Josephine Baker Read online

  I am going to dance tonight. Not my partner and I. We see it beginning. Josephine is her own creation, and there is no place for a partner who is her equal. Throughout her career, many men will partner her, none will be remembered. Many choreographers will teach her, she will forget their steps and improvise her own.

  But let Fredi get on with the story. “Josephine had to go up on a high platform backstage, and then come down on the stage and meet this guy. And she was on the platform and she was so excited she missed her cue. I felt so sorry because this was a big break for her.

  “When she didn’t come down, they didn’t wait, they just moved on. The guy she was supposed to dance with, he just did a few steps and went on to his next routine. But that didn’t hold her back, she had too much ambition. She knew where she wanted to go.”

  She knew where she didn’t want to go, too, and that was home. In March of 1923, when the company left Chicago for St. Louis, Josephine and Billy were not with them.

  Chapter 10

  YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN, IF YOU DON’T STAY THERE

  “My mother, poor woman, I was ashamed of her”

  Carrie came to the American Theatre in St. Louis, looking for her.

  It was backstage after a performance, the girls rushing to get out, meet dates, taking no notice of the very dark woman who stood near the stage door. Too timid—though that was unlike Carrie—to approach anyone directly, she kept repeating into the air, “Excuse me, do you know where Josephine Baker is?”

  Of all the performers, only Adelaide Hall stopped short, moved by the anxiety in the woman’s voice. “Yes, ma’am, what do you want to know about Josephine Baker?”

  “I’m her mother,” Carrie said. “Do you know where she is?”

  “She’s doing fine,” Adelaide said. “She just didn’t come with us to St. Louis.”

  Carrie thanked her, invited her home “to have some food.” Adelaide declined, but never forgot the encounter.

  Why had Josephine refused to come to St. Louis that spring? It would have been a coup de maître, she could have won the city in a walk. But the victory over herself was not so easy. To forge the armor she hid behind, she had told too many lies. In Philadelphia, she was the daughter of Arthur Wells. In Boston, her father was “a famous lawyer.” In neither place did anyone know different, or question her.

  But St. Louis was dangerous territory, especially with the great public interest in Shuffle Along. Old friends from school, from the neighborhood, from the laundry, would surely come to see her, and maybe someone would tell Willie Wells that his wife was back in town. And what if he showed up one night to remind her that she had promised to spend her life with him, never mind that she was only thirteen years old when she said it?

  Her fears cost her dear. Because the pattern was set; once she started running from her past, she couldn’t stop. The best show that had ever happened for black people, and she was not part of its debut in her own hometown. We can presume that many of the other chorus girls enjoyed her absence, she wasn’t around to take the attention away from them. They must have enjoyed too the fact that the American was a white theater; the only black performer who had played there before was Bert Williams, headlining in the 1920 Ziegfeld Follies. To dance on the stage where Bert Williams had walked, that was one of the things Josephine was denying herself.

  When she rejoined the company, Billy wasn’t with her anymore, he had gone back to Chicago, and nobody but Josephine knew why. In her absence, she found she had been promoted. She was now listed on a separate line in the program as “That Comedy Chorus Girl.”

  They played Atlantic City, opening in June at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre on the boardwalk, and a few days later, Miller and Lyles broke up with Sissle and Blake. Though the four shared equally in the profits of Shuffle Along, the Sissle and Blake songs drew so much notice that Miller and Lyles had been feeling overlooked and undervalued.

  Things fell apart, other things came together. Miller and Lyles went off to write a new show—it would become Runnin’ Wild, another big hit—and took half the Shuffle Along cast with them.

  Al Mayer stayed with Sissle and Blake, and the three produced Plantation Days, in a café at La Marne Hotel. Plantation Days was part Shuffle Along (the music, some of the performers, including Lottie Gee and Josephine), but it incorporated other acts too. Johnny Hudgins came in, so did his wife, Mildred, and a girl named Mildred Smallwood who danced on toe and played the violin.

  Opening night, with Will Marion Cook conducting, Plantation Days was applauded through five encores, and Noble Sissle’s grandmother was in the house to see it.

