Josephine Baker Read online

  “ ‘Very well,’ I told her, ‘but only after the premiere. Meanwhile, you will do as I’m asking you to do.’ . . . Sobbing and sniffling, Josephine started to rehearse.”

  With all due respect to M. Charles, neither Evelyn Anderson nor Lydia Jones recalled any sniffling. “Josephine was for anything new,” Evelyn said. “She thought she’d be the first black girl—they did it with white girls at the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge—to go naked onstage.”

  “I don’t remember Josephine crying,” said Lydia. “You know, she was always naked in the hotel, laughing and posing in front of the mirrors.” (Despite the “delirium” created by the “Danse de Sauvage,” Jacques Charles said later, “I’m still waiting for a simple thank-you letter.”)

  It was Jacques Charles who told Daven and de Maré, “We need tits. These French people, with their fantasies of black girls, we must give them des nichons.”

  In 1905, Mata Hari had danced at the Museum Guimet, bare-breasted except for two metallic shells, and shocked Parisians. Four years later Colette, that most sensual of writers, proved she was an equally uninhibited actress. In a melodrama called The Flesh, she played an unfaithful wife whose husband rips off her clothes. Audiences gasped as her breasts were exposed. Not even metallic shells to cushion the outrage. She left the stage to a storm of boos mixed with cheers from the more open-minded like Chevalier, who called her breasts “the most appetizing in the world.”

  Until Josephine’s, if the response to La Revue Nègre is any gauge. But Josephine was not the only girl who appeared topless in the show; I have the Man Ray photographs that prove there were six bare-breasted beauties. In Ray’s pictures they pose, sitting on the floor, naked except for straw skirts and necklaces made of shells. They are all looking out at the audience, smiling.

  During breaks in rehearsal, the cast went sightseeing. “The streets surprised us with cobblestones,” Evelyn says, “and on the boulevards, the pissoirs for men.”

  In Montmartre, they felt at home. The quarter, on a hill at the highest point of the city, was filled with guinguettes, the little cabarets where you could dance, and coffee bars where laborers and office workers stopped to have their morning café au lait.

  Le Sacré-Coeur still looks down on the red chimneys, the crowded houses, the music clubs. Hundreds of steps lead up to the church, and far below, on rue Tardieu, is À l’Angélus, a little pastry shop that has been in the same place since 1912. I can imagine Josephine sitting in a white wire chair, holding a cup of hot chocolate, enjoying a respite from the tension of rehearsals.

  At night, the cast flocked to rue Pigalle. Sidney Bechet remembered looking around a club and asking himself, “Why am I here?” But even as he posed the question, he knew the answer. “France, it’s closer to Africa. . . . My grandfather, he was African . . . and I wanted to get back as far as I could . . . it’s all so mixed up with the music.”

  When Bechet blew his horn on the opening night of La Revue Nègre, it was like the walls of Jericho, Caroline Reagan said. “The house came tumbling down.”

  While Caroline was generous with credit for others, everyone around her did not share this trait. For example, the famous poster of La Revue Nègre—there are only five known to be still in existence, each worth one hundred thousand dollars—was not created entirely in the brain of Paul Colin.

  I discovered this by accident. From 1923 to 1925, Miguel Covarrubias had worked in New York for Vogue and Vanity Fair. In 1983, I was thumbing through a book that contained reproductions of sketches he had done in those years. They reflected the lives of artists in Harlem in a unique and powerful way. The book was called Negro Drawings, and I had bought a copy of it from an auction of Paul Colin’s belongings sold when his family put him into a retirement home.

  Suddenly I was brought up short. There they were, the three people of the poster of La Revue Nègre: a slender girl in a tight white dress, flanked by two men, one with a frieze of nappy hair, big red lips, the other with a hat tilted over one eye and a checked bow tie. The girl everyone believed to be Josephine, the one Paul Colin said he had sketched from life, had been drawn by Covarrubias before Colin ever set eyes on Josephine.

  By then Paul Colin had died, and I went to call on Charles Kieffer, an artist known for his drawings of Chevalier. “Mr. Kieffer,” I said, “I want you to help me. I strongly believe that Paul Colin did not create the poster of La Revue Nègre.”

