Josephine Baker Read online

  Uptown, Connie’s Inn, the Nest, Small’s Paradise, Club Bamville thrived too. And so did Sidney Bechet, playing New Orleans jazz at Club Basha. (Basha seems to have been an attempt to spell Bechet phonetically.) The club was fronted by a twenty-two-year-old, light-skinned showgirl named Bessie de Saussure. “I had this Jewish boyfriend—he was a kind of a gangster—and when I said, ‘I want a nightclub of my own,’ he financed the whole thing for me, but we called it after Bechet. My boyfriend said, ‘Let’s use his name because he has a following.’ Sidney was the draw, he got the whites to come uptown.”

  Many of Josephine’s friends and mentors were appearing in Harlem that summer. Sandy Burns and Sam Russell were playing the Lincoln Theater at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and at the Lafayette, on the corner of 132nd Street and Seventh, the names of Buck and Bubbles were up in lights.

  It was at the Lafayette, one midnight in late July, that “A Big Monster Benefit” was held for Bob Russell, the “Father of Show Business.” Russell, who had written the song “Open the Door, Richard,” who had created more sketches than anyone could remember, who had given a hand up to any number of aspiring comics and singers and dancers—including Josephine Baker—was now aging and ill, and many black artists turned out to help him. Bill Robinson was on the bill that night; so was the dancer Willie Covan, but Josephine didn’t show up.

  Two weeks later, in St. Louis, Bob Russell died.

  The newspapers didn’t write much about Tan Town Topics, but I found a review in The Afro-American. Ethel Waters got one line, Josephine got three.

  “Yeah, Josephine was with us at the Plantation,” said Willie Covan. “She came back six, eight times a night with some new crazy step, she was the star of the thing.” (Willie himself was no slouch at new steps. “I worked in show business since I was nine,” he told me. “Me and my brother. My brother was taken to Russia with a pickaninny show, and my mother thought maybe he got killed or something, and she went to a detective. He said, ‘You want your child back?’ ‘I ain’t got no money,’ she said. But the detective said he could do it, and to make a long story short, my brother came back to us in Chicago. Then he taught me the Russian dance. I did it without no hands, I was a sensation, just left my hands up and kept goin’ like a coffee grinder.”)

  “Josephine was a natural, she never had dancin’ lessons or nothing like that,” said Dorothy Rhodes, another of the chorus girls. “And she did the darndest things. We had a big ledge outside the dressing room on Fiftieth Street, and one day, she said, ‘I’m gonna walk that ledge,’ and she got out and walked from one window to the next.

  “We used to play two shows a night. Stars would come, Connie Bennett, all big-name theatrical people. Everyone asks me if white men made propositions to the girls in the show. How the hell were white men gonna get to the girls? We weren’t allowed to go sit with the customers or nothin’.”

  Once, Ethel Waters was ordered by her doctor to spend two weeks in bed, and Josephine always claimed to have gone on for the star (singing “Dinah” and “Ukelele Lady” and bringing down the house). Actually, Waters stayed out only three days, and I asked Dorothy Rhodes, had Josephine really substituted for Ethel during those three days? No, said Dorothy. “Josephine never sang solo.”

  She was enough of a sensation without singing solo, but in years to come, she always played down the bliss of that summer, making herself the victim in story after story. Even in her very last book, Josephine, published in 1976 after her death, we find a pitiful chapter called “First Love,” in which she recalls “Henry,” a young white admirer, taking her to a “snooty” restaurant where people stare and mutter, “Where did he find her? In a zoo?”

  Dorothy Rhodes remembered only good times. “We’d finish work about 4 A.M. and we’d come uptown in a taxi, go to a gin mill, and sit and drink. We didn’t bother about no dancin’, we’d been dancin’ all night.”

  Once in a while, Booth Marshall would come down to the Plantation with his car and chauffeur to pick up Josephine. “She always dressed like an actress,” he said. “In those days, you wouldn’t catch a showgirl out there with jeans on. We would drive up in front of the Lafayette Theatre, across from where we lived, and young people would run over to our car. I would have the chauffeur open the door, and I would shout, ‘Kiss my ass!’ and Josephine and I would laugh.”

