Josephine Baker Read online

  It’s easy to see why. Every night at the theater, presents and love letters awaited her. Mercer Cook (the Sorbonne scholar) acted as big brother, translating the letters, and Josephine generously gave him a handful of francs each day.

  Josephine was busy homemaking too. She bought fabric for a bedcover, and wood to build a platform for the bed. “I received in that bed,” she said. “I was a coquette.”

  Bricktop, having missed the opening of La Revue Nègre—she was performing in Barcelona—came back to Paris to find everyone talking about Josephine. A light-skinned American black who dyed her hair red, Bricktop had played hostess at Barron Wilkins’s club in Harlem, she’d been in the Panama Trio (with Florence Mills and Cora Green), and in 1924 she came to Paris to work at Chez Florence. A year later, she had her own club. She was a protégée of Cole Porter’s; for her, he wrote “Miss Otis Regrets,” about a woman who killed her lover. “Those bums,” Bricktop said, “sometimes you have to kill ’em. Kill ’em before they kill you, baby.”

  Now she discovered Josephine had replaced her and Florence Jones as the most popular black female entertainers in Paris. “The French people, who loved all that chic, went out of their minds,” Bricktop said. “Josephine was gorgeous. I mean naked or with clothes. She lived a bizarre thing, but what do you expect when you take a chorus girl and overnight she becomes a sensation? She had those legs that went from here to everywhere.

  “All the great designers—Paul Poiret, Edward Molyneux, Jean Patou—were fighting to dress her. She had an apartment right around the corner from my nightclub, and one day I went there and the clothes were just piled high on the floor, and I said, ‘Josephine, why don’t you hang these clothes up?’ ‘Oh, no, Brickie,’ she said, ‘they are going to take them away tomorrow and bring another pile.’ ”

  (I’d heard rumors of a long-ago affair between Josephine and Brick-top, and the rumors, it turned out, were true. Bricktop told me so herself, after Josephine’s death.)

  Caroline Reagan had introduced Josephine and Poiret at L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a cultural landmark of 1925. (Art Deco, the style, took its name from this exhibition.) Poiret had bought three barges—he called them Loves, Organs, and Delights, names representing “women, always women”—and moored them in the Seine at the entrance to the show. The boats were filled with textiles and furniture from his workshops; he considered this display his gift to the people of Paris, though he had to sell his painting collection—by Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo—to pay for it.

  Poiret was a male counterpart of Josephine, rebellious, indifferent to criticism, wildly extravagant. As a teenager, he had made dresses that freed women from their corsets; in his heyday, he gave parties for three hundred guests, with peacocks and herons wandering on his lawn. How could Josephine not adore him, a man obsessed with rich colors, a man who ran a design school for talented poor children, and paid them to come?

  Sadly, by the time she met him, Poiret’s star was in decline (he refused to turn out chemises for scrawny flappers) and he was beset by money problems. Even so, he didn’t charge Josephine for dresses. Christiane Otte, at that time assistant to Poiret’s chief vendeuse, remembered Josephine’s roaring into the salon, kissing everybody, then throwing open her fur coat. “It was November, and she was absolutely naked under it, laughing like a child.”

  But the first time she came—with Caroline—to look at Poiret’s creations, she nearly gave the designer apoplexy. “All his models walked in front of us,” Caroline recalled. “And Josephine was saying, ‘No, not that, no, not that, no!’ Poiret was starting to get worried. Suddenly, Josephine asked for a piece of paper and a pencil; she drew, while laughing. She wanted fringe from the shoulders to the hem, light pink at the top, shading to dark at the bottom. ‘American beauty, voilà!’ she said, as she finished her sketch. Poiret was enthusiastic, he added the Josephine Baker dress to his collection.”

  In the streets, she was besieged for autographs, though Bricktop said she could scarcely write her name. “I said, ‘Baby, get a stamp.’ . . . I saw her on the Champs-Élysées, where you couldn’t get within blocks of her.”

  No question but she had an air. A reporter described an evening at Caroline Reagan’s, and Josephine’s making an entrance in a “cherry-colored dress, small hat pulled low on her forehead, ermine-trimmed coat. ‘Paris is marvelous,’ she gushes. ‘And your dressmakers are divine.’ ” (In her memoirs, she offered one final thought on fashion: “Love dresses you better than all the dressmakers.”)

