Josephine Baker

by Jean-Claude Baker

  The second funeral was set for Saturday, April 19, and on the eighteenth (a sad birthday for me), Mara and I stood guard beside her coffin at the Athanee. A steady stream of mourners came by, people from the region, chic Monte Carlo ladies, veterans dressed in their old regimental colors. Some could hardly stand, but they were there to give Josephine a last military salute. “She was one of us,” they said. Old peasants with leathery faces and knotty hands, the kind of men I had grown up with, walked past, crying, and I knew they cried seldom. When their cows died, when hail ruined their harvests, not for women. But they cried for Josephine.

  I remember a young blind girl brought by her mother. She had the child touch the coffin, as though she believed Josephine had special healing powers. I marveled at the way all these people had been changed by her, and I brooded, blaming myself for having killed her. If I’d begged forgiveness for the interview I never gave, if I hadn’t been so stubborn, I would have been there to force the little blue pill between her teeth. (“My first reaction when I heard Josephine died was, somebody forgot to give her the pill,” says Yvonne Stoney. “I knew it, I just knew it.”)

  We stood there, Mara and I, his heart filled with anger, mine with guilt.

  Richard and his family came to Roquebrune. “We went to Josephine’s house, but we weren’t welcome,” Guylaine says. “Jo said he and his children were having a family reunion.”

  “Not even my father was invited in,” adds her brother Alain. “Jo Bouillon was very hard.”

  Once again, I saw Richard being turned away from that house, but I had to respect Jo’s authority, his duties were not easy.

  All the arrangements for the ceremonies were being handled by Princess Grace, and this funeral was more personal (no press allowed in the church) than the first. Jack Jordan came to say goodbye, and Jacques Abtey too.

  Brialy, Levasseur, Dauzonne arrived from Paris; so did Maguy Chauvin and Marie Spiers. There was some whispering that a young woman hidden behind a heavy black veil was Stellina’s birth mother. Princess Grace wore black, with dark glasses and a single strand of pearls, and the coffin lay inside the sanctuary, a prerogative generally reserved for royalty.

  Just before the funeral, there had been a wedding in St. Charles, so we entered a church decorated for a celebration of life, not death, there was rice all over the floor. And in the silence—no jostling, no commotion here—the voices, pure and sweet, of a boys’ choir rose in farewell to the woman who, the bishop reminded us, had wanted “the unity of God’s children.”

  At the cemetery, to my surprise, the coffin, rather than being put in the earth, was hoisted onto an altar in the open air in the midst of a kind of Greek temple held up by four columns.

  Then the family went back to the Villa Maryvonne, and I prepared lunch with a touch of feast about it because it was Mara’s seventeenth birthday. We were worried for him, his grief and anger were remorseless. Marie Spiers, helped by Maryse Bouillon and her friend Jacky Ducos, set the table on the terrace, and after lunch and birthday cake, Jo Bouillon asked me to come with him to Josephine’s room. It was still the only place in the house where one could talk privately.

  I said I was sad that Josephine’s blood relations had not been invited to lunch, and Jo said he hadn’t known what to do. “When I left France, Josephine and I had friends in common. Each time I came back, more of them were enemies. I was afraid her family might want something, I felt I had to protect our children.”

  Jo told me he was worried about the depth of Mara’s grief. “Please speak to him, I only want his good. They are all my children and I am going to try my best for them.”

  Eighteen months ago, in this same room, Josephine had asked me to help with Jean-Claude, and here again I was being asked to be the big brother, just like at home in St. Symphorien, I had been the big brother to my sisters. In a strange way, that’s the only part of family life I do well.

  I took Mara up to the hills above the villa, and heard him out. He was furious with Jo—“He abandoned my mother!” I told him Jo had come back to try and finish Josephine’s job. “We’re not here to judge.”

  We went home, had dinner, turned on the television, and there was Josephine. Prince Rainier had made a gift to France of the videotape of her last Red Cross gala, and tonight it was being shown nationwide. We had been feeling drained, the spirit of the house gone, and suddenly she was there with us, so alive the room was filled with her.