  Paul Bass, a singer and alto sax player, was another who provided wheels from time to time. (Like Willie Covan, Paul started in show business early—“when I was around five years old. I sang and I used to do a little cakewalk. I’m part Indian: my mother was half Cherokee, my father was half Indian and half Jewish.”) Paul was courting Alice Allison. “Alice and her sister Bessie were both in the chorus with Joe Baker at the Plantation, and their show closed a little earlier than mine—I was at Connie’s Inn—so I used to have a fellow by the name of Ralph Cooper that drove my car for me to go down and pick up Alice. And she would bring Josephine Baker with her.

  “I had an Auburn Phaeton, a gray car with orange wire wheels, and we used to take long rides out into the country at five o’clock in the morning just to get fresh air. Then we would come back to Harlem, to Eva Branch’s place.” (Eva Branch, a onetime chorus girl, had converted her apartment into a “buffet flat,” where you could get food and liquor at any hour of the day or night. Eva would also take your messages, hold your mail, store your valuables.)

  “Eva would cook up pigs’ feet,” Paul Bass said, “and we’d eat and drink till 10 A.M. It was always dark in there, we’d hit the street all walleyed, go home, and sleep till 7 P.M. Most of us was working in nightclubs and the first show didn’t go on till eleven o’clock or midnight.”

  Whether it was the Auburn Phaeton of Paul Bass or Booth Marshall’s limousine, cars were symbols of success to performers. “They would have a car and no place to stay,” Bessie Taliaferro said. “But everybody doesn’t want a home. A room, a car, that’s all they want.”

  Josephine wanted more. Most of all, she wanted to be free of the limitations of her own history. None of her books ever mentioned Ralph Cooper.

  Ralph, who later became a movie star, wasn’t entirely forthcoming, either. Maybe it embarrassed him to admit he had been working as a driver when he first crossed paths with Josephine. “I don’t know how I met her that summer,” he said, “but we became friends right away. It was so hot, we would rent a little boat and go rowing in Central Park Lake at 110th Street. We talked about show business, that was our only talk, how to do something new, how to improve an old routine. Joe was funny—funny onstage, funny in private.”

  It was during one of those boat rides that Josephine told Ralph Cooper how much she envied the girls with whom she worked. “She said to me, ‘You know, Coop, they are so pretty.’ I said, ‘Joe, you’re pretty too.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘not like them. Their skin is so light.’ I said, ‘Joe, those girls are pretty to look at, but your prettiness comes from deep inside you, and on top of that you make people laugh.’ She was always perfumed, always in the latest fashion, always smiling, in a good mood. She was so much fun, so happy.”

  Happy is the word that crops up time and again on the lips of Josephine’s companions, but Josephine never admits, in print, anyway, that she lived one untroubled moment. Here is one of her reminiscences of life at the Plantation: “One day, a famous New York actress invited four of us cabaret girls to supper at her place and she promised them a lot of money. . . . I will never forget my reaction when we entered her suite at the Ritz Carlton. . . . The lady took us to the bathroom.

  “ ‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘Get undressed.’ I undressed slowly because I did not know what she wanted. The others knew. When I entered the Carlton, I was still very naive.

  “ ‘Quick, hurry up,’ the actress said, entering the bathroom all the time. . . .

  “All the while I was looking at the star’s diamond bracelet. I had never seen one like it before. She seemed very nervous, almost hysterical. At last, I only had my undershirt
on. . . . When I entered the room, she yelled, ‘Get into bed.’

  “In the bed, there were already three girls, and the lady dashed around like crazy. I was so scared. She was yelling. I started screaming: I had finally understood. . . . I was furious and created such a ruckus that I was thrown out without the money promised. The next day she telephoned the Plantation: ‘You made me waste my evening. Do not ever send me this crazy Josephine again.’ ”

  The truth about what went on at the Plantation probably lies somewhere between Dorothy Rhodes’s assurance that no customer could get near one of the girls and Josephine’s story of lesbians encouraged to phone in their orders.

  Uptown, Joe Attles told me, white people would hang around the Harlem clubs till after the shows let out. “There were white men who wanted black boys, and white women who wanted them too, and there were white men who wanted black girls, and white women who wanted them too, and everyone had the time of his life in Harlem, in those crowded rooms with music and dancing and bad gin, and smoke, and sex.

