Josephine Baker (22 page)

A different girl might have been satisfied with the bravos of the two thousand people at the theater and the star salary Caroline was paying her, but Josephine had not refused the offer to perform at 2
A.M
. in a decadent café. If her fans wanted to see her up close, she was pleased to oblige. Not even in Harlem had the white people abandoned themselves so shamelessly, and she got into the rhythm of it, flirting with lonely old roués, pushing champagne.

The Prince of Wales was at Le Rat Mort every night. “He liked to drum, and he'd get up on the stand and play,” Claude Hopkins remembered. “He wasn't very good . . . but he was very popular . . . he'd give
us a couple of hundred franc notes for letting him sit in for a couple of numbers.”

Claude said the prince had to be taken out of the club “feet first every night—dead drunk and stoned.” He was said to be grieving over the marriage of his cousin Mountbatten, with whom he was infatuated, but once he met Claude, he perked up. Claude claimed the prince was mad about him. It's funny to think of Josephine and H.R.H. waging a silent war for Claude's favors. (Johnny Hudgins, another favorite of the prince, had met him in London. “He come in to see my show. He married a woman from Baltimore, from my hometown; he didn't want to be no damn king.”)

Moonlighting is easy when you're a teenager, because fatigue is not a concept you grasp. Josephine not only worked two jobs, she tried—briefly—to save some money. She kept on her body the first thousand-franc note she earned, even when she was dancing half naked—“I tacked it on my belt under my green feather”—until it grew tattered. Then she took it to the bank, where she was told that without its serial number, which had somehow got chewed off, the bill was worthless. “It is on that day I understood it was totally useless to save,” she said. Spend, spend, spend, and keep moving.

She bought a little snake. “Around the neck, I twisted my snake. He kept very quiet, because he was warm, but when I started to dance, he woke up, and stuck out his tongue. My partner was frightened to death. Nobody wanted to dance with me anymore. Everybody was frightened. I had been noticed, that is what I wanted.”

She also bought a small mean dog who ran away. “He wanted to be free,” she said. “Free! The lovely word.”

For a long time, I couldn't figure out why every black entertainer who came to Europe bought dogs. Fierce dogs, like wolves. Josephine had one so savage she had to board it in a kennel. Finally, a friend put it all together. “During slavery, blacks were hunted with dogs. In Europe, they could take a kind of revenge, they could own the same kinds of dogs that chased their ancestors. So there they were in little hotel rooms and they had these huge dogs.”

Later, I read a book called
Bullwhip Days
, which confirmed for me that Southern whites had hunted down their runaway slaves with dogs. “Some slaves,” testified John Crawford, “told me a sure way to keep the dogs from ketching you. They said if you put red pepper and turpentine in your shoes, they can't run you, 'cause they can't scent you.”

In Germany, Sam Wooding said, the whole
Chocolate Kiddies
company bought German shepherds, and in Paris, Josephine, Claude Hopkins, Joe Alex, also had police dogs. Often Josephine moved, at the behest of a new lover, with her entire ménagerie. “I lived at Rue Henri-Rochefort, Rue Fromentin, and so on.” In the tradition of the French, she was already being kept—and fought over—by rich and not so rich men. One of her first French suitors was a student of architecture. She told him she didn't love him, but let him buy her dinner at expensive restaurants. “One day he was imprudent enough to take out of his pocket a thousand-franc note. It was the amount his father sent him each month as allowance. I grabbed it. . . .”

“ ‘I won't have any more money to eat,' he said. I laughed. ‘You want to go out with artists, you must pay.'

“Yes, when I think about this gesture, I believe I was not only crazy but a nasty girl. . . . I was like in love with myself. Paris had turned my head a little.”

It's easy to see why. Every night at the theater, presents and love letters awaited her. Mercer Cook (the Sorbonne scholar) acted as big brother, translating the letters, and Josephine generously gave him a handful of francs each day.

