Josephine Baker Read online

  What she could see through the window was like a silent movie at the Booker. A perfect picture, black and white, night all around, and in the darkness, pools of light from the windows she was passing. For a few seconds, it was clear—1537 Papin Street, which she could almost have touched if she had stretched out her arm, Chestnut Street, the Jefferson Barracks Bridge—and then it was gone.

  On Bernard Street, Margaret was nervous because she had promised not to tell Carrie that Josephine was skipping town. Josephine had given Margaret reasons. She wanted to be famous, she wanted to be rich and help the family.

  Loyally, Margaret followed the party line. She told me that the night the Russell company left St. Louis, Carrie asked where Josephine was. Margaret answered that she was staying over at Dyer Jones’s house. Next morning, Margaret confessed that her sister was gone. Carrie seemed to take the news calmly. “To my surprise, Mama said, ‘She has chosen her path. Let her be.’ ”

  Chapter 7

  LIFE ON THE T.O.B.A. CIRCUIT

  “It was going from one dinky theater to another”

  On the map, the distance from St. Louis to Memphis looks to be about 250 miles, as the crow flies. But the journey is longer and prettier if you follow the curves and twists of the Mississippi, the river meandering south, dividing Missouri from Illinois and Kentucky, separating Arkansas and Tennessee.

  It was one of the trains of the Illinois Central Railroad that carried Josephine on this first leg of her wanderings; Bob Russell had a private Pullman car for his large company, their costumes and scenery. Josephine was delighted to find that Andre Tribble, a female impersonator whom she had loved at the Booker (he carried celery as his bridal bouquet) was now part of the Russell entourage.

  The Illinois Central prided itself on furnishing its dining cars with white linen tablecloths, bud vases holding fresh flowers, fine china; but black people weren’t welcome in the dining cars, they ate in their seats.

  Still, it was fun for Josephine. Bob Russell’s wife (also named Josephine) had prepared hampers of food; there were sandwiches, ribs, hard-boiled eggs, cookies, bananas, and thermos bottles full of lemonade. The train slowly built up to speed—fifty miles an hour was its limit—and the tired company began to relax. It had been a long day, Josephine was to remember. “One by one the cast dozed off, their bodies rocking with the motion of the train.” And if you couldn’t sleep, all night long there was a show outside the windows, as passengers boarded at each new stop, some of them carrying frying pans and live chickens.

  When the troupe got to Memphis, a city where the population was about 40 percent black, Josephine discovered there were three black theaters (the New Regent, the Palace, and the Venus, where Bob Russell’s troupe would spend the next seven weeks) but it was difficult for black performers to find places to stay. There were few black hotels for the simple reason that there weren’t enough well-to-do blacks who could afford to stay in hotels.

  Booth Marshall recalled the boardinghouses of his youth. “Sometimes you had to pay extra for laying down during the day, because the lady would say the room had been rented for the night only! She would say, ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted to sleep during the day.’ And some places, as soon as you put the light out, bedbugs by the thousand would come and bite you. I couldn’t take that, I would go down to the railroad station and sit up until morning. Rooms were a dollar a night, the better ones were a dollar and a half. Clara Smith traveled with her own clean sheets; after a while on the road, so did I.”

  In Memphis, Josephine was taken to a boardinghouse “where Mr. Russell gave me a tiny room.” That very afternoon, the troupe opened at the Venus, an opening Josephine described with gusto: “The show started. The heat was crushing. . . . Hundreds of black faces with yellow teeth died of laughter. They ate peanuts and threw the shells on the stage. The air was awful.”

  Again, she was cast as Cupid, flying with a bow and arrow over two lovers, until the lady’s husband came on and tried to pull her from the arms of her boyfriend. Then a spectator tried to do the same. He hopped onstage, brandishing a razor and shouting, “Get your hands off that woman, trash!”

  Some of the male dancers leaped to restrain him. “Everybody screamed, ‘It’s not the truth, it’s only the play,’ ” Josephine recalled. “Nothing helped. Mr. Russell was obliged to come and explain it was only a scene, and not true. Then the man put away his razor, smiled broadly and went back to his seat.”

