Josephine Baker Read online

  The chorus girls are young, supple, they laugh as they dance the Charleston (Paris is crazy about the Charleston), but some in the audience are disappointed that the performers are so fair. Because of the word nègre in the title, the French are expecting black Africans, not American mulattoes. These dancers are creamy-skinned, beige-skinned, and for the ten days since they got off the boat they have moved from astonishment to astonishment, going to the Galeries Lafayette where they can try on clothes and no one forbids it, going to the cafés, where they are served politely, walking in the streets, where they are openly admired.

  Josephine, the star, is darker than the other girls, a clown with rubber legs and rubber face. She works hard in a sketch about an abandoned bride, singing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (badly, because she is not yet a singer), offering a “darky impression” in blackface. She crosses her eyes, pushes her knees together, does splits, her pants rolled high. She’s part Jerry Lewis, part Chaplin, competing with Louis Douglas (they say he has “talking feet”) for the laughter of spectators already dazzled by music, speed, colors.

  The critic Pierre de Regnier describes Josephine as a strange figure “who walks with bended knees . . . and looks like a boxing kangaroo. . . . Is this a man? Is this a woman? Her lips are painted black, her skin is the color of a banana, her hair, already short, is stuck to her head as if made of caviar, her voice is high-pitched, she shakes continually, and her body slithers like a snake. . . . The sounds of the orchestra seem to come from her. . . .

  “Is she horrible? Is she ravishing? Is she black? Is she white? . . . Nobody knows for sure. There is no time to know. She returns as she left, quick as a one-step dance, she is not a woman, she is not a dancer, she is something extravagant and passing, just like the music. . . .”

  “Electric greens,” writes another critic, “burning pinks . . . what rapture. No rest for the eyes or for the ears.”

  But the real sensation of the night—the finale, a “Charleston Cabaret”—is still to come. Suddenly, Josephine, that funny girl, is being carried onstage by Joe Alex, a strong black dancer from Africa. She is naked except for a few feathers tied to her waist and ankles, and she is wrapped around Joe’s body like a vine around a tree in the forest. He is half naked, too, bent over almost double, a hunter with his prey on his back.

  First, you feel sorry that the lovely animal is dead, the shape of the body is so perfect, the color, the stillness. Then she starts to come alive, the muscular body begins to move, the music begins to pound. (“The jazz gets stronger and stronger, the blood pressure goes up six points,” a doctor in the audience said later.)

  She slides down Joe’s body. Shameless, she seems to be making love to him in front of everyone. Joe has been chasing Josephine since rehearsals began, but he is not real to her. The one she wants to make jealous, Claude, is upstage of them, playing the piano, as their frenzy builds.

  For Pierre de Regnier, the “Danse de Sauvage” is “barbaric . . . naughty . . . a return to the customs of the dark ages,” and he tells his readers how Josephine achieves a “silent declaration of love by a simple forward movement of her belly, with her arms raised above her head, and the quiver of her entire rear.”

  This is the way Josephine herself will recall the occasion: “The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience . . . I had to execute a dance rather . . . savage. I came onstage and . . . a frenzy took possession of me . . . seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced!”

  Some people in the audience scream for more, others rise, wrapping themselves in indignation and little furs, and stalk from the theater, muttering that jazz and blacks are going to destroy white civilization. Josephine doesn’t care. First, she doesn’t understand a word of French, so she can’t tell what they’re saying, and second, she and Joe take the noise as a kind of participation in their ritual, it gives an extra energy to their wild mating dance.

  In the wings, André Daven, the director of the theater, knows he has seen theatrical history being made. “It was like the revelation of a new world,” Daven says. “Eroticism finding a style. Josephine was laughing, she was crying, and the audience stood and gave her such an ovation that she trembled, and could not leave the stage. We had to bring the curtain down.”

  Backstage, the chorus girls are amazed. Most feel sorry for Claude Hopkins’s wife, Mabel, because Claude has been cheating on her with this crazy Josephine. Besides being amazed, the girls are embarrassed. Lydia Jones remembers the feeling. “We were horrified at how disgusting Josie was behaving in front of this French audience, doing her nigger routine. She had no self-respect, no shame in front of these crackers, and would you believe it, they loved her.”

