Josephine Baker (19 page)

“The Statue of Liberty disappeared on the horizon. It was over between America and me. . . . Goodbye, New York, goodbye, Philadelphia, goodbye, St. Louis. Goodbye the little girl with purple hands. Goodbye the rats of Bernard Street. Goodbye. . . .

“The secret in order to hold fast was not to move. . . . It was a game.”

The
Berengaria
, Captain W.R.D. Irvine, loosened itself slowly from the berths of New York, drawn by four little tugboats,” said Josephine. “The sea was quiet.”

One day on City Island in the Bronx, I walked into a thrift shop and found an old booklet. It was a first-class passenger list (among the pampered voyagers were “Hon. John Cecil and valet, Mr. Ralph Curtis and governess”) issued by the Cunard Steam Ship Company. On the booklet's front, covered with grease spots, a painting of the
Berengaria
being pulled out of New York harbor by four tugs, just as Josephine described it.

The French have a fairy tale called “Le Petit Poucet,” about a little boy wandering through a dark forest and dropping small white pebbles to leave a trail so he can find his way back home. I have stumbled over so many pebbles marking Josephine's road through the world that I sometimes wonder if she is putting them out for me. The brochure I
held in my hand was dated September 16, 1925, the very day that she had sailed.

My hands shook, but her name was not on the roster of “saloon” passengers because Caroline Reagan had booked all her people into second class. Herself, too. “I was not apart, like the other Broadway managers.”

On board the
Berengaria
, Josephine fell in love with Claude Hopkins. He was tall, elegant, with a beautiful angular face. It was a
coup de foudre;
she was struck to the heart.

“We ran after each other,” Claude told me. “She was different, she was something special, and I really was not cautious. I loved my wife, but . . .” His voice trailed off. “The chorus was with Mabel, they were on her side.”

If there were sinners on the ship, there were also pilgrims praying for them. Josephine, who thought she had put her hometown behind her once and for all, was now surprised to find herself at sea with the Reverend John Thompson and forty-two of his flock on their way from St. Louis to Rome to celebrate Holy Year. We can assume they did not approve of the merrymakers who surrounded them.

“We played cards, did a little drinking,” Claude said. “I won eight hundred or nine hundred dollars, we saw movies. Nobody could beat Sidney Bechet at cards, but he was miserable, got drunk, half the time he wouldn't show up for the game, and he didn't show up for the charity show either.”

The charity show had been worked out with the Cunard Line; Mrs. Reagan was amenable to having her troupe perform for the benefit of children of sailors lost at sea. “I immediately volunteered to sing,” Josephine remembered. “I decided on two sentimental numbers: ‘Brown Eyes' and ‘If You Hadn't Gone Away.' After one rehearsal, I was sure of my success. . . . I would soon be entertaining the first-class passengers. Yes, I would always remember . . . my first resounding flop.

“I couldn't seem to find the beat. Was that why no one listened? When they
did
listen, it was even worse. They clearly didn't like what they heard. My voice began to crack. In quick succession I produced three off-key notes, which the orchestra tried to drown out.”

“She really insisted on doing those songs,” Caroline Reagan said. “Beautiful in her Tappe dress, she sang those sweet songs that she cherished. Alas, or perhaps luckily for me, there was no response, no applause, absolute silence from these ladies and gentlemen in their black
tie and their décolleté. In first class. I say luckily because I knew, and I had to make her know, but it was a mess.”

The show was saved by a five-year-old. Into the chill following Josephine's performance, Louis Douglas threw his little daughter, Marion, sending her out in white socks and black patent-leather shoes to dance the Charleston. “I remember dancing until I saw stars,” she told me. “I had an out-of-body experience. I danced, I danced, I danced, my legs kept going. And the audience was raving, people were screaming, and I was so excited I couldn't calm down afterwards. My father tried to take me downstairs, my mother tried to, but I wouldn't let anyone except Josephine put me to bed. That was my night.”

Despite her kindness to young Marion, Josephine was seething with rage. “Before going to sleep,” Caroline Reagan said, “I ran across her, grey with fury. ‘You're fixing to kill me!' she cried. ‘I'm going back to New York tomorrow morning.' ‘As you wish, Josephine,' I said, ‘but unfortunately, you'll have to wait till we get to Cherbourg. We are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.'

“What a child. What a star I had. . . . Next morning, she came knocking at my door quite timidly, asking me why I had chosen her. It was a nice way to be waked up. I answered, ‘Meeting in our dining room at ten o'clock. Let Douglas and our composer, Spencer Williams, know.'

“When I arrived for the meeting, there was Josephine already. Worried. Louis Douglas and Spencer Williams were at the piano.

“ ‘All right,' I answered her question. ‘Josephine, you know how to dance, you're beautiful, you have a chic that will amaze even Parisians, and you are a clown, don't forget that.' At that moment, Spencer Williams put his great black hands on the white piano keys and began to compose ‘I Want to Yodel.' Josephine stayed with him to learn the song.”

It would be a huge hit in
La Revue Nègre
.

Probably because of her affair with Claude, Josephine quickly recovered her high spirits. “She had a cabin by herself, her being the star, you know,” Lydia Jones said. “But the other girls were really angry that she would take the man away from his wife. Some of them were actually plotting to throw Josephine overboard. Evelyn Anderson and I had to talk them out of it.”

