Josephine Baker Read online

  In Stamford, they arrived in time to see “Anna Pavlova and her Ballet Russe with Symphonic Orchestra.” Josephine was not impressed. “I never liked ballerinas on their toes. . . . They look like silly little birds . . . La Pavlova, you know, dreadful for me.”

  Massachusetts, Atlantic City, Brooklyn, as winter turned to spring.

  On May 24, for the first time, Josephine performed on a stage in New York City. To celebrate its first anniversary at the Sixty-third Street Theatre, the Broadway company invited the road company, including Josephine, to come across the bridge from Brooklyn and join them. The cast of Bandanaland, another Sissle/Blake/Miller/Lyles revue, playing at the Paradise Garden, was also summoned. Altogether, 140 performers took part in that midnight show on Sixty-third Street. “I had a triumph, I must say,” Josephine said. “The public applauded me so much nobody wanted to dance after me.”

  A couple of weeks later, Sissle, Blake, and partners decided to quit the Sixty-third Street Theatre and take the original company on tour. Several performers who didn’t want to travel gave notice, making it necessary to hire replacements. The new people would spend a couple of weeks being assimilated into the Broadway cast.

  Josephine and Maude were back on the road, in Atlantic City again, when they got the news. Sissle and Blake wanted them. They headed for Broadway.

  So, from Paris, did Maurice Chevalier.

  For more than two years, Chevalier had been playing in an operetta called Dédé, and now he had an offer to bring it to New York. He decided to spend his vacation checking out the Manhattan theater scene, and sailed from Le Havre with Mistinguett, his long-time music hall partner and lover. (Chevalier would remember as the highlight of this trip that he had seen “the sexually dynamic Josephine Baker.”)

  It was Americans coming to Paris, not Parisians headed the other way, that worried French musicians. They wanted, said one newspaper, “to eliminate American jazzers from France. . . . The French musicians . . . would gladly lay aside their violins and flutes and do the jazzing themselves . . . but their offers are scorned by dance hall managers who tell them: ‘Call again when you have changed the color of your skin.’ The musicians call it ‘the black peril.’ ”

  And they had good reason for jealousy; even the Prince of Wales was going home from Paris with “a collection of the latest popular music which he obtained from Negro jazz band musicians in various Montmartre dancing places.” But the French public’s interest in black musicians was not confined to those who played jazz. Roland Hayes, a black American tenor, found himself much in demand for his renditions of Southern spirituals translated into French. “Steal Away to Jesus” began, “Fuyons, fuyons, fuyons vers Jésus, fuyons, fuyons vers notre patrie.”

  Spirituals, however, were not on Josephine Baker’s mind. In the brief time before she and her cohorts would once again hit the road, she was doing her best to light up Manhattan.

  Among the new Happy Honeysuckles hired in New York was sixteen-year-old Fredi Washington, who went on to become famous in the 1934 movie version of Imitation of Life. “It wasn’t that I wanted to get into show business,” she said. “But somebody told me they were paying more to chorus girls than I was making as a bookkeeper.”

  Josephine, said Fredi, “wasn’t just an ordinary somebody, she stood out like a sore thumb, the craziness was just a part of her.”

  “It was really a singing show,” said Revella Hughes, who had signed on as vocal coach. “Eubie Blake wrote beautiful tunes. It was the first time a love theme was permitted in a musical with black people. A boy kissed a girl, told her he loved her.” (Back at the beginning, Noble Sissle had worried about this, afraid that when Lottie Gee and Roger Mathews started to sing “Love Will Find a Way,” they would be attacked, and Eubie, “stuck out in front, leading the orchestra—his bald head would get the brunt of the tomatoes and rotten eggs. Imagine our amazement when the song was not only beautifully received, but encored.”)

  Josephine took her first voice lessons from Revella Hughes. “She still lacked the ability to project a number,” Hughes told me, “but she was just bubbling over with natural talent.”

  During their time in New York, Maude found Josephine a room at 126 West 129th Street, with a family named Sheppard. In 1985, Maude took me to have lunch with Ethel Sheppard, beautiful, feminine, and—at eighty—apologetic for being a bit overweight.

