Josephine Baker (3 page)

Later, I discovered the other books, filled with more myths Josephine had planted herself, the misinformation repeated by writer after writer. I was more and more intrigued, picking my way through the discrepancies.

By then, I had settled permanently in New York, and I read that the old blues singer Alberta Hunter was appearing at the Cookery on
University Place, and I went and asked her if she remembered Josephine Baker.

“Of course,” she said. “We used to be roommates.”

It seemed too good to be true, but that was how my American odyssey began. Through Alberta and the people she steered me toward, a dead world came alive. In Harlem, she would point out the windows of an apartment over a funeral parlor. “We used to live here. And Lena Horne's mother lived there, and Langston Hughes lived in that building, and this is the beauty parlor where I have had my hair done since 1923.”

Witness after witness, many frail with age, shared their memories with me. Josephine's story is not hers alone, it's the story of all those people. I had to capture them before they disappeared. One day, I called the director of jazz studies at Rutgers University and asked him if he knew anyone still alive who had been with
La Revue Nègre
, the show that had taken Josephine to France. “Why don't you talk to Claude Hopkins?” he said. “He was musical director.” I was irritated. “Monsieur,” I said, “everybody knows Claude Hopkins is dead.” His voice remained kind. “Mr. Baker, Claude Hopkins is in Parkview Nursing Home in the Bronx.”

The next day, trembling, I walked into the Parkview Nursing Home. In a nursing home, you smell overcooked food, cheap perfume, medicine, and you see old people talking to themselves; the life there is a kind of going away, a ship leaving the harbor and it's too late to get off. I was directed to Claude's room. He was half asleep, and a nurse came in, shook him, and said, “Wake up, Claude, you have a visitor.”

He opened his eyes, I said, “
Bonjour
, I'm Jean-Claude Baker,” and we talked, but he was incoherent, rambling. I found a nurse. “Is he always like that?”

She shook her head. “He needs dialysis every day, and we don't have a machine here, so they come and take him once a week. The day before he goes, his blood is full of poisons, but if you come to see him after his treatment, he thinks as clearly as anyone. In fact,” she said, starting to laugh, “he runs down the halls naked, chasing nurses.”

I was there the next afternoon when they brought Claude back from dialysis, and his head worked better than mine. He answered all my questions, he even gave me addresses of two of the show's chorus girls who were still alive. And he admitted that, on the boat to Paris, he had
become Josephine's lover, despite the misery this had caused his wife, Mabel. “I was bad to Mabel,” he said, “but we were so young then, we were all so young.”

Before I left, I asked if he remembered where they had rehearsed in New York. “232 West 138th Street,” he said. “At William Spiller's. He had a jazz group.”

Next day, I went uptown and rang the bell at 232 West 138th Street. A dignified old lady came to the door. “Is this William Spiller's house?” I asked. She said yes, William Spiller had been her brother-in-law. He was dead. “My name is Bessie Taliaferro,” she said, and invited me in.

She was ninety-seven years old, living in the basement that had been
La Revue Nègre
's rehearsal studio. She told me most of the cast had not believed in Josephine, they did not think the French would love her. “They were wrong, eh?” she said.

In that basement was a Chickering piano made in 1885, the piano Claude Hopkins had played for rehearsals. “He was so good-looking,” Bessie said, “and Sidney Bechet stood right over there with his clarinet.” I was transported, I could see them, I could hear them. Three years later, on her hundredth birthday, Bessie sold me the piano for a dollar. She thought I was the right one to have it.

I was getting used to miracles. In Philadelphia, I found an old woman (she looked like Popeye, sitting in her rocking chair, smoking a pipe) who had been a waitress at one of Josephine's weddings. Her name was Ethel Lockman, her nickname was the Duchess. “I used to work at the Green Dragon,” she said. “It was a speakeasy, but I quit because every morning when we closed, I would have to step over a dead body, and I was too tired to wipe up the blood on the floor. That's why I went to work in the Bakers' restaurant on South Street. It was Mr. Baker who told his good-for-nothing son Billy he had to marry Josephine. He said, ‘You have to marry her, or get out of my house.'

“Josephine was a nice girl,” said the Duchess. “She didn't smoke.”

In Atlantic City, I found Maude Russell, known in her prime as the Slim Princess. She had been a soubrette at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia when Josephine arrived there, fresh off the road from her first professional tour. Maude remembered Josephine's opening night, April 25, 1921. “She was dressed like a ragamuffin, but she killed them all the way up to the peanut gallery. Next day, her picture was out in front of the theater.”

My research led me to St. Louis, and then back to Paris, where, out of the blue, a respected art dealer phoned to offer me a cache of letters—hundreds of pages—from Josephine to her lawyer, written between 1954 and 1961, most of them while she was on tour. In those letters, she was alive again, manipulating, cajoling, literally counting sheep. She had one ram, one ewe, twelve lambs—why were there only eleven mentioned in his last letter? Every night, she wrote that lawyer ten-page documents. She said she had fallen. “Do you know how hard it is to dance on your two feet when your ankles are swollen like sausages?” she demanded. “But I can't call a doctor, we need all the money. How are the children? I miss them so much.”

At the end of seven years, Josephine terminated the lawyer's services with one last letter. Thank you, don't need you anymore, goodbye. And she never paid him. That was Josephine.

I said earlier that she had hurt me too. Like the lawyer, I was dumped. This was a pattern I only came to understand—and forgive—much later.

One trail led me to Commandant Jacques Abtey, who had been Josephine's boss in the French underground during World War II. He told me that when he first interviewed her for the job, she said, “France is the country that adopted me without reservation, I am willing to give my life for her.”

