Josephine Baker Read online

  Appendix 2

  Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW

  “She is like Salome, she has seven veils”

  Who am I to think I have to write a book on Josephine Baker when I’m not even her legal son? She had thousands of lovers; I’ve never been her lover, I’ve never even been her fan. I was a fan of Edith Piaf, not of Josephine Baker. And I’m certainly not the first person to try to capture her on paper. There have been more than a dozen books written about her. She herself turned out five autobiographies, a novel, and a collection of fairy tales that expressed her vision of universal brotherhood. Since she died in 1975, seven volumes by other people have appeared.

  Because I loved her, hated her, and wanted desperately to understand her, I read them all. And they made me crazy. It’s hard to read a life of anyone you have known and be entirely satisfied with the account; you recognize too many half-truths, you find too little illumination. Gradually it became clear to me that if I wanted to come to terms with my memories of Josephine, I was going to have to become a biographer myself, and I set out to track down stories, fill in the gaps in what had already been reported.

  I was ridiculed (“He wasn’t really her son”), I went broke, but I persisted; even when a writer with a contract for a Baker book offered me fifty thousand dollars to share what I had found, I refused.

  I once said on a television documentary that Josephine was like the sun. We need the sun for the flowers to grow, for the birds to sing, but if you come too close, you can get burned, you can die. Everyone who came too close to Josephine got burned.

  We first met in 1958. I was fourteen years old and she was fifty-two. I was working at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris, running errands, and I was called to her room. When I got there, I saw a woman in a bathrobe, and someone at her feet giving her a pedicure. The woman sent me to the drugstore to buy something, and when I came back, she was alone. She said, “Do you love your mother, little one?” I was shocked, because nobody gave a damn about me, and I was missing my mother back in my village every day. Five minutes later, I was sitting on the bed next to her, telling her my story.

  I was born Jean-Claude Julien Leon Tronville, a bastard. It was a tragedy for my thirty-five-year-old mother, who was very pure and Catholic, and would have become a nun if Hitler had not come along. Once the war started, the convent sent her back to her family in Paris, and at the train station she met a gentleman who looked like Rudolph Valentino. Nine months later, I came into the world in Dijon. Because of the war, my parents moved to a little village in Burgundy. Everyone else had been there two hundred years; I never felt I belonged.

  When I was seven, my father married my mother and the schoolteacher told me my name was Rouzaud. I didn’t like that name. I planned three things for when I grew up: I would not do my military service. I would have a statue of myself like Napoleón III on a horse. And I would not bear the name of my father.

  Soon after my parents’ marriage, my father left us to go back to Paris to work in a restaurant. At first, he came home toward the end of each month, loaded like Santa Claus with toys for me and my sisters, but I would resent that because it was not Christmastime. He was never there at Christmas. After a while, he was never there at all. When I was fourteen, I made a big decision. I did not want to work in the fields or the factory, so I wrote my father and told him we needed to have a man-to-man talk.

  He mailed me a third-class ticket to Paris, and my mother brought me to Dijon to the train station, but when my train pulled in, she started to cry in front of everyone. She said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not a bad mother, it’s just I have three little girls at home, so I can’t go to Paris with my Jean-Claude; please keep an eye out for him.”

  I was so ashamed, and she ran along beside the train until it left the station, and then I cried too, and that’s the way I arrived in Paris. And what happened was, I found my father living in a hotel for prostitutes, where they rented rooms by the hour; he had gambled away all his money. Three days later, he disappeared, and didn’t come back.

  Josephine listened to all this, and then she said, “Don’t be worried, my little one, you have no father, but from today on, you will have two mothers.”

  But the fact is that I didn’t find her again—we didn’t become close—until the last seven years of her life. The Josephine I knew was an old lady who had adopted children from all over the world and called them her Rainbow Tribe. But sometimes, she would open a door to the past, talk about private things. So I gathered bits of the puzzle, told by her in the nights when she couldn’t sleep. She was always afraid to be alone, afraid of the darkness.

