Josephine Baker (36 page)

George Balanchine, her friend since the day he came calling at Beau Chêne, was sympathetic. “Thank God, when I first began to choreograph in Paris, I didn't speak French. Fifty years later, somebody read me my reviews. If I'd read them in the twenties, I would have gone back home to Russia.”

As though the critical savagery weren't crushing enough, the
Philadelphia Tribune
ran a piece suggesting that Josephine might be “released from the current ‘Ziegfeld Follies' because she failed to click. . . .”

That very same day, the
Tribune
had featured a front-page story about Marian Anderson, a native of south Philadelphia. Her concert at the Academy of Music marked Miss Anderson's “triumphal return” from abroad. And it could not have escaped Josephine's notice that while she was being scorned for her foreign airs and graces, Marian Anderson was being praised for hers. “Continental Europe has remodeled her in more delicate, more alluring lines, and has given her the high privilege of charm,” said the
Trib
.

The newly married Donald Wyatt, then an official of the National Urban League, took his bride, Marian, to the Forrest to see Josephine (whom he would later meet in North Africa). “We had heard about her, so we went. In a number called ‘5
A.M
.,' the Balanchine choreography was great, and Josephine was great. But the audience, mostly white, was unable to accept the public adoration of a black woman by four handsome young white men.

“Most blacks didn't like it any better, but as a sociologist, I felt this is where we needed to be going, to the point where there would be an interracial performance accepted by both sides for its artistic value.

“At the end of the number, the boys lifted her into the air and ran off the stage with her, and there was total silence. Nobody clapped. Then the tempo of the music picked up, and the Nicholas brothers made their entrance tap-dancing like mad, and everybody was relieved, and burst into a tremendous wave of applause.”

Josephine returned to New York unhappy. Gossip was rife that a feud between her and Fanny Brice was the reason. Despite its temperamental leading ladies, the show pulled itself together and opened on January 30. New York critics Percy Hammond, John Mason Brown, Burns Mantle, and Brooks Atkinson were stylish writers who loved the theater, but weren't shy about panning performers who disappointed them. Josephine was so riddled with their arrows she could have posed as Saint Sebastian.

Atkinson: “After her cyclonic career abroad, Josephine Baker has become a celebrity who offers her presence instead of her talent . . . her singing voice is only a squeak in the dark and her dancing is only the pain of an artist. Miss Baker has refined her art until there is nothing left of it.”

Hammond: “The most prominent Negress since Eliza in ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin' . . . exhibits herself and her person . . . in African displays too exotic for me to talk about.”

Mantle: “. . . Josephine sings unusual songs. I suspect they are descriptive songs, but I could not catch the words, so I cannot tell you as to that. . . . It just goes to prove that fifty million French press agents can be over-enthusiastic.”

Brown: “Josephine Baker, whose voice sounds gnome-like in the vast spaces of the Winter Garden, is on hand. . . .”

There were others. The nameless reviewer for
Time
magazine sneered, “In sex appeal to jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type, a Negro wench always has a head start, but to Manhattan theatregoers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any nightclub show, whose dancing and singing could be topped practically anywhere outside France.”

Variety
weighed in with a left-handed compliment. “Miss Baker cannot sing but sure can wear clothes and roll those eyes.”

Compliments like that could give a star a headache.

If she hadn't already got one from reading the accolades accorded Fanny Brice. “Fanny is marvellous. . . .” “It is her evening. . . .” “Miss Brice . . . is given many a chance to bring her delicious mimicry, her occasionally crossing eyes . . . and her knees that often are not on speaking terms with one another to skits and songs which gain enormously because of her ever-hilarious presence.”

Josephine had once got such raves for
her
crossed eyes and
her
rubber knees; she must have wondered if God was playing a joke on her.

The
Amsterdam News
reported that Josephine had told friends she regretted having come back to the States “because of the hostile attitude of the white public here.” And not just the white public, either. “Harlem observers feel the French star's style of work is outmoded,” the paper added, noting that Josephine
had
opened in the
Follies
, “despite the rumor that she had been dropped from the cast.”

