Josephine Baker (16 page)

Bessie Taliaferro recalled how marvelous the brownstone she lived in on 134th Street had looked to her youthful eyes. “The woodwork! The fireplaces! We had dumbwaiters, we had bells. We used to have more fun with the tubes, talking up to the top floor, you know, and the bells are ringing in the kitchen. People made jokes about those of us who lived in such a grand neighborhood. They said, ‘Oh, those niggers up there just strivin' to pay the rent, and sleeping on the floor.' Striver's Row, they called it, and the name stuck.”

It was about 1900 that the black trek from other parts of the city to Harlem had begun. Then, with World War I, Southern blacks came north to work. “A great migration,” the playwright Wallace Thurman called it. “Southern Negroes, tired of moral and financial blue days, struck out . . . to seek adventure among factories, subways and skyscrapers. . . . New York to the Negro meant Harlem, and the great influx included not only thousands of Negroes from every state in the Union, but also thirty thousand immigrants from the West Indian Islands and the Caribbean regions. Harlem was the promised land.”

Among its sadder promises were Ko-Verra (“Makes Skin So Light Would Hardly Know She Was Colored”) and Bleacho (“Be more popular, earn more money. Lightens skin or money back”), to be found in every drugstore. Josephine bought it, along with Mary's Congolene, the same hair straightener that was to blight—or almost blight—her opening night in Paris.

Booth Marshall, then renting the apartment above hers, recalled a day when her water was turned off—for some reason, the little wheel that controlled it was in
his
bathroom—and he heard screaming from downstairs. Looking out of the window, he saw Josephine. “She had this white stuff on her head, and she was hanging over Seventh Avenue stark naked yelling, ‘Booth! Booth! Turn the fucking water on!'

“We loved watching the people down on Seventh Avenue.”

Anyone would have. Wallace Thurman described the Seventh Avenue of that time: “Adolescent boys and girls flaunting their youth. Street speakers on every corner. A Hindoo fakir here, a loud-voiced Socialist there, a medicine doctor ballyhooing, a corn doctor, a blind musician, serious people, gay people, philanderers and preachers. Seventh Avenue is filled with deep rhythmic laughter.”

True, said Booth. “Joe and I were always laughing, oh, those were happy days.”

And nights. All night long in Harlem, people danced. Even on the street corners, where pedestrians threw nickels to kids demonstrating the Charleston.

“You saw throngs on Lenox and 7th Avenue, ceaselessly moving from one pleasure resort to another,” reported Lloyd Morris, another chronicler of the period. “The legend of Harlem by night—exhilarating and sensuous, throbbing to the beat of drums and the wailing of saxophones, cosmopolitan in its peculiar sophistications—crossed the continent and the ocean.”

The queer thing is that Josephine, who would become part of that legend, credited with having put Harlem on the world map, never worked there until 1951. Courtesy of Will Marion Cook, she did get a job dancing, but downtown, at the Plantation, a supper club above the Winter Garden. The club had been a big success ever since producer Lew Leslie had lured Florence Mills to work there.

“Lew Leslie had the whole interior takened out and decorated as a plantation,” said Florence's husband, the tap dancer U. S. Thompson. “Watermelons . . . and lights—little bulbs—in the melons. There was a well, where you could draw the water out, and statues of hogs and corn. The place was packed every night to see Florence. She had a peculiar high voice, and she was never a bighead woman, that's why everyone loved her.”

That spring, Lew Leslie had decided to take Florence on the road, but first he'd booked her into the Palace for a week. She was the first black woman to headline there, and
Variety
reported that whites and blacks in the audience were equally enthusiastic. Blacks bought the eighty-five-cent tickets and sat upstairs, though some, like Ethel Waters, stayed away. “I didn't care to sit in the peanut gallery,” she said. “Lincoln freed me too.”

Josephine and Mildred Hudgins went, and were given a ride back to
Harlem in Florence's chauffeured car. “We were so proud,” Mildred told me, “not just because a colored woman was headlining, but because she was our friend.”

