Josephine Baker (26 page)

By October,
Blackbirds
had moved to London, and with Florence Mills no longer on the scene, Josephine was once again the biggest black star in Paris. She had switched her after-hours allegiance to a club called L'Impérial Souper, on rue Pigalle. The owners renamed it Josephine Baker's Impérial, and she signed a year's contract with them. Two months later, she and Pepito decided she should go into business for herself, and on December 10, she marched one block away, to rue Fontaine, and opened Chez Joséphine. It was financed by one of her protectors, a Dr. Gaston Prieur.

Since she took with her half the staff of the Impérial, and most of the customers, the owners sued. Already a veteran of legal skirmishes, Josephine was unfazed. “I get lawsuits occasionally, you understand?” (People like Caroline Reagan and Paul Poiret understood all too well. Once Josephine began to make big money, Poiret thought she should pay for the clothes he made her. She didn't agree, she said he was lucky to have her wearing his designs all over town. Deep in debt, Poiret took her to court and lost. It was not in Josephine's character to pay unless you sued her; even then, you could seldom collect.)

In any case, Chez Joséphine flourished, with Josephine dancing there from midnight till dawn “in front of a full room, before a brass band while the high-society ladies play tennis with racquets and paper balls above champagne bottles, and between dances Josephine feeds her goat, Toutoute.”

“I never had so much fun,” said Josephine. “I joke, I stroke the heads of bald men . . . I make fat ladies dance.”

A correspondent for
Le Soir
painted a word picture of the club: “Midnight. Naked shoulders . . . Blue chandeliers pour a soft light . . . to the slow dying of the jazz. . . . The flesh is sad. . . . A world exhausted . . . Suddenly a shiver goes through the sold-out room . . . Josephine Baker has just made her entrance. Simple, quick, amiable, she slides between the tables . . . gives away confetti . . . she stops, pulls a beard, laughs. . . . Joy, absent until now, has returned. . . .

“She dances. . . . Then suddenly remembering she is the owner of a bistro, she forces a customer to dance with her, and then another, until everybody is on the floor. Then she goes to the kitchen to get her chef to dance.”

The chef, Freddy, was as much a fixture of Chez Joséphine as Albert the pig. “I have an American chef six foot two who is a formidable
Negro,” Josephine said, “with his white chef's hat and his Russian rabbit eyes.”

It was a totem of a rich and careless age, this temple of the Black Venus, where businessmen mingled with the avant-garde, and an Indian maharanee won a Charleston contest dancing with the sixteen-year-old Aga Khan. “I want people to shake off their worries the way a dog shakes off his fleas,” announced Josephine.

The place, Marcel Sauvage recalled, “was open twenty-four hours a day. Josephine asked me to help—‘You will arrange everything during the day, because during the night I have given the job to Sim.' ”

Neither Sauvage nor Georges Simenon (who signed his early writings “Sim”) was paid for his efforts, and even so, Josephine was a demanding boss. “It took too much time from my work as a journalist, so I left,” Marcel said. “Sim did too, but there was a flirt between him and Josephine.”

Simenon's ex-wife Régine (nicknamed Tigy) put it more bluntly. “Of course Simenon was Josephine's lover. I have learnt it since but I was ignorant at the time.”

Claiming, toward the end of his life, to have made love to ten thousand women, Simenon shared with Josephine a reputation for voracious sexual appetite. In 1984, during the course of a
New York Times
interview, the eighty-year-old Simenon said Josephine had been one of his great loves. “We were ready to marry, but I was very poor at this time . . . and I did not want to be Mr. Baker. So I went for six months to a small island . . . to forget.”

He took his long-suffering wife with him. Simenon and Josephine remained friends; they understood each other. But I keep wondering about Pepito. What did
he
understand? Nobody faulted him as a manager, but friends found it hard to accept his hanging around while Josephine's other lovers came and went. It was as if, seeing he could not be the only man in her bed, he decided to be her alter ego, make her the most famous entertainer in the world.