  They did love her. Berenice Abbott, the American photographer, called the night electric. “Josephine came out with these feathers on her tail and this beautiful little body, and people went wild. The French were kind of tired and a little bit decadent, it’s hard to get them excited, but everybody just wanted to leap over the balcony; a great spontaneous combustion took place.”

  In Le Crapouillot, Louis Cheronnet wrote that he had never seen anything more sensual than the dance where Josephine “mimics love, the gift of herself, while a black man wraps her in his passionate movements, his frantic desire. . . .”

  In L’Art Vivant, André Levinson spoke of Josephine’s having “the splendor of an ancient animal, until the movements of her behind and her grin of a benevolent cannibal make admiring spectators laugh.”

  Reviewing for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner found the music “tuneless” and the finale “dull,” but later reversed herself. In 1972, forty-seven years after the fact, she described the moment when Joe Alex set Josephine down on the stage. “She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater.”

  It’s all in the perspective. One man’s scream of salutation is another man’s “What an ass!”

  The belated Flanner homage continued: “Within a half hour of the final curtain on opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the grapevine up to the cafés on the Champs-Élysées, where the witnesses of her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what they had just seen. . . .”

  News tearing through the streets, my God, it’s like Napoléon, when he was fighting. And yet, Josephine’s triumph was real. And she had made it look easy, effortless, so spontaneous that some observers were fooled into thinking the performance they had just seen was an expression of her nature, not a product of her art. They were mistaken. Josephine was not a natural child, she was a complicated, driven nineteen-year-old. She herself had created that “magnificent dark body,” out of will and her need to be noticed. And the day leading up to her conquest of Paris had been one of the worst she had ever lived.

  Chapter 2

  TERROR BEFORE THE OPENING

  “Josephine, don’t you jump out that window!”

  There is a truth behind every legend that is different from what you might imagine. The legend, for instance, of the night a dancer with a body “possessed by the devil” seduced a jaded public.

  In the twenty-four hours before the opening of La Revue Nègre, it was Josephine who was feeling seduced and abandoned.

  But let us step back a moment. Most of the cast had been drinking since they got off the SS Berengaria in Cherbourg. It had been ten days of nonstop party, though it began quietly. In a manuscript she never published, Caroline Dudley Reagan wrote of “our modest arrival in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare. . . . There was no fanfare, nor anybody to notice . . . the performers were a little bewildered, lost. . . . It was Mr. Daven who told me he had reserved rooms, two here, three there . . . and we were on our way to the hotels—in Montmartre, in the section of artists of all colors and all races, no prejudice, no racism—at the right time, without a fuss.”

  Even during the rehearsal period, there were celebrations every night, one at a cabaret where Maurice Chevalier bought caviar for the
cast. “I liked it on those little pieces of toast,” says Evelyn Anderson. “I was eighteen years old, and it was great to be onstage and in France.”

  Josephine wasn’t so sure. Claude Hopkins had been her lover all the way across the ocean (even with his wife, Mabel, right there, only a step behind them), but almost as soon as the Berengaria docked, he discovered the brothel of Madame Blanche. Now, every evening after rehearsal, he would lie to Mabel (and to Josephine) about where he was going, and show up at Madame Blanche’s door.

  The first time he went, there were five or six other patrons. After a few days, he decided he didn’t want to be part of a crowd, asked, “How much for the house?” and a deal was made. A sultan with a harem, Claude spent blissful hours sitting naked at a gold piano, one girl perched on top of the gaudy upright, her legs around his neck, another girl on his knee.

  If Mabel guessed what was going on, she kept her own counsel. Josephine was different. For a week, she had been raging to Lydia Jones about Claude’s disappearances. She was also beginning to worry about the reception she might receive at the hands of the opening-night crowd. The company had already given a preview for an invited audience, and the responses had not been uniformly enthusiastic. (One journalist wrote of “dancers, singers and musicians who perform their sketches terribly”; another complained about the “infernal racket” made by the band.)