Me, I was looking for some indignation. In the 1980s, I wanted Mildred to tell me how insulted she and Josephine had been that they had to go up to the balcony to hear someone of their own race. But Mildred was not an angry person. “Times have changed,” she said softly, “and we helped change them.”

When Ethel Waters was first approached about following Florence Mills into the Plantation—in a show called
Tan Town Topics
—she had her doubts. “I felt Broadway and all downtown belonged to Florence Mills.”

Tan Town Topics
was set to open on June 5, with Bill Vodery's orchestra providing the music, but it was postponed for three weeks. The management (which included the Shuberts, in for 15 percent of the gross receipts) then asked Will Marion Cook to come in and help pull things together; that's when he chose Josephine to dance in the chorus.

“When anybody had a job to be filled, they went to Will Marion,” said Bessie Taliaferro. “They'd say, ‘We want a girl, Dad. You got a singer?' And he always had a string of talented girls around him, and he would recommend one.”

In 1925, Will Marion Cook was fifty-six years old, a genius without a dime or a steady job, and he lived, like Bessie, in the Spiller house, a fairly clamorous environment, since the Spiller band rehearsed in the basement. “The neighbors never minded the noise,” Bessie said. “It was good noise, you know. Will Marion could take a song and fix it. He could coach performers. He'd be stomping his feet, trying to get some spirit, some soul in them, and his eyes would be piercing. Ethel Waters wouldn't do anything unless he approved. I knew if Will Marion said Josephine had talent, she had it. Because that was one of his callings, to discover talent that other people couldn't see.”

The heat was terrible that summer. People slept in parks or sprawled on subway steps, hoping for any gust of stale air pushed up by a passing train, and the owners of thirty-one Broadway theaters cut their ticket prices. It didn't help. According to
Variety
of July 15, “So far as business is concerned, there just ain't none.”

But
Tan Town Topics
at the Plantation, with Ethel Waters singing “Dinah” fourteen times a week, was doing fine.

So was Louis Armstrong, a block away, at the Roseland dance hall. New in town, he blew his trumpet and astonished all who heard him. The Kentucky Club, on Forty-ninth and Broadway, was home to Duke Ellington. It was open all night, and other musicians would come there when they had finished working. Paul Whiteman always showed his appreciation, Duke said, “by laying a big fifty-dollar bill on us.”

As for the Club Alabam', on West Forty-fourth Street, it boasted “a Colored Revue . . . combining the natural native talent of the Colored race with . . . refinement, lavishness and beauty. . . .” Talent did abound—Johnny Hudgins, Abbie Mitchell, Fredi Washington starred there—but the chorus girls of the Alabam', light-skinned, pretty, and not weighted down by too many clothes, were the club's big lure.

Uptown, Connie's Inn, the Nest, Small's Paradise, Club Bamville thrived too. And so did Sidney Bechet, playing New Orleans jazz at Club Basha. (Basha seems to have been an attempt to spell Bechet phonetically.) The club was fronted by a twenty-two-year-old, light-skinned showgirl named Bessie de Saussure. “I had this Jewish boyfriend—he was a kind of a gangster—and when I said, ‘I want a nightclub of my own,' he financed the whole thing for me, but we called it after Bechet. My boyfriend said, ‘Let's use his name because he has a following.' Sidney was the draw, he got the whites to come uptown.”

Many of Josephine's friends and mentors were appearing in Harlem that summer. Sandy Burns and Sam Russell were playing the Lincoln Theater at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and at the Lafayette, on the corner of 132nd Street and Seventh, the names of Buck and Bubbles were up in lights.

It was at the Lafayette, one midnight in late July, that “A Big Monster Benefit” was held for Bob Russell, the “Father of Show Business.” Russell, who had written the song “Open the Door, Richard,” who had created more sketches than anyone could remember, who had given a hand up to any number of aspiring comics and singers and dancers—including Josephine Baker—was now aging and ill, and many black artists turned out to help him. Bill Robinson was on the bill that night; so was the dancer Willie Covan, but Josephine didn't show up.

