Josephine Baker (29 page)

“In Berlin,” Josephine said, “two things left me with a dream-like impression. One was silent, the aquarium at the zoo, the other deafening, the colossal Vaterland where all the countries of the world have their echo.”

Haus Vaterland was a palace of entertainment with many rooms. In one that could hold six hundred people, Barney Josephson said, “they had American shows, kind of burlesque acts, with dogs, chorus girls . . . Then there was a Spanish room with guitars and flamenco dancers and a Wild West bar with a black orchestra all dressed as cowboys, and a Turkish café that reproduced Istanbul, with belly dancers and strong sweet coffee . . . oh God, you can't describe it all.”

By the time Josephine opened at the Theater des Westens in
Bitte Einsteigen
, it wasn't only “collective lust” that roared unashamed at the theater, it was Nazi sympathizers. Lea Seidl, a singer in the show, remembered the hoots and the catcalls on opening night. “I think they
were not only against the Jewish management but against Josephine Baker too. You know, after the first night one of the Nazi critics wrote, ‘How dare they put our beautiful blond Lea Seidl with a Negress on the stage.' It was already awful.”

Three weeks into the run (which was scheduled to last six months), Josephine disappeared. “She had a very elegant chinchilla coat,” Lea Seidl said, “and I saw her in her coat with a big sack on her back and she whispered, ‘Don't say anything, I run away.' And she did.”

(In that period of flux, Berlin audiences were hard to predict. Bessie de Saussure, playing at Haus Vaterland, was hooted off the stage not because she was too dark but because she was too light. “I'm singing, ‘digadoo, digadoo, digadoo,' and they just carried on like niggers, they yelled, ‘We want a
black
American.' The manager had to take me out the back door; those people wanted to hurt me, oh yes.”)

Josephine quit Berlin, but her German tour continued.

Dresden. The citizens of Dresden “were scandalized,” said one newspaper, “to see Germany's national dances parodied in the convulsions of the ‘
coloured girl
.' ”

Munich. Worse than Dresden. “No, Mademoiselle, you will not dance in Munich, this city that respects itself.”

Leipzig. The Crystal Palace, where she played on a bill with an animal trainer who worked with snakes, goats, and crocodiles. One day she found three of the crocs in her dressing room, “tap dancing with their teeth.”

Hamburg. “My best memory of Germany. It's good American cooking, but a little more grease. I sang, in German, ‘I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.' ”

The photographs taken at that time show how much she had changed. We see her holding a saxophone in the Berlin Chez Joséphine; the pose isn't goofy like the old shots on Revere Beach or in
La Revue Nègre
. She's a well-dressed young woman in control, no longer a waif you want to take care of. Her eyes are sad, worldly. But she fascinates crowds wherever she goes. And where she and Pepito are going now is back to Paris, the city that isn't fun anymore because there's “no money left.”

Many of the French still adore her, though they laugh at themselves for this fixation. “It was so easy for Josephine Baker to have us in the palm of her hand that she got tired of us,” says an article in
Chronique
du Pingouin
. “The good white Parisians are so dumb it was enough for her to wiggle her bottom, and they fell at her feet in adoration. The black idol got tired of humanity lying there like a rug, and left us to conquer new kingdoms . . . secretly hoping to encounter a resistance to match her talent.”

Paris forgives her infidelity, she takes its love as her due. Now she wants to show how much progress she has made in French, she wants to play in French sketches. Unfortunately, the impresarios of Paris are not so constant as the public. News travels fast, they know that on the road Miss Baker has improved not only her French, but also her gift for being unreliable. No big theater offers are forthcoming.

No matter, there are friends to see, dresses to buy, and anyway, Josephine tells
Le Journal
, she has really hurried back to help Dr. Gaston Prieur, backer of the first Chez Joséphine. He is on trial for fraud, accused of presiding over a syndicate of fake doctors who treat 750 fake patients every day and split the insurance money with them.

