Josephine Baker Read online

  Sketches changed weekly, guest artists appeared and disappeared. There were the Whitman Sisters, who played banjos and sang. “Sister Mae” headed the group, and had a low opinion of theater managers. Most of them, she said, “feel that any kind of show is good enough for a colored audience . . . their only desire is to have a comedian and a few half-naked girls on hand. . . . If these birds pay you a living wage, they want you to guarantee that it will not rain or snow during the week you are booked with them.”

  Once in a while, an exotic newcomer like Esther Bigeou, “The Singer with the Million Dollar Smile,” would come along to entrance Josephine. Esther sang in French. “Avez vous du boeuf rôti, de l’agneau, du porc, des petits pois, ou des pommes de terre?” she would croon. “The words,” said one reviewer, “flow from her lips so naturally that it seems like the careless warbling of a bird.” A carnivorus bird. For those who do not speak my native tongue, permit me to translate. “Do you have roast beef, lamb, pork, peas, or potatoes?” is what Esther was inquiring of her audience.

  Mildred Martien, who would become Josephine’s lifelong friend, worked with her at the Standard. “I went in the chorus with Josephine, we were six girls, she was at the end, the comic one. Later on, she introduced me to Billy Baker. He and his parents were lovely people, they all looked like they were white. And their restaurant was so high-class, white tablecloths, waiters, everything. I went out with Josephine and Billy a few times.”

  Billy worked in his father’s restaurant—“He was a good-looking thing,” said the Duchess, but it was for Pa Baker that she reserved her highest praise. “If you had no money, he’d give you a meal. He did his own cooking, but he didn’t serve no whiskey, didn’t allow no cussing or nothing.

  “The family lived upstairs over the restaurant. There were two sons, Billy and Edward, and after Billy married Josephine, she came to live there too, up on the third floor. I seen her at the Standard—oh my God, she broke the show up, how she could dance—and I seen her at home.

  “I used to run upstairs from the restaurant and take the conk off her hair. She used to call me, ‘Please come up and get it off my neck ’cause it’s burning me.’ She slept all day, then went to work, and as soon as the Standard would let out, she was right home, she didn’t hang out with nobody. She was a loner.”

  Again and again we will hear this about Josephine. “She was all right in the theater,” Maude Russell says, “but as soon as she hit that street, to hell with you, she’s gone, she’s on her own, whatever she was doing, you wouldn’t be there to witness it. Not ever.”

  In Philadelphia, at least, there doesn’t seem to have been much to witness; once she married Billy, for the first time in fifteen crowded years, she had a home. She called Mr. Baker “Pa,” and the Duchess said this pleased him. “Her and her father-in-law was very close because he wanted a daughter, and she looked so much like the Bakers she could have been one of them, except she was darker. Mr. Baker called her ‘Daughter,’ he never called her Josephine. Yes, he sure did love her. He wanted everything for her.”

  But he never knew if she got it. After she left this country, the Bakers heard no more from her.

  I couldn’t find them, either. For more than fifteen years, I tracked Billy Baker, the man whose name I bear. My first attempts to locate him began in Philadelphia, where I had gone to interview Evelyn Anderson. (She was the chorus girl who came to Paris and fell in love with caviar “on those little pieces of toast.”)

  I went to the Free Library of Philadelphia, dug out a 1921 phone book, and there it was: “BAKER Warren Rest . . . 1520 South St.,” confirming what Billy had said in that article in 1934. I ran out like a thief, grabbed a taxi, gave the address. The black driver looked at me. “I wouldn’t advise you to go there alone.” I told him I was hunting for the past, and nothing would happen to me. He dropped me on the corner of Fifteenth and South, and I started walking. I was on the street where she and Billy had lived, and it was deserted, houses empty, most of the ground-floor windows boarded up. But you could still see that the brownstones had been beautiful.

  Here was the Royal Theatre, silent like the rest of the block, though I could imagine how grand it had once been. Now its sign was pitted with holes where lightbulbs used to burn, and the front of the marquee said, ALWAYS A GREA HOW; the missing letters had fallen on their sides.

