Josephine Baker Read online

  “What a child. What a star I had. . . . Next morning, she came knocking at my door quite timidly, asking me why I had chosen her. It was a nice way to be waked up. I answered, ‘Meeting in our dining room at ten o’clock. Let Douglas and our composer, Spencer Williams, know.’

  “When I arrived for the meeting, there was Josephine already. Worried. Louis Douglas and Spencer Williams were at the piano.

  “ ‘All right,’ I answered her question. ‘Josephine, you know how to dance, you’re beautiful, you have a chic that will amaze even Parisians, and you are a clown, don’t forget that.’ At that moment, Spencer Williams put his great black hands on the white piano keys and began to compose ‘I Want to Yodel.’ Josephine stayed with him to learn the song.”

  It would be a huge hit in La Revue Nègre.

  Probably because of her affair with Claude, Josephine quickly recovered her high spirits. “She had a cabin by herself, her being the star, you know,” Lydia Jones said. “But the other girls were really angry that she would take the man away from his wife. Some of them were actually plotting to throw Josephine overboard. Evelyn Anderson and I had to talk them out of it.”

  Evelyn vouches for Lydia’s story. “When nobody knew where to find Claude, he was with Josephine.”

  At one point during the voyage, the ship stopped. In her first book, Josephine told the story quite simply. “September 18. Everybody on deck. We put on life jackets, boats are unhooked, sailors work quietly. You can hear pulleys and small children scream. The ocean nevertheless is calmer than ever. . . . So what’s the matter? There is a German mine in the area. Luckily, we didn’t run into it.”

  In a later book, the tale was dramatically expanded. “There would probably be a boat for our deck if there were enough to go around, but we would be the last to leave ship. We could hear the first-class passengers shouting. Children were crying. Gathering by the railing, we began to sing. The same songs our ancestors had sung on the slave ships that carried them to America. A musician called Sidney picked up his clarinet. He played so softly and sweetly that tears came to my eyes.”

  Suddenly we have slave ships and spirituals. It’s interesting to note how Josephine manipulates her souvenirs as the years pass. Yes, everyone did go on deck when the alarm sounded, and yes, Sidney Bechet was there, but he wasn’t carrying a clarinet. Claude gave me a picture of some of the cast taken during that drill. The men are wearing jaunty peaked caps, everyone except Josephine is smiling. Life jackets are tied around their necks, the word FRONT spelled out across their chests. Only Josephine wears her jacket upside down. There are no tears in her eyes, she is squinting into the sun, lost in thought.

  The Berengaria docked in Cherbourg at 8:30 A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, September 22. “When we arrived, it was raining,” said Josephine. And cold.

  The four-hour trip to Paris included lunch, which was a pleasant surprise. In the dining car, the whole company was welcome. Not like the dining car of the Illinois Central train with its white rosebuds and its white clientele.

  The cooking in the restaurant car was a revelation too, “but not as much as that of my first dinner in Paris. Can you imagine, they gave me snails to eat. . . . And then oysters! What a strange business! They moved in the shells. So I wanted to have them killed before eating them because I was afraid they would stay alive inside me.”

  Josephine’s impressions of Paris, when she arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare: “What did I see first? Men and women kissing each other in the streets! In America, you were sent to prison for that! This freedom amused me. Yes, one could kiss in the street, and, in the theatres, women could show themselves without clothing. I could not believe it, so I bought dozens of pictures of nude women.” She admired the train station, observed the people—“Everybody pushed, shoved without looking at each other”—and was charmed by the taxi horns. “It was a real orchestra. . . . I left at once for the Hôtel Fournet, boulevard des Batignolles. I thought I had settled in a palace. . . . What thrilled me was to have a private bathroom; it was the first time it happened to me. . . . In my little room, I walked like a queen. I strutted in front of the mirror.”

  Her sister Margaret said that Josephine “had set out to conquer the world.” But that night in the Hôtel Fournet, her ambition was less grandiose and more specific. “I fell asleep with the idea of conquering Paris.”