  Ten glorious weeks La Revue Nègre played at the Music-Hall of the Champs-Élysées. Booked for a fortnight, it was extended and extended. Early in November, Josephine and company were still dancing there while the great Pavlova waited impatiently for the theater she had been promised.

  On November 7, under the auspices of the president of the Republic, Gaston Doumergue, there was a dinner to mark the closing of the exposition. Pavlova danced (with M. Veron) during the appetizer, Josephine (with Honey Boy) during the main course. As though the great Russian were nothing but a warm-up act for the headliner.

  At the end of the month, La Revue Nègre was finally forced to move to the Théâtre de l’Étoile, where Josephine added insult to injury by performing a wicked parody of Pavlova as the Black Swan.

  Creative artists of the day—Milhaud, Van Dongen, Picabia, René Clair—lined up to meet the cast of La Revue Nègre. The composer Ravel wrote to a friend, “I must go and soak myself in this bouillon of culture.” Princess Murat begged Caroline Reagan to bring Josephine to her house. And Josephine, who was crazy about automobiles, was given several of them even before she could drive. “One was a Bugatti worth thirty thousand dollars,” Claude Hopkins said. “She used to throw her own money away, too, she played the horses.”

  But Paris is fickle, people were already looking for the next sensation; La Revue Nègre was winding down.

  It didn’t matter; Caroline had big plans. She and her troupe would tour Europe, seduce a whole new audience.

  Josephine hated to go. “I had plotted to leave St. Louis,” she said. “I had longed to leave New York; I yearned to remain in Paris. I loved everything about the city. It moved me as profoundly as a man moves a woman. Why must I take trains and boats that would carry me far from the friendly faces, the misty Seine . . .”

  In spite of her reluctance, in mid-December, she and the rest of the company entrained for Brussels. But Josephine had a secret.

  Chapter 17

  JOSEPHINE BETRAYS A FRIEND

  “She had flown, she had been stolen from me”

  The secret: three days after La Revue Nègre opened in Paris, Josephine heard a knock on her dressing-room door. “The man who entered spoke dreadful English, but his face was kind. ‘I was told there was a girl at the Champs-Élysées who was setting the stage on fire. I see that it’s true. I’m Paul Derval, director of the Folies-Bergère, Miss Baker. I’d like you to be in my next show.’ ”

  There was irony in the offer. When Caroline Reagan had been running all over Paris trying to find a home for La Revue Nègre, she’d solicited help from anyone—including Paul Derval—who would listen.

  Now Derval was preparing to steal Caroline’s star, who was eager to be stolen. She signed a paper right then and there agreeing to come work at the Folies-Bèrgere in March, and afterward, kept her own counsel. During the entire Paris run of La Revue Nègre, she never said a word to a living soul about her intentions, but permitted Caroline to go on dreaming of new successes in Belgium, Germany, even Russia, where she had booked the company for six weeks.

  They left Paris as they had come to it, by train. At the border between France and Belgium, Bechet disappeared, and, just as the Berengaria had been delayed for him in New York, now the train was held. It was three hours before he was found, dead drunk, and the troupe could proceed.

  In Brussels for one week, they played the Cirque Royal; even though King Albert I of Belgium came to th
e show, the city appears to have made little impression on Josephine. “Germany is the first European country where I went after Paris,” she declared.

  La Revue Nègre opened at Berlin’s Nelson Theatre on Kurfürstendamm on New Year’s Eve 1925, in a city where 120,000 workers were out of work. Two months later, the number of unemployed had risen to 227,500. In the wake of World War I, with Germany broke, Berlin was filled not only with starving people, but with people who no longer believed in the social contract. By the end of 1923, although the country’s raging inflation had been brought under control, wrote Wolf Von Eckardt and Sander Gilman, “the German sense of values, the old propriety . . . were gone. . . . Hard work and thrift no longer meant salvation.”