  The day before the opening, dress rehearsal seemed to go well enough, but the theater was swarming with photographers and, as soon as the final curtain fell, Josephine made her escape. Claude was nowhere to be seen, but maybe he would show up at her place later.

  Josephine, being the star, was booked into a different hotel than the chorus; she had a living room, a bedroom with a mirrored ceiling, and a bathroom with a bidet. In the bidet, she had installed a few goldfish; she always had some kind of livestock around.

  Even though she had invited Lydia Jones to be her roommate (as always, she disliked spending nights alone), the two were not particularly compatible, and one of the things they disagreed about was the mirrored ceiling. Lydia was somewhat moralistic—“Claude used to come sleep in the bed with Josephine, and I would be in the next bed, that made me sick, you know”—and did not like to see endless reflections of herself. Josephine, on the other hand, admired her body day and night, loving it from every angle.

  Waiting for Claude, who did not arrive, she put a hair straightener, Mary’s Congolene, on her hair, and fell asleep. When she woke—was it noon? 2 P.M.?—she was not thinking of the opening of La Revue Nègre, only hours away; she was thinking of running. Anyplace.

  For one thing, the Congolene had left her almost bald, her scalp badly burned. It was meant to be combed through and rinsed out, not slept in. And Lydia, her small pretty face so set in disapproval, was not the person to comfort a wild woman, so Josephine fled, making for Evelyn Anderson’s hotel, on rue Pigalle.

  Evelyn lived with Joe Hayman, Claude’s saxophone player, and they were in bed on the fifth floor when the banging on the door woke them up. Bam! bam! bam! like a machine gun. Half asleep, Evelyn opened the door, and there like a fury came Josephine, eyes puffy, screaming a torrent of words.

  “She was talkin’ about Claude, she was so upset because she couldn’t have him, and she’d had some champagne, I guess, and she went to the window, and I said, ‘What are you gonna do, Josephine?’ I said, ‘Don’t you act like no fool and jump out that window, you come on back here.’ She was on the verge. Ain’t no doubt about it, she really was.”

  Roused from sleep, Joe Hayman’s reaction was fury. When Josephine opened the shutters and leaned over the balcony railing, he leaped naked from the bed, grabbed her, and nearly went off the balcony with her. He managed to yank the bellowing Josephine back inside—Evelyn remembers his yelling, “Stupid cow, you almost got me killed!”—and he hurled her onto the bed, where she continued to sob.

  “She’s having a nervous breakdown,” said Evelyn.

  “Get the cognac,” said Joe.

  Evelyn brought the bottle, then telephoned Caroline Reagan, who came rushing over and put in a call to her friend Antoine, the most famous hairdresser in Paris. She said she was bringing Miss Baker to see him. But after one look at Josephine, Antoine shook his head. Alas, Madame must forgive him, he could do nothing for that poor burned skin. He was desolate, he regretted—and then, all at once, an inspiration.

  He fetched some paper, took up his scissors. He cut out a cap, complete with the spit curls that would become famous, lacquered it black, and gently glued it to Josephine’s temples. A little black helmet so cleverly fashioned that from far away it would look like hair.

  Crisis averted. Josephine had one more cognac, courtesy of Antoine, and went home. Caroline wanted her to get some rest before she came to the theater. Came, as it turned out, to be greeted by flowers and crowds and bravos and controversy and adulation.

  She did not yet know that her life would never again be simple. Half an hour after the last curtain came down, she was slipping through the crowds, laughing, flirting, no more the naked savage, but a queen in a gold lamé dress by Poiret.

  André Daven and Rolf de Maré, the theater’s owner, had turned the place into a giant club (supper on the balcony, dancing on the stage) for three hundred invited guests. Mistinguett, queen of the music halls, who had just opened at the Moulin Rouge, came straight from her own show just in time to discover that she had, at last, a rival.