  To work in Atlantic City in the summer was almost as good as a vacation. The ocean right outside the door, the salt spray you could taste on your lips. But the beaches were segregated—“Like everyplace else,” Maude Russell says, “they had a white beach and a colored beach”—and fancy hotels posted signs: NO DOGS, NO JEWS.

  “They didn’t have to put NO NIGGERS, because we knew it,” said Mildred Hudgins. “Josephine used to get up in the morning and put on evening clothes and stage makeup and walk up and down the boardwalk. People said she was crazy, but she wasn’t, she just liked pretty clothes. She’d wear big picture hats with the evening dresses, and she’d walk, and everybody made fun of her. But Josephine just went about her business, she didn’t humble to nobody.”

  It was Fredi Washington who suggested to me another reason why her fellow chorus girls “treated Josephine like a dog.” Not only was she stealing the show, but she suffered from catarrh, which the dictionary describes as “an inflamed condition of a mucous membrane, usually that of the nose or throat, causing a discharge of mucus.” In those days before antihistamines, newspaper ads promising cures asked, “What is Catarrh? . . . Is your breath foul? Is your voice husky? Is your nose stopped? Do you snore at night?”

  Fredi had her own remedy for bad breath. “I told Josephine to swim in the sea every day, and after a few days, that salt water cured it, she never had it again.”

  Now Josephine was playing two shows a night, sleeping late, spending afternoons at the movies. She favored Pearl White and Rudolph Valentino—“Ah, in front of Rudolph Valentino, I have cried out my eyes and my heart”—and she had time left over for romance. It was rumored that she and Mildred Smallwood were lovers, and it was certainly Mildred from whom she learned to dance on toe. “Mildred was just an ordinary little pretentious toe dancer,” says Maude. “She wasn’t a great toe dancer, but she was a novelty because she was black. She and I had our picture in Dance Magazine, that was the first time colored girls had ever been in it.”

  When Josephine wasn’t with Mildred, she was with Charlie Davis. She spent so many hours in the company of the tap-dancing Charlie that some of the cast believed they were married. They could believe what they liked, Josephine wasn’t telling.

  Backstage at Plantation Days, Johnny Hudgins spun stories. He had played with Helen Morgan—“the one that sits on top of the piano, she’s a pain in the ass, God bless her”—and he had been encouraged by Fats Waller. “He’d talk to me from back of the curtain, ‘Hold still, Banty, knock ’em dead.’ ” Johnny had seen Bert Williams on the stage of the Merlin Theater in Baltimore, “my hometown. His pictures were all over, and some of the people tore his picture and scratched it in the face. I guess they just didn’t want no Negro in no white show like that.”

  Josephine listened raptly. She also liked to hear Lottie Gee tell about playing in France, England, Italy, and how she had found no race prejudice in those places. (Around the same time, the French press was reporting that France might expel Americans who were making rows in cafés where “management permits Negroes to dance with white girls.”)

  Toward the end of August, Plantation Days was converted back to Shuffle Along, and the company traveled to Toronto. It was Josephine’s first trip out of the United States, and one reviewer said she “burlesqued jazz until the audience nearly fell out of their seats.”

  The show k
ept moving—Pittsburgh, Detroit, back to St. Louis. Eight months since it had played there without Josephine. This time she came, putting aside—for whatever reason—the anxieties that had made her avoid that earlier visit.

  The American Theatre advertised that the “Entire CENTER and LEFT section in FIRST BALCONY Has Been Reserved For Colored Patrons,” and Richard told me he and Willie Mae didn’t mind having to go upstairs to watch their sister perform.

  “Tumpy stayed with us,” he said. “She was a big star, and she gave my mother seventy-five dollars.”

  Here is Josephine embroidering on that brief reunion. “I still can see that Christmas evening when after the theatre I found the whole family drinking whiskey. Grandmother, tipsier than the others, danced her great Indian dance.”

  Mother, you weren’t there “that Christmas evening.” On November 24, after the last show, you left for Philadelphia with the rest of the cast. This is the way you wrote of your retreat: “My mother insisted on taking me to the train. . . . Luckily she stopped in every bistro to see her friends. Poor woman, I was ashamed of her. . . . Quickly I went out through another door, left her and the train departed before anyone could see her. . . . Goodbye . . . that’s life!”

