Josephine Baker (20 page)

Traditionally a haven for painters, the city was by then also crowded with expatriate writers. They called themselves the Lost Generation, and were referred to as “literary pilgrims” by Sylvia Beach, founder of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Gertrude Stein gave dinner parties to which she invited her neighbor, Caroline Reagan, and Mrs. Reagan returned the favor, serving tea in her penthouse.

Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus, had found the Reagans their apartment at number 26, right across the street, and helped them hire workmen to install a new bathroom. “My mother wasn't going to put her husband and baby in an apartment without a bathroom,” Sophie Reagan (then five years old) remembered. “She got me a governess, and
disappeared from my life for a while; she went back to America to put together
La Revue Nègre
.”

Paris was a city in which Ernest Hemingway took his little son to bistros and bought him drinks (they were made of grenadine), and everyone went to music bars, to gay bars, to transvestite bars. The autumn of 1925, wrote Noel Riley Fitch, was highlighted by “the rhythms of American jazz, the folk-singing of Paul Robeson, the Chaplin shuffle in his acclaimed film
The Gold Rush
, the erotic movements of Josephine Baker . . .” Women who looked like underfed boys, the Charleston, decadence in the arts—Jean Cocteau was said to have seduced a young man by giving him “his first whiff of opium in a kiss.”

The country had always been fascinated by black people. After the Revolution, Robespierre's coachman dressed himself in feathers, painted on a ferocious face, and beat a drum in a place he had decorated like a cave. He called it Au Café du Sauvage. During World War I, black American soldiers came, bringing jazz. Lieutenant Jim Europe of the 369th U.S. Infantry organized a regimental orchestra (Noble Sissle was the drum major) and this “dusky band,” boasted the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, was being celebrated all over France. (Lieutenant Europe wrote home to Eubie Blake: “. . . if the war does not end me first as sure as God made man I will be on top and so far on top that it will be impossible to pull me down.”)

Jacques Charles, a god of the music halls who was also a wounded war hero, came home to discover a “cyclone of jazz” blowing over Paris. He proceeded to write and direct a show at the Casino de Paris that prefigured the opening scene of
La Revue Nègre
. When the curtain went up, the audience saw a Mississippi riverboat, and heard a black jazz band.

Jean Cocteau found it more noise than music. “The Negroes in the air, in a sort of cage, lash about, waddle, tossing to the crowd morsels of raw meat, to blows of trumpet and rattle,” he wrote.

“Few thought of jazz as art,” says dance critic Lynn Garafola. “But many felt, with Cocteau, that the ‘savagery' and bold flouting of tradition associated with jazz could stimulate the imagination.”

Even Picasso was influenced by African masks and sculpture, writers like Blaise Cendrars and Paul Morand were turning to black themes, Art Deco home furnishings and jewelry reflected the rage for black culture.

It was partly because of Jacques Charles's success with popular revues that, during the spring of 1925, Rolf de Maré decided to convert his
beautiful Théâtre des Champs-Élysées—the one Fernand Léger called a white elephant—into the Music Hall des Champs-Élysées.

In 1920, de Maré had brought the Royal Swedish Ballet to Paris, and when he could not interest a single theater owner in his project, he had simply bought his own theater complex. In addition to the huge Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, it contained two smaller auditoriums, and boasted printing facilities in the basement, costume and sewing ateliers under the roof.

After his ballet company had disbanded, de Maré, hoping to attract a more general audience, tried various other entertainments. But even with its new name—and certainly, “Music Hall” had a more friendly, less intimidating sound than “Théâtre”—the house seemed too grand, too chic, to the working man who didn't want to have to dress in evening clothes to go out for a bit of entertainment.

Until, of course,
La Revue Nègre
came along and broke all the rules. Josephine recalled her first rehearsal in the huge house. “The theater is dark, the stage is lit. There are twenty people in the first row.

“Hello! Charleston. The stagehands watch, the two firemen are amazed. They are not used to receiving trombone blows in their stomach.

“At the end, behind the scenery, the younger ones try to imitate, they would like to dance the Charleston: they shake flannel legs, they kick their feet in the air like cows, they also kick their neighbors. . . . The Charleston already possesses them. ‘Yes, sir, that's my baby.'

“The Charleston should be danced with necklaces of shells wriggling on the skin and making a dry music. . . . It is a way of dancing with your hips . . . to bring out the buttocks and shake your hands. We hide the buttocks too much. They exist. I don't see what reproach should be offered them.”

It was still hot, that September, though the leaves of the chestnut trees had already fallen, covering the streets. At one point, because of the heat, it was decided to move rehearsals to the roof of the theater, and since nobody wanted to haul a piano up there, Bechet accompanied the dancers on his saxophone.

“Oh! What an intoxication to dance in the sun with practically nothing on,” said Josephine. “But I have to say that I was more dressed up than on the stage . . . because of the neighbors. There were some at every window. The typists . . . the liftboys . . . All applauded. I was in
a bathing suit: someone took a picture of me like that on that roof from where you can see the trees of the embankments and the Champs-Élysées. . . .”

“We had ten days before the opening,” Caroline Reagan said. “Quick, quick to work. . . . It was now or never. I had to incorporate Josephine in the act, and pull the whole thing together. . . . And then to create Josephine's clothing. I'm not calling them costumes. First her dresses, her dances, her yodel, the play of her eyes.”

Louis Douglas had different problems; he had to whip some excitement into this show that had been born of Caroline's infatuation with the “ebony chorus,” and about which Rolf de Maré and André Daven seemed unenthusiastic.

