Josephine Baker Read online

  Ethel Waters was marvelous, but she wanted $750 a week. Still, Reagan and Cook went back to the Plantation a second time to try to talk Ethel around, and that was one of the nights she was out. Watching Josephine clown, Caroline turned to Will Marion. “That’s our star,” she said.

  The idea made Louis Douglas unhappy.

  “He wanted no part of Josephine Baker,” says Bessie Taliaferro. “He said, ‘She’ll never go over in Paris, they won’t like her.’ But you see, they did.”

  It was no easier to negotiate with Josephine than with Ethel Waters, Caroline discovered. She offered $150 a week and was rejected. “I was not Madame Ziegfeld, covered with jewels. (Even fake ones inspire confidence.) I was nobody important. I proposed, Josephine disposed. . . . She was happy where she was, free, the featured girl of eight girls.”

  Caroline persisted. “ ‘With me, you’ll be the star of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.’ In the end, it was yes. Above all, because she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to sing sweet pretty songs. She assured me that she knew them. ‘All the better,’ I said. ‘That way, you won’t have to come to rehearsals, you can continue at the Plantation.’

  “My contract with de Maré gave me three months in which to wire him the name of the show and the names of the stars. I was partial to Hotsy Totsy. A friend told me, ‘Stop, where is your tact?’ So, quite without thinking, I wired: LA REVUE NEGRE, STARRING JOSEPHINE BAKER AND LOUIS DOUGLAS. God help me, the die was cast.”

  In Paris, Rolf de Maré had flyers printed, promising “Une Revue Nègre avec Josephine Baker et Louis Douglas,” not to mention “Les 8 Charleston Babies,” but two days after Josephine gave her word, she took it back again. Over the phone she told Caroline her bosses had doubled her pay. “I outbid them, saying, ‘Wait for me, I’m coming,’ ” Caroline recalled. “Then I grabbed my extraordinarily beautiful mandarin coat, embroidered in gold. My father had brought it to me from China, as though he knew that I was going to need it for her. . . . A taxi, and there I was again at Josephine’s. ‘Quick, quick, Josephine, the taxi’s waiting for us.’ The mandarin coat worked its spell, and she followed me. ‘We’re going to see the great designer, Tappe, who’s making a dress for you for Paris.’

  “And here is how Tappe spoke to her, while draping her in the fabric beaded with pearls. ‘Mademoiselle, what luck you’ve been chosen by Madame Reagan . . . she will make you famous, she’s your lucky star.’

  “Once she was put in her pearls, in that dress intended for the finale (later photographed in Paris by Man Ray), she kissed me. She was happy and beautiful, and she saw herself singing these sweet pretty songs. . . . I kept a hermetic silence, saying to myself, we shall see.”

  To the end of her days, Caroline Reagan mourned the loss of the glittering coat. But she had her star. At $250 a week.

  She still had to get a good jazz band. She and Will Marion Cook auditioned forty groups before they went down to the Smile-A-While Inn in Asbury Park to hear Claude Hopkins, who was twenty-two, handsome, talented, a pianist as well as a bandleader. “When I learned she was there,” Claude said, “I put up several novelty numbers that we used.” One of them was a long comedy version of “The St. Louis Blues” set in a Baptist church, and, Claude said, “The act put the audience in stitches. Mrs. Reagan . . . was almost hysterical.”

  She had found her band. She also found several chorus girls, choosing them the way you choose ripe peaches, the ones with pretty color, the ones without bruise or blemish. Evelyn Anderson was eighteen years old, and working in the revue at the Smile-A-While. “After I did my Charleston for Mrs. Reagan, she asked me if I was interested in joining them to go to Europe. I said yes because I was likin’ Joe Hayman then. He was playing alto sax in Claude’s band.

  “Claude’s wife, Mabel, was working in a different cabaret in Asbury Park, and that’s where Mrs. Reagan got her and Bea Foote and Marguerite Ricks. It was the end of August, and hot as hell when we came to New York.”

  Satisfied with the results of her foraging along the Jersey shore, Caroline’s pleasure was capped when Sidney Bechet asked to join the band. Will Marion Cook told her the truth: Bechet drank, and maybe he’d miss a show once in a while, but every night he played, she would be grateful.

