Josephine Baker (21 page)

During breaks in rehearsal, the cast went sightseeing. “The streets surprised us with cobblestones,” Evelyn says, “and on the boulevards, the
pissoirs
for men.”

In Montmartre, they felt at home. The quarter, on a hill at the highest point of the city, was filled with
guinguettes
, the little cabarets where you could dance, and coffee bars where laborers and office workers stopped to have their morning café au lait.

Le Sacré-Coeur still looks down on the red chimneys, the crowded houses, the music clubs. Hundreds of steps lead up to the church, and far below, on rue Tardieu, is À l'Angélus, a little pastry shop that has been in the same place since 1912. I can imagine Josephine sitting in a white wire chair, holding a cup of hot chocolate, enjoying a respite from the tension of rehearsals.

At night, the cast flocked to rue Pigalle. Sidney Bechet remembered looking around a club and asking himself, “Why am I here?” But even as he posed the question, he knew the answer. “France, it's closer to Africa. . . . My grandfather, he was African . . . and I wanted to get back as far as I could . . . it's all so mixed up with the music.”

When Bechet blew his horn on the opening night of
La Revue Nègre
, it was like the walls of Jericho, Caroline Reagan said. “The house came tumbling down.”

While Caroline was generous with credit for others, everyone around her did not share this trait. For example, the famous poster of
La Revue Nègre
—there are only five known to be still in existence, each worth one hundred thousand dollars—was
not
created entirely in the brain of Paul Colin.

I discovered this by accident. From 1923 to 1925, Miguel Covarrubias had worked in New York for
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
. In 1983, I was thumbing through a book that contained reproductions of sketches he had done in those years. They reflected the lives of artists in Harlem in a unique and powerful way. The book was called
Negro Drawings
, and I had bought a copy of it from an auction of Paul Colin's belongings sold when his family put him into a retirement home.

Suddenly I was brought up short. There they were, the three people of the poster of
La Revue Nègre:
a slender girl in a tight white dress, flanked by two men, one with a frieze of nappy hair, big red lips, the other with a hat tilted over one eye and a checked bow tie. The girl everyone believed to be Josephine, the one Paul Colin said he had sketched from life, had been drawn by Covarrubias before Colin ever set eyes on Josephine.

By then Paul Colin had died, and I went to call on Charles Kieffer, an artist known for his drawings of Chevalier. “Mr. Kieffer,” I said, “I want you to help me. I strongly believe that Paul Colin did not create the poster of
La Revue Nègre
.”

I told him what I knew, and also what I suspected. Colin had been an artist on Rolf de Maré's payroll. Every two weeks de Maré presented a new show, and Colin drew the posters for them. Since he was around the theater all the time, he had probably seen sketches by Covarrubias that Caroline Reagan had sent from New York and, impressed by their strength, had appropriated them.

A brief, Machiavellian smile crossed Kieffer's face. “How the devil did you find that out?” he said. “A few of us knew, but it was a secret.”

A few of them knew, yet no art critic ever discovered it. Not even after Colin's
Le Tumulte Noir
appeared in 1927.
Le Tumulte Noir
is a gorgeously colored portfolio of pictures affectionately mocking the infatuation of Parisians with all things black—the Charleston, jazz, Josephine in her grass skirt—but it's easy to spot Covarrubias's influence behind the dazzling images.

Still, I don't mean to denigrate Paul Colin's great talent. I agree with his biographer, Jack Rennert, who said Colin's paintings captured “the essence of Josephine . . . of a sultry, sensuous performer . . . full of feral magnetism.”

When I met Paul Colin, I hadn't yet stumbled across the Covarrubias sketches, and even if I'd known about them, I wouldn't have cross-examined
the old man; by then he was ninety. I went to his birthday party at the Maison Nationale des Artistes, a château in Nogent-sur-Marne, where seventy venerable graphic artists lived in comfort, each with his own studio.

Asked about Josephine, Colin's face brightened. His strength was gone, but his eyes were fierce.
“C'est moi qui l'ai inventée!”
he cried. “I'm the one who invented her.” I didn't tell him he was not the only man to make that boast.

He said
La Revue Nègre
had been a scandal, “but I found it very nice. Josephine invaded the stage, she was extraordinary. For the French people, there is always the lure of the sensual. They had this sexual fantasy, the women dreaming of black men, the men of black women.”

His voice drifted off, returned. Again: “I'm the one who invented her. She didn't know how to sing. Many artists have something in their stomachs, but they don't have the opportunity to give birth.”

He was clear and cold about having slept with Josephine—“She's not the first Negress I ever had”—but vague about how he had created the poster. He said he had taken Josephine to his studio, rather than sketching her at the theater, because he wanted to sleep with her. She posed for him, and yes, he captured her soul on paper, even after she had left him for other embraces. “For a few weeks,” he said, “I took her everywhere, I introduced her.”

In her own memoirs, she mentions going to his studio, but omits the sex. “Monsieur Colin . . . led me to a little washroom attached to the studio. I reappeared in my bra and panties. . . . I avoided Monsieur Colin's eyes. With a sudden gesture, he reached over and undid my hooks. Oh,
no!
I wanted to dash through the door and down the stairs, but was glued to the spot. Monsieur Colin calmly began to draw.”

Josephine, Colin said, chattered away in English, which he did not speak. “Her expressions were exaggerated. She laughed too loudly, and then she would suddenly go dark. She was a born exhibitionist. And ambitious. Make no mistake.”

“We haven't had this much sense of a bursting forth since the Ballets Russes,” wrote Paul Achard of
La Revue Nègre
. Almost no one remembers now that
La Revue Nègre
, which made worldwide news, was only the second half of a two-part show, and ran less than an hour. The first
half featured vaudeville—Ski Tayama (Japanese acrobats), the Klein family on trapeze, Saint-Granier (a tenor who impersonated Parisian stars), and strongman Louis Vasseur, who twirled on his head “a huge merry-go-round bearing six men suspended on trapezes.”