  She was like a piece of Ming china. You know nothing about it, you think it’s beautiful, six hundred years old, a treasure, but if you look through a jeweler’s loupe, you see it’s been cracked. That was Josephine. When she died, something was taken from me, I suffered a loss and I wanted to know who she was, that woman I had witnessed in so many ways, sometimes a criminal, sometimes a saint. My real detective work began then, when she was gone and questions could not hurt her anymore, or threaten to expose the secrets she had hidden so fiercely.

  After her funeral, I came back to New York. One day I walked into an antique shop, and on a hunch, I said, “Do you have anything about Josephine Baker?” The proprietor brought out a small volume in French—the earliest of three autobiographies Josephine had written in collaboration with Marcel Sauvage. It told how she came from St. Louis, joined a show called Shuffle Along, spent her first three nights in New York in a park where she ran from shadows and slept cold, hungry, “exhausted in the grass. . . .” Published in 1927 and filled with such fancies, that book also said Josephine had to go to Paris to become famous, though the truth was, she left New York with a star’s contract in her pocket.

  Later, I discovered the other books, filled with more myths Josephine had planted herself, the misinformation repeated by writer after writer. I was more and more intrigued, picking my way through the discrepancies.

  By then, I had settled permanently in New York, and I read that the old blues singer Alberta Hunter was appearing at the Cookery on University Place, and I went and asked her if she remembered Josephine Baker.

  “Of course,” she said. “We used to be roommates.”

  It seemed too good to be true, but that was how my American odyssey began. Through Alberta and the people she steered me toward, a dead world came alive. In Harlem, she would point out the windows of an apartment over a funeral parlor. “We used to live here. And Lena Horne’s mother lived there, and Langston Hughes lived in that building, and this is the beauty parlor where I have had my hair done since 1923.”

  Witness after witness, many frail with age, shared their memories with me. Josephine’s story is not hers alone, it’s the story of all those people. I had to capture them before they disappeared. One day, I called the director of jazz studies at Rutgers University and asked him if he knew anyone still alive who had been with La Revue Nègre, the show that had taken Josephine to France. “Why don’t you talk to Claude Hopkins?” he said. “He was musical director.” I was irritated. “Monsieur,” I said, “everybody knows Claude Hopkins is dead.” His voice remained kind. “Mr. Baker, Claude Hopkins is in Parkview Nursing Home in the Bronx.”

  The next day, trembling, I walked into the Parkview Nursing Home. In a nursing home, you smell overcooked food, cheap perfume, medicine, and you see old people talking to themselves; the life there is a kind of going away, a ship leaving the harbor and it’s too late to get off. I was directed to Claude’s room. He was half asleep, and a nurse came in, shook him, and said, “Wake up, Claude, you have a visitor.”

  He opened his eyes, I said, “Bonjour, I’m Jean-Claude Baker,” and we talked, but he was incoherent, rambling. I found a nurse. “Is he always like that?”

  She shook her head. “He needs dialysis every day, and we don’t have a machine here, so they come and take him once a week. The d
ay before he goes, his blood is full of poisons, but if you come to see him after his treatment, he thinks as clearly as anyone. In fact,” she said, starting to laugh, “he runs down the halls naked, chasing nurses.”

  I was there the next afternoon when they brought Claude back from dialysis, and his head worked better than mine. He answered all my questions, he even gave me addresses of two of the show’s chorus girls who were still alive. And he admitted that, on the boat to Paris, he had become Josephine’s lover, despite the misery this had caused his wife, Mabel. “I was bad to Mabel,” he said, “but we were so young then, we were all so young.”

  Before I left, I asked if he remembered where they had rehearsed in New York. “232 West 138th Street,” he said. “At William Spiller’s. He had a jazz group.”

  Next day, I went uptown and rang the bell at 232 West 138th Street. A dignified old lady came to the door. “Is this William Spiller’s house?” I asked. She said yes, William Spiller had been her brother-in-law. He was dead. “My name is Bessie Taliaferro,” she said, and invited me in.