  The real work began. Rehearsals for the Hopkins band in the Spiller basement, rehearsals for the chorus girls at Club Basha.

  “My sister Dorothy’s house on Twelfth Street had become a sweat shop,” Caroline wrote. “It was hot, not work for the classic dressmakers of Broadway. . . . Dorothy had imagined corsets with red laces for the eight girls.”

  The girls loathed the corsets (“You want to dress us like monkeys”) but liked the white organdy overcoats with real diamond buttons, and “the bras and panties, dyed separately to match their skin tones.”

  Caroline rejected a set design by her friend, the novelist John Dos Passos (“It was very nice, but I found it was a little bit too much the way whites thought of blacks, a street in the south with houses of all colors”) and engaged Miguel Covarrubias to do the scenery. “I chose . . . sets from among the models. . . . My Mississippi steamboats, the Memphis and the Natchez . . . the skyscraper that leaned, while Bechet played. . . .”

  In the midst of all this, a dispute broke out between Will Marion Cook and Louis Douglas. Variety of August 26 had carried the headline COLORED TAB FOR PARIS WITH WILL MARION COOK, along with the news that Cook would be leading the show’s orchestra, but it turned out to be a false report. Something had gone wrong.

  It was Bessie Taliaferro’s view that quarreling with his son-in-law had soured Will Marion on the job. “He couldn’t stand Louis Douglas, because Louis married his daughter, I guess.” (Marion, in London with her father in 1919, had fallen in love with the young entertainer.) “And then Louis had been so nasty about Josephine, he had done everything he could to keep Will Marion from taking Josephine for the show. And then I think Mrs. Reagan and Will Marion fell out before she went across the seas.”

  Variety had got everything else right, reporting that “a chorus of eight girls and an orchestra of six pieces (males) will be included in the company of 20. Among the principals are Josephine Baker, Maud de Forrest, and Louis Douglas.”

  Will Marion was replaced by Spencer Williams (he would write the music, while Jack Palmer, a white man, did the lyrics), and Caroline signed Josephine as her star. “I needed a lawyer and a notary for each contract,” she said, “but everyone assured me I risked nothing with Josephine, that with or without a contract, she would never leave me.”

  On September 10, the entire cast is milling around the passport office. It’s a mess. Some of them can’t read or write. Some who have never met before swear they are related because everyone needs a witness who has known him or her for ten years.

  And you, Mother, you top them all. You deserve an award for your performance.

  Six days before sailing, Mrs. Reagan has discovered you don’t have your birth certificate. “What to do?” she asks herself. “Go to St. Louis and find her mother, a laundress, and have her make an authorization? There’s no time.”

  She uses her diplomat husband’s clout, and presto! the city of St. Louis sends her a copy of the missing document, and Booth Marshall drives you down to Wall and Nassau streets, along with your witness, Henry Sapan, a pianist. Caroline kisses you when you arrive, saying with relief, “My star is late.”

  She produces your birth certificate, the first time you have seen it. It must be a bit of a shock to read that you were born Freda J. McDonald, and that a man identified only as Edw. was your father.

  You sit down at a heavy wooden desk to fill out the application form. You write “Freda J. McDonald.” Then, on the line that gives you the choice of “father” or “husband,” you cross out “husband.” Your father, you declare, is named Edward McDonald. You don’t know any Edward McDonald, but then, you didn’t know the last father you invented—the Washington lawyer—either.

  You’re an actress
, you’re coming home in one year, you’re five feet eight inches tall, colored, with a large mouth, a short chin, and an oval face. You take the application back to the clerk. He, one William Marshall, notes that you are going to France, and asks to see your contract of employment.

  You present it proudly. He shakes his head. “What’s this, Miss McDonald? The contract says Josephine Baker.”

  “Baker is my married name.”

  “But you wrote you are single.”

  “A mistake. I’m married.”

  McDonald is crossed out, Baker is written in; “single” is crossed out, “married” is written in. But there’s no pleasing this Mr. Marshall. He wants to know where your husband lives. You don’t have a clue to Billy’s whereabouts, so you make you another correction. “Married” is crossed out, and in its place you write, “Divorced, April 15, 1925, in Detroit.”