  “We always had show people as tenants,” Ethel said. “Sissle and Blake were good friends of my parents, and that’s how my sister Evelyn—the one they called Little Shep—and my brother Bill and I got parts in Shuffle Along. Maude brought Josephine to us, and my mother loved her and so did my sister Evelyn. She and Joe were very close. Joe couldn’t write very well, and every week she would give my mother half her salary, and Mother would send it to Joe’s mother back in St. Louis.”

  There was still enough money left to buy Robert’s Oriental Perfume, and cosmetics from Mrs. Lucille. Mrs. Lucille would also sell on credit, “but if you didn’t pay,” says Maude, “she would beat the living hell out of you. She was strong as a mule. She would blend powders to each one’s complexion. Red on a dark cheek looked sexy, Josephine loved it.”

  Shuffle Along gave its final Broadway performance on July 15, 1922. Next stop, Boston. In Boston, no one had to stay in a crummy room with a buggy mattress. Citizens welcomed the girls of the chorus into their houses. Mamie Lewis, one of the Jazz Jasmines, gave me a picture of her and Josephine and Evelyn Sheppard outside the bay-windowed, ivy-covered brownstone where they roomed.

  Some sixty years afterward, I found Mamie living in a ground-floor apartment in the south Bronx. There was no front door, and the fallen plaster from the walls was all over the floor.

  She was very frail, and she was waiting for me, holding dozens of crumbling pages from an old photograph album. She hugged the pictures labeled “Summer, 1922” to her chest. She had nothing left, neither health nor family, everything gone except this handful of souvenirs, the snapshots yellowed, eaten away by the years. But for her it was proof that she had known another life, in a place where green things flourished. She had not always been on welfare, she had been pretty, and young men had come to call. On the backs of the pictures she had glued reviews of Shuffle Along; on the fronts, there were labels with arrows: “Josephine,” “Little Shep,” “Maude.”

  They looked like schoolgirls in their cotton dresses, and Mamie Lewis spoke of Boston, where she had won first prize in an essay contest. The essay, printed in a newspaper, had filled Josephine with awe for the way Mamie could use words to express herself.

  Josephine had a lot to say, but no way to say it except by dancing. Always afraid someone would discover her lack of education, she trusted nobody. But occasionally, she would allow herself to ask for help. Once, backstage, she was writing Carrie a letter. “Dear Mother, much success,” she muttered, then, struggling with the four words, turned to Mamie. “How do you spell ‘much’?”

  Opening night at the Selwyn Theater, Josephine again drew special notice. “One of the chorus girls is without question the most limber lady of whatever hue the stage has yet disclosed,” wrote a rhapsodic critic. “Her name may be printed somewhere in the program—if it is, I can’t find it—but it should be placed outside in lights. The knees of this phenomenon are without joints. . . . The eyes of this gazelle also defy all known laws as they play hide-and-seek with the lady’s nose as goal. I’ve seen nothing funnier.”

  A day later, a reporter who thought he’d hit pay dirt told all. “That chorus girl who makes such a hit in Shuffle Along, that real jazz baby, is not mentioned in the Selwyn program, but if you can keep a little secret, we’ll divulge her name. She is Josephine Baker. Washington, D.C., is her native city. Her father was a prominent Negro lawyer.”

  Mother, you made it, orchestrated it, pulled it off. Your talent recognized, your antecedents upgraded (from no known father to Arthur Martin, gravel hauler, to a prominent Negro lawyer), your secrets still safe.

&nbs
p; If Josephine’s name was not mentioned in that first Boston program, neither were the names of Maude Russell or Fredi Washington or Allegretta Andrews. One week later, the mistake was rectified. Josephine, Maude, Fredi, Allegretta, listed, validated, Happy Honeysuckles all.

  Happy offstage as well. And looking good. “Josephine came in one day with a leather outfit,” Maude says, “and she looked some kind of hot in it, she had those long legs and that red leather suit was fittin’ her out of this world.”

  What was more, in Boston, once you got dressed up, there were places to go. “You know,” Maude says, “once upon a time they looked down on show people, but when we went to Boston, black doctors, black lawyers gave parties for us, we were considered the society showgirls. But we had to be home by midnight. No later. That was the rule.”