  I told him what I knew, and also what I suspected. Colin had been an artist on Rolf de Maré’s payroll. Every two weeks de Maré presented a new show, and Colin drew the posters for them. Since he was around the theater all the time, he had probably seen sketches by Covarrubias that Caroline Reagan had sent from New York and, impressed by their strength, had appropriated them.

  A brief, Machiavellian smile crossed Kieffer’s face. “How the devil did you find that out?” he said. “A few of us knew, but it was a secret.”

  A few of them knew, yet no art critic ever discovered it. Not even after Colin’s Le Tumulte Noir appeared in 1927. Le Tumulte Noir is a gorgeously colored portfolio of pictures affectionately mocking the infatuation of Parisians with all things black—the Charleston, jazz, Josephine in her grass skirt—but it’s easy to spot Covarrubias’s influence behind the dazzling images.

  Still, I don’t mean to denigrate Paul Colin’s great talent. I agree with his biographer, Jack Rennert, who said Colin’s paintings captured “the essence of Josephine . . . of a sultry, sensuous performer . . . full of feral magnetism.”

  When I met Paul Colin, I hadn’t yet stumbled across the Covarrubias sketches, and even if I’d known about them, I wouldn’t have cross-examined the old man; by then he was ninety. I went to his birthday party at the Maison Nationale des Artistes, a château in Nogent-sur-Marne, where seventy venerable graphic artists lived in comfort, each with his own studio.

  Asked about Josephine, Colin’s face brightened. His strength was gone, but his eyes were fierce. “C’est moi qui l’ai inventée!” he cried. “I’m the one who invented her.” I didn’t tell him he was not the only man to make that boast.

  He said La Revue Nègre had been a scandal, “but I found it very nice. Josephine invaded the stage, she was extraordinary. For the French people, there is always the lure of the sensual. They had this sexual fantasy, the women dreaming of black men, the men of black women.”

  His voice drifted off, returned. Again: “I’m the one who invented her. She didn’t know how to sing. Many artists have something in their stomachs, but they don’t have the opportunity to give birth.”

  He was clear and cold about having slept with Josephine—“She’s not the first Negress I ever had”—but vague about how he had created the poster. He said he had taken Josephine to his studio, rather than sketching her at the theater, because he wanted to sleep with her. She posed for him, and yes, he captured her soul on paper, even after she had left him for other embraces. “For a few weeks,” he said, “I took her everywhere, I introduced her.”

  In her own memoirs, she mentions going to his studio, but omits the sex. “Monsieur Colin . . . led me to a little washroom attached to the studio. I reappeared in my bra and panties. . . . I avoided Monsieur Colin’s eyes. With a sudden gesture, he reached over and undid my hooks. Oh, no! I wanted to dash through the door and down the stairs, but was glued to the spot. Monsieur Colin calmly began to draw.”

  Josephine, Colin said, chattered away in English, which he did not speak. “Her expressions were exaggerated. She laughed too loudly, and then she would suddenly go dark. She was a born exhibitionist. And ambitious. Make no mistake.”

  “We haven’t had this much sense of a bursting forth since the Ballets Russes,” wrote Paul Achard of La Revue Nègre. Almost no one remembers now that La Revue Nègre, which made worldwide news, was only the second half of a two-part show, and ran less than an hour. The first half featured vaudeville—Ski Tayama (Japanese acrobats), the Klein family on trapeze, Saint-Granier (a tenor who impersonat
ed Parisian stars), and strongman Louis Vasseur, who twirled on his head “a huge merry-go-round bearing six men suspended on trapezes.”

  The program for La Revue Nègre made no mention of Jacques Charles. It listed Caroline as producer, her husband, Daniel, as director, and Louis Douglas as assistant director.

  The show moved fast, the numbers had names that made the audience laugh: “Shimmy Sha Wabble,” “Boodle-Am.”

  Then suddenly, the stage was empty, and Louis Douglas, in blackface and tailcoat, a big white flower in his buttonhole, came on as Harlequin, and, tears running down his face, sang of his love for Columbine. Of those who had gone to the opening night, none I interviewed had ever forgotten the beauty and sadness of that number.

  Louis Douglas’s wife, Marion, danced, Maud de Forrest sang, Josephine did “I Want to Yodel” and her Charleston, and in front of a flat painted to look like a New York skyscraper, Bechet played alone.

