Josephine Baker Read online

  Josephine felt ready for the premiere. At the curtain call on opening night, she stood in her gold lamé dress, a sweet smile on her face, her head resting lightly on Johnny Hudgins’s shoulder, listening to the audience cheer. She was the only female singled out by The New York Times. “As a freak Terpsichorean artist,” wrote the reviewer, “Josephine Baker, with her imitation of Ben Turpin’s eyes, made quite a hit.”

  Johnny Hudgins walked away with every other notice. It was a queer experience for Josephine, who had become accustomed to stealing the show, but she didn’t have to compete with Johnny for long. Five days after the opening, he gave notice. He felt he deserved his name in lights, and a lot of people agreed with him. A true comic genius, he was making only $150 a week, while Josephine got $125. “All because I could cross my eyes,” she bragged.

  She knew she didn’t have delicate features or fair skin like Maude, Mildred, Fredi, but she could—and did—improve her figure. Charles Walker, a dancer called Cornbread and one of her colleagues in The Chocolate Dandies, recalls Josephine’s stationing herself in the wings, “going through the whole show, doing the numbers along with the performers onstage. She was always moving, doing headstands and stretches, we could see her muscles developing.”

  Josephine and some of the other girls were staying at 200 West 137th Street, in an apartment up over the Howell Funeral Parlor. She and Mildred Smallwood shared a room. In the 1980s, I went to Harlem to interview Lilly Yuen, who still lived in that fifth-floor walk-up apartment. She told me Mama Dinks had held the leases on a few places like this that she sublet to show people. “There was a bunch of us girls here, Josephine had the smallest of the four bedrooms.”

  She showed me the long narrow cubicle with a window at one end. I opened the window and leaned out, wanting to see the view Josephine had seen. “At first I was afraid to live over a funeral parlor,” Lilly said. I wondered if Josephine too had thought about the dead people downstairs. It was strange to be there. Josephine had combed her hair in this room, and closed the door before she went to the theater at night. “People always say she was in the Cotton Club,” Lilly complained. “Josephine wasn’t in no Cotton Club. She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.”

  What a long distance I had come from St. Symphorien to this place where I listened to stories of another world, told by these vital old women—Pontop, Maude Russell, Mildred Hudgins, the Duchess. At the end, I had been associated with someone they had known at the beginning. To strangers, she was the legendary Josephine Baker, but they still thought of her as a pushy, daring kid, a link to their pasts, when they had been young and the future glittered in front of them and they weren’t afraid of anything.

  Somewhere along the way, they had lost her. “I did not know anything about her after she left this country,” one of them told me. And after she left this country, she did not know anything about most of them, either.

  Leaving Lilly’s building, I thought of that September in New York, the still-warm days when the city smiled at pretty girls of all shades. Josephine and the two Mildreds, Hudgins and Smallwood, would wander along Lenox Avenue, sometimes heading for a little shop above the Amsterdam News where they could try on the latest hats. And at night, Mildred Hudgins said, after the show, they would often go to Tillie’s Chicken Shack on 133rd Street. “People would storm the place to get the hot biscuits and the fried chicken. White people and colored people would mingle there till all hours.”

  Three months at the Colonial, and The Chocolate Dandies closed. Despite its splendor, the lovely music and dances, the horses, it had not achieved the success of Shuffle Along. (Eventually, including its incarnation as In Bamville, its Broadway run, and the post-Broadway tour, the show would play sixty weeks and lose sixty thousand dollars.)

  In Philadelphia, they came to the Dunbar. John T. Gibson had grown tired of seeing black shows that once would have been his booked into white theaters, and he outbid the Forrest to get The Chocolate Dandies.

  “I saw Josephine in it,” the Duchess said. “My God, she just got encores after encores, and Mr. Baker was so proud of her. He didn’t care that Billy was gone, everything was ‘Daughter.’ ”

  By February 1925, Josephine and friends were in St. Louis, back at the American Theatre. ONE WEEK ONLY. OH, BOY, SOME SHOW! THRILLING KENTUCKY RACE SCENE. BRASS BAND ON STAGE. SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA IN THE PIT. 125—COUNT ’EM—CAST AND CHORUS. SEATS NOW ON SALE FOR ALL PERFORMANCES!