Two weeks later, in St. Louis, Bob Russell died.

The newspapers didn't write much about
Tan Town Topics
, but I found a review in
The Afro-American
. Ethel Waters got one line, Josephine got three.

“Yeah, Josephine was with us at the Plantation,” said Willie Covan. “She came back six, eight times a night with some new crazy step, she was the star of the thing.” (Willie himself was no slouch at new steps. “I worked in show business since I was nine,” he told me. “Me and my brother. My brother was taken to Russia with a pickaninny show, and my mother thought maybe he got killed or something, and she went to a detective. He said, ‘You want your child back?' ‘I ain't got no money,' she said. But the detective said he could do it, and to make a long story short, my brother came back to us in Chicago. Then he taught me the Russian dance. I did it without no hands, I was a sensation, just left my hands up and kept goin' like a coffee grinder.”)

“Josephine was a natural, she never had dancin' lessons or nothing like that,” said Dorothy Rhodes, another of the chorus girls. “And she did the darndest things. We had a big ledge outside the dressing room on Fiftieth Street, and one day, she said, ‘I'm gonna walk that ledge,' and she got out and walked from one window to the next.

“We used to play two shows a night. Stars would come, Connie Bennett, all big-name theatrical people. Everyone asks me if white men made propositions to the girls in the show. How the hell were white men gonna get to the girls? We weren't allowed to go sit with the customers or nothin'.”

Once, Ethel Waters was ordered by her doctor to spend two weeks in bed, and Josephine always claimed to have gone on for the star (singing “Dinah” and “Ukelele Lady” and bringing down the house). Actually, Waters stayed out only three days, and I asked Dorothy Rhodes, had Josephine really substituted for Ethel during those three days? No, said Dorothy. “Josephine never sang solo.”

She was enough of a sensation without singing solo, but in years to come, she always played down the bliss of that summer, making herself the victim in story after story. Even in her very last book,
Josephine
, published in 1976 after her death, we find a pitiful chapter called “First Love,” in which she recalls “Henry,” a young white admirer, taking her to a “snooty” restaurant where people stare and mutter, “Where did he find her? In a zoo?”

Dorothy Rhodes remembered only good times. “We'd finish work
about 4
A.M
. and we'd come uptown in a taxi, go to a gin mill, and sit and drink. We didn't bother about no dancin', we'd been dancin' all night.”

Once in a while, Booth Marshall would come down to the Plantation with his car and chauffeur to pick up Josephine. “She always dressed like an actress,” he said. “In those days, you wouldn't catch a showgirl out there with jeans on. We would drive up in front of the Lafayette Theatre, across from where we lived, and young people would run over to our car. I would have the chauffeur open the door, and I would shout, ‘Kiss my ass!' and Josephine and I would laugh.”

Paul Bass, a singer and alto sax player, was another who provided wheels from time to time. (Like Willie Covan, Paul started in show business early—“when I was around five years old. I sang and I used to do a little cakewalk. I'm part Indian: my mother was half Cherokee, my father was half Indian and half Jewish.”) Paul was courting Alice Allison. “Alice and her sister Bessie were both in the chorus with Joe Baker at the Plantation, and their show closed a little earlier than mine—I was at Connie's Inn—so I used to have a fellow by the name of Ralph Cooper that drove my car for me to go down and pick up Alice. And she would bring Josephine Baker with her.

“I had an Auburn Phaeton, a gray car with orange wire wheels, and we used to take long rides out into the country at five o'clock in the morning just to get fresh air. Then we would come back to Harlem, to Eva Branch's place.” (Eva Branch, a onetime chorus girl, had converted her apartment into a “buffet flat,” where you could get food and liquor at any hour of the day or night. Eva would also take your messages, hold your mail, store your valuables.)