  The abandoned restaurant next door had no number over the entrance, but I looked down, and there it was on the floor, 1520, in mosaic tiles. It was just as the Duchess had described it to me, two big glass windows—now boarded-up—and a kind of Moorish arch connecting them. Debris was piled in the doorway, but I was seeing what wasn’t there—lights, sounds of silverware and plates, a table for a wedding reception in the back, a young couple who looked like brother and sister celebrating their marriage.

  I came to a corner, and went into a secondhand record shop. No customers, but a man behind racks of old records. I asked him about Josephine, and he said I should go down the street to Felix, the barber. “He lived his whole life on this block, he was a friend of Billy Baker’s father.”

  Felix’s barbershop smelled of age, and of the aftershave trapped in its walls. It was small and dark, with two barber chairs in front of a rusted mirror. Felix said he remembered when Mr. Baker opened the restaurant. “He was a good cook, and people from all over town—even white people—came to eat at his place. Mostly sports people, but I forget which sport. Billy came right here and got a shave on his wedding day.”

  As I left the shop, I noticed on a shelf the old straight razor and the strop used to sharpen it. It was exactly like the one the old man, Pepe Lombard, my friend in St. Symphorien, had used every Sunday. It made me smile, thinking how small the world is.

  The way Josephine had Elvira to tell her stories of the old days, I’d had Pepe Lombard. He’d lived alone in a big old house across the unpaved road from us; you came into the front room, which was always very dark, warm in winter, cool in summer. He never talked to me like you talk to a child, but as a witness to his life. I can still see his wonderful face beaten by the years; you could tell the day of the week by looking at his beard, shaved only on Sunday, and his white mustache was like a big M under his nose. He always held up his pants with pieces of string, and his gestures were slow; he knew his strength was no longer what it had been, and he used it wisely, like a friend.

  On that Saturday in 1921, Billy Baker had left Felix’s barbershop, picked up his bride, and crossed the river to Camden. Then they came back to a party in the restaurant. Only ten or twelve people, the Duchess said; the big table had been set up in the corner. “My station.”

  For Josephine, the change in her fortunes was pleasant. Warren Baker took her to a tailor, and, the Duchess said, “She started dressing. She wore way-out clothes ’cause she could get away with them. When I first seen her with a long white astrakhan fur coat, and a muff, I kissed her. She looked beautiful.”

  Whatever Josephine told her in-laws about her family back in St. Louis, she was careful never to bring the two sets of parents together. Then, surprisingly, she took Billy home to St. Louis to meet the folks. “We honeymooned a while,” Billy told the Chicago Bee. “We loved each other and were very happy.”

  Josephine’s brother remembered the couple’s staying at Bernard Street “one or two days. I don’t know if she was in love, they weren’t there long enough for me to find out.”

  And if Carrie—or anyone else who knew about Willie Wells—wondered how Josephine could have married Billy Baker, nobody said a word.

  The bride spent most of that visit with Elvira, the grandmother who never questioned, never judged. Then, satisfied that familial duty had been done, Mr. and Mrs. Baker left St. Louis.

  Back in Philadelphia, life resumed its usual shape. Mildred Martien was a bride too—she had married Johnny Hudgins, a young comedian touring the T.O.B.A. circuit—and she and Josephine liked to walk up and down South Street, window-shopping. Across from Mr. Baker’s restaur
ant was Tryham’s, a dry goods store with a shiny red door, and there were always pretty cars in front of the Royal Theatre. You could see movies at the Royal, and enjoy Fats Waller’s piano-playing between features. Sometimes Mildred would come by to pick up Josephine and find her waiting outside, “leaning against the wall, kind of dreaming, not really there. But she would smile at the customers coming in.”

  Sunday in the City of Brotherly Love was referred to by actors as Doomsday, since blue laws kept the theaters closed. (They would reopen at one minute past midnight, offering a late-Sunday-night, or, more accurately, an early-Monday-morning show.) So sometimes on a Sunday, Pa Baker would round up Josephine, Mildred, and his friend, the composer and conductor Will Marion Cook. Then the foursome, two middle-aged men, two young girls, would take the train to New York, to 125th Street, the heart of Harlem.

