Josephine Baker (37 page)

In May 1936, Haile Selassie lost his throne, Mussolini was decorated by his king for service to the “Fascist Fatherland,” Robert E. Sherwood's antiwar play,
Idiot's Delight
(on Broadway with the Lunts), won the Pulitzer Prize, and Paul Derval of the
Folies-Bergère
showed up in Josephine's dressing room at the Winter Garden. He had been out front. “They don't give you much of a break, do they?” he said.

He asked if she wanted to be in his next show, to open in October. “I threw my arms around his neck,” she said.

“I sat down in a white satin chair,” he recalled, “whereupon Josephine began to scream. . . . I assumed that she was just getting worked up for her usual outrageous salary demands. . . . As it turned out, she was having a fit because I had sat on top of her chihuahua.”

They worked out the deal at Chez Joséphine, in the wee hours of the morning. The star made her own contract. (When she returned to Paris,
she told Maurice Bataille how proud she was. “It's a good deal, a fortune.”)

Since one of the stipulations in the new contract was that she could choose the people she wanted to work with, she chose the dancer Paul Meeres (with whom she was also sleeping) to costar in the Folies-Bergère. A light-skinned West Indian, Meeres, like Jacques Pills, was famous for his “dependable object.” Before going onstage, chorus girls used to run into his dressing room and touch it for good luck. Meeres was married, but that had never stopped Josephine, and Meeres's wife, Thelma, left behind, felt apprehensive. “The French women will go mad over my Paul,” she said.

Paul Meeres and Josephine sailed on the
Normandie
on May 26, immediately after the
Ziegfeld Follies
closed. (The closing was blamed on Fanny Brice's neuritis, but several people in the cast assured me that Josephine had given Fanny a nervous breakdown.) The minute she hit the deck of the French ship, Josephine felt lighter. In the beauty salon, she found Jean Clement, her old friend and hairdresser; every night she dined at the captain's table, restored to her royal position. Her reckless mother's loss of the family house, Fanny Brice, the cruel theater critics—it had been a bad dream and it was already receding.

Back in her beloved Paris, she was surprised to find herself lonely. “Without Pepito,” she observed, “Le Beau Chêne was an empty shell.”

“He had been so much part of her life,” says Maurice Bataille. “Like a shadow. She asked me to come and stay at Beau Chêne. In the day, she kept herself busy going to the Folies-Bergère, getting on with the rehearsals for the new show, but at night, she could not be alone.

“She went to call on my mother, dressed in a sober dark-blue suit, and carrying a large bouquet of red roses. She knelt in front of my mother and said, ‘Madame, I have the honor to ask you for the hand of your son Maurice.'

“My mother helped her to her feet. ‘My little Josephine, it is Maurice you should ask.' And can you imagine? That scenario was repeated four times.”

Why hadn't Maurice married Josephine? I put the question, and he shrugged. “I was in no rush, that's all.”

While Josephine was begging Madame Bataille for her son, Carrie Martin took a husband without asking anyone's permission. On June 17, 1936, Josephine's mother became Mrs. Tony Hudson in St. Louis. She hadn't even confided her plan to the daughter with whom she shared a house. “My husband went upstairs where Mama lived,” Margaret told me, “and she was all dressed up, and she said, ‘I'm getting married.' Elmo came back downstairs, astonished. ‘Your mother's getting married today!' So then
I
rushed up and she told me, ‘It's none of your business.' ”

A month after Carrie's latest wedding, Elvira died of old age. Another door had closed. Elvira, the little slave girl with the long silky hair, was gone, and with her, the secrets of her blood. “Maybe there was some Blackhawk Indian in my grandmother,” Richard told me. “But she always said her family had struggled on the desert, and from that I thought she was African.”

Beau Chêne without Pepito, St. Louis without Elvira, neither place would ever again be the same for Josephine.

She now became even more obsessed with having a baby. “Doctor after doctor had told her she could not,” says Maurice Bataille, “and my mother finally sent her to a famous gynecologist, Professor Alexandre Couvelaire.”

By the time I started researching this book, Alexandre Couvelaire was dead, but I was able to speak with his son, René, a professor of urology. “I met Josephine,” he said, “when my father went on vacation and left her my phone number. She called me to Beau Chêne. My father had told me she had a congenital malformation of the uterus and could not conceive a child. He took care of her until the war started, then he destroyed his dossiers because he did not want them to fall into German hands.”

She went, says Maurice Bataille, from one medical man to another, some reputable, some quacks. I once said that Josephine had a fairy godmother watching over her cradle. Really, there were two of them, and they could never agree. One said, “You are going to be black”; the other said, “Yes, but I'm going to put some milk in your coffee.” One said, “You are going to be a great sex symbol”; the other said, “Yes, but you are not going to be able to bear children.”

The sets and costumes for
En Super Folies
were being designed by Michel Gyarmathy, and Josephine told him he could do whatever he
liked, as long as she was center stage at all times. And as long as everything was white.

“Michel, you understand, in the North Pole number, I want white snow, white furs, white sled dogs; in the circus number, there should be a white parade; in
The Fairy Dream
, I will be queen of the white country . . .”

He understood. Gyarmathy, a young Hungarian, had first met Josephine in Budapest in 1928. “I was a student at the Beaux-Arts, and she was playing two shows a day, doing some sketches in Hungarian, and doubling every night at the Moulin Rouge cabaret. The Moulin Rouge held a contest for the best poster to announce Josephine, and I won first prize.

“She impressed me very much. She impressed all the Hungarians, because of her hairdo—all glued back, black, polished—and her music and the way she held herself. Women imitated her, they used the Bakerfix. When I met her again eight years later at the Folies-Bergère, she was just back from the
Ziegfeld Follies
, where she had not done well.

