sneered at questions about her youthful appearance—“That’s the best you can do?”—and when a reporter inquired about her adopted children, she said, “Why don’t you ask Jean-Claude, who is sitting among you?”
I obliged. I spoke of my brothers and sisters, said I was happy to be for the first time under the sky of America, but was soon interrupted by Josephine, who demanded of the reporters, “Are you interviewing him or me?”
Tickets were starting to sell, but the tension between her and the producers had not eased. While she and I were enjoying our luxurious suite, Jack and Howard were sharing one little room, and were so short of cash they would buy a single club sandwich to share at lunch. They also had a preacher staying with them, and every morning this man called on Josephine to see whether or not she had “the bad eye.” If the answer was yes, the producers wouldn’t talk to her, and I had to serve as go-between.
Josephine’s contract stipulated that she was to be paid in cash—for each performance—five hours before curtain time. She had already sent to Nice for Joseph Bessone, her most recent business adviser. On paper, Monsieur Bessone represented “Lewston Incorporation Monravia,” Josephine’s dummy corporation based in Luxembourg. This company had been created in order “to cultivate the fame of Mrs. Josephine Baker, lyrical artist” and “to present her in the show business world.” Since she was simply an employee of the company, and not its director, she couldn’t be sued—successfully, anyway—no matter how much money she made.
When Monsieur Bessone arrived, not knowing a word of English, I got a new job as translator. (Josephine had decided she would no longer speak English to Jack or Howard.) A man who knew nothing about show business, Bessone adored his client, but wasn’t flimflammed by her.
“Josephine loved schemes,” he told me. “She knew how to spread discord and confusion. In France, it was impossible to find an interested publisher or producer anymore, so there was only America.
“The first time I saw her perform was at Carnegie Hall, and I realized what an American success could be. I was breathless, but so was the rest of the audience, watching a sixty-seven-year-old woman in a body stocking and a few feathers, slim as a sylph, looking half her age. She knew how to erase time, she knew it so well she died of it. Because she refused to recognize her own limits, she pulled once too often on the rope. She didn’t care, it was enough for her to hear the bravos at the end.
“In Los Angeles, she was lost; that’s why I came. You remember all the discussions with important people? Danny Kaye was interested in producing the movie about her life, we were very close on the numbers, but then he made the mistake of calling twice in the same day. She raised t
he price three times, and he dropped out. She was intoxicated with her own success, she thought she was Josephine with forty years less on her shoulders, Josephine who had not had cardiac crises, Josephine to whom the future belonged.”
And to whom the past was a burden. From St. Louis, Richard, Jr., phoned, and she refused to talk to him, as she had refused to talk to his father when he’d come to the Villa Maryvonne. Richard, Jr., asked me to “tell Aunt Tumpy the people here want to give her a ticker-tape parade.” It was the first time I ever heard her childhood nickname, but I was more moved than Josephine. “I will never go back to St. Louis,” she announced.
Her costumes finally arrived, but she had greater things on her mind. She’d heard Ann-Margret was making ninety thousand dollars a week in Las Vegas. “So you see,” she told me, “they’re getting me for nothing.”
Five hours before the curtain, as stipulated, she was paid. We left for the theater, me with half her money in my Jockey shorts, she with the rest of it in her bra.
When I got into my dressing room, I found I had forgotten to bring makeup. Josephine was not sympathetic. “Monsieur wants to go onstage, and Monsieur does not have makeup?” she screamed. “Too bad! Go find some!”
I was paralyzed, but I understood her fury. She was telling me, “You fool, don’t you know you need makeup to get through life? If you don’t have it, they will eat you alive.” She had developed her own protection—makeup was only a metaphor for protection—against an ugly world.
Gene Bell, the black tap dancer, came to my rescue. “I showed you how to use a sponge, make your face smooth,” he remembered. “Lupe, my wife, was there and she thought you looked very handsome, especially in your electric-blue velvet tuxedo.”
After dressing, I walked to the wings. Josephine was standing alone near her quick-change booth (an improvised dressing room close to the stage) in her embroidered body stocking. She looked naked, very old and abandoned, like a character in a Fellini movie. She caught sight of me and said, “Let’s go peek.” Through a hole in the curtain, we peered at the audience. “C’est du beurre,” she whispered. “It’s butter.” A full house, but not a tough one. I laughed. The old pro had pronounced her verdict.
Everything about that night lives in my memory. Going onstage with her voice—“Merde, mon chéri!”—in my ear, and telling myself, she cares for me after all.
Even so, I was petrified. I have no ear for music, my German records had been made in a studio, so performing live seemed a suicidal act. Fortunately, I had a microphone to hold on to, a sort of electronic security blanket, otherwise I might have fled.
The lights dim, the orchestra plays a medley of songs Josephine has made famous, building up to “Ça, C’est Paris.” As the music ends, the stage goes to black. A spotlight finds me. Josephine and I have been mother and son, but I’m getting my show business baptism from a general, not a mother. Her orders still ring in my ears.
“Mesdames et messieurs, bonsoir.”
Look straight up at the balcony, Jean-Claude. Throw them your most beautiful smile, they’re the ones who set the temperature of the room. (Fifty years before, she had discovered that the peanut gallery was generally crowded with people whose pockets may have been empty, but whose hearts were full. These were the ones with whom she felt most comfortable.)
“Buona sera, signore, signori.
“Buenas noches, damas y caballeros.”
Slowly, I begin moving across the huge stage.
Down front are the Nazis who came to America to make their fortunes. Here is where you can make use of your years in Berlin.
“Guten Abend, meine Damen. Guten Abend, meine Herren.”