  Pa Baker admired Will Marion Cook and was honored to be in his company; as for Josephine, knowing Mr. Cook would turn out to be one of her luckiest breaks.

  But I’m getting ahead of my story. Cook was a crotchety genius, a violin prodigy. He had studied for five years in Berlin with Joseph Joachim, and in New York with the popular Czech composer, Antonin Dvořák, at the National Conservatory of Music. As a young man, Cook had quit the Boston Symphony when he was told a black could not solo. “If I can’t get fame,” he said to a friend, “I’d like to make money.” The gods were not listening. Fame came early to Will Marion, money gave him a wide berth.

  So did a lot of musicians who found him difficult. He couldn’t bear a false note, especially if the note had been written by him. He would stop conducting and, in front of the full audience, correct the sloppy player.

  He had a lighter side too; he adored chorus girls, the more fair-skinned the better, and he enjoyed the Sunday excursions organized by Pa Baker.

  Harlem was beautiful then. Seventh Avenue, its main artery, had trees and flowers planted on its center island. The buildings on either side of the boulevard were five and six stories tall, no skyscrapers to shut out the brightness. There were churches, nightclubs, theaters, photographers’ studios, bookstores, beauty parlors, restaurants. Mr. Baker would take his guests to lunch at Dabney’s on 132nd Street, and then to a matinee, because Josephine and Mildred had to be back in time for their own 12:01 show at the Standard.

  The theaters were fun, the streets were fun. Looking for excitement and bootleg gin, whites came to Harlem in ermine and pearls and Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows. If you didn’t have a Duesenberg, you could take the subway.

  The nightlife, the music, the after-hours places, Josephine would not discover until she came to live there. But one magical afternoon, she got to see Shuffle Along, which wasn’t in Harlem, but wasn’t exactly in the theater district either. It was playing at the Sixty-third Street Theatre, a kind of run-down lecture hall; even so, white people came in droves, helping to make it the longest-running (504 performances) book musical ever coproduced, directed, written, and acted by black talent.

  Shuffle Along was, Josephine knew, the show she needed to make her happy. The final curtain hadn’t rung down before she was racing backstage, father-in-law by the hand, asking him to invite Wilsie Caldwell for a bite to eat. Chorus people hear all the gossip; Wilsie, who’d got her the Philadelphia audition, might be able to help again, she might have news of replacements, or touring companies.

  Back in Philadelphia, business was so good at the Standard and the Dunbar that John T. Gibson, who owned both houses, put up new illuminated signs; a hundred lights made them so bright they could be seen from anywhere on South Broad Street. “Old Gibby kept them two theaters running,” said Lily Yuen.

  Josephine should have been happy. Christmas was coming, she had a handsome husband, a loving father-in-law, work she enjoyed. But what she wanted from Santa Claus was a job in Shuffle Along.

  Have I said it was foolish to bet against her? Wilsie phoned one day to say a second company was being formed. The show, now in its sixth month on Sixty-third Street, was so popular that even the owners of white theaters out of town were clamoring for it. The road company was already scheduled to open on February 14 and play one-night stands through New England.

  That was all Josephine needed to know. She took the train to New York, went to the theater, and was hired—at thirty dollars a week—by Al Mayer, one of the producers who didn’t realize she’d ever auditioned before.

  She went back to Philadelphia, packed, and bought a one-way ticket to New Haven. “It was the Shuffle Along No. 2 show that gave Josephine a new start in the theatrical profession of which she was very fond,” Billy Baker recalled. Maude Russell put it more bluntly. “I don’t think she stayed with her husband but a hot minute.”

  The way it turned out, Maude’s was the first face Josephine saw when she reported to the theater in New Haven. Maude had been in the original New York cast of Shuffle Along, and had quit to go back to her on-again, off-again marriage, but when Sam Russell punched her, it was the end. “I stole a hundred dollars from him,” she says gleefully, “and I left town so fast I blinded him with ass.”

  Now, having joined the second company of Shuffle Along, she was delighted to see Josephine, swathed in black sealskin and a silk turban, sweeping through the stage door.