“She was beautiful and wanted to forget that she was a woman of color. She did her hair like the Parisian women, long and curly, wore light makeup. . . . She wanted to be married to a white man . . . she did not want to know that her color played a great part in her success at that time.”

Josephine worked hard in rehearsals, but she also threw her weight around. No other artist could have his name printed as large as hers in programs or on posters for
En Super Folies
, all publicity would revolve around her, and she could fire whom she liked.

“By now,” Gyarmathy says, “Josephine's talent was not disputable, she shone in the sky of international stars. She no longer thanked . . . her audience with words, she threw kisses with those admirable hands, long, narrow, supple, capable, and she was good to everyone she worked with—except the too talented ones and the ones with no talent. There she was exactly like all the other stars, including Mistinguett. For Miss, the ideal partner was the partner who served her well but wasn't noticed.”

For some reason, Josephine took Gyarmathy for a soulmate, confessing her deepest anxieties. “You see, Michel, I do not like myself deep inside. And you will understand me because you are Jewish, and the skin of a Jew is as easy to recognize as the skin of a black, so I know you hate your skin, and at the same time want to claim justice for your brothers.”

This was news to Michel. That there were black Jews, white Jews, brown and yellow Jews, and their skins were not colored by their religious beliefs had never dawned on Josephine, who was convinced of what she was saying. Again, she told him her father was a Spanish Jew—this was a story she came back to with great regularity—so there was double persecution in her history. “I would like to be white,” she said, “and go to crusade for those who are black. Michel, I'm talking to you, Michel . . .”

Weary of these intense and sometimes lunatic confidences, Michel would try to steer the talk in another direction. “Josephine, I have a beautiful white fox cape for you to wear in the North Pole sketch . . .”

En Super Folies
provided Josephine with two fine dancing partners—not only Paul Meeres, but Frédéric Rey, a young man who had been smuggled out of Vienna without a passport when Mistinguett hid him in a wardrobe trunk.

Fred Rey, Gyarmathy recalled, “was making all the girls lovesick, but they despaired. He was not eating that kind of meat.”

“Josephine knew I was gay,” Rey says, “but she did not care: I had to sleep with her. Since we were dancing together almost in the nude, I guess it made her feel better. She had to possess you. When we danced, she let herself go with total abandon, so she had to know her partner well. Once I slept with her, we were good friends, and it never happened again. She was half that way herself, or at least she had the soul of a gay person.”

On September 21, two weeks after the opening, Pepito died.

“The last time I saw him,” said André Rivollet, “was in the pink of a spring morning, near the Parc Monceau. He was gaunt, coughing, shabby-looking, no brilliantine in his hair . . . ruined, perhaps, after a difficult tour in America. Racial laws had kept them apart; she stayed in Harlem while he strutted about in a classy hotel on Fifth Avenue. They became estranged and he tried to cash in.

“As her ex-manager, he claimed damages, demanding the larger part of the fortune she had made with his unselfish help! No talk of love or friendship now. But she showed her gratitude after his death. She asked me to escort her to his funeral service in Neuilly. He had lived there with a beautiful redhead from the Folies. Flanked by two lines of chorus girls in mourning, I walked behind the widow-in-title, carrying a huge heart of red roses that I laid on the coffin.

“Josephine mourned with dignity. She glanced with pity across the
wreaths at her white-skinned substitute. Being romantic and possessive, she decided she wanted his body and would have a marble mausoleum built for him in his native Sicily. It would be as large as a Renaissance palace, it would be sparkling as a show at the Casino! Meanwhile, the coffin stayed in a drawer of the crypt of the church in Neuilly. A temporary resting place that almost became eternal.”

For some months after Pepito's funeral, Maurice Bataille told me, if he happened to be driving Josephine within three blocks of the church at Neuilly, she would start to scream. “I don't want to go so near Pepito, he has the evil eye on me.”

Anna Sosenko, musician, producer, and manager of the singer Hildegarde (“I created Hildegarde!”) knew Josephine and Pepito in the thirties. “He was the brain,” she says. “He did the dirty work, and the minute she thought she didn't need him anymore, kaput. I don't think she felt the loss of Pepito until she had to fight on her own, until she had managers to whom she was just another act.

“These people always think everything came to them naturally, but nothing comes naturally. The talent is there, but you have to get somebody who can nourish it. That happens once in a lifetime if you're lucky. When Josephine had problems at the end of her career, nobody could really help her out. She was shrewd, but she did not have vision, this came from him. She was impulsive, first she did it, then she thought about it. I think she had as much understanding as you
can
have when the whole wide world is telling you how great you are, but I think a good part of her died when Pepito died.”

It wasn't until April 1937 that Josephine wrote to Miki Sawada in Japan to say she was at the Folies, having an “enormous success,” and adding that Pepito had “passed away. No need to tell you I was much distressed, you know he was only 37. . . . He had a liver cancer. You see that in any case we are not a big thing on this earth, and it is useless to grieve oneself or complicate one's existence as we do. But let's not talk about it anymore, the subject is so sad.”

In the next sentence, she was on to other matters. Beau Chêne was marvelous, she was going to make another film, and right this minute, “while I'm writing to you, I have a little rabbit on my knees. . . . Here, everybody is getting ready for the Exposition.”

The Exposition Internationale opened in May, foreshadowing things to come. Albert Speer had designed the German Pavilion, over which a
Nazi flag billowed. Parisians could not have guessed that within three years, all public buildings in the city would be flying the swastika.