  Rules are easier laid down than enforced. Some nights, Josephine spent alone in her bed, Vaseline all over her body (“How terrible it must feel,” said Fredi. “I love it, it’s good for my skin,” said Josephine); some nights she wandered. “She was crazy about Evelyn Sheppard—Little Shep,” Maude says. “I didn’t think she was gay, she got around with too many men, but she didn’t talk about those things. ‘Hey, what you say, girl?’ and she was gone.”

  Others, less guarded than Josephine, brought their troubles to Maude. She was experienced. She’d had an abortion early on because “babies wasn’t in my mind. You know what all was in my mind? Show business and bein’ a star. Abortions were done very crudely then, you went to some old lady or old man and took your chance on them killin’ you, and you paid them ten or fifteen dollars. But I knew this little brown-skinned woman, and I told her I was pregnant, and she says, ‘Honey, get yourself some carbolic acid and pour it in a pot of hot water and sit over it, the baby will dissolve.’ And that’s just what happened.”

  When one of the younger cast members got pregnant in Boston, Maude went out and bought the carbolic acid.

  Booked for two weeks, Shuffle Along did such good business it stayed at the Selwyn three months. Josephine’s troubles with the other girls continued. Once the loyal Fredi came to the theater and found they had moved Josephine out of the communal dressing room. “That’s where I blew my top. All her stuff was in the hallway, and I knew exactly what had happened. All those girls thought they were a big deal, and looked down on Josephine, who was so much darker. I just decided to protect her. I went in and yelled, ‘Who told you you own this dressing room? You go and get her stuff.’ So they got it and brought it back.”

  “It seemed that Joe did not care,” Ethel Sheppard said. “She was doing what she wanted.”

  There’s a picture of the entire Shuffle Along company, some sixty-three people, under the marquee of the Selwyn. Josephine is sitting down front, in the same row as her bosses. (How had she managed that? Let me hazard a guess. Eubie Blake, an enthusiastic ladies’ man, was very fond of her, and she may have been his lady of the moment. “Eubie,” says one of his friends, “would pore over pictures of Shuffle Along, recalling the chorus girls he’d slept with. He would just point with his finger—‘This one, this one, this one.’ Josephine was no exception.”)

  The other women are dressed in the style of the season, simple shifts, a harbinger of flapper clothing to come. Only Josephine looks like a creature from another time. She is wearing taffeta, the skirt ruffled. A fringed bertha curves over her shoulders, her full sleeves are short enough to expose slender wrists and long fingers. Josephine liked her hands, and would often have them photographed. Under these photographs, she would write, “My hands.”

  She probably designed the dress herself. (Since her first road trip, she had passed time on the trains studying fashion magazines and sketching.) A big hat is on her lap, her hair is smooth, curved under, a single strand of pearls adorns her throat, her legs are crossed at the ankles. “I am the first black countess,” she would say, after she claimed to have married Pepito; studying her likeness as she sat outside the Selwyn, anyone would have believed it.

  I have another snapshot, more informal, in front of a Shuffle Along poster. It’s of Little Shep, her brother Willie, and Willie’s wife, Ruth Walker. I look at it and think of Maude’s saying, “We all babied Evelyn, because she was the youngest, she wasn’t even sixteen, and she stuttered.” In my snapshot, Little Shep looks out at us shyly, huge brown eyes, little cat chin, as guileless a face as anyone has ever seen. Many—including Josephine—were charmed by her.

  In Josephine’s scheme of things, men were more important, or at least more necessary, than women. Not so much for sex as for power. Men had the money, they ran the banks and wrote the contracts. Still, once in a while—starting with Clara Smith—there would be a lady lover in Josephine’s life. Little Shep was one of them.

  I have talked to so many of those girls—by now respectable old ladies who have turned to Jesus.

  “Often,” Maude Russell says, “we girls would share a room because of the cost. (In the boardinghouses of that time, they wouldn’t let an unmarried man and woman room together.) Well, many of us had been kind of abused by producers, directors, leading men—if they liked girls. In those days, men only wanted what they wanted, they didn’t care about pleasing a girl.