  Chapter 15

  JOSEPHINE CHECKS OUT POETS, PAINTERS, WAITERS

  “I wanted to seduce the whole capital”

  When the waiter arrived with breakfast, he nearly had a heart attack. It was Josephine’s first morning in Paris, and, she said, “I definitely wanted to seduce the whole capital. Thus . . . I had half taken out my breasts from under my nightdress. A servant came in: it was a little old man . . . he only had one hair that he draped around his skull.”

  Out of breath from having carried a tray up three flights of stairs, the old man stood there in his long white apron, quivering. “He was so excited,” says Lydia Jones, who had answered the knock at the door. “The poor fellow, I don’t want to know what he thought about us colored people from America, but that was Josephine.”

  The waiter’s name was Albert, and from then on, Josephine boasted, he would “steal a jar of jam from the owner and give it to me for my breakfast.”

  Albert got his reward for being the first Frenchman to gape in admiration at what Bricktop described as “the most beautiful bronze body in the world.” The next year, when she opened Chez Joséphine, her club in Montmartre, Josephine hired him as headwaiter. She paid him further homage by naming her pig Albert, and lest you think that was an insult, bear in mind that she liked her pig better than she liked most people. Albert (the pig) waddled freely about the club until he got so fat he could no longer squeeze through the kitchen door, a problem Josephine solved by having the whole wall torn down.

  Paris of the twenties was filled with tremors. Four years of la Grande Guerre had left France devastated. She had suffered 1,393,000 deaths and three million wounded, which represented 20 percent of her workforce. Women had been obliged to cultivate fields and work in factories, replacing their men, learning new ways to survive. But after the grieving, a madness set in. Young people longed to forget the gray days, they didn’t want to be bound by their parents’ values anymore. Lucky to be alive in the aftermath of so much carnage, they gave their appetites free rein, ushering in an era the French called les Années Folles, the crazy years. (Those years in America were known as the Roaring Twenties.)

  Bricktop said it was a time when people with money but no talent helped people with talent but no money. “They used to take care of all the geniuses, the people who could write and paint and perform. . . . It was a beautiful thing.”

  Old games came back; in the summer of 1924, the Olympics (never held in wartime) took place in Paris; an American girl named Ethel Lackie won the one-hundred-meter freestyle swim, and track star Harold Abrahams of Great Britain won the one-hundred-meter dash. (His story would later be told in the movie Chariots of Fire.)

  Traditionally a haven for painters, the city was by then also crowded with expatriate writers. They called themselves the Lost Generation, and were referred to as “literary pilgrims” by Sylvia Beach, founder of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Gertrude Stein gave dinner parties to which she invited her neighbor, Caroline Reagan, and Mrs. Reagan returned the favor, serving tea in her penthouse.

  Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, had found the Reagans their apartment at number 26, right across the street, and helped them hire workmen to install a new bathroom. “My mother wasn’t going to put her husband and baby in an apartment without a bathroom,” Sophie Reagan (then five years old) remembered. “She got me a governess, and disappeared from my life for a while; she went back to America to put together La Revue Nègre.”

  Paris was a city in which Ernest Hemingway took his little son to bistros and bought him drinks (they were made of grenadine), and everyone went to music bars, to gay ba
rs, to transvestite bars. The autumn of 1925, wrote Noel Riley Fitch, was highlighted by “the rhythms of American jazz, the folk-singing of Paul Robeson, the Chaplin shuffle in his acclaimed film The Gold Rush, the erotic movements of Josephine Baker . . .” Women who looked like underfed boys, the Charleston, decadence in the arts—Jean Cocteau was said to have seduced a young man by giving him “his first whiff of opium in a kiss.”

  The country had always been fascinated by black people. After the Revolution, Robespierre’s coachman dressed himself in feathers, painted on a ferocious face, and beat a drum in a place he had decorated like a cave. He called it Au Café du Sauvage. During World War I, black American soldiers came, bringing jazz. Lieutenant Jim Europe of the 369th U.S. Infantry organized a regimental orchestra (Noble Sissle was the drum major) and this “dusky band,” boasted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was being celebrated all over France. (Lieutenant Europe wrote home to Eubie Blake: “. . . if the war does not end me first as sure as God made man I will be on top and so far on top that it will be impossible to pull me down.”)