  Josephine, however, was enjoying herself, even though, at 3 A.M., she went home alone. Tonight, of course, Claude had been with Mabel at the party, but Josephine had other things to think about.

  The disastrous day had ended well. Until she went into her bathroom at the hotel. Hearing her scream, “Call a doctor!” Lydia Jones ran to help. “Look!” cried Josephine, pointing. The goldfish were lying dead in the bidet, which was empty of water. One more failure of communication. How could a simple child of St. Louis be expected to understand the mysteries of French plumbing?

  As the worst and the best twenty-four hours of her life came to an end, Josephine reviled the universe for having murdered her goldfish. That she herself had put the fish in the bidet was not a subject Lydia brought up. It was better, she decided, to go to bed and think about finding a less volatile roommate.

  Years before, in St. Louis, Josephine’s mother had had the same thought.

  Chapter 3

  ELVIRA, CARRIE, THE BEGINNINGS

  “Grandma often talked about slave days”

  There is only one picture of Josephine Baker as a baby, and nobody is sure if that one is authentic.

  She was born Freda J. McDonald on June 3, 1906, in the Female Hospital, which had opened as the St. Louis Social Evil Hospital, a treatment center for prostitutes suffering from venereal disease.

  She died on April 12, 1975, in the Salpêtrière hospital, which had been built to care for the prostitutes, beggars, and criminal women of Paris.

  But what a dance in between! Though even through the years of wine and roses, she could not forget the slums she had run so fast and so far to escape. Despite herself, she thought about them. Despite herself because, a friend said, “Miss Baker does not like to remember. She lives . . . in the present.”

  So much did Josephine “not like to remember” that when she left America, she erased all evidence of her early life. Pictures, papers, cut up, torn up, burnt. Goodbye.

  And still, this impulse to cover her tracks was at war with her impulse to get the world’s attention. She would alter her story again and again, reshaping history as she went. Marcel Sauvage told me how they worked on the first memoirs, a collection of “notes, impressions, images,” when she was twenty. “Around 5 P.M., I would go to her hotel. That was when she got up. The maid would bring breakfast, and Josephine, half naked, her pink nightgown all open, laughing, playing with a parrot, would start to remember.”

  And what did she remember, in the shadows of those late afternoons?

  She said her fa
ther and mother were married (they were not), and she said she sent a check home every month (at the time, she did). “Now, dear, you understand . . . I am the great man of the family.”

  She said that kings walked with pointed shoes in her dreams. “And the queens were blond . . . sometimes I cried because I too would have liked to be a queen.”

  She said she became a dancer “because I was born in a cold city . . . .”

  She said her childhood was filled with “stories of cemeteries. A black childhood is always a little sad.”

  Even when the sadness was once removed. Her grandmother, Elvira, “often talked about slave days. I adored Grandma. The songs she sang as she rocked me to sleep . . . told of the freedom that would someday come.”

  As a child on a tobacco plantation, Elvira had seen a pregnant woman put in a hole, belly down, and beaten. Her great-grandson, Richard Martin, Jr., told me she repeated that story over and over. “She used to say, ‘Poor Miz So-and-So, why is Master beating her on the back that way?’ And she would cry, and I would just be amazed, it was as though she was living through the whole thing.

  “I had no idea of slaves, but the way she was telling it made me feel very sad, not for the woman being beaten on the back, but for my great-grandmother. Each time, after she told that story, my grandmother Carrie would give her a peppermint to make her feel better.” (No matter how terrible the past, Elvira at least had family; many former slaves had lost all trace of relatives. The government cared for some of these old people in homes like the one called Blue Plains, near Washington, D.C.)

  Elvira had been born on a tobacco plantation in Holly Springs, Arkansas (when she died in 1936, the death certificate listed her as being “about ninety”), and Josephine would always be in conflict about her, partly proud, partly ashamed that her grandmother had been a slave. She sometimes claimed that Elvira was an Indian—hadn’t the red man been in America when the first white man came ashore? In fact, the tiny five-foot-tall woman may have been part Indian; she had long, straight, black hair.