Josephine Baker (13 page)

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 Dreamland, 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.' ”

I
am going to dance tonight. Not my partner and I. We see it beginning. Josephine is her own creation, and there is no place for a
partner who is her equal. Throughout her career, many men will partner her, none will be remembered. Many choreographers will teach her, she will forget their steps and improvise her own.

But let Fredi get on with the story. “Josephine had to go up on a high platform backstage, and then come down on the stage and meet this guy. And she was on the platform and she was so excited she missed her cue. I felt so sorry because this was a big break for her.

“When she didn't come down, they didn't wait, they just moved on. The guy she was supposed to dance with, he just did a few steps and went on to his next routine. But that didn't hold her back, she had too much ambition. She knew where she wanted to go.”

She knew where she didn't want to go, too, and that was home. In March of 1923, when the company left Chicago for St. Louis, Josephine and Billy were not with them.

Carrie came to the American Theatre in St. Louis, looking for her.

It was backstage after a performance, the girls rushing to get out, meet dates, taking no notice of the very dark woman who stood near the stage door. Too timid—though that was unlike Carrie—to approach anyone directly, she kept repeating into the air, “Excuse me, do you know where Josephine Baker is?”

Of all the performers, only Adelaide Hall stopped short, moved by the anxiety in the woman's voice. “Yes, ma'am, what do you want to know about Josephine Baker?”

“I'm her mother,” Carrie said. “Do you know where she is?”

“She's doing fine,” Adelaide said. “She just didn't come with us to St. Louis.”

Carrie thanked her, invited her home “to have some food.” Adelaide declined, but never forgot the encounter.

Why had Josephine refused to come to St. Louis that spring? It would
have been a
coup de maître
, she could have won the city in a walk. But the victory over herself was not so easy. To forge the armor she hid behind, she had told too many lies. In Philadelphia, she was the daughter of Arthur Wells. In Boston, her father was “a famous lawyer.” In neither place did anyone know different, or question her.

But St. Louis was dangerous territory, especially with the great public interest in
Shuffle Along
. Old friends from school, from the neighborhood, from the laundry, would surely come to see her, and maybe someone would tell Willie Wells that his wife was back in town. And what if he showed up one night to remind her that she had promised to spend her life with him, never mind that she was only thirteen years old when she said it?

Her fears cost her dear. Because the pattern was set; once she started running from her past, she couldn't stop. The best show that had ever happened for black people, and she was not part of its debut in her own hometown. We can presume that many of the other chorus girls enjoyed her absence, she wasn't around to take the attention away from them. They must have enjoyed too the fact that the American was a white theater; the only black performer who had played there before was Bert Williams, headlining in the 1920
Ziegfeld Follies
. To dance on the stage where Bert Williams had walked, that was one of the things Josephine was denying herself.

When she rejoined the company, Billy wasn't with her anymore, he had gone back to Chicago, and nobody but Josephine knew why. In her absence, she found she had been promoted. She was now listed on a separate line in the program as “That Comedy Chorus Girl.”

They played Atlantic City, opening in June at Nixon's Apollo Theatre on the boardwalk, and a few days later, Miller and Lyles broke up with Sissle and Blake. Though the four shared equally in the profits of
Shuffle Along
, the Sissle and Blake songs drew so much notice that Miller and Lyles had been feeling overlooked and undervalued.