Josephine Baker Read online

  Josephine loved it, and became “an entirely different person who kept asking when she could dance.”

  In Kessler’s library, he had a huge, powerful Maillol sculpture called Crouching Woman. Josephine studied the statue, leaning against her, “speaking to her, visibly startled by the overwhelming rigidity and impact of her expression. She danced around her in grotesquely grandiose movements resembling a priestess playfully making fun of herself and her goddess. One could see Maillol was more interesting and alive to her than the people watching.” To Kessler, the scene was “one genius speaking to another.”

  You had to be very young and strong to live the life of Josephine. Kessler gives an account of her sitting on a couch at 3 A.M. “eating one bockwurst after another.”

  In Berlin, Josephine was in her element, diverted by the down and dirty action—the nightlife, she said, was of “an intensity Paris doesn’t know”—and the streets blazing with lights that promised bawdy pleasures.

  Between her numbers in the cabaret she would sit with customers, and they would issue invitations to further merriment. “There used to be a lot of high-society people around,” Claude Hopkins said. “The Krupp family, they were there almost every night. They really liked the music, and they really liked Josephine.”

  Once, she was asked to serve as a judge at a costume ball at the Neue Kunsthandlung. “A real can of sardines,” she called it. “Women and men flattened against each other, Negroes in every corner.”

  She was actually beginning to think she might stay in Berlin. She endowed the thought with high moral purpose: She would study with Max Reinhardt, and become a respected actress. “He appeared to sense my feelings,” she said. When a journalist friend of Paul Derval mentioned that he was looking forward to seeing her in the Folies, she shrugged. “Don’t count on it, I may have changed my mind.”

  The journalist phoned Derval with this news, and Derval went into action, sending an envoy to Berlin to bring back his wavering star. The new show would have a supporting cast of three hundred, twelve hundred costumes, music by thirteen composers including Irving Berlin and Spencer Williams, sets by famous designers including Erté; she could not go back on her contract.

  But the contract was never written that Josephine couldn’t go back on. “Lawsuits, contracts,” she said. “The less I knew about that kind of red tape, the better. . . . Anyway, who could make a decision when there was dancing every night and all that wonderful German beer to drink?”

  She finally laid it on the line for Derval’s agent. “If you want me to leave Berlin, it will cost an extra four hundred francs a show.” Derval agreed. “What could I do? The show was too far advanced for us to cancel it.”

  So much for Kessler’s pantomime, so much for Max Reinhardt’s acting school, au revoir, La Revue Nègre, Josephine was going to star in the Folies-Bergère at a salary of more than five thousand dollars a month.

  All sweet innocence in one of her autobiographies, she writes, “Mrs. Caroline had learned about my contract with the Folies and she was furious.” What had she expected, congratulations? But Josephine saw herself as the abused one. “I felt like kicking everyone in sight. Why couldn’t people leave me alone?”

  Finally, poor Caroline was forced to face reality. “Louis Douglas came to me and he said, with what sadness, emotion, tact, that Josephine was leaving us in three days!

  “Leaving us high and dry. . . . What to do? kill myself? . . . I called Josephine and we took a walk through Berlin, in the grey streets of melted, dirty, salty snow. What to say to her? What better than, ‘Josephine, you are going to harm your soul.’ ‘But Missus, I’m feeling just fine,’ whistled the red and black devil.”

  Louis Douglas was worried about cast reprisals against Josephine. “He was afraid of fights, razors, knives,” Caroline said. “The troupe was right to be angry. . . . They found themselves empty-handed, and it was not their fault.”

  Mr. Nelson, the theater’s owner, brought in two big policemen who patrolled backstage, and Caroline offered food and drink “to the survivors. We were like shipwrecks. No more Josephine. . . . Deep down, we were in mourning. . . .”

  That Josephine’s defection was the betrayal of Caroline’s life there seems no doubt. “It was as though the Mississippi had lost its waters, after she left us, our boats could no longer navigate.

  “Josephine had flown, she had been stolen from me. It was the end of the beautiful Revue Nègre. It didn’t breathe any more.”

  Maud de Forrest took Josephine’s place, but it was all over one week later. Not only had the star decamped, she had taken with her two of the most talented musicians, Henry Goodwin, who played trumpet, and Percy Johnson, the drummer.