  “And girls needed tenderness, so we had girl friendships, the famous lady lovers, but lesbians weren’t well accepted in show business, they were called bull dykers. I guess we were bisexual, is what you would call it today.”

  Little Shep was never very well known outside a small circle, but there were other girls in the chorus of Shuffle Along who did become famous. In the thirties, Katherine Yarborough would be the first black opera star to sing Aida with a white company, though Shuffle Along had offered her scant respect. “Talk about discrimination,” she said. “I was put in the wings to sing. I had that beautiful voice, but I was too black to be onstage.” Maude Russell backs up the story. “She was there in the wings, all by herself.”

  On November 11, 1922, the company finally closed in Boston, and traveled to Chicago. They had three sleeping cars, plus three baggage cars to carry scenery, draperies, costumes, and the many trunks filled with personal wardrobe.

  Two days later, they opened at the Olympic Theatre, in the midst of a minor scandal. The Chicago Star had printed that the show “did not want colored patronage” (during the first week of the run, at any rate) and that the producers were not advertising “in Negro and Jewish newspapers.”

  But there was good news, too. It looked as though Charles B. Cochran—“Britain’s Greatest Showman,” known for the beauty of his chorus girls, who were called Mr. Cochran’s Young Ladies—was going to invite Shuffle Along to London.

  It didn’t happen. Instead, Cochran signed Florence Mills to star in Plantation Days.

  In Chicago, Josephine was reunited with her husband. Determined to try show business himself, Billy Baker had left Philadelphia with Booth Marshall. “I took him to Bob Russell,” Booth said. “He could dance a little.” (As a child, Billy had indeed been sent to dancing school—“I was the first Negro to give dancing lessons in Philadelphia,” Walter Richardson told me—but the old teacher didn’t remember much about his onetime student.)

  In any event, by the time he and Josephine came together again, Billy’s dancing career had tapped itself out, and he was waiting tables at the Grande Terrasse Café, the Cotton Club of Chicago. When he got off early, he could be found backstage at the Olympic, hanging around until Josephine was through. The other girls all thought he was terrifically handsome—though he was only a little taller than Josephine—and soon he had a temporary job with the company. According to Billy, “I was employed by Noble Sissle as his private secretary.”

  On the ninth of December, the Chicago Defender cautioned its readers, “Don’t Go To Sleep and Miss the Greatest Breakfast Dance of the Season in Honor of the Shuffle Along Co.”

  The party would take place at the Eighth Regiment Armory; date: December 12, time: 4 A.M. There would be music by Wickliffe’s Ginger Band of D
reamland, and Alberta Hunter would sing. (Alberta was the sweetheart of the town, appearing nightly at the Dreamland Café, where she sang what she liked, including numbers from Shuffle Along, the musical that hadn’t hired her because Noble Sissle had said she was too black. In their book, Alberta Hunter, Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook say Alberta called Sissle “a dicty,” and accused him of having “a color complex.”) Admission to the Armory was fifty cents, and promoters promised that “No Expense Has Been Spared to Make This the Biggest Event in the History of Chicago.”

  Well, yes, except maybe for that night in 1871 when the whole city caught fire. It was the good life, especially for the creators and stars of Shuffle Along. They had earned a lot, and were busy spending it. Ashton Stevens, drama critic of the Herald Examiner, observed that “our colored brothers at the Olympic . . . have eleven limousines and their own chauffeurs. It is easy come, easy go with them. ‘What’s money for but to spend?’ is their slogan, and they live up to it in union suits that cost $40.”

  But a number of the company’s foot soldiers, less well paid and therefore less eager to work so hard, had begun to complain about the extra shows on Sundays. For no extra money. They were also chafing under the remorseless discipline of Sissle and Blake, who fined you if you moved wrong, hit a false note, came late to the theater.

  Josephine didn’t mind any of that. Josephine wanted to work more, she wanted to work harder, and in Chicago, she got her first chance to really step out. “There was a pretty girl who did a dance with a fellow,” Fredi remembers. “She had a principal role, and she got sick.

  “Josephine knew every step, she knew the whole thing. She was into the other girl’s costume before the girl had left the theater. She was raving, she was telling everyone, ‘I am going to dance tonight.’ ”