Josephine Baker (23 page)

The city's fevered nightlife offered revues with naked girls, and clubs where men dressed as women danced together. The streets were home to young, pretty whores, and old, blind ones too. Criminal gangs roamed freely, morphine and cocaine were sold at hot dog stands, and pornographic films were easy to find. Despite its pride in its culture—it boasted three opera houses and a wealth of experimental theater—Berlin was the most decadent city in Europe.

Josephine adored it, and Berlin adored her in return. “It's madness. A triumph,” she said. “They carry me on their shoulders. At a big dance, when I walk in, the musicians stop playing, get up and welcome me. Berlin is where I received the greatest number of gifts.”

In her memoirs, she reeled them off. “I was given rings with fire as big as an egg; I was given a pair of ancient earrings which belonged to a duchess 150 years ago; I was given pearls like teeth: flowers that came in one day from Italy in moss and baskets . . . big peaches . . . perfume in a glass horse. One fur, two furs, three furs, four furs. Bracelets with red stones for my arms, my wrists, my legs.”

Between the opening of presents and the trying on of bracelets, Josephine somehow found the time to pay a call on Sam Wooding. After touring Europe for eight months,
Chocolate Kiddies
had come back to
Berlin, and though some of the original cast—Lottie Gee, Adelaide Hall, Charlie Davis—had left, Gene Sedric was still there playing sax.

Gene and Josephine had gone to Dumas together; Gene's father and Eddie Carson had been fellow musicians on the Mississippi riverboats. The children used to walk the men down to the boats to try and cadge a ride.

Seeing Gene in Berlin, the secretive Josephine may have been brought face-to-face with more of her past than she liked. Sam told me she'd been cool to Gene. “She was a very fine artist, but in my estimation a very small person.”

When
Chocolate Kiddies
had first played Berlin, many Berliners had been hostile, not only because the actors were black, but because it was thought they were blacks from French Colonial Africa.

A year earlier, France had sent a regiment of tall, black Senegalese soldiers to Bavaria, hoping this would intimidate Germany into paying its war debt. The Germans (who had heard stories about “savages” cutting ears off German soldiers and wearing them around their necks as charms) were already bitter at having lost the war, so to see Senegalese troops even after the Armistice was horrifying to them. It had to be made clear to the public that the
Chocolate Kiddies
company was American, before tensions were dispelled.

The same scenario was repeated with
La Revue Nègre
. On opening night at the Nelson, there was a sizable anti-black demonstration outside the theater. Again, the cast was not troubled because, as in France, they didn't understand the language. Even when Brownshirts distributed pamphlets calling Josephine subhuman (she was black
and
she went naked, both affronts to Aryan notions of perfection), she remained untroubled. “I'm not immoral,” she said. “I'm only natural.”

It is perhaps not surprising that Josephine, insulated by her fame and the powerful new friends who whisked her from pastry shops to bike races to dance halls to late-night suppers, did not observe signs of the storm that was coming. Sam Wooding, on the other hand, saw more than he wanted to.

Sam and the rest of the
Chocolate Kiddies
company stayed in a small hotel run by a Jewish couple, and one night, a few of the musicians were having a midnight snack when two Germans in hiking suits came in. “They walked over to where this Jewish lady was standing behind the bar and started a conversation,” Sam said. “All of a sudden, one of the
Germans slapped the woman's face several times, and the other man broke some glasses. Then they walked out.

“My men and I jumped up and ran to her as she was crying. She said, ‘They asked what right had we to have this hotel, why didn't we get out of Germany.'

“We felt very sorry for her; most of the men only wished they had understood enough German so they could have caught the bastards before they slapped this old lady.

“We didn't have long to wait. A couple of days later, in walks six of these same guys. They were drunk. The hotel had small rooms for private parties, and two of our people, Chick Horsey (one of The Three Eddies) and Bobby Martin from my band, were in one of these rooms eating with a couple of chorus girls, and these Germans came into the room. Chick told the girls to get lost, and after they left, one of the Germans locked the door and walked over and said something in German, and his friends laughed.

