So many people came back, Vincente Minnelli, Mayor Tom Bradley, Isaac Stern, the French consul. Flowers kept arriving, and there was a champagne supper party given by a fashion authority known as Mr. Blackwell.
Next morning, at a breakfast meeting, we got the word. And the axe. She was pruning away all competition. Gene Bell (whose dancing had been praised by a critic as “the evening’s most successful segment”) would no longer be appearing in both acts. “The public is bored by too much tap dancing,” announced Josephine. Bessie Griffin, who had brought down the house, would also be cut back. “No encore, people don’t like gospel except in church.”
Me? She eliminated one of my two songs. I should have been prepared; last night, after my second number, she had made an entrance and cut off my applause. (I had been nervous when it was my turn to sing, but she had coached me. “Go to the fattest woman in the first row, charm her. ‘Madame, I have brought you the most beautiful perfume in the world, the perfume of the Champs-Élyseés.’ Then the music will start for the song ‘Champs-Élysées.’ ” It had worked like magic—too well, maybe.)
The Variety review was hard on her. It described her “wobbling across the stage in one uncomfortable-looking, outlandish outfit after another,” accused her of hitting “harsh, sour notes,” and “forgetting words and beats.”
But other critics—and the audiences—loved Josephine and the show. We heard that Marlene Dietrich had asked the theater manager about the lighting. “I’m not surprised,” said Josephine. “That German cow has copied me all my life. The only thing left for her to copy will be my funeral.”
On our second night, Gene Bell came in with a notice from The Hollywood Reporter. After much praise for Josephine (“unbelieveably beautiful,” “expressive voice,” “great talent”), the reviewer turned to me: “Jean-Claude Baker, one of Miss Baker’s adopted children, handled the introductions with ease and also offered a couple of pleasant and bouncy songs.” Elated, I ran to my mentor. “Maman, look what he said about me—”
I had thought she would be pleased because she had taught me how to behave onstage; instead, she was angry. “My name, Jean-Claude, do you know what it is to have my name? It took me fifty years to make it—and to keep it. And do you think it was fun? Don’t you think I’m tired of singing ‘J’ai Deux Amours’ over and over like an idiot?”
I hadn’t asked for her name. I wasn’t listed in the program, even as Jean-Claude Rouzaud. But because she played the game of Universal Mother, because she’d worked out the introductions—“My mother!” “My oldest son!”—it was only natural that the press assumed I was Jean-Claude Baker. Nobody in America even knew that her children bore the name of Bouillon, not Baker. Leaving her dressing room, I was numb, destroyed. I had never tired of her singing “J’ai Deux Amours”; even when she improvised on the tune, it didn’t occur to me that she was doing it out of boredom, that for her, the song was a martyrdom.
That night, introducing her, speaking of my “brothers and sisters,” I felt like a fake. But the lights, the music, the applause, melted my rancor. And Josephine was superb. She asked Ella Fitzgerald to come up from the audience and join in singing “My Sweet Lord”—it was a way of keeping Bessie Griffin in her place—and when the last note ended, Josephine, in a simple black velvet dress that cost a simple five thousand dollars, knelt before Ella, putting her head on the great singer’s knees. She was Mary Magdalene at the feet of Jesus. The audience screamed as the curtain fell and rose and fell again on the tableau.
When it came down for the third time and Josephine still hadn’t moved, I knew something was wrong. Jack Jordan and I ran on, carried her off, and I got one of the little blue pills and put it under her tongue. Her jaw was frozen. We unbuttoned her dress, and she regained consciousness. She’s dying, I told myself, and I was ashamed of the bad thoughts I’d had. This is Josephine, don’t try to understand her, try to make her life easier. That’s why you’re here, and it’s enough.
During the day there was constant madness and meanness; at night, when she and I were alone, she was different. We slept in the same bed, but there was nothing sexual about it. Once the lights were out, she talked—about Stellina, whom we both missed, about anything that came into her head. And I listened, spellbound. But I realized now that she was sick, and sometimes I would get into a cold sweat: What if she died in bed right next to me?
