Josephine Baker (2 page)
Authors: Jean-Claude Baker,Chris Chase
This book would not have been published were it not for the trust and confidence placed in me by a number of people. First, by the editors of
The New York Times Book Review
, who gave me the chance to explore its possibilities in their pages (February 4, 1990)âRebecca Sinkler, Richard Fiaste, and Michael Anderson,
merci
. Owen Laster gave me the benefit of his expertise and I am honored to be associated with the legendary Robert Loomis, my editor, who understood with both his mind and heart what this book was all about (and, to his assistant Barbé Hammer, a big kiss). Needless to say, I am grateful to my co-writer, Chris Chase.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: J
ACQUES
A
BTEY
: Excerpts from
La Guerre Secrete de Josephine Baker
by Jacques Abtey (Paris and Havana: Editions Siboney, 1948) and from unpublished notes and the original manuscript. Any further reproduction of this material is strictly prohibited. Reprinted by permission. C
ENTRE
N
ATIONAL
J
EAN
M
OULIN
, B
ORDEAUX
, F
RANCE
: Letter from M. Brandin contained in the archives of Jean Moulin housed at the Centre National Jean Moulin, Bordeaux, France. Reprinted by permission. I
NSTITUT
C
HARLES DE
G
AULLE
: Excerpt from personal letters from General Charles de Gaulle to Josephine Baker. Any further reproduction of this material is prohibited. Reprinted by permission. S
OPHIE
R
EAGAN
-H
ERR
: Excerpts from an unpublished work entitled
La Revue Nègre
by Caroline Dudley. Reprinted by permission of Sophie Reagan-Herr. E
MI
S
AWADA
-K
AMIYA
: Personal correspondence and photos from her mother, Miki Sawada. Reprinted by permission. Y
ALE
U
NIVERSITY
: Excerpts from material regarding Josephine Baker from the files of Henry Hurford James housed at the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Reprinted by permission.
“She is like Salome, she has seven veils”
1. Paris, October 1925: All Hell Breaks Loose
“She had no shame in front of those crackers”
“Josephine, don't you jump out that window!”
3. Elvira, Carrie, the Beginnings
“Grandma often talked about slave days”
“There are no bastards in my family!”
5. Race Riots, and Tumpy Leaves Town
“Oh God, why didn't you make us all one color?”
6. Josephine Marries at Thirteen
“She cut his head open with a beer bottle”
7. Life on the T.O.B.A. Circuit
“It was going from one dinky theater to another”
8. Josephine Tries Marriage for the Second Time
“She was a little snip, about fifteen years old”
9. On the Road with
Shuffle Along
“Some of those girls treated Joe like a dog”
10. You Can Go Home Again, If You Don't Stay There
“My mother, poor woman, I was ashamed of her”
11.
In Bamville
, or
The Chocolate Dandies
“She'd be laughing, to her the work was joy”
12. Summer of '25: Heat and Harlem Nights
“She was hanging over Seventh Avenue, stark naked”
13. Mrs. Reagan Comes to Harlem
“I got off at Lenox Avenue. . . . I was happy”
14. A Shipboard Romance, and Hello, Paris
“Men and women kissing in the streets!”
15. Josephine Checks Out Poets, Painters, Waiters
“I wanted to seduce the whole capital”
17. Josephine Betrays a Friend
“She had flown, she had been stolen from me”
18. The Folies-Bergère: Everyone Goes Bananas
“I was manicured, pedicured. . . .”
“He used to beat the hell out of her”
20. Condemned by Church and State
“They denounced me as the black devil!”
21. Sex and the (Sort Of) Married Woman
“She saw him with his pants off, we didn't”
22. A Star of the Ziegfeld Follies
“I don't want to be refused in a hotel”
“She insisted on speaking only French”
24. Trashed by Critics, Envied by Peers
“My God, how does it feel to be a big star?”
25. Another Husband, More Lovers, and Sex, Sex, Sex
“She knew I was gay but she had to possess you”
“I am ready to give the Parisians my life”
“As a mistress, she wanted the whole treatment”
“My people, my people, I have abandoned them!”
29. Josephine, Heroine of the Resistance
“That German cow in my blue satin sheets!”
30. Josephine Dumps a Millionaire for a Bandleader
“I can't marry Claude, he's much too jealous”
31. Breaking the Color Bar in Miami
“She wanted to go down in history, like Lincoln”
32. The Feud with Walter Winchell
“She broke my heart, I am a finished man”
33. A Career Collapses, a Universal Mother Is Born
“I want to adopt five little two-year-old boys”
34. Life Is a Cabaret at Les Milandes
“Jo [Bouillon] would seduce young men”
35. More Comebacks, More Babies, More Losses
“In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been”
36. Twenty Lawsuits and the Legion of Honor
“I can't take care of six hundred acres and eleven children”
37. The March on Washington, and the Death of JFK
“I'm not the star, just another sister”
38. Uncle Fidel, and Last Gasps at Les Milandes
“I know God will not abandon me”
39. Down and Almost Out in Paris
“What happened to all that money?”