Now you move to center stage. You’ve said hello to all the little satellite countries. Now you’re addressing the citizens of this country. Now the smile has to explode, Jean-Claude, and the voice has to be very strong!
“And of course, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
“I come to you this evening as a representative of my many brothers and sisters. We have been called the Rainbow Tribe.”
(“Sisters” is the cue—eleven violinists stand up and start to play, very softly, “J’ai Deux Amours.” I choke up, my voice fills with tears.)
“We have been called the children of universal brotherhood. As you can see, time passes. Le temps passe.”
This is supposed to be a joke. When people think of Josephine and her tribe, they still conjure up pictures of a beaming woman surrounded by many babies. I am thirty years old and, dressed by Cardin, hardly the stock image of an orphan. The joke doesn’t work, except to irritate Josephine because I tried it without asking permission. I walk back to the side of the stage. “My brothers and sisters have asked me to introduce to you the lady we all love so much.”
Pause, Jean-Claude. Then shout the words out!
“Our MOTHER!”
The violins stop. The drum roll begins. I count nine beats. I bend over, gesturing toward the spot where she will appear, my hand reaching the floor as if I’m cleaning it. I look across the stage, smiling my most beautiful smile. The spotlight—the famous pink gel that keeps Josephine looking young—jumps all over, as if searching for her, then stops abruptly.
By now, my nervousness is gone. Suddenly everything seems to be working. The audience is holding its collective breath, and all at once, she is there, just as lungs are ready to burst. People stand and scream, applauding, when I have barely finished shouting, “JOSEPHINE BAKER!”
“Is it for me?” she asks demurely, acknowledging the welcome. “Do you remember me?” Another ovation. It’s a miracle. The tired old lady is gone, here’s this vision of strength and youth, and I’m an idiot to have been worried for her. Then she touches the five-foot-high headdress she is wearing, and confides, “I can’t move with this thing on.” She sticks her head through the curtain so Yvonne can remove the burden, while keeping up a running commentary. “Ooh la la, I just got a pin in my scalp; in the old days, with the bananas, I did not have these problems.”
I remember racing toward my dressing room to change, hearing on the speaker, “Jean-Claude, come help Mother,” and reversing direction, somehow making it back in time to lead her down into the audience so she could hand out roses, read palms, flirt, seduce, enchant.
She told the crowd how when I was a young boy I had held on to her skirt because I was afraid to fall, “and today, it is I who need his strong arm. Because if I fall today, I won’t be able to get up and come to you.” Applause, during which she asks me, sotto voce, “How old are you?” “Twenty-six,” I say. She turns with a mischievous look to the audience and says, “Jean-Claude, my oldest son, thirty-two years old, let’s have big applause for Jean-Claude.”
Sometimes she was so sharp, but other times she would sit on the apron, right next to the stairs that took her from center stage down into the house, and she would reminisce, and become confused. We had key words written in black ink all over the tops of the stairs to anchor her when she found herself drifting. Like a blind horse who still knows his way home, she was fine until she made a slip, and then the struggle to get back again, the flailings of the orchestra trying to follow her, were frightening. Still, she could put on a show so thrilling that you realized what she might have done if she’d taken the time to rehearse. But she was old, she was tired, she was spoiled.
There were also times when it was plain she was having fun. At the end of the first act, she’d be singing “Bill,” when a black man, ostensibly a paying customer, would run up on the stage, and she, greeting him as her long-lost love, would knock his derby hat off, revealing a head covered with pink curlers and a hairnet. It was an old bit from the twenties, and it tickled Josephine as much as it did the audience.
During the intermission, she sent me out into the house to see what people were saying. In the lobby, two girls were selling record albums with Josephine’s picture on the cover. I got on line, paid my ten dollars, and ran back to her. “Look what I just bought!”
“I had no voice on the second night,” she said, “because you forgot to have the air conditioning in the limousine turned off, so it must be a terrible record. Thank God Jean-Claude discovered your thievery!”
Suddenly, she has recovered her use of the English language, despite her vow to speak only French in front of poor hapless Jack.
It was touch-and-go whether she would return for the second act, but a truce was finally called. She did a number in jeans and metal-studded leather, like a Hell’s Angel on a Harley-Davidson; she presided over a dance contest (her favorite part of the show), and there was a spectacular crossover in which she looked like a drawing of herself from the thirties, arrogant and triumphant in white satin, leading two rhinestone-collared white wolfhounds.
At one point I came on with a sealed letter and a red rose, supposedly from someone in the audience, and presented them to Josephine. She opened the envelope, and looking out into the house, said, “It’s a love letter, nothing is more beautiful than love.” The orchestra played the music from Love Story, Josephine pretended to finish reading, then kissed the rose and handed it to a woman in the front row. “Here, Madame, with my love. Hold it long enough to make a wish, then pass it to your neighbor. I call it my traveling rose.”
The next-to-last number employed a choir of white-robed gospel singers holding lighted candles. Bessie Griffin, a huge-voiced gospel artist—“Jetting for Jesus” was the legend over her publicity pictures—came on with the choir, everybody sang “My Sweet Lord,” and finally, Josephine did “My Way.”
She was tired when it was over, and asked me not to let anyone in to her dressing room. I was standing watch at the door when Bob Brady, her “husband,” who was not staying at the Beverly Hills but at another hotel, arrived with a tiny old lady in a pink satin suit. Her face dead white, she looked like a mummy. “Of course, Jean-Claude, you know Miss Swanson,” Brady said. I went and told Josephine that Gloria Swanson was waiting with Bob, and she said to let them in. Then Jack Jordan arrived with a wildly excited Johnny Mathis, who threw himself at Josephine’s feet, murmuring, “My queen, oh, my queen.” Josephine enjoyed every minute of it.