The program for
La Revue Nègre
made no mention of Jacques Charles. It listed Caroline as producer, her husband, Daniel, as director, and Louis Douglas as assistant director.

The show moved fast, the numbers had names that made the audience laugh: “Shimmy Sha Wabble,” “Boodle-Am.”

Then suddenly, the stage was empty, and Louis Douglas, in blackface and tailcoat, a big white flower in his buttonhole, came on as Harlequin, and, tears running down his face, sang of his love for Columbine. Of those who had gone to the opening night, none I interviewed had ever forgotten the beauty and sadness of that number.

Louis Douglas's wife, Marion, danced, Maud de Forrest sang, Josephine did “I Want to Yodel” and her Charleston, and in front of a flat painted to look like a New York skyscraper, Bechet played alone.

But it took the “Danse de Sauvage” to conquer Paris, and even then, there were detractors. One critic couldn't make up his mind about Josephine (“She's horrible! She's wonderful! . . . Is that her hair I see or is her skull painted black?”), another complained that the revue was “not Negro enough,” and Paul Robeson's wife, Essie, wrote friends that it was “rotten,” that Josephine's voice couldn't be heard over the orchestra, and that the “Danse de Sauvage” was fine until the star did “this ridiculously vulgar . . . wiggling.”

The French authorities got in a couple of low blows of their own. Despite the nudity at the Folies-Bergère and the Casino de Paris, a prefect of police was sent around to announce that more modesty was in order at
La Revue Nègre
. “The color black alone does not dress one,” he said.

The press jumped on the story. “In one of the scenes,” ran a newspaper account, “the ladies of the chorus appeared to be dressed in a few inches of lace and rows of glass beads. For the past few days, this costume has featured a piece of fabric between the lace and the skin. Why this modification? It was imposed by the prefecture of police, deciding that white dancers could complain if colored dancers were allowed to appear in such scant attire.”

Evelyn Anderson still believes it was because the prefect's girlfriend
was working in the chorus at the Casino de Paris. “The public,” she says, “loved
La Revue Nègre
.”

The public would, by and large, have preferred the cast to be more black, resembling Africans right off the boat. Because of this, the very light-colored Hazel Valentine was forced to apply black body makeup, an act she and the other high-yellow girls considered a supreme degradation. (Mother, were you laughing? These French people love you for your dancing, your singing—at that time, a high, quavery Florence Mills imitation—and also for the color of your skin. Nineteen years you have hated the color of your skin, now it is one of your glories.)

The day after
La Revue Nègre
opened, every journalist in Paris converged on the Hôtel Fournet to interview the new queen of the night. One of them asked her what it was like “when they all screamed at you, ‘Bravo! Bravo!' ”

“Nice,” Josephine said. “It was nice.”

“But what is your most vivid memory of last night?”

She thought a moment. “Well,” she said, “last night after the show was over, the theater was turned into a big restaurant. . . . And for the first time in my life, I was invited to sit at a table and eat with white people.”

She had tears in her eyes, a reporter observed. And why not? As Duke Ellington said, after his first trip to Europe, “You can go anywhere and talk to anybody and do anything you like. When you've eaten hot dogs all your life and you're suddenly offered caviar, it's hard to believe it's true.”

Luck, of course, had something to do with Josephine's conquest of Paris. “It is necessary to say that she arrived exactly at the moment we needed her,” wrote Jean Prasteau. “With her short hair, her free body, her colored skin and her American accent, she united the tendencies, tastes and aspirations of that epoque.”

Josephine was even credited with bringing the Charleston to Paris, though Bee Jackson, a white American billed as Queen of the Charleston, had performed the dance on the stage of the Music-Hall des Champs-Élysées the previous July, warming up the audience for Paul Whiteman. (Ironically, in America, the Charleston was being called “the dance of death,” because of a tragedy that had taken place in Boston. “The collapse of the dance floor in the Hotel Pickwick,”
Variety
reported, “is attributed to the strenuous efforts of Charleston dancers.
Nearly 50 people are dead as a result . . . the off-beat rhythm of the Charleston, reinforced by the indulgence in things alcoholic, is said to have caused the building to sway so violently that it fell apart.” It was then against the law to dance the Charleston on the sidewalks of New York.)

Besides being lucky, Josephine worked hard. Now, every night after the curtain rang down on
La Revue Nègre
, she and the band and a few of the dancers would go to Pigalle and double at Le Rat Mort. “We would strictly do our numbers,” Evelyn says, “and then the band stayed after and played the dance music, but Mabel Hopkins and me, we would go to the dressing room and play blackjack. Because we couldn't leave until Claude and my boyfriend Joe left, you know.

“This used to tickle me because a fellow from the Vanderbilt family used to send champagne to me in the dressing room, and he always wanted to take me out, and I would say, ‘No, Joe Hayman won't let me.' ”

“Men sent us red roses and notes in French,” says Lydia Jones. “And the white girls in Paris went mad for our boys, black men were the craze wherever we went. At the Dead Rat, we made a lot of tips, it was quite a naughty place.”

Naughty wasn't the half of it. Le Rat Mort was owned by the Corsican Mafia. “We worked every joint in Pigalle, but not that one,” says Stephane Grappelli, the jazz violinist who played with Django Reinhardt. “It was a tough place where a girl would come and grab a man and say, ‘
Chéri
, I'm thirsty,' and the man would buy a bottle of champagne and at the end of the night, the girl would go to the boss, take all the corks out of her bra where she'd hidden them, and turn them in for money.”