“But Chick Horsey was a master at gang fighting. He smashed this German and the German went down like a bull in a slaughterhouse, blood flying everywhere. Bobby picked him up and threw him out the window—it was on the ground floor—and from then on, as Chick would smash these bastards, Bobby would throw them out the window.

“Chick said every time he socked one of those guys, he saw the German that slapped that poor Jewish woman and he thought of how some of the white Southerners had treated black men and women in America, and this gave him strength.

“It seemed like a miracle, we didn't know Chick and Bobby was that good. Well, the Germans never came back.”

German racism was, in fact, the reason some performers had quit
Chocolate Kiddies
, but Josephine didn't seem to notice it, she never spoke of trauma in Berlin, only of conquest. “Max Reinhardt, the famous director, comes to see me, he carries a contract: ‘I hire you for three years at the Deutsches Theatre and believe me you will be the greatest star in Europe.'

“In the magazines and newspapers of Berlin, they wrote that I was a figure of the contemporary German ‘expressionism,' of the German ‘primitivism.' . . . Why not? And what does it mean?”

A review of
La Revue Nègre
appeared in the
Tageblatt
. The critic dismissed the show as noisy, but bowed to Josephine. “In her survives
the untamed wildness of her forebears who were transplanted from the Congo basin to the Mississippi.” Two days later, a Paris newspaper advised the French public to stop worrying about the rumor that Josephine was going back to live in America. “She will be one of the stars of the next revue at the Folies-Bergère.”

From the embassy in Paris, Caroline's husband called to read her the paragraph. She didn't take it seriously; she had made a star of Josephine, she had a contract with Josephine, why should she listen to foolish gossip?

Especially since Josephine was working hard to make
La Revue Nègre
an international hit, doing what amounted to two shows a night. Because after each performance, the theater (it wasn't a huge house) was converted into a cabaret, and Berliners packed the place. Dolly Haas, who would become a German leading lady in the thirties (and later marry Al Hirschfeld, theater caricaturist for
The New York Times
), was only sixteen years old when she saw Josephine at the cabaret. “At the end of one number, she would sink to her knees, and finish the song like a prayer, her arms wide open. You did not know if she wanted to embrace the audience or wanted the audience to embrace her, but it moved everyone.”

Never mind that half an hour later, Josephine would be absolutely naked, rolling around on the floor with another girl at a party, while Max Reinhardt watched.

The night of that frolic—it was February 13, 1926—Count Harry Kessler, a publisher and art collector who kept a diary, recorded the fact that Reinhardt had called him at 1
A.M
. from the home of playwright Karl Vollmoeller and invited him to come over. Kessler went and found Reinhardt “surrounded by half a dozen nude girls including Miss Baker also naked except for a pink gauze loincloth, and the young Landshoff girl . . . dressed as a boy sporting black tie.

“Miss Baker danced with extreme grotesque artistry and pure style, like an Egyptian or archaic figure. . . . She does it for hours without any sign of fatigue. . . . She does not even perspire. . . . An enchanting creature, yet almost without sexuality. With her one thinks of sexuality as little as at the sight of a beautiful feral beast.”

The party went on until 4
A.M
. “Reinhardt, Vollmoeller, and I were standing around Miss Baker and Miss Landshoff, who were embracing like a pair of beautiful young lovers,” Kessler wrote in his diary, leaving
the reader to decide whether he was describing an orgy or simply youthful high spirits. Vollmoeller said he wanted to write a ballet for Josephine, Kessler said he would contribute a scene, a pantomime, and they should all meet for dinner at his house on February 24 for further discussion.

That time, the dinner was stag, except for Miss Landshoff, who at least
looked
like a boy, decked out in “horn-rimmed glasses and a touch of beard painted on with makeup.”

After Josephine finished work, a couple of Kessler's other guests went to fetch her. “I had cleared the library for her to dance,” Kessler said, but she “sat for hours in a corner sulking.”