At intervals, I would rise on my right elbow and bend over her to hear if she was still breathing, and she would open her eyes, half amused, half upset. “You thought I was dead? Well, I’m not!” I would lie down again, and she would kiss my cheek. “I know you care for me, mon chéri.” But with first light, she would rise, the madwoman again.
With seats selling out, she became impossible. Not only with her producers—she was still fighting about the Carnegie Hall record royalties—but with tycoons like Hugh Hefner and Bob Banner. Offered a TV movie of the week, she demanded three million dollars. “Plus hotel and airline tickets for my children.” She saw it as a bargain, “because if I were to die, you would get a lot of free publicity.”
She accepted an award from a black organization, but refused to lead off the dancing at their ball. “I’m too old,” she said, “let my son Jean-Claude do it.”
I asked a pretty black girl to dance, and got hell for it. “Why did you choose that girl? Leave my people alone!”
Again, I was lost. Didn’t she preach that we must be color-blind?
One afternoon a friend of hers came by the hotel with a Yorkshire terrier puppy. “My patients took up a collection to buy him because they love you so much,” he said. After he’d gone, she laughed. “He’s the director of an insane asylum; I don’t want to know how he got the money.”
I named the puppy Moustique, and Josephine ordered him a hamburger. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, a room service hamburger cost seven dollars, and he ate only a little piece, so she put the rest in the refrigerator. Next day, when I was hungry, she told me to eat it. Again, I was resentful; she was feeding me leftovers from the dog.
After our last performance at the Ahmanson, she flew back to France so Princess Grace could name her Woman of the Year. (The award was being given by an American magazine.)
At some point during the few days she was at home, she was interviewed by the satiric weekly newspaper Minute, which printed a half-mocking, half-rueful piece reprising her life—the childhood, the military service, the career, the spending. “And the children, in spite of themselves, are dragged into this tragi-comedy. They are at Les Milandes when Josephine slaps the priest who reproaches her for having a virgin carved in her own image for the chapel. It is total dementia.”
Now, the reporter said, Josephine’s idée fixe was a college of universal brotherhood to be built on the island Tito put at her disposal. “I’m a woman who doesn’t give up, and neither do my children. When we were expelled from Les Milandes, we were ready to go and live in a tent in Libya!”
Moïse was used by the paper to illustrate Josephine’s “tragi-comedy.” She had chosen him “to represent the Jews in her cosmopolitan community.” As a child “he had to wear, all day long, a skull cap on his head.” Now nineteen, he refused to be a symbol anymore, and declared himself a Catholic. To “Uncle” Marc Vromet-Buchet, he said, “I’m not Jewish, I’m from Brittany, and I have a brother!”
“It is true, it is difficult for a woman approaching 69 to bring about order in a home,” wrote the interviewer. “Especially when the home does not really exist. The twelve children Josephine collected . . . never really were a family. . . . She wanted to make them into children of the world. But the world is not a home. The children of Josephine Baker have remained the children of their fathers.”
In New York, I was staying with my old friend from Liverpool, Peter Brown. He was now president of the Robert Stigwood organization that had produced Jesus Christ Superstar. Josephine had asked me to find out if Stigwood would like to take over her tour.
Peter Brown said s
he was too demanding. “Like a lot of those old-time stars. She comes into a hotel and wants the curtains changed because they aren’t blue. Producers don’t mind that when a star sells tickets, but with Josephine, unfortunately, only a few old people remember her.”
We were to resume the tour, opening at the Fisher in Detroit on October 21. Josephine didn’t get back from France until October 20. On the way into the city from the Detroit airport, she asked the black taxi driver where he went to eat with his sweetheart, then told him to take us there. At the restaurant, she wolfed down chitlins and peach cobbler, and invited people at other tables to come see her show.
Some of them did. The show built. One night, Bobby Mitchell appeared backstage. “Ma Josephine.” “Mon Bobby.” They talked about the old days at the Casino and the Folies.