  Many of the cast were stranded. Caroline wired her brother on Wall Street for help, but couldn’t raise enough money to pay everyone’s fare back to America. “We had been having such a good time in the past five months, we had not saved a penny,” Evelyn Anderson says. Everyone scrabbled for jobs. Joe Hayman signed on with some German brothers named Siegel (“They had a little combination, they played all around,” Evelyn says), Claude Hopkins went out on his own, and Sam Wooding, who was taking Chocolate Kiddies to Russia, picked up Maud de Forrest and Sidney Bechet. The rest of the performers and musicians were left to get home as best they could.

  In the end, Caroline forgave Josephine. “She had given me the best of herself, those three months in Paris, Berlin,” she said. Even after a lawyer had convinced her to sue, she got as far as the courthouse but couldn’t go through with the action. “Finding myself side by side with her, whom I loved and admired so much, I said, ‘Tell your lawyer the suit is cancelled. Forever. Amen.’ ”

  Years later, generously searching for virtues to attribute to her lost star, Caroline (whose own maternal instinct was fragile) praised Josephine’s love of children. “I can still see how kindly she indulged my little Sophie in Berlin. . . .”

  Sophie Reagan could see the same thing. “I remember a gilt and red plush hotel . . . and being taken upstairs to this beautiful salon, lots of gilt and flowery carpet, and having this marvelous young girl sink to her knees in the middle of the room, and I just flung myself on top of her, curled my arms around her and cried, ‘Ma petite maman.’

  “My mother was standing looking at us. My mother didn’t give me a very warm feeling, but this person who wasn’t even a woman, she was an adolescent, I was calling this young girl my little mother, and I meant it. It was very strange, a very short but real love relationship.

  “Later, it was explained to me that Josephine was one of the causes of the divorce between my parents because my father had lost his savings in La Revue Nègre.”

  Caroline used to make excuses for Josephine, Sophie says, because she was “a child who came from nothing. She had no morality because nobody had taught her morality. Mother said when she told Josephine she couldn’t quit—‘You have a contract’—Josephine laughed in her face. ‘But Mrs. Reagan, I’m a minor, my signature isn’t worth the ink I used to write it.’ ”

  If Caroline had known what lay in store for Paul Derval, the star snatcher, she might have smiled. He wrote it in Folies-Bergère, his book: “The black pearl gave me a lot of white hairs.”

  Fifty years later, Josephine told a reporter that she had returned to Paris from Berlin with trepidation. “I never recognized my having taken Paris by storm. I have never recognized, felt nor understood that I was successful.”

  How was it possible? In her first weeks in Paris, she had achieved rapturous reviews; her career seemed assured, men vied for her favors, she had too many cars, too much champagne, but her insecurities drove her ceaselessly.

  “I had to succeed,” she said, ignoring the fact that success had already come to her. “I would never stop trying, never. A violinist had his violin, a painter his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument I must care for. . . . That’s why I spent thirty minutes every morning rubbing my body with half a lemon to lighten my skin and just
as long preparing a mixture for my hair. I couldn’t afford to take chances.”

  Chapter 18

  THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE: EVERYONE GOES BANANAS

  “I was manicured, pedicured. . . .”

  The Folies-Bergère is shabby these days, its red and gold look tired, though on any given night, you might still see girls dancing the cancan, or a topless reincarnation of Catherine the Great descending the high, shallow steps. (Never look down, that’s the trick.) But the loincloth wearing performer stroking a half-naked woman’s body does it as mechanically as if he were smoothing a tablecloth.

  Once it was different. Opened in 1869, the Folies-Bergère was the first music hall in Paris. Over the years, it presented singers, dancers, acrobats, elephants. Yvette Guilbert, immortalized by Lautrec, appeared there; so did Chevalier, Mistinguett, and the young Charles Chaplin. But most of all, the Folies will be remembered for beautiful legs and breasts, for its glorification of the female body. Paul Derval, who became the boss in 1918, loved women.

  In the old days, fashionable revelers strolled the great lobby filled with couches, potted palms, statues. To get to the dress circle, you made your way up winding staircases; to reach the downstairs seats, you passed through a “promenade” prowled by ladies of the evening.