  “You know, in them days,” Booth Marshall said, “the colored people just talked back to the shows. Like a villain shoots somebody and hides behind the door, and the audience yells, ‘There’s that dirty rascal, behind the door, go get him!’ Damnedest people I ever seen in my life.”

  The audiences were no more primitive than some of the playhouses with which the Theater Owners’ Booking Association was affiliated. Black vaudevillians swore that T.O.B.A. stood for Tough on Black Asses. “Some of the theaters were so small,” a female dancer told me, “you could not cross behind the stage to go to the toilet, you had to learn to pee in a bottle. Life on the T.O.B.A. was just going from one dinky theater to another, some of them blacksmith shops where they shoed horses. You worked hard, did four shows a day, and learned a lot.”

  Josephine was living proof of that. She learned from everything and everybody, including Mama Dinks, whose routine she had seen many times. And of course she continued to study the phenomenon that was Clara Smith. “Clara outdrew Bessie Smith in Nashville all the time,” says trumpet player Doc Cheatham. “Because she was mean, and she sang mean. She would give everybody hell, give the men hell, give the women hell, in her blues singing. She was a mean woman but she was a great singer.”

  It wasn’t only Clara’s voice that Josephine loved, but the long silk handkerchief Clara used as a prop, and her blue feather boa. Blue was Josephine’s favorite color, and I still keep, like a talisman, one of her headpieces, a satin turban out of which rises a three-foot-tall spray of blue feathers. When I’m in the room with it, it’s as though Josephine is looking over my shoulder.

  Though business was good there, Memphis wasn’t memorable to Josephine, she never spoke or wrote much about it. New Orleans was different, New Orleans and the beautiful Lyric Theater where Bob Russell’s troupe next landed. An ad in the New Orleans Item heralded their arrival: “Beginning Monday BOB RUSSELL and His 25 Hottest Coons in Dixie.”

  Two T.O.B.A. members, a Mr. Boudreaux and a Mr. Bennett, owned the Lyric. Bennett was a friend of the racing car driver Barney Oldfield, who had given him a ring set with two three-carat diamonds, which he’d pawned for a thousand dollars to invest in the theater. A showplace that stood on a corner, the Lyric had arched windows, a white marble foyer, dressing rooms of marble and oak. The stage, which could be raised or lowered by hydraulic power, was thirty-eight feet deep; seven hundred patrons could sit on the lower floor, eight hundred in the balcony, and there were twelve boxes on each side.

  Josephine wrote about this pleasure palace and the city that contained it. “There are the French and the Blacks. That is the origin of the creoles. Huge theatre with real orchestra, many musicians: happy! I thought I was coming into high society. . . . It’s fashionable there to eat crabs with rice, corn cut in it, and a little green vegetable called okra. . . . And . . . I saw the Jones family again. . . .”

  Hired by Mr. Russell for the New Orleans leg of the tour, the Joneses had shown up with instruments and prop trunk. “After we had fallen into each other’s arms,” Josephine said, “Mrs. Jones suggested that I move in with them and split the costs. It seemed like a good idea. . . .”

  What seemed like a bad idea was Clara Smith’s greedy consumption of sweet-potato pies. She ate too many, “and she made me eat them too. As I had a sweet tooth, I loved sugar . . . and I fell sick.”

  Sick, maybe, but not too tired to explore the city. “The piano player had told me that it was a musician’s paradise and he was right. . . . I had never seen so many people, bars and dance halls. .
. . ‘This is nothing,’ the piano player insisted. ‘You can’t imagine how it used to be. One parade after another; bands competing in the streets to prove they were the best. But Storyville’s [Storyville, New Orleans’s legalized red-light district, had thrived between 1897 and 1917.] been closed down since the war. It’s simply not the same.’ ”

  The ways Josephine remembered the rest of her tenure with Bob Russell were wonderfully creative. One variation went like this: She was fired in New Orleans, so she hid in a packing crate and was shipped on the train with the rest of the luggage, and after she was discovered, Mrs. Russell went to bat for her, and Mr. Russell agreed she could remain with the company until they got back to St. Louis. Then came a list of miseries endured. Fleabag hotels. A gas heater that rendered our heroine unconscious and caused the rest of the company to think she was suicidal. Work unending. It was Mrs. Kaiser’s house all over again. “I sewed, brushed costumes, polished shoes, ironed, dressed hair, hooked and unhooked clothes, fastened, buttoned . . . hung up, laid out, packed, unpacked.”