  This time in Philadelphia, they played the Forrest, and Josephine had her Thanksgiving dinner at Pa Baker’s restaurant.

  After that engagement at the Forrest, I lost her for a while. She disappeared. My research turned up the information that there were Shuffle Along companies touring all over America, but she wasn’t with any of them. In a single line in one of her books, she dealt with this. “I left Shuffle Along.”

  Not much of a clue, but Alberta Hunter finally came up with a lead to Josephine’s whereabouts at the end of 1923. “She was working with Buck and Bubbles, I think,” Alberta said. “Yes, she was going with Buck.”

  Buck was dead, but I found Bubbles living in a nice house in Los Angeles. In 1967, he’d had a stroke that left him half paralyzed; it slowed him, but didn’t break him.

  Born John Sublett (he’d changed his name to John W. Bubbles), he was ten years old, and Ford Lee Washington (known as Buck) was six, when they formed their act. Buck played piano, Bubbles sang, and a scant ten years later, in 1922, they were playing the Palace. One wore pants that were too long, one wore pants that were too short, both wore shoes that were too big, both danced.

  “Our costumes was our success,” Bubbles said. “We looked poor, we talked like we didn’t know nothing, and we danced like we didn’t care. I’d tell Buck, ‘Get out of that hole,’ and he ain’t in no hole, he’s just so short. I say, ‘Man, look at your feet, your feet sure big,’ and he say, ‘You look at ’em, I’m sick of lookin’ at ’em.’ And he start playing, and I start dancing. We had a lovely act, ain’t nobody can talk about this act not being the best act.”

  Josephine had met Buck and Bubbles in Philadelphia, when she was at the Standard, and they were on the same bill. “We both fell in love with her because she was so nice, and so different,” Bubbles told me. “She had her own style, she’d dance ad lib, do whatever came into her mind. She came on the road with us, she had no agent, she booked herself. We went to Boston, to Chicago, to New York (we played the Everglades Club on West Forty-eighth Street, Alberta Hunter was on the bill); I don’t remember all the places we went.”

  Bubbles had been tall and slender, Buck small, not much to look at. “Why didn’t she go out with you,” I asked, “if Buck was so ugly?”

  He thought that was funny. “We were famous,” he said, “we were making fifteen hundred dollars a week, it didn’t matter what we looked like.”

  Fine, I said. “Why didn’t she and Buck get married?”

  “Well,” he said, “Buck wasn’t thinking about getting married, you know. They were close, very close friends.”

  Bubbles recalled arriving in Rochester, New York, with Buck and Josephine. “And Sissle and Blake were already there rehearsing this new musical, In Bamville. They were going to open at the Lyceum, and I had a girlfriend who went to audition. She mentioned Buck and me and Josephine to Sissle and Blake. They said they’d been looking for Josephine. And they got her.

  “In Bamville was a beautiful show, and Josephine was beautiful in it. She had such talent. What she did in Paris proved it, and they surrounded her there, they never surrounded nobody here like that, never.”

  The last time Bubbles ever saw Josephine was during the March on Washington, with Martin Luther King. Had they talked about the old days? “The old days spoke for themselves,” he said. “We didn’t have to talk about them, we only had to look at each other.”

  John Sublett, aka John W. Bubbles, died in May 1986; his companion of seventeen years, Wanda Michael, sent me a letter. “Don’t be sad,” she wrote, “just be happy that he had a long and many times splendid life.”

  Chapter 11

  IN BAMVILLE, OR THE CHOCOLATE DANDIES

  “She’d be laughing, to her the work was joy”

  Not only was she in the new Sissle and Blake show, but, Josephine boasted, “they had written a special part for me.” (Later, she eliminated that bit of history, insisting that nothing good happened to her until she left the United States.)

  Sumptuous was what Sissle and Blake had in mind for In Bamville. Determined to have sets and costumes as opulent as anything created by Ziegfeld or George White, they hired Ziegfeld veteran Julian Mitchell to stage the show, although he was by then so deaf he could hear the music only when he pressed his ear against the rehearsal piano. Charlie Davis choreographed, comedian Lew Payton played one of the leads and helped write the book.