Through Jacques, I met soldiers, spies, nurses—the world of the Resistance—who had gone on fighting against Hitler even after France was defeated, and they spoke of Josephine's courage, the way she had risked her life and lifted the morale of all around her. For five years, Jacques said, Josephine had been his lover; they shared not only affection but grief that they could not have a child.

Listening, I thought of a night in 1973 when Josephine and I came back from a party to the villa where the family was living on the Riviera. We kissed good-night, and after a minute, I heard a knock at my bedroom door. Josephine stood there, tears streaking her face. “Come, darling,” she said, and led me to her room. Her bed had two big pillows. On one, Stellina (at nine, the youngest member of the Rainbow Tribe) was sleeping, curly brown hair framing her angelic face. On the other was a piece of paper with a message in pink crayon. “Little Mother,” it said, “by the time you get home, the Sandman will have taken me away. But I wanted you to know I love you very much. Your daughter, Stellina.”

Josephine looked at me and whispered, “You see, my Jean-Claude, no lover can give me that, no jewels.” And after a pause, almost with regret, “Not even my public.” We stood there holding each other, tears running together. Today, eighteen years after my search for Josephine began, I think I have discovered something. I think we were crying not for Stellina, but for the child in each of us who was forever gone with the Sandman.

I met the choreographer George Balanchine, who had known Josephine in the thirties, and although he refused to be interviewed on tape—he was ashamed of his accent—he told me how she had invited him, on a Sunday, to Le Vésinet, the suburb of Paris where she had a house called Le Beau Chêne. Balanchine, who was poor then, put on his best suit, took the train, and arrived at the mansion with two big iron gates. Josephine's name was spelled out in flowers on either side of the entrance, and everywhere there were life-size naked statues. Mostly of Josephine.

Balanchine went up the stairs, knocked on the door, and nobody answered, so he started yelling, “Josephine, Josephine—” Suddenly, in one of the tall ground-floor windows, Josephine appeared, naked except for three flowers glued on in strategic places. “Yes, yes, yes,
chéri
, I'm coming.” She said she had given the servants the day off, and she had been baking bread.

A half century later, recounting the story, Balanchine turned a little pink. “Yes,
maître
,” I said. “And then what happened?” He smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think we had lunch.”

I told him how I was discovering Josephine, and he said yes, “she is like Salome. She has seven veils. If you lift one, there is a second, and what you discover is even more mysterious, and you go to the third, and you still don't know where you are. Only at the end, if you keep looking faithfully, will you find the true Josephine.”

JOSEPHINE

Quel cul elle a!”
What an ass! Excuse the expression, but that is the cry that greeted Josephine as she exploded onstage in “La Danse de Sauvage.” (Sixty years later, her friend and sometime lover, Maurice Bataille, would say to me, “Ah!
ce cul
 . . . it gave all of Paris a hard-on.”)

It is October 2, 1925, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, opening night of
La Revue Nègre
. Everyone is here, painters, writers, music hall stars—Léger, Gertrude Stein, Chevalier—diplomats, princes, expatriate Americans (of whom there are forty-three thousand in Paris). At home, there is Prohibition; in France, drink and sex seem free. For one American dollar, you get twenty-five francs.

The theater is sold out, all two thousand mauve-colored velvet seats. Earlier, a voice has roared a message—“Full! Only folding chairs left”—into the avenue Montaigne. So many flowers arrive that they are put on the street, there is no more place for them inside. Ticket holders walk to the entrance across a red carpet flanked by white rose trees, the men
in full dress, the women with bobbed hair, lips and nails lacquered scarlet, arms flashing those narrow diamond bracelets the cynical of the age call “service stripes.”

Backstage, producer Caroline Dudley Reagan paces. She has given herself the role of narrator. “Side by side with my artists.” Years later, she will say of
La Revue Nègre's
success, “It wasn't me, but the phoenix inside Josephine, that bird of paradise. It wasn't me, but Bechet's saxophone, and his soul. It wasn't me, but Louis Douglas, my choreographer. . . . He had already danced in Russia, even for the czarina. . . . Decidedly, God was with me.”

In the first row are students from L'École des Beaux-Arts. They have rented twenty seats for the entire two weeks
La Revue Nègre
is expected to run. One tall blond boy—Maurice Blech—will come back every night until Josephine invites him to her dressing room, and then to her bed.

The show begins. “On one side of the stage,” reports the man from
Le Figaro
, “before a curtain on which thick-lipped faces with immense black eyes stand out among the geometric designs in dazzling colors applied by some local Picasso in Tallahassee or Honolulu, eight musicians in red tailcoats take their seats.”

The “local Picasso” is, in fact, the Mexican painter Covarrubias, the eight musicians are Claude Hopkins and his orchestra, and once they begin to play,
Le Figaro
's critic loses all objectivity. “The music seems to have captured the echoes of the jungle and to mingle the moan of the breeze, the patter of rain, the crackling of leaves . . .”

The curtain rises to reveal a backdrop of two Mississippi riverboats. Down front is a wharf where people rest in the sun. A man comes on pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowers. It's Sidney Bechet. He picks his horn off the cart, bends his head to the mouthpiece, a short fat Pan inciting his listeners to revelry, filling the theater with genius.

The chorus girls are young, supple, they laugh as they dance the Charleston (Paris is crazy about the Charleston), but some in the audience are disappointed that the performers are so fair. Because of the word
nègre
in the title, the French are expecting black Africans, not American mulattoes. These dancers are creamy-skinned, beige-skinned, and for the ten days since they got off the boat they have moved from astonishment to astonishment, going to the Galeries Lafayette where they can try on clothes and no one forbids it, going to the cafés, where they are served politely, walking in the streets, where they are openly admired.