40. Princess Grace to the Rescue
“I want to be buried in the nightgown of my agony”
41. Maman Is Tough on the Kids . . . and Herself
“At a certain age, one should stop having sex”
42. A Plan to Make Three Million Dollars in America
“She knew how to profit from her friends”
43. Josephine Marries “In Spirit,” and Wrecks a Tour
“Once men get what they want, they keep walking”
44. Josephine Is Sick but Won't Admit It
“It was her last chance to reconquer Paris”
45. Going Out in a Blaze of Glory
“We always believed she was immortal”
Epilogue: An Open Letter to My Second Mother
“You were a hustler; I'm a hustler too”
“She is like Salome, she has seven veils”
Who am I to think I have to write a book on Josephine Baker when I'm not even her legal son? She had thousands of lovers; I've never been her lover, I've never even been her fan. I was a fan of Edith Piaf, not of Josephine Baker. And I'm certainly not the first person to try to capture her on paper. There have been more than a dozen books written about her. She herself turned out five autobiographies, a novel, and a collection of fairy tales that expressed her vision of universal brotherhood. Since she died in 1975, seven volumes by other people have appeared.
Because I loved her, hated her, and wanted desperately to understand her, I read them all. And they made me crazy. It's hard to read a life of anyone you have known and be entirely satisfied with the account; you recognize too many half-truths, you find too little illumination. Gradually it became clear to me that if I wanted to come to terms with my memories of Josephine, I was going to have to become a biographer myself, and I set out to track down stories, fill in the gaps in what had already been reported.
I was ridiculed (“He wasn't really her son”), I went broke, but I persisted; even when a writer with a contract for a Baker book offered me fifty thousand dollars to share what I had found, I refused.
I once said on a television documentary that Josephine was like the sun. We need the sun for the flowers to grow, for the birds to sing, but if you come too close, you can get burned, you can die. Everyone who came too close to Josephine got burned.
We first met in 1958. I was fourteen years old and she was fifty-two. I was working at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris, running errands, and I was called to her room. When I got there, I saw a woman in a bathrobe, and someone at her feet giving her a pedicure. The woman sent me to the drugstore to buy something, and when I came back, she was alone. She said, “Do you love your mother, little one?” I was shocked, because nobody gave a damn about me, and I was missing my mother back in my village every day. Five minutes later, I was sitting on the bed next to her, telling her my story.
I was born Jean-Claude Julien Leon Tronville, a bastard. It was a tragedy for my thirty-five-year-old mother, who was very pure and Catholic, and would have become a nun if Hitler had not come along. Once the war started, the convent sent her back to her family in Paris, and at the train station she met a gentleman who looked like Rudolph Valentino. Nine months later, I came into the world in Dijon. Because of the war, my parents moved to a little village in Burgundy. Everyone else had been there two hundred years; I never felt I belonged.
When I was seven, my father married my mother and the schoolteacher told me my name was Rouzaud. I didn't like that name. I planned three things for when I grew up: I would not do my military service. I would have a statue of myself like Napoleón III on a horse. And I would not bear the name of my father.
Soon after my parents' marriage, my father left us to go back to Paris to work in a restaurant. At first, he came home toward the end of each month, loaded like Santa Claus with toys for me and my sisters, but I would resent that because it was not Christmastime. He was never there at Christmas. After a while, he was never there at all. When I was fourteen, I made a big decision. I did not want to work in the fields or the factory, so I wrote my father and told him we needed to have a man-to-man talk.
He mailed me a third-class ticket to Paris, and my mother brought me to Dijon to the train station, but when my train pulled in, she started to cry in front of everyone. She said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not a bad mother, it's just I have three little girls at home, so I can't go to Paris with my Jean-Claude; please keep an eye out for him.”
I was so ashamed, and she ran along beside the train until it left the station, and then I cried too, and that's the way I arrived in Paris. And what happened was, I found my father living in a hotel for prostitutes,
where they rented rooms by the hour; he had gambled away all his money. Three days later, he disappeared, and didn't come back.
Josephine listened to all this, and then she said, “Don't be worried, my little one, you have no father, but from today on, you will have two mothers.”
But the fact is that I didn't find her againâwe didn't become closeâuntil the last seven years of her life. The Josephine I knew was an old lady who had adopted children from all over the world and called them her Rainbow Tribe. But sometimes, she would open a door to the past, talk about private things. So I gathered bits of the puzzle, told by her in the nights when she couldn't sleep. She was always afraid to be alone, afraid of the darkness.
She was like a piece of Ming china. You know nothing about it, you think it's beautiful, six hundred years old, a treasure, but if you look through a jeweler's loupe, you see it's been cracked. That was Josephine. When she died, something was taken from me, I suffered a loss and I wanted to know who she was, that woman I had witnessed in so many ways, sometimes a criminal, sometimes a saint. My real detective work began then, when she was gone and questions could not hurt her anymore, or threaten to expose the secrets she had hidden so fiercely.
After her funeral, I came back to New York. One day I walked into an antique shop, and on a hunch, I said, “Do you have anything about Josephine Baker?” The proprietor brought out a small volume in Frenchâthe earliest of three autobiographies Josephine had written in collaboration with Marcel Sauvage. It told how she came from St. Louis, joined a show called
Shuffle Along
, spent her first three nights in New York in a park where she ran from shadows and slept cold, hungry, “exhausted in the grass. . . .” Published in 1927 and filled with such fancies, that book also said Josephine had to go to Paris to become famous, though the truth was, she left New York with a star's contract in her pocket.