  Jo recognized that the older children needed to talk about their mother as much as the younger ones did. They had all loved Josephine, and fought with her, and wanted to understand what had just happened to them. He suggested we all go upstairs and out onto the terrace. It was a soft night, the moon shone, and the bay of Monte Carlo shimmered at our feet the way Fredi Washington had described it on her first visit in 1926, “as if someone had thrown a handful of diamonds into the water.” There was something jarring, out of kilter, about grief in the midst of so much beauty.

  “Josephine touched us deeply,” Jo said. “She hurt us, but we have to forget that, she wasn’t aware of it, she was a very special human being, difficult to explain, and we are going to miss her a lot, but we have to be strong because she would have wanted it.”

  Then he told us a story. “We had just got married when your mother went on the road. It was after the war, and France had nothing. The Milandes château was in such bad shape we could not live in it, there was no money or material to repair it, so while she was away, I restored a little house on the grounds. I cut the wood, I painted it, hung curtains in the front windows, made a sign that said J’AI DEUX AMOURS, and put it over the front door.

  “When Josephine came back, I picked her up at the train station, and driving home, I told her I had a surprise for her. I couldn’t wait to see her reaction to the nest I had prepared for us. Well, she came in, dropped her coat, and started off to see her newborn piglets. I said, ‘Josephine, have you seen what the sign says?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s very nice.’ She was already running toward the farm.”

  His voice was trembling. You loved her, and she hurt you, that was the price you paid for being with Josephine.

  Jari, the most reasonable of all of us, doesn’t quite agree. “She never hurt me. When we older ones were five, Daddy and Mother talked candidly to us. They said we were adopted, that our parents could not provide for us, and that Mother had taken us since she could not have children of her own. It helped us later on when we were growing up with a black brother, a yellow brother, a red brother. You were not shocked, you understood this other little child was from a family who could not feed him, and after a few months, he was your brother.

  “I have always admired Mother as a great artist, but she was also the mother hen. Sometimes she wanted you to mature, become an important person; at the same time she tried to keep you a child.

  “But once she passed away, life was different, we grew up. Like with green fruit, it was the time to ripen.”

  “She brought Paradise on earth,” says Yvette Malaury. “If we are still here taking care of the castle, we don’t do it for the owner, we do it for Josephine. Even when I am tired, and I have to climb the stairs to show the château to the tourists, she is the one giving me the will to go on. I hear her voice in my ear, ‘Allez, allez,’ and I keep going.”

  Jacqueline Abtey thinks Josephine is taking bows in Heaven. “She probably sat down directly, without being invited, at St. Peter’s right (unless she pushed her natural temerity and went directly to God himself). And she must be laughing, she must be thinking we are not so far from the truth about Josephine, she must be sending us some powerful and meaningful glances. A quick pirouette, and she will disappear behind the great curtain of Eternity, where all light is truth. The devil wouldn’t have claimed her, he would have been too afraid she might convert him!”

  As she had converted multitudes. Think of that young girl, newly arrived in Paris, Caroline Reagan’s “bird of paradise.” Jean Vergne, the great chef,
remembered in his seventies his days as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in a restaurant kitchen, scrounging up pennies to go with his friends to see Josephine Baker, la Perle Noire, on the stage of the Folies-Bergère. “Ah, Josephine,” he says, still smiling at the thought. “We were hungry kids, we wanted to bite her, we wanted to eat her raw.”

  Six months after we left her on the altar in the Monaco cemetery, France-Dimanche ran an indignant headline: EVEN A DOG DESERVES A BURIAL, it proclaimed, over a piece that said Josephine’s body was still awaiting inhumation.

  For all this time, it had been stored in a stone shed where the gardeners kept their tools. It was left to Madame Armita to explain the delay. The princess, who had extended to Josephine the privilege of burial in Monte Carlo, was still considering various samples of black marble, but she had not yet decided on the right stone for the tomb.

  On October 2, 1975, Josephine was finally laid to rest. I stayed away. I didn’t want to see her put in the ground, I preferred to think of her lying under the sun of the Riviera in her little Greek temple.