  In a different story, when the Russell company came to St. Louis, Josephine found her mother in a basement apartment, “her lovely teeth completely yellow and destroyed by tobacco! My stepfather continued to lie down all day and spit on the floor. . . . In a corner there was a crate full of coal, the water used to wash is frozen. Dirty curtains . . . You can’t take garbage out after six o’clock, it brings bad luck. So all the garbage is pushed under the bed.”

  This tale has Josephine going without a bath for a month in the Martins’ hovel, and having to say no to her little sister (“she had only one eye and she was despised”) when Willie Mae begged to be taken on the road.

  The only difficulty with any of these marvelous fables is that the Russell company didn’t go back to St. Louis, it went directly from New Orleans to Philadelphia, and even about Philadelphia, Josephine was not exactly candid. “I started in Philadelphia,” she contended. “In a small theatre: the Standard Theatre, in a bad revue. I made ten dollars a week. In fact I earned nothing because they nearly never paid and I was always hungry. I was hollow, hollow enough to fall. Teeth came out of my mouth. I thought about New York, big money . . .”

  I believe you thought about New York and big money, Mother, and I also believe your explanation of why you left home. “You cannot,” you said, “do anything with your family on your back.” But most of what you said about Philadelphia was nonsense. It was in Philadelphia that you became Josephine Baker.

  Chapter 8

  JOSEPHINE TRIES MARRIAGE FOR THE SECOND TIME

  “She was a little snip, about fifteen years old”

  She met him in Philadelphia—Billy Baker, the pretty boy with fair skin, the one the Duchess called “trifling; he was lazy, half the time he didn’t want to work.”

  The Duchess (remember the waitress who quit the Green Dragon speakeasy when the body count got too high?) was then employed by Billy’s father in his restaurant. “Josephine,” she said, “was nothing but a little snip, no more than about fifteen years old, and they eloped someplace.”

  The someplace was Camden, New Jersey, right across the river. In Camden, you could get married on the spot, no questions asked, so long as you brought two witnesses with you. These facts were verified by Billy Baker himself in 1934, after a reporter on the Chicago Bee tracked him down for a piece on “Forgotten Husbands of Famous Women.”

  Billy said he had first set eyes on Josephine when she was playing at the Standard. “I was living with my father at 1520 South Street. Because of her youth, Joe and I had difficulty securing a marriage license in Philadelphia but undaunted in our plans, we went to Camden.”

  Where the Reverend Orlando S. Watte united in wedlock William Howard Baker (twenty-three years of age; Colored; Birthplace, Gallatin, Tennessee; Father’s name, Warren Baker; Mother’s maiden name, Mattie Wilson) with Josephine Wells (nineteen years of age; Colored; Birthplace, St. Louis, Missouri; Father’s name, Arthur Wells; Mother’s maiden name, Carrie Martin). Each said it was a first marriage.

  Mother, I love you! You are daring, you get what you want. You aged yourself four years, gave your father’s name as Arthur Wells—poor Willie Wells, all that remained of him in your history was the temporary borrowing of his name—and covered your tracks. You were still doing the same thing fifty-two years later, when a journalist asked about your husbands. “I have been married thousands of times,” you told him, “because every man I loved has been my husband.”

  I’m glad you said it yourself, Mother. Imagine if I had claimed you loved thousands of men!

  It was on September 17, 1921, that Josephine vowed to love, honor, and obey Billy Baker. Indeed, Billy, not Willie Wells, would be Josephine’s first legal husband, but she would die without knowing it. (In Camden in 1921, the fact that she was a minor did not invalidate her marriage, even though she had not produced evidence of parental consent.) Just five months earlier, on April 25, she had opened with Bob Russell’s company at the Standard. They had a tough act to follow—the Billy King players had been thrilling Philadelphians with an onstage bullfight and “The Triumphant Return of the Shah of Persia on His Camel”—but Josephine wasn’t intimidated, she was in paradise, dancing across the very stage where the Shah’s camel had so recently galumphed.

  “I had learned,” she said, “that when I rolled my eyes and made the very faces that had earned me a scolding at school, the crowd would burst out laughing.”