It came close to being more than a rumor. Maude Russell was working with Fats Waller's band at the Loew's State Theater when representatives of the Shubert office approached her. “They wanted a replacement for Josephine because she wasn't going over,” Maude says, “and I had opened on a Monday and got a beautiful write-up in the paper, so they came looking for me on Tuesday.

“I said, ‘What happened to Miss Baker?' They said she was acting up and they were fixing to get rid of her. At that time, nobody wanted to see a colored girl being twirled around with four white boys and dressed up like a queen. All those people were saying, ‘She's black, trying to be white, why don't she go on and be her original self like she was in
Shuffle Along
, when she was stickin' her fanny out and looking ugly?' But that same day, they had a conference with her and patched things up. I don't know whether she ever knew they had talked to me. I never told her.”

Fanny Brice denied that she had threatened to resign if Josephine stayed in the cast. “I have never snubbed a performer in my whole life,” she said. Maybe so, but Balanchine witnessed one unpleasant scene. “We were sitting at a run-through, Larry Hart, Josephine, Gertrude Niesen, Fanny Brice—she really didn't like Josephine—and Josephine said something in French. ‘Ah, you nigger,' Fanny Brice said, ‘why don't you talk the way your mouth was born?' ”

Fred de Cordova, the movie director who would in time become producer of
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
, stage-managed the
Follies
. “I have the belief,” he told me, choosing his words with tact, “that there was no particular cordiality between Fanny and your mother.”

Offstage, Josephine retreated to the safety of her lavish dressing room, where walls and ceiling were draped with sky-blue satin (the beloved blue of Clara Smith's feather boa) and her feet rested on a white fur rug. “Next time my brother and I worked the Cotton Club,” Fayard Nicholas says, “we made
our
room all blue.”

One night, after finishing her own show at Loew's State, Maude Russell went to see Josephine in her dressing room. “She had changed into a beautiful blue outfit with a chiffon bottom, real frilly, and she sat there like a madonna, and when I walked in, she smiled sweetly.

“I said, ‘Girl, you are something else.' She said, ‘You liked it? They don't seem to be taking to it here.' I said, ‘If you had come here and they'd said you was a Moroccan or somebody, they would have accepted you to the hilt. But everybody in the world knows who Josephine Baker is now. My God, how does it feel to be a big star?' And she said, ‘You get used to it.'

“She was so different from the days when she was giggly, and falling over, now she was so elegant. She shook my hand, no hug, and I tried to talk about the old days, but she just cut that right off, she said, ‘France
is very beautiful and fascinating,' but she didn't really make any conversation, and she didn't offer me nothing, so I didn't stay but a minute.”

Pepito was gone now, and Josephine blamed him for her troubles. Why hadn't he negotiated a better contract? Why hadn't he let her quit this disaster of a show before it was too late?

Maybe he just got tired of sailing against the wind. He couldn't protect Josephine from her own hardheadedness, and he couldn't protect either one of them from snide comments in the tabloids. For a proud man, it was hard to read, “Her major diversion is heckling the dapper and harried pencil-mustached fellow who says he is an Italian count and to whom she is married.”

Jo Bouillon, Josephine's last husband, insisted that she left “no further written account of this period of her life, nor would she talk about it. This was typical of her wish to suppress anything that wasn't a personal victory. . . . Her failure to conquer New York in the
Follies
 . . . barred her from a future in Hollywood.”

Indeed, when Josephine came to New York, Hollywood was very much on her mind. And she was on Hollywood's mind. The buzz was everywhere. She had been offered a major role in
The Green Pastures
, she had been offered a starring role in a movie with Paul Robeson. But after her reviews came out, the movie people's courtship of her ceased. (Fortunately for her
amour-propre
, producers of stage musicals were less fickle. Ichizo Kobayashi, known as the Ziegfeld of Japan, was wild to have her do a production in one of his theaters—he said she was the best musical comedy actress he had ever seen—and though Josephine wouldn't commit herself, she did say she thought Japan would be a nice place to work.)