  Mr. Marshall is showing definite signs of strain. He demands proof of your husband’s citizenship. No passport can be issued until you, Freda Josephine McDonald Baker, single, married, divorced, “present satisfactory evidence of husband’s American birth.”

  Quick as a flash, you see what you have to do. Kill the guy off. Cross out “divorced,” write in “widowed.” Only thing is, you do solemnly swear that your husband died September 14, 1924. Good work, Mother. He dies in 1924, and you divorce him in 1925. It’s hard for Mr. Marshall to swallow your divorcing Billy Baker seven months after he’s dead.

  “You are crazy!” cries Mr. Marshall. Fortunately, Mrs. Reagan, who has been choking with laughter, jumps in and saves you. Now I understand why you said in one of your books that you were running around in circles in the passport office, afraid you might be put in jail.

  You are Carrie’s child, no question about it. When the census man came around, Carrie had the guts to look him in the eye, swear she’d been married to Arthur Martin for five years, and in one tidy sweep, legitimize all three of you children. You had the guts to go up against the passport man, daring him not to give you what you wanted. Your will be done. “Joe really got that clerk,” Booth Marshall told me. Even so, he said, she was not excited to be going abroad. “She didn’t know what was going to happen. She thought it was going to be like here, no future in it.”

  A year before, Bricktop had thought the same thing. “It wasn’t unheard of for an entertainer to go to Europe,” she said, “but not many did, and hardly any blacks did. . . . I wasn’t excited. I wasn’t nervous. I barely knew where Paris was and didn’t know a word of French, but I’d traveled to a lot of cities in the United States, and it didn’t seem to me that Paris would be much different.”

  On the eve of the Berengaria’s sailing, there was a farewell party for Josephine. Dorothy Rhodes was there. “It was at the Club Bamville on 129th Street and Lenox Avenue that was run by Broadway Jones, who had been in Chocolate Dandies with Josephine. And I can even tell you what Josephine had on. She had somebody to make her an outfit, pantaloons in gray, with suspenders. We had a good time.”

  Booth Marshall had been paid fifty dollars to deliver Josephine to the boat, but all he could remember later was being too drunk to get out of bed. In the end, a whole bunch of people saw Josephine up the gangplank: Will Marion Cook, Paul Bass, Alice and Bessie Allison, Ralph Cooper (Bessie and Ralph had been her most recent lovers), and Mildred Smallwood (a lover from the past). There is a picture of Josephine clutching a small violin, a going-away present from Mildred.

  Right up till the last minute, Josephine considered not going. “As far back as I can remember,” she wrote later, “I can only recall one single day of fear in my life. One day, which lasted only one hour, maybe one minute . . . one minute when fear grasped my brain, my heart, my guts with such force that everything seemed to come apart. It was September 15, 1925.”

  On September 16, the Berengaria sailed. The last cast member to make it aboard was Sidney Bechet. “He didn’t show up for a long time,” Claude Hopkins said. “And we couldn’t move without him because Mrs. Reagan had his passport. He finally came. Later. Oh, he was something.”

  “A quarter of Harlem was on the docks,” Caroline Reagan said. “ ‘Bon voyage, have a good time, come back.’ With little blue, white and red flags waving in the air. . . . On the boat, the orchestra played, and Harlem became farther and farther away.”

  The adventure had begun. Half the troupe wasn’t sure where Paris was, and even the ship-to-shore phone was an astonishment. (On a different transatlantic voyage, Johnny Hudgins remembered getting a telegram from Louis Armstrong. “I said, ‘A telegram? How can a telegram get way out through all this water?’ I didn’t see no land.”)

  Awake at last, Booth Marshall telephoned Josephine on the boat. She was summoned by a loudspeaker: “Miss Baker, Miss Josephine Baker, please come to the radio room.”

  Miss Josephine Baker hugged herself with excitement. It didn’t matter that it was still mid-morning; true to form, she found reality too ordinary, and in one account of the sailing, she turned day into twilight. “The sea was calm, with a red glow from the setting sun. . . . Nobody paid any attention to me. Who would have looked at me? Who would have extended a hand or said a word? I was only a little girl, not even that, a little black girl.

  “The Statue of Liberty disappeared on the horizon. It was over between America and me. . . . Goodbye, New York, goodbye, Philadelphia, goodbye, St. Louis. Goodbye the little girl with purple hands. Goodbye the rats of Bernard Street. Goodbye. . . .