  “I ran over and threw my arms around her and said, ‘Oh, Tumpy, how good you look, I’m so glad—’ She cut me off. ‘My name is not Tumpy anymore. My name is Josephine Baker.’ And then she started to giggle. But I was impressed. I thought she was really grand out there, puttin’ on the dog.”

  Chapter 9

  ON THE ROAD WITH SHUFFLE ALONG

  “Some of those girls treated Joe like a dog”

  From the moment the curtain went up on opening night in New Haven, the customers were captured by the surefire mix—the costumes, the fun, the girls—of Shuffle Along. There was no profanity, there was a foolish plot—three men running for mayor of Jimtown, two of them crooks—and there was a script that prefigured the dialogue Flournoy Miller would later write for the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show.

  There was also terrific music, supplied by Luckey Roberts. Luckey was not only the orchestra leader, but a pianist, his left hand so big that it could span two octaves. (One time at a private party in Palm Beach, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, an even more famous piano player, heard Luckey play, and approached him. “Oh God,” said the future president of Poland, “if I had your hands, I would be greater.”

  Pictures of Josephine as a Happy Honeysuckle—she is made up with white powder—show her smiling and demure. She and eleven other Honeysuckles crouch onstage, half a dozen Jazz Jasmines posing behind them, while on the porch of the Jimtown Hotel a young groom sings to his bride about how “the preacher will be waiting when the knot am tied.”

  Things were going fine when Josephine made her move; she just broke loose. It was in the silence right after a number, the music had died away, the cast stood breathless, waiting for applause, and suddenly this imp was flying, mugging, strutting. Luckey tried to improvise an accompaniment for her while the other actors froze.

  “Most of them were relieved,” Maude Russell says, “when the stage manager told Tumpy to pack her things.”

  A phone call from Eubie Blake in New York: how had the opening gone? Great, said the stage manager, “except for Josephine Baker, who broke the line. I fired her.”

  “How did the audience react?” said Blake. The stage manager laughed. “The truth is, those crackers loved it.”

  “Put her back in,” said Blake.

  The reviews all mentioned her. “Unique sense of rhythm.” “A born comic.” “It’s impossible to take your eyes off the little cross-eyed girl.”

  “Honey, the audience laughed so hard,” Maude Russell says, “but the girls would whisper, ‘That old Josephine Baker makes me sick.’ ”

  This wasn’t news to Josephine. “The other girls didn’t like me,” she said. “ ‘You act and dance like a monkey,’ they shouted.” Was their cruelty the result of sim
ple jealousy? I think that was part of it, and color was part of it too. When I first came to America, I knew whites discriminated against blacks, but I didn’t know that blacks discriminated against each other. “The high yallers [high yellows] had nothing to do with the blacks,” Maude Russell told me. “And in between were the brown skins with their own circle. Listen, down South, if you weren’t the color of the paint on the church door, which was yellow, you had no pew in that church.

  “On the road, the girls who didn’t like Joe would taunt her with ‘God don’t love ugly!’ and she would just say, ‘He’s not crazy about beauty either, if it’s not the right beauty!’ ” (In an Amsterdam News column, the songwriter Andy Razaf—a great lyricist who worked with Fats Waller—suggested “a ‘get-together’ movement . . . among our colored professionals with the object of checking the many jealousies and hatreds that exist within their group.” Razaf decried the fact that musical producers hired the whitest black women they could find, and that black artists rushed to sign up with white producers. He felt it would be nice for “colored shows . . . to take a few colored girls, for a change.”)

  Josephine had been too light for her family, and now, for many of her colleagues, she was too dark. But while she envied the high-yellow girls their skin color, those ladylike stuck-up creatures were no threat to her. She had a talent to amuse, and tricks learned from old pros. She was a classical clown, hiding the anger that fueled her, turning that energy into a joy she shared with the audience.

  The company was on a tight schedule, one-nighters, mostly. “You barely had time to catch your breath after a show,” Maude remembers. “Fifty of us were running to get the train to the next town, we packed, we unpacked, we had our own railroad car—we didn’t want those white theater people to think we weren’t as grand as a white show.”