  But it took the “Danse de Sauvage” to conquer Paris, and even then, there were detractors. One critic couldn’t make up his mind about Josephine (“She’s horrible! She’s wonderful! . . . Is that her hair I see or is her skull painted black?”), another complained that the revue was “not Negro enough,” and Paul Robeson’s wife, Essie, wrote friends that it was “rotten,” that Josephine’s voice couldn’t be heard over the orchestra, and that the “Danse de Sauvage” was fine until the star did “this ridiculously vulgar . . . wiggling.”

  The French authorities got in a couple of low blows of their own. Despite the nudity at the Folies-Bergère and the Casino de Paris, a prefect of police was sent around to announce that more modesty was in order at La Revue Nègre. “The color black alone does not dress one,” he said.

  The press jumped on the story. “In one of the scenes,” ran a newspaper account, “the ladies of the chorus appeared to be dressed in a few inches of lace and rows of glass beads. For the past few days, this costume has featured a piece of fabric between the lace and the skin. Why this modification? It was imposed by the prefecture of police, deciding that white dancers could complain if colored dancers were allowed to appear in such scant attire.”

  Evelyn Anderson still believes it was because the prefect’s girlfriend was working in the chorus at the Casino de Paris. “The public,” she says, “loved La Revue Nègre.”

  The public would, by and large, have preferred the cast to be more black, resembling Africans right off the boat. Because of this, the very light-colored Hazel Valentine was forced to apply black body makeup, an act she and the other high-yellow girls considered a supreme degradation. (Mother, were you laughing? These French people love you for your dancing, your singing—at that time, a high, quavery Florence Mills imitation—and also for the color of your skin. Nineteen years you have hated the color of your skin, now it is one of your glories.)

  The day after La Revue Nègre opened, every journalist in Paris converged on the Hôtel Fournet to interview the new queen of the night. One of them asked her what it was like “when they all screamed at you, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ ”

  “Nice,” Josephine said. “It was nice.”

  “But what is your most vivid memory of last night?”

  She thought a moment. “Well,” she said, “last night after the show was over, the theater was turned into a big restaurant. . . . And for the first time in my life, I was invited to sit at a table and eat with white people.”

  She had tears in her eyes, a reporter observed. And why not? As Duke Ellington said, after his first trip to Europe, “You can go anywhere and talk to anybody and do anything you like. When you’ve eaten hot dogs all your life and you’re suddenly offered caviar, it’s hard to believe it’s true.”

  Luck, of course, had something to do with Josephine’s conquest of Paris. “It is necessary to say that she arrived exactly at the moment we needed her,” wrote Jean Prasteau. “With her short hair, her free body, her colored skin and her American accent, she united the tendencies, tastes and aspirations of that epoque.”

  Josephine was even credited with bringing the Charleston to Paris, though Bee Jackson, a white American billed as Queen of the Charleston, had performed the dance on the stage of the Music-Hall des Champs-Élysées the previous July, warming up the audience for Paul Whiteman. (Ironically, in America, the Charleston was being called “the dance of death,” because of a tragedy that had taken place in Boston. “The collapse of the dance floor in the Hotel Pickwick,” Variety reported, “is attributed to the strenuous efforts of Charleston dancers. Nearly 50 people are dead as a result . . . the off-beat rhythm of the Charleston, reinforced by the indulgence in things alcoholic, is said to have caused the building to sway so violently that it fell apart.” It was then against the law to dance the Charleston on the sidewalks of New York.)

  Besides being lucky, Josephine worked hard. Now, every night after the curtain rang down on La Revue Nègre, she and the band and a few of the dancers would go to Pigalle and double at Le Rat Mort. “We would strictly do our numbers,” Evelyn says, “and then the band stayed after and played the dance music, but Mabel Hopkins and me, we would go to the dressing room and play blackjack. Because we couldn’t leave until Claude and my boyfriend Joe left, you know.

  “This used to tickle me because a fellow from the Vanderbilt family used to send champagne to me in the dressing room, and he always wanted to take me out, and I would say, ‘No, Joe Hayman won’t let me.’ ”

  “Men sent us red roses and notes in French,” says Lydia Jones. “And the white girls in Paris went mad for our boys, black men were the craze wherever we went. At the Dead Rat, we made a lot of tips, it was quite a naughty place.”