As Christmas of 1926 drew near, her childhood was much on Josephine's mind. She had not forgotten Tumpy searching through the trash of rich white families to find a headless doll she could fix for her sisters. And now, amazingly, a Josephine Baker doll, the rage among children in France and Harlem that year, was sharing one of the Christmas windows of the Galeries Lafayette with Santa Claus and the Virgin Mary.

To celebrate the holiday, Josephine gave a party at the Folies-Bergère for the children of Paris policemen. “I had a fir tree in the theatre, tiny candles, glass eggs, cakes, toys. I had had this dream . . . to be a young black Christmas mother. That day, I had more joy than all those children.”

She was doing too much. The Folies, the cabaret, the benefits, the lovers, the lessons in singing and walking and French conversation. “I was exhausted. They dunned taxes on me, I didn't understand anything.”

Still, she couldn't stop. She loved being loved, she loved knowing accomplished people; it made her feel safe. “She was the one who introduced me to Pirandello,” Marcel Sauvage said. “She called him Papa. Colette came to Chez Joséphine too.” (Josephine saved a letter from Colette. It read in part, “Take my tender wishes on this old paper I have kept for so long it is yellow. Today these sentimental papers please only sensitive hearts, children, and poets. This is why I give it to you. . . .”)

The night Josephine went to the Rothschild party with Bessie and Pepito, she had stared at the house, ablaze with lights, spotted dogs lying on the lawns, and asked, “Is it a hotel? Do you think they rent rooms here?”

Now she knew better.

Endlessly ambitious for his Galatea, Pepito was busy sending potential backers a prototype of
Josephine Baker's Magazine
. The publication never got off the ground, but if it had, Simenon was set to be editor, with Pepito and Josephine the “producers.” They would print pictures of the famous at play, caricatures by Zito, pieces about art and cooking, and Josephine's opinions. She offered a sample column called
“J'aime
.”

Among the things she loved: “Wives of gentlemen, because it is frightening to think that without them, I would be alone with all the men on earth,” and dogs “because you cannot eat dogs, you cannot make furniture of dogs, or shoes of dogs or cigarette holders of dogs.”

She loved money too, and was pleased when she got an offer to endorse Pernod. The man in charge of the liquor company's advertising treated her like a daughter, helped with her business affairs. He was rewarded with reprimands—“Monsieur Bondon, you are spending too much on stamps!”

On March 6, 1927, she not only signed her first movie contract—a
script was to be written especially for her by the well-known novelist Maurice Dekobra—she also began rehearsing the new Derval revue,
Un Vent de Folie
. This show was no challenge for her; in fact, in a scene called “Plantation,” she was dressed in overalls and white socks almost entirely copied from a
Revue Nègre
costume. In another sketch, she went bare-breasted, draped in a few ropes of pearls, a bunch of red feathers plastered to her backside. Again, in blackface, checked pants, and derby, she performed a bit of larceny, imitating Johnny Hudgins (though this time, she gave him credit in the program).

Josephine had asked Bessie Allison to come to Paris and be her companion, but Paul Bass (who was married to Bessie's sister Alice) said Bessie didn't stay long. “She could not stand the ménagerie of animals Joe kept, and she couldn't stand that pimp of hers, he used to beat the hell out of her.”

Hadn't Josephine fought back? “I guess not,” Paul said. “I guess she liked it. Joe had talent, but Pepito really made her do things.”

“She just wanted to do what pleased her,” said Marcel Sauvage, “but Pepito would lock her in her room until she had learned a song, or whatever he wanted her to learn.”

Every afternoon, the impoverished countess came, and the pupil made progress. Now Josephine's French, still broken, was charming, her grammar improved, and she could offer her hand for a kiss in the properly blasé way.

On June 3, 1927, she turned twenty-one and, in rapid succession, committed two acts of recklessness. First she got her driver's license. How she passed the test is still a mystery, she was a nightmare of a driver, though that didn't prevent the driving school from using her in an ad. Once, motoring past the Grand Hôtel near the Opéra, she crashed into a lamppost, emerged nonchalantly from the car, signed a few autographs, got into a taxi, and went home.

But her driving was in no way so incautious as her announcement of a wedding to Pepito. She said they had been married on her birthday, at the American consulate, by Ambassador Herrick. She said Pepito was a count, and that made her a countess.