  The city’s fevered nightlife offered revues with naked girls, and clubs where men dressed as women danced together. The streets were home to young, pretty whores, and old, blind ones too. Criminal gangs roamed freely, morphine and cocaine were sold at hot dog stands, and pornographic films were easy to find. Despite its pride in its culture—it boasted three opera houses and a wealth of experimental theater—Berlin was the most decadent city in Europe.

  Josephine adored it, and Berlin adored her in return. “It’s madness. A triumph,” she said. “They carry me on their shoulders. At a big dance, when I walk in, the musicians stop playing, get up and welcome me. Berlin is where I received the greatest number of gifts.”

  In her memoirs, she reeled them off. “I was given rings with fire as big as an egg; I was given a pair of ancient earrings which belonged to a duchess 150 years ago; I was given pearls like teeth: flowers that came in one day from Italy in moss and baskets . . . big peaches . . . perfume in a glass horse. One fur, two furs, three furs, four furs. Bracelets with red stones for my arms, my wrists, my legs.”

  Between the opening of presents and the trying on of bracelets, Josephine somehow found the time to pay a call on Sam Wooding. After touring Europe for eight months, Chocolate Kiddies had come back to Berlin, and though some of the original cast—Lottie Gee, Adelaide Hall, Charlie Davis—had left, Gene Sedric was still there playing sax.

  Gene and Josephine had gone to Dumas together; Gene’s father and Eddie Carson had been fellow musicians on the Mississippi riverboats. The children used to walk the men down to the boats to try and cadge a ride.

  Seeing Gene in Berlin, the secretive Josephine may have been brought face-to-face with more of her past than she liked. Sam told me she’d been cool to Gene. “She was a very fine artist, but in my estimation a very small person.”

  When Chocolate Kiddies had first played Berlin, many Berliners had been hostile, not only because the actors were black, but because it was thought they were blacks from French Colonial Africa.

  A year earlier, France had sent a regiment of tall, black Senegalese soldiers to Bavaria, hoping this would intimidate Germany into paying its war debt. The Germans (who had heard stories about “savages” cutting ears off German soldiers and wearing them around their necks as charms) were already bitter at having lost the war, so to see Senegalese troops even after the Armistice was horrifying to them. It had to be made clear to the public that the Chocolate Kiddies company was American, before tensions were dispelled.

  The same scenario was repeated with La Revue Nègre. On opening night at the Nelson, there was a sizable anti-black demonstration outside the theater. Again, the cast was not troubled because, as in France, they didn’t understand the language. Even when Brownshirts distributed pamphlets calling Josephine subhuman (she was black and she went naked, both affronts to Aryan notions of perfection), she remained untroubled. “I’m not immoral,” she said. “I’m only natural.”

  It is perhaps not surprising that Josephine, insulated by her fame and the powerful new friends who whisked her from pastry shops to bike races to dance halls to late-night suppers, did not observe signs of the storm that was coming. Sam Wooding, on the other hand, saw more than he wanted to.

  Sam and the rest of the Chocolate Kiddies company stayed in a small hotel run by a Jewish couple, and one night, a few of the musicians were having a midnight snack when two Germans in hiking suits came in. “They walked over to where this Jewish lady was standing behind the bar and started a conversation,” Sam said. “All of a sudden, one of the Germans slapped the woman’s face several times, and the other man broke some glasses. Then they walked out.

  “My men and I jumped up and ran to her as she was crying. She said, ‘They asked what right had we to have this hotel, why didn’t we get out of Germany.’

  “We felt very sorry for her; most of the men only wished they had understood enough German so they could have caught the bastards before they slapped this old lady.

  “We didn’t have long to wait. A couple of days later, in walks six of these same guys. They were drunk. The hotel had small rooms for private parties, and two of our people, Chick Horsey (one of The Three Eddies) and Bobby Martin from my band, were in one of these rooms eating with a couple of chorus girls, and these Germans came into the room. Chick told the girls to get lost, and after they left, one of the Germans locked the door and walked over and said something in German, and his friends laughed.

  “But Chick Horsey was a master at gang fighting. He smashed this German and the German went down like a bull in a slaughterhouse, blood flying everywhere. Bobby picked him up and threw him out the window—it was on the ground floor—and from then on, as Chick would smash these bastards, Bobby would throw them out the window.