  “The secret in order to hold fast was not to move. . . . It was a game.”

  Chapter 14

  A SHIPBOARD ROMANCE, AND HELLO, PARIS

  “Men and women kissing in the streets!”

  The Berengaria, Captain W.R.D. Irvine, loosened itself slowly from the berths of New York, drawn by four little tugboats,” said Josephine. “The sea was quiet.”

  One day on City Island in the Bronx, I walked into a thrift shop and found an old booklet. It was a first-class passenger list (among the pampered voyagers were “Hon. John Cecil and valet, Mr. Ralph Curtis and governess”) issued by the Cunard Steam Ship Company. On the booklet’s front, covered with grease spots, a painting of the Berengaria being pulled out of New York harbor by four tugs, just as Josephine described it.

  The French have a fairy tale called “Le Petit Poucet,” about a little boy wandering through a dark forest and dropping small white pebbles to leave a trail so he can find his way back home. I have stumbled over so many pebbles marking Josephine’s road through the world that I sometimes wonder if she is putting them out for me. The brochure I held in my hand was dated September 16, 1925, the very day that she had sailed.

  My hands shook, but her name was not on the roster of “saloon” passengers because Caroline Reagan had booked all her people into second class. Herself, too. “I was not apart, like the other Broadway managers.”

  On board the Berengaria, Josephine fell in love with Claude Hopkins. He was tall, elegant, with a beautiful angular face. It was a coup de foudre; she was struck to the heart.

  “We ran after each other,” Claude told me. “She was different, she was something special, and I really was not cautious. I loved my wife, but . . .” His voice trailed off. “The chorus was with Mabel, they were on her side.”

  If there were sinners on the ship, there were also pilgrims praying for them. Josephine, who thought she had put her hometown behind her once and for all, was now surprised to find herself at sea with the Reverend John Thompson and forty-two of his flock on their way from St. Louis to Rome to celebrate Holy Year. We can assume they did not approve of the merrymakers who surrounded them.

  “We played cards, did a little drinking,” Claude said. “I won eight hundred or nine hundred dollars, we saw movies. Nobody could beat Sidney Bechet at cards, but he was miserable, got drunk, half the time he wouldn’t show up for the game, and he didn’t show up for the charity show either.”

  The charity show had been worked out with the Cunard Line; Mrs. Reagan was amena
ble to having her troupe perform for the benefit of children of sailors lost at sea. “I immediately volunteered to sing,” Josephine remembered. “I decided on two sentimental numbers: ‘Brown Eyes’ and ‘If You Hadn’t Gone Away.’ After one rehearsal, I was sure of my success. . . . I would soon be entertaining the first-class passengers. Yes, I would always remember . . . my first resounding flop.

  “I couldn’t seem to find the beat. Was that why no one listened? When they did listen, it was even worse. They clearly didn’t like what they heard. My voice began to crack. In quick succession I produced three off-key notes, which the orchestra tried to drown out.”

  “She really insisted on doing those songs,” Caroline Reagan said. “Beautiful in her Tappe dress, she sang those sweet songs that she cherished. Alas, or perhaps luckily for me, there was no response, no applause, absolute silence from these ladies and gentlemen in their black tie and their décolleté. In first class. I say luckily because I knew, and I had to make her know, but it was a mess.”

  The show was saved by a five-year-old. Into the chill following Josephine’s performance, Louis Douglas threw his little daughter, Marion, sending her out in white socks and black patent-leather shoes to dance the Charleston. “I remember dancing until I saw stars,” she told me. “I had an out-of-body experience. I danced, I danced, I danced, my legs kept going. And the audience was raving, people were screaming, and I was so excited I couldn’t calm down afterwards. My father tried to take me downstairs, my mother tried to, but I wouldn’t let anyone except Josephine put me to bed. That was my night.”

  Despite her kindness to young Marion, Josephine was seething with rage. “Before going to sleep,” Caroline Reagan said, “I ran across her, grey with fury. ‘You’re fixing to kill me!’ she cried. ‘I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.’ ‘As you wish, Josephine,’ I said, ‘but unfortunately, you’ll have to wait till we get to Cherbourg. We are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.’