Josephine was busy homemaking too. She bought fabric for a bedcover, and wood to build a platform for the bed. “I received in that bed,” she said. “I was a coquette.”

Bricktop, having missed the opening of
La Revue Nègre
—she was performing in Barcelona—came back to Paris to find everyone talking about Josephine. A light-skinned American black who dyed her hair red, Bricktop had played hostess at Barron Wilkins's club in Harlem, she'd been in the Panama Trio (with Florence Mills and Cora Green), and in 1924 she came to Paris to work at Chez Florence. A year later, she had her own club. She was a protégée of Cole Porter's; for her, he wrote “Miss Otis Regrets,” about a woman who killed her lover. “Those bums,” Bricktop said, “sometimes you have to kill 'em. Kill 'em before they kill you, baby.”

Now she discovered Josephine had replaced her and Florence Jones as the most popular black female entertainers in Paris. “The French people, who loved all that chic, went out of their minds,” Bricktop said. “Josephine was gorgeous. I mean naked or with clothes. She lived a bizarre thing, but what do you expect when you take a chorus girl and
overnight she becomes a sensation? She had those legs that went from here to everywhere.

“All the great designers—Paul Poiret, Edward Molyneux, Jean Patou—were fighting to dress her. She had an apartment right around the corner from my nightclub, and one day I went there and the clothes were just piled high on the floor, and I said, ‘Josephine, why don't you hang these clothes up?' ‘Oh, no, Brickie,' she said, ‘they are going to take them away tomorrow and bring another pile.' ”

(I'd heard rumors of a long-ago affair between Josephine and Brick-top, and the rumors, it turned out, were true. Bricktop told me so herself, after Josephine's death.)

Caroline Reagan had introduced Josephine and Poiret at L'Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a cultural landmark of 1925. (Art Deco, the style, took its name from this exhibition.) Poiret had bought three barges—he called them
Loves, Organs
, and
Delights
, names representing “women, always women”—and moored them in the Seine at the entrance to the show. The boats were filled with textiles and furniture from his workshops; he considered this display his gift to the people of Paris, though he had to sell his painting collection—by Matisse, Picasso, Utrillo—to pay for it.

Poiret was a male counterpart of Josephine, rebellious, indifferent to criticism, wildly extravagant. As a teenager, he had made dresses that freed women from their corsets; in his heyday, he gave parties for three hundred guests, with peacocks and herons wandering on his lawn. How could Josephine not adore him, a man obsessed with rich colors, a man who ran a design school for talented poor children, and paid them to come?

Sadly, by the time she met him, Poiret's star was in decline (he refused to turn out chemises for scrawny flappers) and he was beset by money problems. Even so, he didn't charge Josephine for dresses. Christiane Otte, at that time assistant to Poiret's chief
vendeuse
, remembered Josephine's roaring into the salon, kissing everybody, then throwing open her fur coat. “It was November, and she was absolutely naked under it, laughing like a child.”

But the first time she came—with Caroline—to look at Poiret's creations, she nearly gave the designer apoplexy. “All his models walked in front of us,” Caroline recalled. “And Josephine was saying, ‘No, not that, no, not that, no!' Poiret was starting to get worried. Suddenly,
Josephine asked for a piece of paper and a pencil; she drew, while laughing. She wanted fringe from the shoulders to the hem, light pink at the top, shading to dark at the bottom. ‘American beauty,
voilà!
' she said, as she finished her sketch. Poiret was enthusiastic, he added the Josephine Baker dress to his collection.”

In the streets, she was besieged for autographs, though Bricktop said she could scarcely write her name. “I said, ‘Baby, get a stamp.' . . . I saw her on the Champs-Élysées, where you couldn't get within blocks of her.”

No question but she had an air. A reporter described an evening at Caroline Reagan's, and Josephine's making an entrance in a “cherry-colored dress, small hat pulled low on her forehead, ermine-trimmed coat. ‘Paris is marvelous,' she gushes. ‘And your dressmakers are divine.' ” (In her memoirs, she offered one final thought on fashion: “Love dresses you better than all the dressmakers.”)