  Manet captured the hubbub in an 1882 painting called Le Bar des Folies-Bergère; the spectacle was also described by Camille Debans—“Men all smoking, drinking and joking . . . women . . . offering themselves as happily as you could wish.”

  Once Paul Derval took over, he cast out the happy hookers. “My work was to direct a theater,” he said, “not a bordello.” The great courtesans of La Belle Époque were not to be found in the promenade anyway, but on the stage.

  Caroline Otero. Cleo de Merode. Liane de Pougy. Emilienne d’Alençon. They were beautiful, even talented, but it was liaisons with millionaires that made them famous. Of the four, Otero, a Spanish dancer, was greediest. A French duke built her a villa, Kaiser Wilhelm II contributed to her upkeep. She wore so many jewels, reported Le Figaro, that “when she ends her dance, the boards continue to glitter as if a crystal chandelier had been pulverized on them.”

  It was Otero who offered Colette advice from a platinum-plated heart. “Don’t forget,” she said, “there is always a moment in a man’s life, even if he’s a miser, when he opens his hand wide. . . .”

  “The moment of passion?”

  “No, the moment when you twist his wrist.”

  Josephine didn’t need that kind of lesson. She once wheedled a diamond “as big as a frog’s egg” from an admirer, but when he demanded she come to his place, she threw herself on the mercy of the cab driver—“I told him I didn’t want to give in to the whims of the old man!”—and the driver sent the old man packing. If she took your baubles and broke your heart, was she not acting in the great tradition of La Belle Otero? Had she not come to the right country, at the right time?

  Stories of Josephine’s lovemaking were legion (in Berlin, someone called her “a beast for sex”), but in fact, she had many friendships with men where sex was no part of the equation. Even when she cavorted naked during the time she and Marcel Sauvage were working on her first book, he said her nudity was not provocative. “Sometimes when I would arrive and she was taking her bath, she would call out, ‘Come in,’ and I would go in and a little monkey would be on the rim of the tub. ‘He doesn’t like the telephone,’ Josephine would say. ‘When it rings, he jumps on it because he doesn’t want me to answer.’ ”

  The phone, a source of irritation to the monkey, gave pleasure to a young man named Henri Ruinet. Paul Derval had found his new star an elegant apartment near the Parc Monceau, and sure enough, when Ruinet, a country boy, was sent there to install the phone, he was admitted by a smiling Josephine, wearing her favorite covering, her skin. He cherished the memory till he died.

  I know it’s beginning to sound as if Josephine never greeted a visitor while dressed in anything more formal than a pleasant expression, but this is logical for a person who said, “I hate laces . . . I hope later we will live naked.”

  Contributing his bit to the Josephine-without-drawers legend, Ernest Hemingway told of meeting her in a club. “Very hot night but she was wearing a coat of black fur, her breasts handling the fur like it was silk.” They danced. “She never took off her coat,” he said. “Wasn’t until the joint closed she told me she had nothing on underneath.”

  Josephine’s first show for Paul Derval was called La Folie du Jour. It included seventeen “John Tiller Girls” (direct from England, and chaperoned by a minister) along with some fabulous Russian dancers. All grand dukes who fled the Russian Revolution did not open cabarets, some became taxi drivers; and some ballerinas who could not find work with Diaghilev were happy to dance at the Folies. Those once-privileged girls—Krasovaska, Komarova—who had spent evenings at the court of the czar were now reduced to making a living barely clothed, but their poses, their expressions, came direct from the Russian school. Josephine studied them, and learned.

  There were thirteen letters in the show’s title, because once, when Derval had deviated from the tradition, he’d had a flop. Josephine was as superstitious as her producer. Don’t whistle in my dressing room, don’t eat animals’ heads if you don’t want a headache, don’t work with needles on Saturday afternoon.

  She also prayed before she went onstage, and before she went to sleep. (In September of 1973, she and I were on Lexington Avenue in New York and she led me into a beautiful building. “What is this place?” I asked. She said it was a synagogue. “But we’re not Jewish.” “Jean-Claude,” she said, “you can pray in any house of God.”)