  She was ninety-seven years old, living in the basement that had been La Revue Nègre’s rehearsal studio. She told me most of the cast had not believed in Josephine, they did not think the French would love her. “They were wrong, eh?” she said.

  In that basement was a Chickering piano made in 1885, the piano Claude Hopkins had played for rehearsals. “He was so good-looking,” Bessie said, “and Sidney Bechet stood right over there with his clarinet.” I was transported, I could see them, I could hear them. Three years later, on her hundredth birthday, Bessie sold me the piano for a dollar. She thought I was the right one to have it.

  I was getting used to miracles. In Philadelphia, I found an old woman (she looked like Popeye, sitting in her rocking chair, smoking a pipe) who had been a waitress at one of Josephine’s weddings. Her name was Ethel Lockman, her nickname was the Duchess. “I used to work at the Green Dragon,” she said. “It was a speakeasy, but I quit because every morning when we closed, I would have to step over a dead body, and I was too tired to wipe up the blood on the floor. That’s why I went to work in the Bakers’ restaurant on South Street. It was Mr. Baker who told his good-for-nothing son Billy he had to marry Josephine. He said, ‘You have to marry her, or get out of my house.’

  “Josephine was a nice girl,” said the Duchess. “She didn’t smoke.”

  In Atlantic City, I found Maude Russell, known in her prime as the Slim Princess. She had been a soubrette at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia when Josephine arrived there, fresh off the road from her first professional tour. Maude remembered Josephine’s opening night, April 25, 1921. “She was dressed like a ragamuffin, but she killed them all the way up to the peanut gallery. Next day, her picture was out in front of the theater.”

  My research led me to St. Louis, and then back to Paris, where, out of the blue, a respected art dealer phoned to offer me a cache of letters—hundreds of pages—from Josephine to her lawyer, written between 1954 and 1961, most of them while she was on tour. In those letters, she was alive again, manipulating, cajoling, literally counting sheep. She had one ram, one ewe, twelve lambs—why were there only eleven mentioned in his last letter? Every night, she wrote that lawyer ten-page documents. She said she had fallen. “Do you know how hard it is to dance on your two feet when your ankles are swollen like sausages?” she demanded. “But I can’t call a doctor, we need all the money. How are the children? I miss them so much.”

  At the end of seven years, Josephine terminated the lawyer’s services with one last letter. Thank you, don’t need you anymore, goodbye. And she never paid him. That was Josephine.

  I said earlier that she had hurt me too. Like the lawyer, I was dumped. This was a pattern I only came to understand—and forgive—much later.

  One trail led me to Commandant Jacques Abtey, who had been Josephine’s boss in the French underground during World War II. He told me that when he first interviewed her for the job, she said, “France is the country that adopted me without reservation, I am willing to give my life for her.”

  Through Jacques, I met soldiers, spies, nurses—the world of the Resistance—who had gone on fighting against Hitler even after France was defeated, and they spoke of Josephine’s courage, the way she had risked her life and lifted the morale of all around her. For five years, Jacques said, Josephine had been his lover; they shared not only affection but grief that they could not have a child.

  Listening, I thought of a night in 1973 when Josephine and I came back from a party to the villa where the family was living on the Riviera. We kissed good-night, and after a minute, I heard a knock at my bedroom door. Josephine stood there, tears streaking her face. “Come, darling,” she said, and led me to her room. Her bed had two big pillows. On one, Stellina (at nine, the youngest member of the Rainbow Tribe) was sleeping, curly brown hair framing her angelic face. On the other was a piece of paper with a message in pink crayon. “Little Mother,” it said, “by the time you get home, the Sandman will have taken me away. But I wanted you to know I love you very much. Your daughter, Stellina.”

  Josephine looked at me and whispered, “You see, my Jean-Claude, no lover can give me that, no jewels.” And after a pause, almost with regret, “Not even my public.” We stood there holding each other, tears running together. Today, eighteen years after my search for Josephine began, I think I have discovered something. I think we were crying not for Stellina, but for the child in each of us who was forever gone with the Sandman.