  Who wouldn’t have come up with fifty cents for all of that?

  Carrie wouldn’t. She could expose her concern about Josephine to a stranger, as she had done backstage with Adelaide Hall, but in the living presence of her oldest child, she was paralyzed, so the silence between them continued. “Me and Margaret and Willie Mae went,” said Richard. “We went up in the section of the balcony reserved for colored. Tumpy had good numbers.”

  The Chocolate Dandies traveled to Canada, and from there to Pittsburgh, where Josephine held a press conference, setting reporters straight on manners and marriage. She was scheduled to bow to Pittsburgh society at the Cavalier’s Reception, and, she said, “I will smile my introduction to friends. No shaking hands, it’s terribly old-fashioned and quite a bore.” As for being happy though married, “it can be done, I believe. The couple that looks for trouble usually finds it, the happily smiling pair goes merrily along forever after.”

  One week later, in Detroit, she began divorce proceedings against Billy Baker. (A decree was never granted. “This case was dismissed on October 25, 1928, for no progress,” says the document furnished by the Wayne county clerk.)

  “I never heard Josephine say one unkind word about anybody,” said Clarissa Cumbo, who had recently joined the chorus. “Yes, she didn’t speak good English, and had no education, but let me tell you, she had no complex about it. Why should she, with all the success she had with the public, black and white. We had mostly white audiences, you see. I remember she’d always come off the stage with this big split. When she got past the wings, she could hardly get up, she’d be so tired, and we’d put our hands out to help her. And she’d be laughing about what she’d done, to her the work was joy.”

  Had Josephine ever talked about Billy Baker? I asked Clarissa. Yes, she said. “She was not living with him, but she still used to send him some money when he needed it.”

  Clarissa’s husband, Marion Cumbo, who played cello in the orchestra, had some memories of The Chocolate Dandies tour that were less than ecstatic. He recalled one early morning when the company had pulled into a new town. “We left the train to go have breakfast. Josephine, Clarissa, a couple of others, were walking together, and I was behind them. Two little white boys were crossing the street, and they looked over and saw these brown-skinned girls and I heard one of them say, ‘Look at the niggers in the fur coats.’ This was way out in the Midwest somewhere.”

  Marion Cumbo said he always felt there was something sad about Josephine. “Something missing. She was never completely happy. I think she never got what she was looking for, which was love.”

  In May, The Chocolate Dandies, dying on the road, barely managed to limp into the Werba Theatre in Brooklyn, where it was scheduled to play one week.

  Lottie Gee, having read the handwriting on the wall, had already given notice. 43 COLORED PERFORMERS, HEADED BY MISS LOTTIE GEE, SAILING FOR EUROPE, announced the Amsterdam News. The forty-three were going off to Berlin to do a show called Chocolate Kiddies, with music by Duke Ellington, and Sam Wooding leading the band—and a good thing too, the paper observed, “as things have not been breaking as nicely in the theatrical game for some of our people as in the past.”

  Even without Miss Lottie Gee, the show made the front page of the Amsterdam News, and now it was Miss Josephine Baker getting all the attention. Over her picture was the legend “A Success Everywhere.” She was called a “chocolate edition of Charlotte Greenwood” and “the bronze counterpart of a celebrated French eccentrique, Pasquerette.” Miss Baker, reporte
d the Amsterdam News, “has a sweet voice, loves jazz, but confesses that the sweetest music in the world is that of a burst of applause.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also declared The Chocolate Dandies to be a “lot of fun,” assuring readers it was “going back to Broadway.” But the only place it was going was to court.

  On Saturday, May 23, the curtain had to be held for twenty minutes because the performers, some of whom hadn’t been paid for months, refused to start the show. A month later, Noble Sissle filed for bankruptcy, listing liabilities of more than $26,000. Among his creditors were two automobile companies and Josephine Baker, to whom he owed $1,235.

  It was a bitter ending to a long and mostly successful adventure, but Josephine may have been looking forward to some vacation. What’s more, she was carrying on her person a fair amount of hard cash, because, like Alberta Hunter and Mildred Hudgins, she was suspicious of banks.

  “When we were on the road, I didn’t even send money to my mother,” Mildred said. “I didn’t trust the white postman, and many of us colored people were afraid that banks would not give you your money back. Besides, most of us in show business could barely write our names, let alone make out a bank slip. I kept my money in a grouch bag sewn under the belt of my dress.”