  Whether or not Paul Derval was a believer, he didn’t hold God responsible for getting Josephine to fittings on time. Whenever she failed to show up, he had her served with a subpoena.

  Though her costumes should not have taken long to fit. “In this revue, they had the idea to dress me with a belt of bananas!” she wrote. “Oh! how people ridiculed this idea! And how many drawings and caricatures came out of it. Only the devil, supposedly, could have invented such a thing.”

  The credit for having dreamed up this costume was given at various times to various people; Christiane Otte, the vendeuse at Chez Poiret, insisted that the bananas had been the inspiration of Monsieur Poiret, while Josephine said Jean Cocteau was responsible. “It is Cocteau who gave me the idea for the banana belt. He said, ‘On you, it will look very dressy.’ ”

  Luckily, a section of the banana dance was filmed, but only the version made for the United States, in which she had to wear a bra, survives. Lost for sixty years, the footage was found in a box in Rochester. It is amazing to see. Josephine enters into a jungle setting at twilight and moves barefooted along the trunk of a fallen tree, her arms stretched back like the wings of a giant bird. And there on the riverbank, beside the sleeping body of a young white explorer, while his bearers beat drums, she dances. It’s a Charleston, a belly dance, Mama Dinks’s chicken, bumps, grinds, all in one number, with bananas flying. (Taylor Gordon, a black American singer who caught the show, remembered that “the vivacious Josephine Baker was flopping her bananas like cow-tails in fly time. I wished a lot of people who didn’t like her at home could see her then.”)

  She was, said Marcel Sauvage, “a comic nudity of bronze . . . in tune with the sax, the banjo. . . . A little hate is mixed with it . . . quickly masked behind a grimace. . . .”

  Some have suggested that she was being exploited, that white men had put onstage their fantasy of a nubile African girl, but it was not so easy to exploit Josephine; you couldn’t make her do anything unless she was convinced the public wanted it. Besides, there was nothing prurient about all those swinging bananas, they were funny.

  “The people were on the edge of their seats,” the singer Suzy Solidor told me, adding that Josephine had “charm and youth. Always. When she talked, she was twenty years old right up until the end of her life.”

  Which alm
ost came too soon. “It was four o’clock in the morning, a day or two before the dress rehearsal,” said Paul Derval, “and we were going through the ‘globe’ scene. . . .

  “An immense Easter egg, covered with flowers, was lowered from the ceiling. . . . The ball opened to reveal Josephine, nearly nude, nothing but a raffia skirt . . . on a mirror. She danced the Charleston, then the ball closed over her and steel cables pulled it slowly up again.”

  At least that was the plan. Halfway through rehearsal, the ball (thrown off-balance on its way back to the ceiling when some cables jammed) began to open. “In another second,” Derval said, “Josephine would start sliding off the mirror and crash into the orchestra pit forty feet below.” Somehow, she managed to hang onto the edge of the lid, and was lopsidedly hauled to safety. Two cast members fainted.

  On opening night, all worked perfectly. “You could have heard a fly in that room,” said Suzy Solidor, “when Josephine, reflected in the mirrors and the lights, stood up and danced a sensational Charleston. Mirrors multiplied the sight of her sublime body. All around us, we had thousands of Josephines, reflections and shadows, dancing.”

  E. E. Thompson’s group was supposed to play for the number, but band member Bert Marshall later confessed they hadn’t blown a lick. “If you were black in Paris, they thought you were great even if you were terrible. . . . The band was so lousy that when we went onstage . . . the pit orchestra played for us and we just mimed to it.”

  Following the mirror number came a parody of Josephine with the black actor, Benglia, got up to look like her. He wore a short grass skirt, and was partnered by the comic Dorville. (The year before, Benglia had caused a sensation at the Folies by dancing with a white girl. J. A. Rogers, visiting Paris for the Amsterdam News, reported that this sight—“of a magnificent Senegalese Negro nude, save for a loin cloth, dancing with an equally striking white woman, similarly dressed”—had caused “the crackers who are here in great numbers to gnash their teeth with rage. . . . In the dance, the woman sat on his knee and caressed him. It sure made the Mason-Dixon folks mad. . . .”)