  I met the choreographer George Balanchine, who had known Josephine in the thirties, and although he refused to be interviewed on tape—he was ashamed of his accent—he told me how she had invited him, on a Sunday, to Le Vésinet, the suburb of Paris where she had a house called Le Beau Chêne. Balanchine, who was poor then, put on his best suit, took the train, and arrived at the mansion with two big iron gates. Josephine’s name was spelled out in flowers on either side of the entrance, and everywhere there were life-size naked statues. Mostly of Josephine.

  Balanchine went up the stairs, knocked on the door, and nobody answered, so he started yelling, “Josephine, Josephine—” Suddenly, in one of the tall ground-floor windows, Josephine appeared, naked except for three flowers glued on in strategic places. “Yes, yes, yes, chéri, I’m coming.” She said she had given the servants the day off, and she had been baking bread.

  A half century later, recounting the story, Balanchine turned a little pink. “Yes, maître,” I said. “And then what happened?” He smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think we had lunch.”

  I told him how I was discovering Josephine, and he said yes, “she is like Salome. She has seven veils. If you lift one, there is a second, and what you discover is even more mysterious, and you go to the third, and you still don’t know where you are. Only at the end, if you keep looking faithfully, will you find the true Josephine.”

  JOSEPHINE

  Chapter 1

  PARIS, OCTOBER 1925: ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

  “She had no shame in front of those crackers”

  Quel cul elle a!” What an ass! Excuse the expression, but that is the cry that greeted Josephine as she exploded onstage in “La Danse de Sauvage.” (Sixty years later, her friend and sometime lover, Maurice Bataille, would say to me, “Ah! ce cul . . . it gave all of Paris a hard-on.”)

  It is October 2, 1925, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, opening night of La Revue Nègre. Everyone is here, painters, writers, music hall stars—Léger, Gertrude Stein, Chevalier—diplomats, princes, expatriate Americans (of whom there are forty-three thousand in Paris). At home, there is Prohibition; in France, drink and sex seem free. For one American dollar, you get twenty-five francs.

  The theater is sold out, all two thousand mauve-colored velvet seats. Earlier, a voice has roared a message—“Full! Only folding chairs left”—into the avenue Montaigne. So many flowers arrive that they are put on the street, there is no more place for them inside. Ticket holders wa
lk to the entrance across a red carpet flanked by white rose trees, the men in full dress, the women with bobbed hair, lips and nails lacquered scarlet, arms flashing those narrow diamond bracelets the cynical of the age call “service stripes.”

  Backstage, producer Caroline Dudley Reagan paces. She has given herself the role of narrator. “Side by side with my artists.” Years later, she will say of La Revue Nègre’s success, “It wasn’t me, but the phoenix inside Josephine, that bird of paradise. It wasn’t me, but Bechet’s saxophone, and his soul. It wasn’t me, but Louis Douglas, my choreographer. . . . He had already danced in Russia, even for the czarina. . . . Decidedly, God was with me.”

  In the first row are students from L’École des Beaux-Arts. They have rented twenty seats for the entire two weeks La Revue Nègre is expected to run. One tall blond boy—Maurice Blech—will come back every night until Josephine invites him to her dressing room, and then to her bed.

  The show begins. “On one side of the stage,” reports the man from Le Figaro, “before a curtain on which thick-lipped faces with immense black eyes stand out among the geometric designs in dazzling colors applied by some local Picasso in Tallahassee or Honolulu, eight musicians in red tailcoats take their seats.”

  The “local Picasso” is, in fact, the Mexican painter Covarrubias, the eight musicians are Claude Hopkins and his orchestra, and once they begin to play, Le Figaro’s critic loses all objectivity. “The music seems to have captured the echoes of the jungle and to mingle the moan of the breeze, the patter of rain, the crackling of leaves . . .”

  The curtain rises to reveal a backdrop of two Mississippi riverboats. Down front is a wharf where people rest in the sun. A man comes on pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowers. It’s Sidney Bechet. He picks his horn off the cart, bends his head to the mouthpiece, a short fat Pan inciting his listeners to revelry, filling the theater with genius.