  Jacques Charles, a god of the music halls who was also a wounded war hero, came home to discover a “cyclone of jazz” blowing over Paris. He proceeded to write and direct a show at the Casino de Paris that prefigured the opening scene of La Revue Nègre. When the curtain went up, the audience saw a Mississippi riverboat, and heard a black jazz band.

  Jean Cocteau found it more noise than music. “The Negroes in the air, in a sort of cage, lash about, waddle, tossing to the crowd morsels of raw meat, to blows of trumpet and rattle,” he wrote.

  “Few thought of jazz as art,” says dance critic Lynn Garafola. “But many felt, with Cocteau, that the ‘savagery’ and bold flouting of tradition associated with jazz could stimulate the imagination.”

  Even Picasso was influenced by African masks and sculpture, writers like Blaise Cendrars and Paul Morand were turning to black themes, Art Deco home furnishings and jewelry reflected the rage for black culture.

  It was partly because of Jacques Charles’s success with popular revues that, during the spring of 1925, Rolf de Maré decided to convert his beautiful Théâtre des Champs-Élysées—the one Fernand Léger called a white elephant—into the Music Hall des Champs-Élysées.

  In 1920, de Maré had brought the Royal Swedish Ballet to Paris, and when he could not interest a single theater owner in his project, he had simply bought his own theater complex. In addition to the huge Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, it contained two smaller auditoriums, and boasted printing facilities in the basement, costume and sewing ateliers under the roof.

  After his ballet company had disbanded, de Maré, hoping to attract a more general audience, tried various other entertainments. But even with its new name—and certainly, “Music Hall” had a more friendly, less intimidating sound than “Théâtre”—the house seemed too grand, too chic, to the working man who didn’t want to have to dress in evening clothes to go out for a bit of entertainment.

  Until, of course, La Revue Nègre came along and broke all the rules. Josephine recalled her first rehearsal in the huge house. “The theater is dark, the stage is lit. There are twenty people in the first row.

  “Hello! Charleston. The stagehands watch, the two firemen are amazed. They are not used to receiving trombone blows in their stomach.

  “At the end, behind the scenery, the younger ones try to imitate, they would like to dance the Charleston: they shake flannel legs, they kick their feet in the air like cows, they also kick their neighbors. . . . The Charleston already possesses them. ‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby.’

  “The Charleston should be danced with necklaces of shells wriggling on the skin and making a dry music. . . . It is a way of dancing with your hips . . . to bring out the buttocks and shake your hands. We hide the buttocks too much. They exist. I don’t see what reproach should be offered them.”

  It was still hot, that September, though the leaves of the chestnut trees had already fallen, covering the streets. At one point, because of the heat, it was decided to move rehearsals to the roof of the theater, and since nobody wanted to haul a piano up there, Bechet accompanied the dancers on his saxophone.

  “Oh! What an intoxication to dance in the sun with practically nothing on,” said Josephine. “But I have to say that I was more dressed up than on the stage . . . because of the neighbors. There were some at every window. The typists . . . the liftboys . . . All applauded. I was in a bathing suit: someone took a picture of me like that on that roof from where you can see the trees of the embankments and the Champs-Élysées. . . .”

  “We had ten days before the opening,” Caroline Reagan said. “Quick, quick to work. . . . It was now or never. I had to incorporate Josephine in the act, and pull the whole thing together. . . . And then to create Josephine’s clothing. I’m not calling them costumes. First her dresses, her dances, her yodel, the play of her eyes.”

  Louis Douglas had different problems; he had to whip some excitement into this show that had been born of Caroline’s infatuation with the “ebony chorus,” and about which Rolf de Maré and André Daven seemed unenthusiastic.