  Appearing at the Standard on the same bill with Josephine was Maude Russell, the wife of Sam Russell. (They were not related to Bob Russell.) “Oh, Lord,” says Maude, “everybody knew Sam Russell. He worked in blackface like all the comedians then. To be funny, you had to wear blackface. He and Sandy Burns had a comedy act called Bilo and Ashes.”

  Maude confirms that the fledgling Josephine was a crowd pleaser. “She did her act, and I said, ‘Where did they get her from?’ She was a ugly little thing, but she was funny.”

  If Maude wondered where Bob Russell had got Josephine, she knew exactly where Josephine had got her act. “Mama Dinks. Dinks was never nothing but a chorus girl, but she was a star chorus girl. All her mouth was gold, she had funny legs, she could bend them way back, she did those antics, walkin’ like a chicken, lookin’ cross-eyed, and then she’d go offstage bowlegged with her butt stuck out. And Tumpy—she was introduced as Tumpy—copied Dinks.

  “She was nothing but a kid, and the people was crazy about her. ‘Tumpy! Ah, come on, Tumpy! Dance some more, Tumpy!’ And those audiences were rough, if you wasn’t any good, honey, they would boo you off the stage!”

  It was no small accomplishment to draw bravos on a bill that blazed with so much talent: Butterbeans and Susie, who were popular comics; Alex Lovejoy, a much-admired actor; Maude herself, who could dance till she set the house to screaming. “I was featured!” she says. “I wasn’t a chorus girl.” Clara Smith had stayed behind—she never came north if she could help it—but Dyer Jones was still with the company, so Josephine still had a surrogate mother.

  Dyer watched over all the chorus girls. “She would care for us children,” Lilly Yuen says, “and look after us that we don’t do foolish things.” Lilly, half Chinese, half black, nicknamed “Pontop,” reminds you how young they were. “We all used to play out in the alley between shows.”

  Most of the cast ate at a boardinghouse called Mom Charleston’s. Mom set out good food—greens, fried fish, chicken, corn pudding, peach cobbler—all for seventy-five cents.

  By 1921, Philadelphia was already a big city with more than 134,000 black residents. It boasted Independence Hall, and an interest in theater that dated back to the 1720s, when wandering players drew crowds to the outskirts of town. But for Josephine, its appeal lay in the fact that it was only eighty-three miles from New York City.

  As it happened, Shuffle Along, playing the Dunbar, a few blocks from the Standard, was headed for New York City. Josephine heard from Wilsie Caldwell, a former Dumas classmate who
was in the Broadway-bound show, that the management was looking for more dancers, and she asked Wilsie to help her get an audition.

  Next thing she knew she was doing her routine for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. (Sissle and Blake were the elegant vaudeville team who had joined forces with Miller and Lyles, a comedy-dance act, and created Shuffle Along, the musical designed “to put the Negro back on Broadway.”)

  The way Josephine described her audition, Mr. Blake had said nothing, while Mr. Sissle had said she was too young, too small, too thin, too ugly. And too dark. “ ‘Can you even dance?’ he asked me. ‘No, but it doesn’t matter . . . I watch, I dance without knowing . . . without dancing.’ ”

  Whatever Noble Sissle may have said to Josephine, a letter he wrote to the dancer Willie Covan indicates clearly that it was only Josephine’s age that had made him turn her away.

  “I will always remember her,” Sissle said, “leaving us without a word, her eyes full of tears. . . . The last we saw, she was walking in the street under heavy rain. Her clothes were all wet, so was her hair. She did not even open the big umbrella she was carrying. We felt so sad for her, but we were heading for Broadway, and the law was, you had to be sixteen to perform onstage there; on the road, nobody cared.”

  Josephine recovered fast. Next week, at the Standard, the sun was shining again. The Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, and her five Jazzoway Dandies, had come to play. The months flew by. Bob Russell and his troupe left town, but Josephine stayed behind and joined Sandy Burns’s stock company. (In addition to the touring players who came and went, the Standard always featured a resident stock company.)

  Sandy Burns bragged about the caliber of his people. “It’s not every company that has girls in the chorus who can put over a number, or talk,” he told the Chicago Defender, “and from the ovations my girls receive week in, week out, they must be pleasing and making good.” Among those they pleased, of course, was Billy Baker.