Josephine Baker (33 page)

Every day now, Sacha Guitry, one of the most brilliant actors in France, came to Le Beau Chêne to give Josephine diction lessons. She was thrilled—“At last I would play to a family audience, without my feathers and spangles”—and terrified. “I'd never be able to memorize my part.”

“Act onstage as you do in real life,” Guitry said. “Keep the theater constantly in mind when you are
not
performing, and forget about the critics.”

She insisted on wearing light stage makeup, and the director told her she looked like a clown. “Creoles are light-skinned,” she argued. This time, color didn't matter. She was working in the “legitimate” theater, not a music hall, and she was good.

“It is dazzling, there is simply no one else today who possesses such radiance, spontaneity, and unique charm,” said the composer Henri Sauget, and the composer/singer Reynaldo Hahn called her voice “true and supple throughout.”

It had been ten years since
La Revue Nègre
. “Now I spoke French,” she said. “I played in French at the side of strictly French actors.”

The winter of 1934 was bitter cold. In her dressing room, Josephine sipped hot toddies and celebrated the fact that the theater was filled every night. Around Christmas, Eddie Cantor came backstage. It was time, the American comedian said, for her to tackle New York. “You've already conquered South America and most of Europe.”

Josephine said she was tempted, “but suppose I got stranded there?” In print too, she voiced apprehension about going home. “They would make me sing mammy songs, and I cannot
feel
mammy songs.”

The journalist to whom she said this had come to Beau Chêne to interview her, and had described the villa with its turrets and dormers, its monkeys, birds, ducks, geese, pigeons, pheasants, rabbits, turkeys. “When they all get to hissing and gobbling and barking and chattering at once, the chorus is superb. ‘I do so love the quiet of the country,' booms Miss Baker passionately from the middle of the din.”

At home, the interviewer said admiringly, Josephine dressed simply, wore no makeup, and sometimes went down to the grocery store “to buy champagne for guests. The shopkeeper curses her in French for a stingy American, and she curses him in fluent Harlem for a thieving bourgeois. Both understand each other perfectly, and have a fine time.”

Josephine's show was selling out, but for some others, pickings were slim. Bricktop pronounced Christmas Eve the dullest she had experienced in years of operating a club, and said nothing would prevent her departure for America “save the complete destruction of all ships and planes.”

Pepito, perhaps encouraged by Eddie Cantor, perhaps responding to inquiries from Lee Shubert, decided he should go to New York and check things out. While he was about it, he would pack a print of
Zou Zou
and see if he could find an American distributor.

On March 22, 1935, Josephine wrote Miki Sawada that Pepito would sail on the
Île de France
, leaving April 3. “I do wish you could meet him on his arrival because he doesn't know where to go. I mean the best hotel. And if you could get him a valet . . . You know how I feel being left alone, but we have offers to go to America next winter and Pepito wants to see for himself. . . . I do hope I am not asking too much, because you are my little sister, I take liberties.” There was a postscript. “Do take care of my Pepito. Paris is splendid now that spring has come.”

New York wasn't bad either. Lee Shubert wanted Josephine for the next
Ziegfeld Follies
, but he wasn't sure about the identity of this Italian
gentleman. Josephine had to send a telegram:
I AUTHORIZE JOSEPH ABATINO MY MANAGER TO SIGN ALL CONTRACTS IN MY BEHALF
.

Two days later, there was an agreement. The
Follies
would open in October. Josephine would be assured of first-class passage on an ocean liner, she would be paid $1,500 a week, and if the show ran beyond June 1936, her salary would be raised to $1,750 a week. She had permission to double in any “smart east side cabaret,” and would be given featured billing on a separate line, and a dressing room “equivalent in size and type to the usual #2 dressing room.”

The #1 dressing room would go to Fanny Brice.

While Pepito labored in New York, Josephine was, as usual, titillating the French press. Here, a few remarks as they appeared in
Paris-Magazine:

“If you ask me, how are you? I dance.

“Something enchants me, a dress, a play, a film, a cocktail, I dance.

“In dying, I will be dancing.

“I do not want to get married. I would be too black and him, he would be too white!

“Anyway, the day theatre is no longer my preoccupation, I will automatically become a widow.

“Widow of what? Of the theatre, of course, my only master, my only husband . . . I know only one God, the theatre.

“In matters of the heart, a white is worth—let's put it, a black and a half, and don't talk any more about it!

“Ooh la la . . . what are they going to say in my country if they read that. They are capable of not letting me get off the boat.”

On May 12,
La Créole
closed.

On May 14, Josephine wrote to Miki Sawada that she had bought an airplane, and that after only six hours of instruction, “I fly myself, and I'm crazy with joy. They make a lot of stories each time there is a plane accident and they almost never speak about car accidents. That's why the public is afraid; it is ridiculous.” Pepito was home—“Think how happy I am to see him, after a month and a half”—and soon they would leave for North Africa, where “I film my next movie before I come to America.”

On May 19, she wrote again. Paris was cold, they slept with winter blankets, she was tired because they were going out so much. “Lily Pons had a great great success here. . . .” Again, she spoke of starting her next
film “in four or five days, then I rest in Italy before sailing for New York.”

On May 25, Josephine and Pepito left for Tunisia (and Tangier) to shoot
Princesse Tam-Tam
, based on an idea by Pepito. It is, in Josephine's words, “the story of an Arab urchin who is transformed into a social butterfly by a French nobleman.”