“Poor Doctor Prieur,” says Josephine, “what a fine fellow he is.”

Despite Josephine's presence at his trial, Dr. Prieur drew a jail sentence, a fine, and was told he could not practice medicine for the next ten years.

Then Josephine got
herself
in hot water. She was riding in a taxi, one of three loaded with her luggage, when the first cab hit and knocked down a pedestrian. All three cabs stopped, but Josephine was unwilling to be held up by some stupid accident. She ordered her convoy to get moving. People surrounded her, indignant. A gentleman intervened on behalf of the wounded pedestrian, whose face was bloody. He got the victim into one of Josephine's cabs, and dispatched the driver to the hospital. Josephine grew more outrageous. “I'm Josephine Baker,” she screamed at the crowd. “The one you applauded like imbeciles, in the show!”

The horrified listeners advanced as if to attack her, at which point, her driver accelerated and drove off. It is hard to know what to make of such a scene. Josephine was moody, she could be kind or unkind, you never got what you expected. “She was sick,” Pepito declared, after the taxi mishap. “What she said was not what she meant.”

In the spring of 1929, Josephine and Pepito went to Italy to visit his family, then boarded the ship
Comte Verde
, on their way to South America. Two weeks later, in Buenos Aires, they were again greeted by headlines:
THE SCANDALOUS JOSEPHINE
.

“My heart sank,” she said. President Yrigoyen denounced her, and on opening night, the theater was filled with Josephine supporters fighting Josephine detractors. It made her angry to be used “as a banner waved by some in the name of free expression and by others in defense of public morality. . . . What did I care about Argentine politics?”

In her dressing room, hearing Pepito tell the theater manager he feared for her safety, she cried, “That stage is mine, no one can keep me off it!”

Demonstrators had put firecrackers under the seats; they exploded as Josephine came on. Hoping to appease the hotheads, the orchestra played all the tangos of the world. The show was, of course, a tremendous success. Two hundred performances, twenty-five hundred seats, sold out every day. “I have never made as much money,” said the director. He should have thanked President Yrigoyen.

And so to Chile, by train, through the Andes. “The train goes up and down, women fainted. We were at an altitude of 3,200 meters, and stewards ran from one car to another to give oxygen to the fainting ladies. Through the window, I see we are in the clouds, I see an eagle, his scream more piercing than any siren I have heard.

“Maybe twenty thousand people were waiting for me in Santiago, it reminded me of my arrivals in Europe. I was rescued by the station chief who drove me away in his old Ford, like in the movies.”

Brazil she found breathtaking, São Paulo where they spoke Italian, Rio, a city of “lights, hundreds of different orchids, thousands of monkeys playing. Ah! what beautiful films you could make here, my dream is to film in Rio.”

She loved the food—“I recommend Feijoada, black beans with burned bread, sausages and smoked pork, a marvel”—she loved the Beira-Mar Casino where she played, her only complaint about Rio was “its one stupid skyscraper.”

Thousands of miles to the north, New York, which had more than its share of stupid skyscrapers, was again talking about Josephine. Because on Sunday, September 20,
La Sirène des Tropiques
had its premiere at the Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue. The crowds were huge; even His Honor, James J. Walker, the mayor, showed up. “The first time,” said the
Amsterdam News
, “that such a high official of this city ever decided to enter one of the local playhouses.”

Most people thought the mayor could have saved himself the trip. One columnist wrote that Josephine's performance was hard to describe.
“The closest I can come to telling what it is like is to say that five minutes of her acting in an American studio would cause the director to hit her in the head with the camera.” Her dancing was patronized too. “She is a spirited comic hoofer, but even in her hottest moments she isn't any hallelujah.”

There was a hint that American blacks were starting to look at her more critically. She had been the pride of Harlem,
Shuffle Along
had made her a star, yet she had abandoned America and her language and her people. Even some who had lived vicariously through her triumphs were having second thoughts.