  Marie was there though, and Jo and the children, and faithful Jacques Abtey. “None of her ‘good’ friends from the old times,” says Jacques. “But that’s life, you understand. It was hard for me to grasp that she could just disappear like that, after having done all she had done. There was the hole in the earth, and the princess of Monaco standing motionless, facing me across the open grave for an hour. We were waiting for the priest to come, and he was late.”

  It was strange. She was buried exactly fifty years after she first danced onto a Paris stage. Fifty years to the day.

  Epilogue

  AN OPEN LETTER TO MY SECOND MOTHER

  “You were a hustler; I’m a hustler too”

  Petite Maman,

  It’s over. Or is it? We still live together every night at Chez Josephine. For seven years, people have come trooping into my restaurant, and every so often, one of them asks, “Is Josephine cooking tonight?”

  I laugh, thinking that you’re probably cooking up something somewhere, but that would take too long to explain, so I just say, “Yes, in spirit.”

  You took your secrets with you when you left us. The sixty containers stored for you in Marie Spiers’s name were sold by Jo through a Paris auction house, your treasure scattered to the four corners of the Earth. But the safe in your Paris apartment was already empty, your last will had disappeared, and most of the fabled jewels that had been stashed in a Monte Carlo bank vault were gone too. I hope Margaret got them, God knows she earned them.

  Any other gems that surfaced were disposed of by Sotheby’s in Zurich. (Again, not under your name, because of all the financial claims still pending against you.) Even those few baubles amazed Jari. “The diamonds,” he said. “I didn’t think she had kept so much.”

  For me, you were the diamond. I loved you. When you were cruel, I blamed your actions on a racist society, and the injuries you had suffered. I wanted the verdict of history to read, “Guilty, but with an explanation.”

  We were both bastards, and in a way, I liked that; it made me a brother to little Tumpy.

  “Maybe she did to us what had been done to her,” says Jean-Claude number one, trying, like me, to figure out his life with you. “Maybe she broke down inside, asking herself, ‘Who do they think they are? I did not live in a castle when I was a little girl, I lived in misery, and they should have a taste of it.’ ”

  Jean-Claude remembers your devising an embarrassing punishment when one of the children stole a few pennies for candy. “Nobody confessed,” he says, “and our mother had to break the pact that bound us. Like the master in slave times. So we were forced to march through the village with signs that said, I’M A THIEF hanging around our necks.

  “Another time she locked me in the coal cellar of the château. It was dark, there were rats, and she would come and scream through the basement window, ‘Confess!’

  “Elvira and Caroline had survived so much hardship, and then had to adapt to a new life after slavery, and our mother must have lived with all that in her head, with a history of things not really buried, only covered by the ashes of time. Everybody was satisfied with the fairy tale of Josephine Baker coming out of poverty, sailing on a boat to stardom, but she had to live with her ghosts.”

  When I showed your birth certificate to Jean-Claude, it suddenly became clear to him why you always called Fifi, that little dog, “Freda.” It is hard for us to understand how you could joke about your given name with a dog, but not share your past with us.

  Trusting no one but yourself, you kept your own counsel, Mother. No wonder you fled St. Louis; Bob Russell’s private railroad car was the golden coach that carried you to the ball. But why did you bury the springtime of your life? Why, over the next half century, did you pretend that the radiant girl I saw in pictures on the walls of the Hudgins’ house, and in Fredi Washington’s scrapbooks, never existed?

  The world knelt at Josephine Baker’s feet, but Tumpy was too busy to make peace with her past. A chameleon, you absorbed what you needed, in show business or in life, even if it meant stealing somebody’s act, somebody’s money, somebody’s lover. Discovering you—not the fiction but the fact—I have been shaken as when I was a small boy, and the bigger kids told me there was no Santa Claus.

  It was easy for me to love you because I was always so angry with my birth mother, with her passivity and the way she surrendered to other people’s rules. One day when I was ten years old, I found her crying in her room. “Why don’t you divorce Father?” I said.

  “Don’t ask me that,” she said. “Without a father, your sisters would never find good husbands.”