  So Josephine had a pouch with money in it, and she had a place to go. Harlem was humming, Harlem was waiting.

  Chapter 12

  SUMMER OF ’25: HEAT AND HARLEM NIGHTS

  “She was hanging over Seventh Avenue, stark naked”

  I never was a Harlemite.” That’s what she said, years afterward, turning her back on the streets, the sounds, the tastes that had delighted her. Was it that remembering can make you too lonely in a foreign place? Or was it only that she had the gift of forgetting? Like the gypsy’s daughter in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, Josephine was reborn a virgin every time the moon rose.

  It was the summer of 1925, and she was living at 2259 7th Avenue, in a solid corner house. On the 133rd Street side, under the stoop, more steps led down to an after-hours club. On the Seventh Avenue side, there was a drugstore where you could put a dollar on a number. Until May of 1924, when his life came to an abrupt end, a black entrepreneur named Barron Wilkins had owned number 2259—apartments, cabaret, drugstore, all.

  Referred to in a Harlem newspaper as “the city’s leading sporting man,” Wilkins was killed by a fellow called Yellow Charleston. “Barron was shot right in front of the house, coming out of the drugstore,” said Sam Wooding, whose band played in Wilkins’s club. “He died in a taxicab. He was going to the hospital but he never got there. St. Peter stepped in.”

  Mama Dinks was again Josephine’s landlady, in the very apartment to which Barron Wilkins had brought his young bride. It was splendid, with floors made of Italian marble, and light pouring through large windows.

  Harlem was filled with beauties like the brownstones on Striver’s Row, left behind when the white people panicked and fled as the first blacks arrived.

  Bessie Taliaferro recalled how marvelous the brownstone she lived in on 134th Street had looked to her youthful eyes. “The woodwork! The fireplaces! We had dumbwaiters, we had bells. We used to have more fun with the tubes, talking up to the top floor, you know, and the bells are ringing in the kitchen. People made jokes about those of us who lived in such a grand neighborhood. They said, ‘Oh, those niggers up there just strivin’ to pay the rent, and sleeping on the floor.’ Striver’s Row, they called it, and the name stuck.”

  It was about 1900 that the black trek from other parts of the city to Harlem had begun. Then, with World War I, Southern blacks came north to work. “A great migration,” the playwright Wallace Thurman called it. “Southern Negroes, tired of moral and financial blue days, struck out . . . to seek adventure among factories, subways and skyscrapers. . . . New York to the Negro meant Harlem, and the great influx included not only thousands of Negroes from every state in the Union, but also thirty thousand immigrants from the West Indian Islands and the Caribbean regions. Harlem was the promised land.”

  Among its sadder promises were Ko-Verra (“Makes Skin So Light Would Hardly Know She Was Colored”) and Bleacho (“Be more popular, earn more money. Lightens skin or money back”), to be found in every drugstore. Josephine bought it, along with Mary’s Congolene, the same hair straightener that was to blight—or almost blight—her opening night in Paris.

  Booth Marshall, then renting the apartment above hers, recalled a day when her water was turned off—for some reason, the little wheel that controlled it was in his bathroom—and he heard screaming from downstairs. Looking out of the window, he saw Josephine. “She had this white stuff on her head, and she was hanging over Seventh Avenue stark naked yelling, ‘Booth! Booth! Turn the fucking water on!’

  “We loved watching the people down on Seventh Avenue.”

  Anyone would have. Wallace Thurman described the Seventh Avenue of that time: “Adolescent boys and girls flaunting their youth. Street speakers on every corner. A Hindoo fakir here, a loud-voiced Socialist there, a medicine doctor ballyhooing, a corn doctor, a blind musician, serious people, gay people, philanderers and preachers. Seventh Avenue is filled with deep rhythmic laughter.”

  True, said Booth. “Joe and I were always laughing, oh, those were happy days.”

  And nights. All night long in Harlem, people danced. Even on the street corners, where pedestrians threw nickels to kids demonstrating the Charleston.