  Originally, the idea had appealed to de Maré because he knew that the black Chocolate Kiddies was already a huge success in Berlin. But he had given Caroline only enough money to go to New York and bring back a little divertissement, and when it arrived, it seemed too little. A few sketches, a few songs, some dancing, a star who wanted to sing though she wasn’t very good at it, and on top of that the cast, whom de Maré had expected to be a collection of coal-black exotics, were not as dark as most sun-tanned Frenchmen. (In addition, André Daven told a friend, he and de Maré had “a lot of trouble stopping the black performers from using white-face makeup, which is very much the fashion in the Negro theater of New York.”)

  Caroline went to the flea market to piece out the costumes; she brought back “a strange hat and a pair of black and white laceup high boots, and also a wedding veil,” along with assorted uniforms and headgear and medals and feathers, half of them from the Napoleonic era.

  De Maré and Daven also hired a few very black African-born dancers (Joe Alex was one of them) and recruited some supernumeraries who couldn’t dance at all. Mercer Cook, Will Marion’s son, was studying at the Sorbonne (he would eventually become a diplomat) and he enjoyed the idea of moonlighting. “I just had to walk on the docks in front of the two big boats. It was easy money.”

  But after fleshing out the cast, Daven and de Maré were still unhappy. There was one man, they decided, who might save them. They would beg Jacques Charles for help, throw themselves on the mercy of the much-acclaimed director.

  Caroline, however, was in no mood to acclaim some interloper hauled in at the last minute to shed his brilliance on her production. Bitterly, she recounted how de Maré had informed her “that Mr. Casino de Paris was supposed to come in two or three days before the dress rehearsal.”

  She felt humiliated. “A person of honor,” she reflected, “would have said adieu and disappeared. . . . But I didn’t know that sort of dignity. My mother taught me, ‘You have two cheeks, turn the other one, my little one.’ Since then, from time to time, both cheeks burn. What do you want?”

  Until the day he died, Jacques Charles would insist that he created La Revue Nègre, rechoreographed La Revue Nègre, and plucked Josephine out of the chorus. “I invented her,” he said.

  Chapter 16

  THE GOOD TIMES ROLL

  “We need tits”

  It began one morning as he sat at his desk, Jacques Charles remembered. “Daven entered my office. . . . On the recommendation of an impresario, he had engaged a troupe of Negroes without seeing them. That revue had arrived in Paris, and the first rehearsal had been a catastrophe. ‘My dear,’ said Daven, ‘they tap, tap tap for two hours and they are going to chase the audience away. You are the only one who can rescue us from this mess.’ ”

  Charles agreed to take a look and determine if anything could be done in the fo
rty-eight hours before the opening. “On the stage,” he said, “I found the ladies and gentlemen with gray faces, because they could see the lack of enthusiasm from their managers for their talent.”

  I can believe that. For eight days, nobody had been strong enough to pull the show together. Louis Douglas was trying to direct two dozen black Americans who were far more strange to him than the girls at the Moulin Rouge would have been, and Caroline Reagan, passionate but inexperienced, was trying to be a producer. There was no real boss.

  Jacques Charles watched a rehearsal and was agreeably surprised. “There was certainly too much tap, all was impossibly monotonous, but there were excellent elements in the troupe . . . remarkable intelligence and a rare good will. . . . The error was to have wanted to make it Parisian. You had to make it black. . . . I mixed everything. I put Louis XV hats with overalls, and big straw hats with fur costumes. I combined backdrops from one scene with designs from other scenes, and then I lit it all. Bizarre and multicolored.

  “We cut, modified, inverted, reversed numbers, and mostly tried to make it what it was, a revue.

  “But something was missing. I wanted a note a little bit more voluptuous, an erotic, sensual duet to give the audience some rest from all that jazz and tap. I talked about it with Joe Alex, who was a fine porteur. He could carry a partner onstage and make himself and her look good, an art that has little to do with strength. And Joe Alex suggested that his partner be Josephine Baker.

  “I had already noticed her beautiful body, but to be honest, Josephine rejected my suggestion that she dance almost nude. In vain, did I leave Joe Alex alone with her to try and persuade her. When I came back, she was crying, and asked to go back on the boat.