  “I wondered what was going on in those white people’s heads, when they went back to their apartments, after they’d spent the night with the brothers or sisters of their maids. But it wasn’t always nights without tomorrows; many true and deep love stories developed between white and black.”

  Wallace Thurman saw it differently, regretting that Harlem’s clubs had become “sideshows for sensation seeking whites.”

  And every night and all day, Harlem blazed with music. On those summer afternoons, in the second-floor front room he rented on Striver’s Row, James P. Johnson bent to his piano, arched fingers plucking at the keys, while passersby stopped in the street outside to listen. W. C. Handy, the father of the blues, lived a block away; so did Scott Joplin.

  This was the world that Caroline Dudley Reagan came looking for. She was a small white woman, in love with blackness, with black music, black bodies, with what she called “the soul of the ebony chorus.”

  For Mrs. Reagan, climbing the stairs to the top of one of the Fifth Avenue Coach Company’s double-decker buses on a sultry July morning, the heat was a matter of no consequence. She was wearing a dress that had been made for her in Paris by Paul Poiret, and she was on her way to Harlem, where she would change the course of Josephine Baker’s life.

  Chapter 13

  MRS. REAGAN COMES TO HARLEM

  “I got off at Lenox Avenue. . . . I was happy”

  Josephine didn’t know a thing about Caroline Reagan’s crusade. Broadway babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn, and in the shaded bedrooms of number 2259, nobody stirred.

  There are dozens of stories about how Mrs. Reagan took Josephine back to Paris. Josephine’s own recollections were, as always, fanciful. An impresario had offered her a part in an overseas tour, and the French waiters at the Plantation encouraged her to take it. “ ‘Go,’ they said, ‘you will feel better, you will be understood.’ So I left.”

  Some variations on the theme:

  U. S. Thompson: “The lady came to the Plantation lookin’ for talent and right away, she could see Josephine had the makin’s of a big star, all she need was a chance.”

  Ralph Cooper: “When she got the proposition to go to France, we talked a lot about it. She said, ‘I don’t know where it is, I don’t speak the language, and you are not coming. I don’t want to go.’ I told her it was a good opportunity, and if she liked it, then she could arrange for me to come over; I guess that helped her decision.”

  Paul Bass: “This woman from the Folies-Bergère, she wanted Joe to go back and teach the Folies-Bergère chorus girls the Charleston. And Josephine told me, ‘Well, I don’t want to leave Ralph,’ so I said, ‘Look, Joe, this is an opportunity, you can go over to Paris and make the money and send back for Ralph,’ and she laughed and said, ‘Well, okay.’ Then she went over and met this count, and she forgot about Ralph.”

  Dorothy Rhodes: “Our producers tried to scare Josephine from going to Europe, they were telling her they were gonna take her off the boat, and you know, if she go, they wouldn’t let her into France, all that stuff. Well, she was a little leery, but the other girls got with her and we said, ‘Go, don’t let this chance pass you by.’ ”

  Claude Hopkins: “Josephine was the end girl, last to leave the stage, she was doing some bits going off, and the house was coming down, hollerin’ and whistlin’. And Mrs. Reagan noticed that. She wanted Ethel Waters, but Ethel wouldn’t have been the star that Josephine was.”

  Ethel Waters: “I said I preferred to see America first. . . . Josephine ended up with a château, an Italian count and all Paris at her feet permanently . . . Sacrebleu!”

  Few people ever got the story straight. Most of the ones I talked to called Mrs. Reagan the “little French woman.”

  She was actually a little American woman from Chicago. She had been the youngest of five children, four sisters and a brother, she the tiniest, “good to repair the electric wires under the dining room table.” Her father, Emilius Clark Dudley, was a famous gynecologist. (At the age of seventy-one, he went to China to teach at the Hunan-Yale Medical College—known as Yale-in-China—and was “absent from home during most of 1922 and 1923.”)

  His daughters grew up interesting: One painted, one wrote, one was loved by Bertrand Russell. And Caroline, during the First World War, went to France and served coffee and doughnuts to soldiers.