When Pepito came back to Paris, his friend Arys Nissotti (who had produced
Zou Zou
) was shocked by his appearance; he was jaundiced and seemed fragile. Nissotti attributed this to heartbreak. “Instead of returning to Le Vésinet,” he said, “Abatino moved into a hotel room on the rue de Marignan. I persuaded him to see my doctor because he complained of constant stomach pains. Immediately after the consultation, I received a call from my physician. ‘Your friend is dying of cancer.' ”

Nissotti never told Pepito; neither did the doctor.

Upon returning from America, Pepito had sent a postcard to Miki Sawada, by then back in Tokyo. “The business between Josephine and
me will be liquidated through common accord,” he wrote, “and each of us will go his new road in life. A thousand kisses to Emi. Pepito.” The postcard had a picture of the Place de la Concorde taken in the early morning before the traffic starts; the obelisk stands lonely in the square beside the Seine. Did he choose it because it reflected his own sadness, or am I only being fanciful?

Stanley Rayburn, one of the Shubert officials who had signed Josephine's contract, was now acting as her manager, though she scarcely knew him. He stood beside her when she announced that she was opening a nightclub on the site of Barbara Hutton's old town house at 125 East Fifty-fourth Street. During the day, the place was a restaurant called Le Mirage; late at night it would become Chez Joséphine.

Frank Cerutti owned Le Mirage. “I was eleven years old when Josephine came to the club,” his daughter Doris says. “On the opening night, a friend of hers gave her a baby pig. We kept him in the basement, and Josephine took him back with her to France.

“To me, she was a fascinating woman. I remember one night my father came home and said that an admirer had given her a brand-new Rolls-Royce! It was parked right outside!

“At each table in the club, there was a glass figurine of Josephine in her famous bananas costume. She was wonderful with children, but she kept telling me, ‘You cannot come to see me, you cannot come.' ”

Doris's sister, Anita, almost sneaked a look. “I was thirteen, and my father seated me at his table and said, ‘I want you to be very quiet, at any moment Josephine will come and perform.' The room went dark, Josephine came upstairs from the kitchen carrying the white baby pig and wearing this gown that had to have cost a few thousand dollars, even in those days. Magnificent. She said hello to everyone and introduced the pig, and then came back to my father's table and said I had to leave the room. ‘Frank, I will not perform in front of the children.' So that's as close as I came to seeing her nightclub act.”

And no wonder. At Chez Joséphine, the star danced (in a number staged by Balanchine) the way she wasn't permitted to dance at the Winter Garden. She worked almost naked, flanked by two white men who maneuvered around her in a wildly suggestive adagio. And the press, which had seemed to turn on her, was beguiled again. “The Baker bumps got going,” wrote journalist Cecilia Ager, “in a costume which amazed even her press agent.”

Snippets from other nightclub columns:

“She works at high tension from midnight until past 3.
A.M
. . . .”

“She, if anyone, was the personification of that mad, pre-depression night life which put the gay in Paree for most Americans. . . . You who are homesick for Babylon, vintage 1928, may find an echo in East Fifty-fourth Street.”

“In the right setting, Miss Baker is a bewitching performer, and the informality of a supper club is just the setting she wants.”

These
were reviews a girl could paper her room with. Now she was able to show what she could do when she was in charge, she could even wear the fabulous gowns she had brought from France.

She was once again working two shows a night, this time hating the theater, enjoying the club, and the presence of celebrities at the front tables. The Count de Gramont came, and Cole Porter and Fred Astaire, and Paul Robeson. Years later, Stanley Rayburn said Josephine had not wanted “colored patronage.” “What few colored people did come were seated as far back in the rear as possible. She never mixed with them. . . . She wanted to be among white people.”

The singer Dick Campbell disagrees. Campbell played in
Hot Chocolates on Broadway
, he played the Savoy Ballroom, and when I interviewed him, he was eighty-eight years old. “Colored people just didn't have the money,” he says. “I went there once, it was costly. And except for Birdland, black people didn't go to downtown clubs much. They stayed in Harlem, they went to Small's, and the Nest.”