  The action centered on the last day of the Bamville Fair. There was a cast of 125, along with three live horses who ran a staged race on a treadmill. Three white men were hired to handle the horses. “Those horses were a lot of trouble,” said Eubie Blake.

  Opening week in Rochester went fine, but the second week, in Pittsburgh, was terrible. Al Mayer had died of cancer in New York. Sissle and Blake were devastated; Mayer had been not just a partner, but their friend. (“There has never been a piece of paper between us,” Mayer had told the Pittsburgh Courier, describing his business deal with Miller and Lyles and Sissle and Blake. “The profits are split five ways.”) Still, the show went on; Detroit was a big booking, so was Chicago.

  In Chicago, another blow. “Too much white man,” the critic Ashton Stevens grumbled. “Too much platitudinous refinement . . . too much ‘art’ and not enough Africa.”

  Eubie Blake had feared just such a response. At the beginning of the second act, a number called “Dixie Moon” featured girls in tiered white dresses with hoop skirts. Eubie went to B. C. Whitney, the producer. “I said, ‘Mr. Whitney . . . the audience stops dead when they see the girls in the hoop skirts. The scene is too beautiful for a colored show.’ . . . He answered, ‘Eubie, this is not a colored show. This is Sissle and Blake’s show for Broadway. . . .’ ”

  Josephine spied an opportunity. Everyone else was pulling back from the old minstrel show buffoonery? She would embrace it. She begged Sissle to write her a blackface number. Few women—Mama Dinks was one of them—blacked up, but Josephine couldn’t wait to get her fingers into the burnt cork packed in a can like shoe polish.

  “I was in black with white lips, and I imitated the sound of a muted saxophone,” she said, describing herself as “a grinning girl making all the silly faces I could think of.” There is a photograph of her in full regalia—checked dress, black stockings, huge floppy shoes—sitting on a railing, her eyes crossed, her legs bent out like a frog’s. One little push and she would have fallen. It was just another of the balancing acts that made up her life.

  In that preciously almost-white show, she decided, she would explode, she would be black and funny-looking and funny and the audience would love her.

  “She was very adventurous,” Maude Russell says. “She was like a black Chaplin, and she would step on anybody’s shoulders to get where she wanted to get; she didn’t give
a damn about me, you, or anybody else.”

  But Josephine was not only a comic, she was also an eighteen-year-old girl, and sometimes, an eighteen-year-old girl needs to be pretty. Having won the first round, she plagued Sissle and Blake afresh. “You think I can only make people laugh? I can be a vamp!” They gave her another scene. It was called “The Deserted Female”; in it, she got to wear a floor-length gold lamé gown, simple, elegant, draped up one side to expose a shapely leg. No critic raved over her prowess as a vamp, but that gown made her happy.

  (Nobody objected to Josephine’s experiments with blackface, but the casting of the black football hero/actor/singer Paul Robeson as the husband of a white actress, Mary Blair, in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings set off what The Afro-American called “a theatrical storm.” It didn’t matter that O’Neill had written the part of Robeson’s wife with Miss Blair in mind; some critics believed it should have been given to a black actress with light skin. “Critics of both races are divided,” reported the newspaper, pointing out that “the role of the wife requires her to kiss her Negro husband’s hand.”)

  In Boston, In Bamville played twelve weeks, and Josephine discovered Revere Beach. There is a snapshot of her clowning on the sand with two of the boys in the band. The bags under her eyes seem especially pronounced, she is very slender, and her legs are long under the dark one-piece bathing suit. Her left hand is clenched, a wedding ring still visible on the third finger.

  On September 1, 1924, after six months on the road, the company arrived in New York. The show had been renamed The Chocolate Dandies, and it opened at the Colonial, where, Johnny Hudgins discovered, Josephine was still stealing his bits. “I used to go up to the balcony and I’d watch her, and it was like seeing myself in a mirror. So the next night, I’d put in something new, and sure enough, she’d be doing the new thing the day after.”