Would there be a honeymoon? Yes, as soon as her contract with the Folies ran out. “We will go to Italy. My in-laws are enchanted because they know I'm a serious woman.”

Why had she got married? “To be happy, it's as simple as that.” And
why a secret ceremony? “I did not need a crowd around, and I thought it too theatrical to be coming out of a church in a white dress with a long train.” Besides, “I'm only twenty-one, it's the first time I got married, and you see I really didn't know what to do.” First time, second time, third time, who was counting?

Variety
reported that Josephine's “tieup with the Count” was the sole topic of conversation in Harlem. Now, in a long
Amsterdam News
interview with J. A. Rogers, Josephine's words were sober. She declared she could never again live in America. She wanted to see her mother, but “I couldn't stand that dogging around we used to suffer when I was on the road, especially in the south.

“I'm glad of my success, and believe me I have worked hard for it. I'm glad because it makes it easier for colored people to get employment on the stage here.
La Revue Nègre
started a vogue for colored musicians in Europe. Of course many had been popular before I came. I do not for a moment wish to take any credit from them.”

“The Countess,” wrote J. A. Rogers, “admitted that she had made a fortune,” but was looking forward to becoming even more famous than she was already. “ ‘The Count . . . is going to devote the rest of his life to perfecting me.' ”

Then the sky fell in. Reporters who went to the American consulate and the Italian consulate could find no record of the wedding. The mayor of the
arrondissement
in which Pepito and Josephine lived didn't know anything about it either. A prefect of police showed up backstage at the Folies to explain that married people's taxes were different. He demanded to see some legal papers. A priest at Trinity Church found himself confronted by an American journalist who asked if he had married the couple. The priest could not believe the question. “Me? This stranger, this colored woman, this music hall artist that is shown naked in posters all over Paris, with bananas as her only covering? Monsieur, you are making a joke!”

Mildred Hudgins was in Paris at the time. (Josephine had sent a plane ticket to her in London, where Johnny was playing.) “And this one night,” Mildred said, “after Josephine dropped me off at my hotel, she telephoned. ‘Mildred, come right away, I need your help.' When I got to her place, she was pacing back and forth. ‘What should I do? The police are after me.' I said, ‘Deny everything, that will give you time to figure how to get out of it.' ”

Now Josephine and Pepito tried to make a joke of the whole business. She was a countess, but only in the movie script written by Maurice Dekobra. She and Pepito were going to costar; he would play a nobleman who marries a girl played by Josephine.

But black Americans had taken Josephine's wedding seriously; they didn't know what to make of the fake story, the contradictory bulletins the couple kept issuing. The press rebelled too. Always before, Josephine had supplied reporters with fabulous copy, and they had dutifully printed her wildest tales: She had come to Paris from Argentina by accident. Somebody had put her on a boat, and when she woke up, too late, she was on her way to France. . . . Her father had inherited—from a crazy preacher who killed himself with an axe—a shop in which her mother and grandmother, both Indians, sold shawls. . . . In New York they called her the American Sarah Bernhardt but she could not judge how accurate this assessment was because “I haven't seen Sarah Bernhardt dance, or eat an egg, either.”

Some journalists had adored her
because
she kept reinventing her life. “You tell your story,” one wrote, “and every day there's a new version.” But this time, they felt duped, foolish.

Three weeks later, more scandal. It began quietly enough, with a book party for
Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker
. She had invited friends for a glass of champagne to celebrate the publication of the little volume. She greeted guests, signed books, spilled ink on one of her publisher's shoes. Many people praised Marcel Sauvage's artistry—“It is a book of poems for which Josephine is the Muse”—and the painter Maurice de Vlaminck admired every word. “She dances, eats what she likes, and ignores immorality. Life to her is an apple she bites with all her teeth.”

Those teeth could bite a co-author like Marcel Sauvage, too. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It occurs to me that it may have been hard for the reader to reconcile an almost illiterate young Josephine with the Josephine of her early books: “. . . an indigestion of snakeskin” requires a command of language the teenager did not have.