Until Kessler began to describe “the pantomime I was planning for her.” It was to be a fantasy, the music half jazz, half Oriental. King Solomon buys a slave girl, a dancer, and has her brought to him naked, “to shower her with gifts, with his own gowns and jewels. The more he gives her, the more elusive she becomes. . . . In the end, it is the king who is naked, while the dancer disappears, ascending in a cloud composed of all the silks and jewels he has bestowed on her.”

Josephine loved it, and became “an entirely different person who kept asking
when
she could dance.”

In Kessler's library, he had a huge, powerful Maillol sculpture called
Crouching Woman
. Josephine studied the statue, leaning against her, “speaking to her, visibly startled by the overwhelming rigidity and impact of her expression. She danced around her in grotesquely grandiose movements resembling a priestess playfully making fun of herself and her goddess. One could see Maillol was more interesting and alive to her than the people watching.” To Kessler, the scene was “one genius speaking to another.”

You had to be very young and strong to live the life of Josephine. Kessler gives an account of her sitting on a couch at 3
A.M
. “eating one bockwurst after another.”

In Berlin, Josephine was in her element, diverted by the down and dirty action—the nightlife, she said, was of “an intensity Paris doesn't know”—and the streets blazing with lights that promised bawdy pleasures.

Between her numbers in the cabaret she would sit with customers, and they would issue invitations to further merriment. “There used to be a lot of high-society people around,” Claude Hopkins said. “The
Krupp family, they were there almost every night. They really liked the music, and they really liked Josephine.”

Once, she was asked to serve as a judge at a costume ball at the Neue Kunsthandlung. “A real can of sardines,” she called it. “Women and men flattened against each other, Negroes in every corner.”

She was actually beginning to think she might stay in Berlin. She endowed the thought with high moral purpose: She would study with Max Reinhardt, and become a respected actress. “He appeared to sense my feelings,” she said. When a journalist friend of Paul Derval mentioned that he was looking forward to seeing her in the Folies, she shrugged. “Don't count on it, I may have changed my mind.”

The journalist phoned Derval with this news, and Derval went into action, sending an envoy to Berlin to bring back his wavering star. The new show would have a supporting cast of three hundred, twelve hundred costumes, music by thirteen composers including Irving Berlin and Spencer Williams, sets by famous designers including Erté; she could
not
go back on her contract.

But the contract was never written that Josephine couldn't go back on. “Lawsuits, contracts,” she said. “The less I knew about that kind of red tape, the better. . . . Anyway, who could make a decision when there was dancing every night and all that wonderful German beer to drink?”

She finally laid it on the line for Derval's agent. “If you want me to leave Berlin, it will cost an extra four hundred francs a show.” Derval agreed. “What could I do? The show was too far advanced for us to cancel it.”

So much for Kessler's pantomime, so much for Max Reinhardt's acting school,
au revoir, La Revue Nègre
, Josephine was going to star in the Folies-Bergère at a salary of more than five thousand dollars a month.

All sweet innocence in one of her autobiographies, she writes, “Mrs. Caroline had learned about my contract with the Folies and she was furious.” What had she expected, congratulations? But Josephine saw herself as the abused one. “I felt like kicking everyone in sight. Why couldn't people leave me alone?”

Finally, poor Caroline was forced to face reality. “Louis Douglas came to me and he said, with what sadness, emotion, tact, that Josephine was leaving us in three days!

“Leaving us high and dry. . . . What to do? kill myself? . . . I called Josephine and we took a walk through Berlin, in the grey streets of melted, dirty, salty snow. What to say to her? What better than, ‘Josephine, you are going to harm your soul.' ‘But Missus, I'm feeling just fine,' whistled the red and black devil.”

Louis Douglas was worried about cast reprisals against Josephine. “He was afraid of fights, razors, knives,” Caroline said. “The troupe was right to be angry. . . . They found themselves empty-handed, and it was not their fault.”

Mr. Nelson, the theater's owner, brought in two big policemen who patrolled backstage, and Caroline offered food and drink “to the survivors. We were like shipwrecks. No more Josephine. . . . Deep down, we were in mourning. . . .”