Ten glorious weeks
La Revue Nègre
played at the Music-Hall of the Champs-Élysées. Booked for a fortnight, it was extended and extended. Early in November, Josephine and company were still dancing there while the great Pavlova waited impatiently for the theater she had been promised.

On November 7, under the auspices of the president of the Republic, Gaston Doumergue, there was a dinner to mark the closing of the exposition. Pavlova danced (with M. Veron) during the appetizer, Josephine (with Honey Boy) during the main course. As though the great Russian were nothing but a warm-up act for the headliner.

At the end of the month,
La Revue Nègre
was finally forced to move to the Théâtre de l'Étoile, where Josephine added insult to injury by performing a wicked parody of Pavlova as the Black Swan.

Creative artists of the day—Milhaud, Van Dongen, Picabia, René Clair—lined up to meet the cast of
La Revue Nègre
. The composer Ravel wrote to a friend, “I must go and soak myself in this bouillon of culture.” Princess Murat begged Caroline Reagan to bring Josephine to her house. And Josephine, who was crazy about automobiles, was given several of them even before she could drive. “One was a Bugatti worth thirty thousand dollars,” Claude Hopkins said. “She used to throw her own money away, too, she played the horses.”

But Paris is fickle, people were already looking for the next sensation;
La Revue Nègre
was winding down.

It didn't matter; Caroline had big plans. She and her troupe would tour Europe, seduce a whole new audience.

Josephine hated to go. “I had plotted to leave St. Louis,” she said. “I had longed to leave New York; I yearned to remain in Paris. I loved everything about the city. It moved me as profoundly as a man moves a woman. Why must I take trains and boats that would carry me far from the friendly faces, the misty Seine . . .”

In spite of her reluctance, in mid-December, she and the rest of the company entrained for Brussels. But Josephine had a secret.

The secret: three days after
La Revue Nègre
opened in Paris, Josephine heard a knock on her dressing-room door. “The man who entered spoke dreadful English, but his face was kind. ‘I was told there was a girl at the Champs-Élysées who was setting the stage on fire. I see that it's true. I'm Paul Derval, director of the Folies-Bergère, Miss Baker. I'd like you to be in my next show.' ”

There was irony in the offer. When Caroline Reagan had been running all over Paris trying to find a home for
La Revue Nègre
, she'd solicited help from anyone—including Paul Derval—who would listen.

Now Derval was preparing to steal Caroline's star, who was eager to be stolen. She signed a paper right then and there agreeing to come work at the Folies-Bèrgere in March, and afterward, kept her own counsel. During the entire Paris run of
La Revue Nègre
, she never said a word to a living soul about her intentions, but permitted Caroline to go on dreaming of new successes in Belgium, Germany, even Russia, where she had booked the company for six weeks.

They left Paris as they had come to it, by train. At the border between France and Belgium, Bechet disappeared, and, just as the
Berengaria
had been delayed for him in New York, now the train was held. It was three hours before he was found, dead drunk, and the troupe could proceed.

In Brussels for one week, they played the Cirque Royal; even though King Albert I of Belgium came to the show, the city appears to have made little impression on Josephine. “Germany is the first European country where I went after Paris,” she declared.

La Revue Nègre
opened at Berlin's Nelson Theatre on Kurfürstendamm on New Year's Eve 1925, in a city where 120,000 workers were out of work. Two months later, the number of unemployed had risen to 227,500. In the wake of World War I, with Germany broke, Berlin was filled not only with starving people, but with people who no longer believed in the social contract. By the end of 1923, although the country's raging inflation had been brought under control, wrote Wolf Von Eckardt and Sander Gilman, “the German sense of values, the old propriety . . . were gone. . . . Hard work and thrift no longer meant salvation.”