Josephine Baker (12 page)

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 simple 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.”

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.

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.”