  Naughty wasn’t the half of it. Le Rat Mort was owned by the Corsican Mafia. “We worked every joint in Pigalle, but not that one,” says Stephane Grappelli, the jazz violinist who played with Django Reinhardt. “It was a tough place where a girl would come and grab a man and say, ‘Chéri, I’m thirsty,’ and the man would buy a bottle of champagne and at the end of the night, the girl would go to the boss, take all the corks out of her bra where she’d hidden them, and turn them in for money.”

  A different girl might have been satisfied with the bravos of the two thousand people at the theater and the star salary Caroline was paying her, but Josephine had not refused the offer to perform at 2 A.M. in a decadent café. If her fans wanted to see her up close, she was pleased to oblige. Not even in Harlem had the white people abandoned themselves so shamelessly, and she got into the rhythm of it, flirting with lonely old roués, pushing champagne.

  The Prince of Wales was at Le Rat Mort every night. “He liked to drum, and he’d get up on the stand and play,” Claude Hopkins remembered. “He wasn’t very good . . . but he was very popular . . . he’d give us a couple of hundred franc notes for letting him sit in for a couple of numbers.”

  Claude said the prince had to be taken out of the club “feet first every night—dead drunk and stoned.” He was said to be grieving over the marriage of his cousin Mountbatten, with whom he was infatuated, but once he met Claude, he perked up. Claude claimed the prince was mad about him. It’s funny to think of Josephine and H.R.H. waging a silent war for Claude’s favors. (Johnny Hudgins, another favorite of the prince, had met him in London. “He come in to see my show. He married a woman from Baltimore, from my hometown; he didn’t want to be no damn king.”)

  Moonlighting is easy when you’re a teenager, because fatigue is not a concept you grasp. Josephine not only worked two jobs, she tried—briefly—to save some money. She kept on her body the first thousand-franc note she earned, even when she was dancing half naked—“I tacked it on my belt under my green feather”—until it grew tattered. Then she took it to the bank, where she was told that without its serial number, which had somehow got chewed off, the bill was worthless. “It is on that day I understood it was totally useless to save,” she said. Spend, spend, spend, and keep moving.

  She bought a little snake. “Around the neck, I twisted my snake. He k
ept very quiet, because he was warm, but when I started to dance, he woke up, and stuck out his tongue. My partner was frightened to death. Nobody wanted to dance with me anymore. Everybody was frightened. I had been noticed, that is what I wanted.”

  She also bought a small mean dog who ran away. “He wanted to be free,” she said. “Free! The lovely word.”

  For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why every black entertainer who came to Europe bought dogs. Fierce dogs, like wolves. Josephine had one so savage she had to board it in a kennel. Finally, a friend put it all together. “During slavery, blacks were hunted with dogs. In Europe, they could take a kind of revenge, they could own the same kinds of dogs that chased their ancestors. So there they were in little hotel rooms and they had these huge dogs.”

  Later, I read a book called Bullwhip Days, which confirmed for me that Southern whites had hunted down their runaway slaves with dogs. “Some slaves,” testified John Crawford, “told me a sure way to keep the dogs from ketching you. They said if you put red pepper and turpentine in your shoes, they can’t run you, ’cause they can’t scent you.”

  In Germany, Sam Wooding said, the whole Chocolate Kiddies company bought German shepherds, and in Paris, Josephine, Claude Hopkins, Joe Alex, also had police dogs. Often Josephine moved, at the behest of a new lover, with her entire ménagerie. “I lived at Rue Henri-Rochefort, Rue Fromentin, and so on.” In the tradition of the French, she was already being kept—and fought over—by rich and not so rich men. One of her first French suitors was a student of architecture. She told him she didn’t love him, but let him buy her dinner at expensive restaurants. “One day he was imprudent enough to take out of his pocket a thousand-franc note. It was the amount his father sent him each month as allowance. I grabbed it. . . .”

  “ ‘I won’t have any more money to eat,’ he said. I laughed. ‘You want to go out with artists, you must pay.’

  “Yes, when I think about this gesture, I believe I was not only crazy but a nasty girl. . . . I was like in love with myself. Paris had turned my head a little.”