  She married Daniel Joseph Reagan, who would later be sent to Paris as a foreign service officer. The couple had one child, a girl they named Sophie, but Caroline did not settle easily into domesticity. She wanted to produce—in France—an all-black musical revue. The notion had come to her while she and her husband were still living in Washington, D.C., and she’d gone to a rehearsal at the Douglas, a small theater in a black neighborhood.

  “Eight black girls in black tights, one more superb than the next, dancing, dancing, dancing. It was the Charleston. . . . I was overwhelmed, drawn by the invisible magnet, to produce a company, to show such artists, to amaze, flabbergast, dumbfound Paris . . . the elite, the masses, the artists from Picasso to the hippie painters of the streets . . . and there is where the seed for this Revue Nègre sprouted. The germ possessed me and began to grow.”

  Possessed as well of a certain sexual ambiguity—Gertrude Stein told her, “You are neither fish nor flesh nor fowl”—Caroline Reagan says she asked herself, “Was I a woman? A man? A spirit in every sense?” and decided it didn’t matter. At the age of thirty, she had become obsessed with the élan vital of the American black.

  In her efforts to bring a black revue to Paris, she solicited cooperation from the directors of all the big theaters, the Casino de Paris, the Folies-Bergère, the Odéon. The directors were respectful but firm. “Madame, we cannot,” they said politely. Then the painter, Fernand Léger, came to her rescue. “Go see Rolf de Maré. He’s got a white elephant of a theatre. Just the other day I told him, ‘Get Negroes, they’re dynamite, they’re the only ones who will wake up your theatre. . . .’ ”

  Rolf de Maré, a rich, Swedish-born patron of the arts who had brought Pavlova, Paderewski, Paul Robeson, Les Ballets Suédois—even Will Marion Cook and his Syncopated Orchestra—to Paris, listened to this possibly crazy woman. “I propose a black revue,” she said. “Authentic, racial, the blacks so sure of themselves, it is their soul that sings, that dances without end.”

  De Maré gave her money to go to New York and put a show together. “That was the best day of my life. . . . I was flying. . . . I came home blinded by happiness.”

  Next stop, Harlem.

  “Harlem,” she writes, “a silken word. Harlem, land of banjos, piano and the mechanical victrola, gramophone, radio morning noon and night. . . . I got off the bus at Lenox Avenue.”

  She asked directions to the theater in which Will Marion Cook maintained a small office. “Young laughing boys led me, each holding slices of red watermelon, the seeds as black as their eyes . . . it was hot. I was happy.”

  Mrs. R
eagan had been told Cook could help her choose the talent for her show, and he obliged. As male star and choreographer, he suggested his son-in-law, Louis Douglas. Douglas was famous in Europe; at the age of six, he’d been taken abroad by Belle Davis with a group called The Little Pickaninnies. (In 1898, Davis, a comedienne and singer, had starred in Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk, the first show written by Will Marion Cook.) Louis Douglas was newly returned to the United States after twenty-nine years away.

  He came in and danced for Caroline. He had conquered Russia, Caroline said, and “he conquered me that morning.”

  He then proposed his wife Marion (daughter of Will Marion Cook) for the chorus. The casting had begun.

  Florence Mills was Caroline’s star of choice, and in fact, her picture appeared in the July 9 program of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as the fall’s coming attraction. But Florence was a big name, and earned big money; Caroline couldn’t afford her.

  So Will Marion and Caroline still needed a female star, and a whole bunch of dancers. They couldn’t check out the Cotton Club; it was closed for alcohol violations, forty-four of them. They could and did go to the Lafayette Theatre. This is the way Lilly Yuen described what took place there:

  “We all was working at the Lafayette, and that French woman that took Josephine to Paris, she came there, and we were supposed to go. Mr. Miller signed the contract, and then this little French woman and Mr. Miller had a big run-in and he tore the contract up. Then this woman wanted to take us herself, and we was kids, you know, and we said, we can’t leave Mr. Miller, he is like a father to us.”

  Irving C. Miller’s company of forty had decided to dance with the guy what brung them, leaving Will Marion free to campaign for Tan Town Topics, the show he had doctored. He thought Mrs. Reagan should engage Ethel Waters.