She and I could still get a good laugh. In Detroit, she sent me out for laxative chewing gum. I had never heard of that in Europe, and on the way back from the drug store, I tried a few sticks. Later in our suite, Josephine and I were running to the bathroom, laughing like little kids. I was discovering America.
On our last night in Detroit, so many people rushed the box office that the curtain was delayed for forty-five minutes. “You see, Jean-Claude,” Jack Jordan said, “if she’d come to town a little earlier, we would have sold out every show.”
Poor Jack, he was an amateur, a lover, a fan. I talked to him in 1979, and he told me about bringing Josephine back to America for the March on Washington and how he’d gone to Roquebrune ten years afterward to sell her on coming to Carnegie Hall. “She said, ‘Nobody wants me, Jack, they’ve forgotten me. You just stay here with the boys and I’ll fix you some food, I’m not going anyplace, forget about it.’ And I convinced her, and that started the whole thing rolling again, and she said, ‘I am going to take my boy Jean-Claude with me, because he has a lot of talent.’ ”
Jack had talent too, but he was no Shubert, no Nederlander, he couldn’t be tough enough. Josephine needed a Pepito, someone to lock her in a room until she behaved.
The April in Paris Ball, held at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, is a fête beloved of the jet set; it raises money for French and American charities, and in 1973, Josephine was its star. She enjoyed the big suite with a sunken tub in the bathroom that the Waldorf’s Claude Phillipe (god of the ball) had assigned to her. Bob Brady was in town, too, and they went everywhere together.
I remember lunching with them in Harlem, and Josephine’s kissing every child in the place. Never had I seen her behave as she did in America. She seemed more natural.
The night of the ball, an interminable fashion show preceded Josephine’s entrance. From where she and I stood waiting, we could see the audience, and suddenly, she erupted. “Look at those women shivering in those little fur stoles, so proud of themselves! God knows what they had to do to get them.”
The outburst caught me off guard. She, who had gleefully used her body to get where she was going, had turned into a stony moralist. Her disapproval set the tone for that night’s performance; she wasn’t good, and cut the act short.
The next day, we heard from Paris that Marie-Hélène de Rothschild wanted Josephine to be part of the Bal à Versailles, another big charity party. “No!” Josephine said. “I will do nothing for the Rothschilds, they stole Les Milandes!” How? “They did not come to rescue me. You know, I met them when I arrived with La Revue Nègre.” (This still did not explain to me why they should have saved Les Milandes forty-eight years later.)
That same day, it was reported in Suzy’s column that Josephine was going to marry Bob Brady. “He put that in to get publicity for his paintings!” Josephine yelled. “I’m going to talk to him!”
But when Bob came by, she said nothing.
After the April in Paris Ball, Josephine and I went to the reopening of Chez Bricktop, and the next night, we saw a Broadway show called Raisin. (It was a musical version of Raisin in the Sun.) Debbie Allen was the ingenue. “That girl should play the young Josephine in the movie of my life,” said Josephine.
Our next date took us back to the West Coast, and I thought we should go there as soon as possible. We had proved that only Josephine’s presence on the scene could sell tickets. But she had decided on a detour to Istanbul, to celebrate the opening of a bridge across the Bosporus. “Jean-Claude, did you know it is a dream of mankind, to unite the Occident and the Orient?”
No, I didn’t know, but I knew publicity in Istanbul would not help us sell the 3,734 seats in the Circle Star Theatre, twenty-five miles from San Francisco. Once again, it was I who was sent to California to smooth things over, while Moustique accompanied Madame to Turkey.
They may have made friends there, but Gasser Tabakoglu, Josephine’s official translator, was not one of them. “She was nasty to me all during her stay,” he says. “She had arrived claiming to be the official ambassador of UNICEF, but two days later, Danny Kaye came, and he was furious. He too claimed to be the official ambassador, not Josephine. They were supposed to open the bridge together, but now he refused. It was finally decided that Josephine would come from the European side and Danny Kaye from the Asian side and they would meet in the middle of the bridge. There were so many people following them—children carrying flowers and dressed in folk costumes, sword dancers, diplomatic leaders and army officers—that the bridge started shaking.