  “You saw throngs on Lenox and 7th Avenue, ceaselessly moving from one pleasure resort to another,” reported Lloyd Morris, another chronicler of the period. “The legend of Harlem by night—exhilarating and sensuous, throbbing to the beat of drums and the wailing of saxophones, cosmopolitan in its peculiar sophistications—crossed the continent and the ocean.”

  The queer thing is that Josephine, who would become part of that legend, credited with having put Harlem on the world map, never worked there until 1951. Courtesy of Will Marion Cook, she did get a job dancing, but downtown, at the Plantation, a supper club above the Winter Garden. The club had been a big success ever since producer Lew Leslie had lured Florence Mills to work there.

  “Lew Leslie had the whole interior takened out and decorated as a plantation,” said Florence’s husband, the tap dancer U. S. Thompson. “Watermelons . . . and lights—little bulbs—in the melons. There was a well, where you could draw the water out, and statues of hogs and corn. The place was packed every night to see Florence. She had a peculiar high voice, and she was never a bighead woman, that’s why everyone loved her.”

  That spring, Lew Leslie had decided to take Florence on the road, but first he’d booked her into the Palace for a week. She was the first black woman to headline there, and Variety reported that whites and blacks in the audience were equally enthusiastic. Blacks bought the eighty-five-cent tickets and sat upstairs, though some, like Ethel Waters, stayed away. “I didn’t care to sit in the peanut gallery,” she said. “Lincoln freed me too.”

  Josephine and Mildred Hudgins went, and were given a ride back to Harlem in Florence’s chauffeured car. “We were so proud,” Mildred told me, “not just because a colored woman was headlining, but because she was our friend.”

  Me, I was looking for some indignation. In the 1980s, I wanted Mildred to tell me how insulted she and Josephine had been that they had to go up to the balcony to hear someone of their own race. But Mildred was not an angry person. “Times have changed,” she said softly, “and we helped change them.”

  When Ethel Waters was first approached about following Florence Mills into the Plantation—in a show called Tan Town Topics—she had her doubts. “I felt Broadway and all downtown belonged to Florence Mills.”

  Tan Town Topics was set to open on June 5, with Bill Vodery’s orchestra providing the music, but it was postponed for three weeks. The management (which included the Shuberts, in for 15 percent of the gross receipts) then asked Will Marion Cook to come in and help pull things together; that’s when he chose Josephine to
dance in the chorus.

  “When anybody had a job to be filled, they went to Will Marion,” said Bessie Taliaferro. “They’d say, ‘We want a girl, Dad. You got a singer?’ And he always had a string of talented girls around him, and he would recommend one.”

  In 1925, Will Marion Cook was fifty-six years old, a genius without a dime or a steady job, and he lived, like Bessie, in the Spiller house, a fairly clamorous environment, since the Spiller band rehearsed in the basement. “The neighbors never minded the noise,” Bessie said. “It was good noise, you know. Will Marion could take a song and fix it. He could coach performers. He’d be stomping his feet, trying to get some spirit, some soul in them, and his eyes would be piercing. Ethel Waters wouldn’t do anything unless he approved. I knew if Will Marion said Josephine had talent, she had it. Because that was one of his callings, to discover talent that other people couldn’t see.”

  The heat was terrible that summer. People slept in parks or sprawled on subway steps, hoping for any gust of stale air pushed up by a passing train, and the owners of thirty-one Broadway theaters cut their ticket prices. It didn’t help. According to Variety of July 15, “So far as business is concerned, there just ain’t none.”

  But Tan Town Topics at the Plantation, with Ethel Waters singing “Dinah” fourteen times a week, was doing fine.

  So was Louis Armstrong, a block away, at the Roseland dance hall. New in town, he blew his trumpet and astonished all who heard him. The Kentucky Club, on Forty-ninth and Broadway, was home to Duke Ellington. It was open all night, and other musicians would come there when they had finished working. Paul Whiteman always showed his appreciation, Duke said, “by laying a big fifty-dollar bill on us.”

  As for the Club Alabam’, on West Forty-fourth Street, it boasted “a Colored Revue . . . combining the natural native talent of the Colored race with . . . refinement, lavishness and beauty. . . .” Talent did abound—Johnny Hudgins, Abbie Mitchell, Fredi Washington starred there—but the chorus girls of the Alabam’, light-skinned, pretty, and not weighted down by too many clothes, were the club’s big lure.