  You were different, daring, you broke rules, you fought back. I admired that, while my affection for my real mother was tinged with scorn. (I didn’t know then of her bravery during the war.) In the end, she died as she had lived, apologizing. She asked me to forgive her for not having been the mother I needed, then gathered a last breath to whisper, “Excuse me,” as she died in the nurse’s arms. Excuse me. I wanted to scream. I wanted her to scream. It was not in her nature.

  Neither of you was very forthcoming about the past, but then, I didn’t tell you everything, either. You never knew about my aunt Dinette, a beautiful Creole from Madagascar married to my mother’s brother. When I was seven years old, she and Uncle Lucien and my cousins came to visit us in St. Symphorien, and those children, true high yellers, were the sensation of the neighborhood. They knew about crocodiles, and gave us presents of ivory and ebony. To me, maybe on some level you were the reincarnation of Tata Dinette, whom I adored and never saw again.

  At that time I was called Yan-Yan (my little sister could not pronounce Jean-Claude), but when I moved to Paris, I left Yan-Yan behind. Or so I thought. He stayed with me, despite myself, and in me, you knew him. As I knew Tumpy in you, before I ever heard her name.

  For six months after you died, Jo Bouillon remained in Paris. I had offered him the use of an apartment that I owned there, and we went together to the fifth floor of number two villa Dancourt in Montmartre. He could not believe it. My apartment was right next door to the one he had lived in during the war, when he met you.

  “Josephine would come there at any hour of the night and wake me up,” he said. “After a while, I just left the door open. Often in the morning, I would find her fully dressed, sleeping beside me.”

  Eventually, Jo returned to Argentina, along with Jari, Akio, Stellina, Noël, and Koffi. I had told him I wanted nothing from the estate, but that I would keep the name of Baker. I said I approved of his decision to try and keep the family together, and I would help as much as I could.

  Back in New York, I started a cable television show called Telefrance-USA (John J. O’Connor of The New York Times called it “The most ambitious, sophisticated weekly production on cable TV.”), and even there, I felt your presence. Because of you, I won an Ace Award for a show called “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Legendary Josephine Baker.”


  “Josephine is still here trying to direct things,” Jack Jordan said.

  I kept in touch with Brahim and Jean-Claude when I visited Paris, and it was in Paris that I saw Jo for the last time. He was holding your grandchild, Marie-Audrey (Marianne’s first baby) and he was happy. He died in Buenos Aires in 1984, with five of the children at his bedside.

  As you had predicted I would, I liked New York, and in 1983 I became an American citizen. The three wishes of my childhood were coming true. I did not do my military service, I no longer bore my father’s name, and even if there would never be a statue of me like Napoléon the Third on a horse, two out of three wasn’t bad.

  In 1986, I opened a Chez Josephine in New York, trying to re-create the ambiance of your first club at 40 rue Fontaine. I even have a pig, in memory of Albert, but mine is made of wood.

  Fredi Washington, Maude Russell, Evelyn Anderson, Sweets Edison—they all drop in, they feel at home there.

  In 1989, Brahim and I went to St. Louis for a “Bal la Baker,” sponsored by Michel Roux, a successful businessman turned patron of the arts, and a one-time employee of yours. “When I was fourteen,” he says, “I spent my summer vacation working at Les Milandes. Josephine got involved with everything; she would tell me how to dress a table even if she didn’t know how to do it. She was like Leona Helmsley.”

  It was in St. Louis that Brahim and I met our cousins, Richard, Jr., and Clifford, and I begged them to share anything they could remember of your mother and grandmother. “Elvira would always be sitting in a rocking chair,” Clifford told me. “I was only a little kid, I had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to me. My grandmother Carrie’s husband, Tony Hudson, was a nice guy, I enjoyed him, but it was a hundred years ago.”

  About you, his famous aunt, he was cool. “I would say she was an entertainer, that’s all. She was a French citizen, what she did with her life over there was her business. So she adopted children? Fine. She was under no obligation to take care of or support her family here. I had no attachment to those children she adopted, they were her children.