“Josephine and Danny Kaye cut the ribbon, and didn’t speak to each other. And when she was asked about her children, she claimed she even had a Turkish child, which was not true. When I finally put her on the plane, with flowers and the little dog, I said to myself, ‘Thank God she’s gone!’ ”
Gasser’s troubles were over when Josephine’s TWA flight left the ground, but her producers’ troubles were just starting up again. She was to fly to London, stay overnight, and catch an early-morning flight to San Francisco. When the customs agent in London told her Moustique would have to be quarantined—“Even the queen cannot come in with a foreign dog”—Josephine, who had been attempting to hide the fist-sized puppy under her blouse, flew to France. Next morning, she learned there was no flight from Orly that would get her back to the States in time.
Even if all had gone according to plan, the scheduling would have been tight. Josephine was to arrive in San Francisco only a few hours before her opening. A press conference had been scheduled at the airport. All day, we waited. No Josephine. It was hot, and I felt something bad was going to happen. I called London. She had come in on the flight from Istanbul, but after that, all traces of her had been lost.
Meanwhile, bulletins from the Circle Star were jubilant. Opening night was sold out. At 5 P.M., people were already arriving to have dinner in the restaurant connected to the theater. By 6 P.M., we decided to tell the press the truth. We didn’t know where Josephine was.
Jack was a wreck. We’d messed up at the April in Paris Ball, lost money in Detroit; we were still coasting on six-month-old reviews from Carnegie Hall. If we flopped in San Francisco, it was over. Eight P.M. arrived, Josephine did not.
The next day, she got in, took one look at the theater-in-the-round, and exploded. “How can I change costumes in this livestock auction ring?”
“But Josephine,” said Jack, “we’re going to have an electric golf cart.” “No,” she said, “I’m not a cow.” As though cows were customarily transported by golf cart.
We held a press conference, and she was cold but controlled—she’d been opening a bridge, mankind’s dream, Danny Kaye was there, it’s wonderful to be in San Francisco—until a pretty black girl asked, “Miss Baker, what do you think of black people in America today?”
She wheeled on the girl. “How can you use the words ‘black people’? Don’t you know black is the same as nigger? We are colored people!”
The girl remained composed. “Miss Baker, I am black, and black is beautiful. You have been away from home too long, I’m sorry for you.”
A chill spread through the room, the press conference was over. Tha
t night, the show went well, though there were only three hundred people in the house; one of them was Alex Haley. Chauffeured by a theater employee, Josephine came on in the golf cart, like an Amazon on a horse, and caroled, “Hi, everybody, do you love me on my scooter?”
Afterward, they had kept the restaurant open for us, and we had dinner and champagne. We were faking it, trying to be cheerful, but it was like after a defeat in a war.
Back at the hotel, I was lying in bed, in the dark, filled with rage against Josephine. I had given up my club, my name, to go to America with her because she needed someone to protect her, and to put the blue pills under her tongue, but she was too crazy. To disappoint thousands of people, break her producers, wreck a show, it was too much. Idly, I considered strangling her. But she’d made enough front pages, and besides people would say I was her lover.
Josephine was psychic, she could always sense what I was thinking, and she came through the door from the bathroom and said, in her nice-little-girl voice, “Jean-Claude, don’t look at Mother, I’m naked.” I didn’t believe it. The way she said naked, it was an invitation. I’ve seen her so many times naked, in the dressing room, in the hospital, but in the intimacy of the bedroom? Am I crazy? No, I’m not, she is the snake, she is temptation, when she says no it’s yes, when she says yes it’s no.
I look. She’s standing in front of a mirror, her back to me, the only illumination coming from the bathroom. In that half-light, I can make out—dimly—the little neck, the little breasts. The face I can’t see very well. Her head is bald, except for a few downy tufts of gray hair. She seems so defenseless, my anger disappears. I just feel sad.
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