Evelyn vouches for Lydia's story. “When nobody knew where to find Claude, he was with Josephine.”

At one point during the voyage, the ship stopped. In her first book,
Josephine told the story quite simply. “September 18. Everybody on deck. We put on life jackets, boats are unhooked, sailors work quietly. You can hear pulleys and small children scream. The ocean nevertheless is calmer than ever. . . . So what's the matter? There is a German mine in the area. Luckily, we didn't run into it.”

In a later book, the tale was dramatically expanded. “There would probably be a boat for our deck if there were enough to go around, but we would be the last to leave ship. We could hear the first-class passengers shouting. Children were crying. Gathering by the railing, we began to sing. The same songs our ancestors had sung on the slave ships that carried them to America. A musician called Sidney picked up his clarinet. He played so softly and sweetly that tears came to my eyes.”

Suddenly we have slave ships and spirituals. It's interesting to note how Josephine manipulates her souvenirs as the years pass. Yes, everyone did go on deck when the alarm sounded, and yes, Sidney Bechet was there, but he wasn't carrying a clarinet. Claude gave me a picture of some of the cast taken during that drill. The men are wearing jaunty peaked caps, everyone except Josephine is smiling. Life jackets are tied around their necks, the word
FRONT
spelled out across their chests. Only Josephine wears her jacket upside down. There are no tears in her eyes, she is squinting into the sun, lost in thought.

The
Berengaria
docked in Cherbourg at 8:30
A.M
. on the morning of Tuesday, September 22. “When we arrived, it was raining,” said Josephine. And cold.

The four-hour trip to Paris included lunch, which was a pleasant surprise. In the dining car, the whole company was welcome. Not like the dining car of the Illinois Central train with its white rosebuds and its white clientele.

The cooking in the restaurant car was a revelation too, “but not as much as that of my first dinner in Paris. Can you imagine, they gave me snails to eat. . . . And then oysters! What a strange business! They moved in the shells. So I wanted to have them killed before eating them because I was afraid they would stay alive inside me.”

Josephine's impressions of Paris, when she arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare: “What did I see first? Men and women kissing each other in the streets! In America, you were sent to prison for that! This freedom amused me. Yes, one could kiss in the street, and, in the theatres, women could show themselves without clothing. I could not believe it, so I
bought dozens of pictures of nude women.” She admired the train station, observed the people—“Everybody pushed, shoved without looking at each other”—and was charmed by the taxi horns. “It was a real orchestra. . . . I left at once for the Hôtel Fournet, boulevard des Batignolles. I thought I had settled in a palace. . . . What thrilled me was to have a private bathroom; it was the first time it happened to me. . . . In my little room, I walked like a queen. I strutted in front of the mirror.”

Her sister Margaret said that Josephine “had set out to conquer the world.” But that night in the Hôtel Fournet, her ambition was less grandiose and more specific. “I fell asleep with the idea of conquering Paris.”

When the waiter arrived with breakfast, he nearly had a heart attack. It was Josephine's first morning in Paris, and, she said, “I definitely wanted to seduce the whole capital. Thus . . . I had half taken out my breasts from under my nightdress. A servant came in: it was a little old man . . . he only had one hair that he draped around his skull.”

Out of breath from having carried a tray up three flights of stairs, the old man stood there in his long white apron, quivering. “He was so excited,” says Lydia Jones, who had answered the knock at the door. “The poor fellow, I don't want to know what he thought about us colored people from America, but that was Josephine.”

The waiter's name was Albert, and from then on, Josephine boasted, he would “steal a jar of jam from the owner and give it to me for my breakfast.”

Albert got his reward for being the first Frenchman to gape in
admiration at what Bricktop described as “the most beautiful bronze body in the world.” The next year, when she opened Chez Joséphine, her club in Montmartre, Josephine hired him as headwaiter. She paid him further homage by naming her pig Albert, and lest you think that was an insult, bear in mind that she liked her pig better than she liked most people. Albert (the pig) waddled freely about the club until he got so fat he could no longer squeeze through the kitchen door, a problem Josephine solved by having the whole wall torn down.

Paris of the twenties was filled with tremors. Four years of
la Grande Guerre
had left France devastated. She had suffered 1,393,000 deaths and three million wounded, which represented 20 percent of her workforce. Women had been obliged to cultivate fields and work in factories, replacing their men, learning new ways to survive. But after the grieving, a madness set in. Young people longed to forget the gray days, they didn't want to be bound by their parents' values anymore. Lucky to be alive in the aftermath of so much carnage, they gave their appetites free rein, ushering in an era the French called
les Années Folles
, the crazy years. (Those years in America were known as the Roaring Twenties.)

Bricktop said it was a time when people with money but no talent helped people with talent but no money. “They used to take care of all the geniuses, the people who could write and paint and perform. . . . It was a beautiful thing.”

Old games came back; in the summer of 1924, the Olympics (never held in wartime) took place in Paris; an American girl named Ethel Lackie won the one-hundred-meter freestyle swim, and track star Harold Abrahams of Great Britain won the one-hundred-meter dash. (His story would later be told in the movie
Chariots of Fire
.)