  “Chick said every time he socked one of those guys, he saw the German that slapped that poor Jewish woman and he thought of how some of the white Southerners had treated black men and women in America, and this gave him strength.

  “It seemed like a miracle, we didn’t know Chick and Bobby was that good. Well, the Germans never came back.”

  German racism was, in fact, the reason some performers had quit Chocolate Kiddies, but Josephine didn’t seem to notice it, she never spoke of trauma in Berlin, only of conquest. “Max Reinhardt, the famous director, comes to see me, he carries a contract: ‘I hire you for three years at the Deutsches Theatre and believe me you will be the greatest star in Europe.’

  “In the magazines and newspapers of Berlin, they wrote that I was a figure of the contemporary German ‘expressionism,’ of the German ‘primitivism.’ . . . Why not? And what does it mean?”

  A review of La Revue Nègre appeared in the Tageblatt. The critic dismissed the show as noisy, but bowed to Josephine. “In her survives the untamed wildness of her forebears who were transplanted from the Congo basin to the Mississippi.” Two days later, a Paris newspaper advised the French public to stop worrying about the rumor that Josephine was going back to live in America. “She will be one of the stars of the next revue at the Folies-Bergère.”

  From the embassy in Paris, Caroline’s husband called to read her the paragraph. She didn’t take it seriously; she had made a star of Josephine, she had a contract with Josephine, why should she listen to foolish gossip?

  Especially since Josephine was working hard to make La Revue Nègre an international hit, doing what amounted to two shows a night. Because after each performance, the theater (it wasn’t a huge house) was converted into a cabaret, and Berliners packed the place. Dolly Haas, who would become a German leading lady in the thirties (and later marry Al Hirschfeld, theater caricaturist for The New York Times), was only sixteen years old when she saw Josephine at the cabaret. “At the end of one number, she would sink to her knees, and finish the song like a prayer, her arms wide open. You did not know if she wanted to embrace the audience or wanted the audience to embrace her, but it moved everyone.”

  Never mind that half an hour later, Josephine would be absolutely naked, rolling around on the floor with another girl at a party, while Max Reinhardt watched.

  The night of that frolic—it was February 13, 1926—Count Harry Kessler, a publisher and art collector who kept a diary, recorded the fact that Reinhardt had called him at 1 A.M. from the
home of playwright Karl Vollmoeller and invited him to come over. Kessler went and found Reinhardt “surrounded by half a dozen nude girls including Miss Baker also naked except for a pink gauze loincloth, and the young Landshoff girl . . . dressed as a boy sporting black tie.

  “Miss Baker danced with extreme grotesque artistry and pure style, like an Egyptian or archaic figure. . . . She does it for hours without any sign of fatigue. . . . She does not even perspire. . . . An enchanting creature, yet almost without sexuality. With her one thinks of sexuality as little as at the sight of a beautiful feral beast.”

  The party went on until 4 A.M. “Reinhardt, Vollmoeller, and I were standing around Miss Baker and Miss Landshoff, who were embracing like a pair of beautiful young lovers,” Kessler wrote in his diary, leaving the reader to decide whether he was describing an orgy or simply youthful high spirits. Vollmoeller said he wanted to write a ballet for Josephine, Kessler said he would contribute a scene, a pantomime, and they should all meet for dinner at his house on February 24 for further discussion.

  That time, the dinner was stag, except for Miss Landshoff, who at least looked like a boy, decked out in “horn-rimmed glasses and a touch of beard painted on with makeup.”

  After Josephine finished work, a couple of Kessler’s other guests went to fetch her. “I had cleared the library for her to dance,” Kessler said, but she “sat for hours in a corner sulking.”

  Until Kessler began to describe “the pantomime I was planning for her.” It was to be a fantasy, the music half jazz, half Oriental. King Solomon buys a slave girl, a dancer, and has her brought to him naked, “to shower her with gifts, with his own gowns and jewels. The more he gives her, the more elusive she becomes. . . . In the end, it is the king who is naked, while the dancer disappears, ascending in a cloud composed of all the silks and jewels he has bestowed on her.”