Originally, the idea had appealed to de Maré because he knew that the black
Chocolate Kiddies
was already a huge success in Berlin. But he had given Caroline only enough money to go to New York and bring back a little
divertissement
, and when it arrived, it seemed
too
little. A few sketches, a few songs, some dancing, a star who wanted to sing though she wasn't very good at it, and on top of that the cast, whom de Maré had expected to be a collection of coal-black exotics, were not as dark as most sun-tanned Frenchmen. (In addition, André Daven told a friend, he and de Maré had “a lot of trouble stopping the black performers from using white-face makeup, which is very much the fashion in the Negro theater of New York.”)

Caroline went to the flea market to piece out the costumes; she brought back “a strange hat and a pair of black and white laceup high boots, and also a wedding veil,” along with assorted uniforms and headgear and medals and feathers, half of them from the Napoleonic era.

De Maré and Daven also hired a few very black African-born dancers (Joe Alex was one of them) and recruited some supernumeraries who couldn't dance at all. Mercer Cook, Will Marion's son, was studying at the Sorbonne (he would eventually become a diplomat) and he enjoyed the idea of moonlighting. “I just had to walk on the docks in front of the two big boats. It was easy money.”

But after fleshing out the cast, Daven and de Maré were still unhappy. There was one man, they decided, who might save them. They would beg Jacques Charles for help, throw themselves on the mercy of the much-acclaimed director.

Caroline, however, was in no mood to acclaim some interloper hauled
in at the last minute to shed his brilliance on her production. Bitterly, she recounted how de Maré had informed her “that
Mr. Casino de Paris
was supposed to come in two or three days before the dress rehearsal.”

She felt humiliated. “A person of honor,” she reflected, “would have said
adieu
and disappeared. . . . But I didn't know that sort of dignity. My mother taught me, ‘You have two cheeks, turn the other one, my little one.' Since then, from time to time, both cheeks burn. What do you want?”

Until the day he died, Jacques Charles would insist that he created
La Revue Nègre
, rechoreographed
La Revue Nègre
, and plucked Josephine out of the chorus. “I invented her,” he said.

It began one morning as he sat at his desk, Jacques Charles remembered. “Daven entered my office. . . . On the recommendation of an impresario, he had engaged a troupe of Negroes without seeing them. That revue had arrived in Paris, and the first rehearsal had been a catastrophe. ‘My dear,' said Daven, ‘they tap, tap tap for two hours and they are going to chase the audience away. You are the only one who can rescue us from this mess.' ”

Charles agreed to take a look and determine if anything could be done in the forty-eight hours before the opening. “On the stage,” he said, “I found the ladies and gentlemen with gray faces, because they could see the lack of enthusiasm from their managers for their talent.”

I can believe that. For eight days, nobody had been strong enough to pull the show together. Louis Douglas was trying to direct two dozen black Americans who were far more strange to him than the girls at the Moulin Rouge would have been, and Caroline Reagan, passionate but inexperienced, was trying to be a producer. There was no real boss.

Jacques Charles watched a rehearsal and was agreeably surprised. “There was certainly too much tap, all was impossibly monotonous, but there were excellent elements in the troupe . . . remarkable intelligence and a rare good will. . . . The error was to have wanted to make it Parisian. You had to make it black. . . . I mixed everything. I put Louis XV hats with overalls, and big straw hats with fur costumes. I combined backdrops from one scene with designs from other scenes, and then I lit it all. Bizarre and multicolored.

“We cut, modified, inverted, reversed numbers, and mostly tried to make it what it was, a revue.

“But something was missing. I wanted a note a little bit more voluptuous, an erotic, sensual duet to give the audience some rest from all that jazz and tap. I talked about it with Joe Alex, who was a fine
porteur
. He could carry a partner onstage and make himself and her look good, an art that has little to do with strength. And Joe Alex suggested that his partner be Josephine Baker.

“I had already noticed her beautiful body, but to be honest, Josephine rejected my suggestion that she dance almost nude. In vain, did I leave Joe Alex alone with her to try and persuade her. When I came back, she was crying, and asked to go back on the boat.

“ ‘Very well,' I told her, ‘but only after the premiere. Meanwhile, you will do as I'm asking you to do.' . . . Sobbing and sniffling, Josephine started to rehearse.”

With all due respect to M. Charles, neither Evelyn Anderson nor Lydia Jones recalled any sniffling. “Josephine was for anything new,” Evelyn said. “She thought she'd be the first black girl—they did it with white girls at the Folies-Bergère and the Moulin Rouge—to go naked onstage.”

“I don't remember Josephine crying,” said Lydia. “You know, she was always naked in the hotel, laughing and posing in front of the mirrors.” (Despite the “delirium” created by the “Danse de Sauvage,” Jacques Charles said later, “I'm still waiting for a simple thank-you letter.”)

It was Jacques Charles who told Daven and de Maré, “We need tits. These French people, with their fantasies of black girls, we must give them
des nichons
.”

In 1905, Mata Hari had danced at the Museum Guimet, bare-breasted except for two metallic shells, and shocked Parisians. Four years later Colette, that most sensual of writers, proved she was an equally
uninhibited actress. In a melodrama called
The Flesh
, she played an unfaithful wife whose husband rips off her clothes. Audiences gasped as her breasts were exposed. Not even metallic shells to cushion the outrage. She left the stage to a storm of boos mixed with cheers from the more open-minded like Chevalier, who called her breasts “the most appetizing in the world.”

Until Josephine's, if the response to
La Revue Nègre
is any gauge. But Josephine was not the only girl who appeared topless in the show; I have the Man Ray photographs that prove there were
six
bare-breasted beauties. In Ray's pictures they pose, sitting on the floor, naked except for straw skirts and necklaces made of shells. They are all looking out at the audience, smiling.