But what Josephine didn't know didn't hurt her. She was busy in South America, and anyway, she had already said that
La Sirène
was a rotten movie. (Even so, it was a big deal at the Booker in St. Louis. The
Argus
carried an ad heralding the arrival of “The Film Which Captured the Hearts of a Million Parisians,” and urged customers to turn out for “The International Sweetheart of the Screen . . . See Josephine . . . With the Noted
COUNT PEPITO D
'
ALBATINA
[
Sic
].”)

Just before Christmas, Josephine and Pepito boarded the French liner
Lutetia
, sailing from Rio to France. I have a painting by Covarrubias of the star and her consort on deck in the moonlight; he made Pepito taller. The architect Le Corbusier was also aboard; Josephine seems to have had a penchant for famous architects. She was already friendly with Adolf Loos, whom she had taught to dance the Charleston, and who had designed a great house for her. The plans still exist; they show a façade of black and white marble, an interior that included a swimming pool lit by the sun coming through a glass roof, and a three-story-high cylindrical tower. The house was never built.

Once she met Le Corbusier, she went off in another direction. “She wanted,” he said, “to build a little village with little houses, little trees, little roads for people to be happy. She was mad to do this project, the Josephine Baker–Le Corbusier project, near Paris.”

That village wasn't built either, but Josephine found herself fascinated by the architect. “He was a modest, fun-loving man and we quickly struck up a friendship.”

For friendship, read love affair. She came to his cabin and he sketched her, nude. She was, he wrote in his journal, “a small child, pure, simple, and limpid. . . . She has a good little heart. She is an admirable artist when she sings, and out of this world when she dances.”

It was true, she sang well now. All the singing lessons, French lessons, German lessons, Spanish lessons, the lessons in table manners, all the steps Pepito had taken to turn a great clown into a lady had borne fruit. Though many were convinced he had moved in the wrong direction, it being easier to find a lady than a great clown.

She sang to Le Corbusier—“Her Negro songs were beautiful, what a dramatic sensibility”—while he drew. They were inseparable throughout the voyage. No longer inclined to fight duels, Pepito knew Josephine would go her own way, but he also knew he was necessary to her.

Was she still necessary to Paris, though, that was the question. In her absence, other black performers had put down roots there. Alberta Hunter was having success as a singer, but she wasn't flamboyant like Josephine, she could not be observed buying up half of the city on shopping sprees. “Alberta?” Arthur Briggs said. “She never spent anything but an evening.”

You could hear Maud de Forrest (of
La Revue Nègre
) at the Melody Club, Florence Jones (of Chez Florence) and Bricktop still reigned in Montmartre, and Lew Leslie was back with
Blackbirds of 1929
, starring Adelaide Hall, whom he billed as “The New Josephine Baker.”

The old Josephine Baker, sailing for France, walked the decks of the
Lutetia
“with a secret joy and a little fear. I'm going to find Paris again, I'm going, once again to try my luck in Paris.”

In New York, the stock market had crashed. No more checks arrived in the mail, so bohemians living in Paris went home. The tourists who had filled the hotels left too, and so did the expatriate artists. Hemingway headed for Spain, Ezra Pound for Italy. Robert McAlmon, a literary dilettante who had been the rage of a moment and had seen that moment pass, chose Mexico. “I knew all too well,” he said, “that Paris is a bitch, and that one shouldn't become infatuated with bitches. . . .”

Although Parisians still went to the theater, live entertainment was being threatened by talking pictures. “For a long time, I did not believe in talking pictures,” Josephine said. “It seemed to me impossible that one could speak sensibly, sing, shout at shadows . . . that this would be anything but gruel for cats around a screen. But in 1929, I witnessed in Vienna the filming of a boxing match. The public screamed. The people were barking. Everyone insulted everyone. It was funny. When the film
was projected, there were the screams I had heard. I was dumbfounded, won over.”