Once again, she plays a free spirit. A famous French novelist, suffering from writer's block, comes to North Africa, where he finds her, and is so entranced he almost forgets he has a wife back home. He attempts to “civilize” Josephine, and next thing we know, she's in Paris attending the opera. She thinks she loves the writer, but she doesn't love having to use silverware, or to wear shoes. “Why do we have to put our feet in boxes? Why live in houses where they walk on your head . . . where the sun doesn't penetrate?”

She has two songs—the voice is beautiful, since
La Créole
it has grown even stronger—and dances the conga, but after a wise maharajah advises her, “When birds of the sky take food from the hands of men, they lose their freedom,” she goes back to Africa. The generous novelist has left her a villa, she marries an Arab, has a baby, and welcomes a donkey into the parlor to eat a book called
Civilization
.

This last action is appropriate for Josephine, who in real life has told the world, “I have what I want now: A big dictionary in seven volumes, full of pictures. No, I do not open it, I do not have the time. I set down each volume and it makes me laugh. Everything makes me laugh. It is not my fault, but words do not weigh that much.”

By early September, Pepito and Josephine were vacationing in Italy. They had been together for nine years; many people thought he was using her, but she knew better. “In the world of the theatre, each time a man manages his wife's business, people say he is a pimp. I think it's funny. . . . No, what is heavy for me is his jealousy. Meanwhile, I have the best manager in Paris.”

From Paris, Josephine wrote Miki a last letter before sailing to New York. “I hope to leave on the
Normandie
the second of October . . . dear Miki, I don't want to live in a hotel. If you know a good family . . . that would take me . . . naturally, I want to pay. I would rather live with friends, don't you think it's best? Pepito is going to live in a hotel, we are going to live apart because for my success, it is better that the American public think I am not married.”

So far, all business, but here comes the cry of the heart. “Then too . . . I don't want to be refused in a hotel.”

On the day she quit Paris, theaters were already playing
Princesse Tam-Tam
, and
Une Vie de Toutes les Couleurs
, her autobiography written with André Rivollet, was in the windows of every bookstore in France.

“In New York,” the book says, “where I'm going to star in the
Ziegfeld Follies
, they ask me to sing and dance on top of a skyscraper. . . . I would love so much to be able to dance under the sky in the open air. It seems that all the kisses of the city are coming toward you.”

And she is coming toward the city, traveling first class.

Before she returned to her native land, Josephine might have found it instructive to consider the bitter experience of her old friend, Fredi Washington.

In 1934, playing a black who passed for white, Fredi had starred in
Imitation of Life
. Here, said historian Donald Bogle, “is a black woman who does not seek so much to be white as to have a chance at white opportunities. . . .” Not wanting to be a servant like her mother, she becomes a rebel “with a daring thirst for freedom.”

Modern audiences see her as a rebel, black audiences of the thirties saw her as a thankless child. People were so naive, said the tap dancer Fayard Nicholas, that they confused Fredi with the part she played. “They believed she was a nasty girl. It compared to when Josephine came home in 1935. Most of the blacks said, ‘Look at her, she thinks she's white, and she's acting like a white woman, a French white woman at that. . . .' ”

The whites were even more snide. In
Vanity Fair
, George Davis wrote, “Does the Countess Pepito Abatino ever pause to dwell in memory on her pickaninny days in America . . . does Josephine Baker ever wonder what Sissle and Blake and all the other Harlem actors in her
Shuffle Along
days must be thinking about her?”

Exactly ten years after she had opened in
La Revue Nègre
, Josephine, with Pepito, his cousin Zito, a white French maid, and a white French secretary, sailed for New York on the maiden voyage of the SS
Normandie
. It was October 2, 1935, the day Italy invaded Ethiopia. Before she left Paris, Josephine lauded Mussolini, telling reporters that the Ethiopian emperor was “really an enemy to the American Negro and keeps his people in bondage. . . . I will organize an army of colored soldiers and fight Selassie to the limit if Mussolini gives the word. . . . I am willing to travel all around the country and tell my people that if they line up against II Duce, they will be making a great mistake.”

Then she got on the boat.

Also aboard were several of her friends—the singer Lucienne Boyer, the writer Colette, Le Corbusier, and Antoine the hairdresser/savior to whom Caroline Reagan had first taken the burnt-haired Josephine. Antoine, now quite old, was accompanied by his cushioned glass coffin. “I do not travel with it for publicity,” he said, “but just in case.”

When the
Normandie
docked in New York, Josephine posed for the horde of photographers and reporters who had stormed aboard. She sat on a rail, her left hand holding down her long skirt against the wind. She wore no wedding band, but Pepito's signet ring was on her little finger. “I've had enough of Europe for the present,” she told the press, addressing reporters as “confreres. I'm a writer too.” She also said Pepito wasn't her husband. “Just my manager . . .” (In a rare moment of candor—or fear—she was telling the truth, as she'd done when she went to get her passport renewed. Then she'd confessed that she'd been married in 1921, that her husband had been born in the United States, and that her marital status had not been terminated.)

The
Amsterdam News
put it more bluntly. “It was well known to many persons that Miss Baker's original [
sic
] husband, Billy Baker, a tan-skinned waiter in Chicago, was still alive and going strong. Billy never seemed to have the urge to go to Paris to claim his wife, but he frankly admitted to friends in Chicago that there had been no divorce and that he expected to pick up relations where they dropped off ten years ago if Mrs. Baker ever returned.”

The paper was also unkind about Josephine's lack of political acumen. She had, said a reporter, jumped “into something of which she knows so little it would take more than the public libraries of the country to contain the vast void of her ignorance on world affairs.”