Josephine Baker (38 page)

Josephine's association with Pepito had not, as it developed, ended cleanly; all her possessions were still in his name, and it took a while for her to regain houses, jewels, the Bakerfix royalties, the music publishing company. She had a good lawyer, but even so, she had to give a portion of her fortune to Pepito's sister. Oddly, she harbored no resentment. After Pepito died, she wrote to Christina Scotto saying, “You are the only family I have.”

That she had no sense of money had been proven beyond a doubt in New York, when she signed the contract with Paul Derval and told herself how clever she had been. She was to get half the box office take, true enough, but out of that, she had to pay salaries for cast and musicians, along with various other production costs that would have left her next to nothing. Mortified and incensed when she discovered this, she told Derval she would not appear, the services of the good lawyer were once again called into play, and a new contract for
En Super Folies
was negotiated.

A love letter from Josephine to her public was printed in the program. It said she had often sung of her two loves, “My country and Paris,” but now she wanted the audience to understand, “My country, it is Paris, and Paris, it is my country.”

She had cut the United States out of the equation.

But she was still proud of the accomplishments of fellow Americans. When Leslie Gaines, a dancer who was one of The Three Dukes, opened (with Chevalier) at the Casino de Paris, Josephine not only attended the premiere, she climbed up to the Dukes' dressing room. “Here comes this gorgeous lady,” said Gaines (nicknamed Bubber). “And she said, ‘I'm Josephine Baker, I'm at the Folies-Bergère, and you'll never know how you thrilled me.'

“We're looking at her, we don't know what to say except, ‘Oh thank you, Miss Baker,' and she says, ‘I want you to come around to the Folies-Bergère.'

“She was so warm and human, and my God, there was nobody in France the people loved more than her. Josephine was the Frenchmen's mistress.”

An unpunctual mistress, who was always late for her own show.
“Sometimes she had a new love or something else on her mind,” says Michel Gyarmathy.

In the second half of
En Super Folies
, she appeared in a number called “The Marvelous Jungle,” seated on a papier-mâché elephant painted jade and gold. Once the applause faded, she got off the elephant and drifted down the stairs. There always had to be a reason to use those stairs. “But one day,” Gyarmathy recalls, “she was so late that she jumped on the elephant in her street clothes. After dismounting, she came down the staircase very dignified, starting to undress, and handing her clothes to chorus kids all the way down. They would run off and bring her costume back to her piece by piece. It was so beautiful I wanted to keep it in the show, have her do it every day.

“Derval said no. ‘Or she will
never
show up on time.' ”

During the run, Mistinguett would sometimes visit Derval's office. “How is the show doing?” she would ask. “How is—I forget her name—that colored girl, my substitute?” Josephine retaliated with innocent sarcasm, always referring publicly to Mistinguett's “long” career and her brave beginnings “back in 1895.”

Josephine was then singing at the top of her form—her records were selling well—and since she never liked to go right home after the show, she agreed to open another club. Jean Merlin, director of Paris's Hôtel Château Frontenac, had made her the offer; the club—called Gerny's Cabaret—was in the basement of the hotel. It had been run by a man named Louis Leplée, who discovered Edith Piaf singing in the street and, moved by the scrawny young girl's voice, hired her. He also changed her name from Edith Gassion to Edith Piaf—“like the Paris sparrow.”

For her opening at Gerny's, Piaf had worn a black dress knitted by her sister, and stared out nervously at the chic audience as Louis Leplée introduced her. “From the street to the cabaret, here is La Môme Piaf.”

The audience didn't know whether to laugh or cry, said Piaf's biographer, Simone Berteaut. “Her poor hair looked like a bad wig, her lipstick so red, her face so white, her hands shaking, the badly made black dress on her small body.”

After she finished her first song, there was a long silence. “It was painful,” Piaf remembered, “it grabbed me by the throat. At that moment, people started to applaud, it was like everything breaking, like rain on a drum. In my corner, I started to cry. . . . I heard the voice of Louis saying, ‘You've got them, La Môme.' ”

But Piaf's world was the streets—pimps, gangsters, soldiers, sailors—and it came to Louis Leplée's door and ended his life. “Leplée was gay, and both he and Edith had the same taste for rough-looking men,” says Jean Merlin's wife, Odette, “and they killed him.”

Gerny's Cabaret closed. But Jean Merlin had started thinking about the tourists who would be coming from all over the world to the Expo, and that's when the club became the latest Chez Joséphine.

Its star was more skittish than ever. “Some nights,” Odette Merlin says, “she would just come and take a look at the room, always very crowded, and if she did not like the people, she would have Jean call Chez O'dett, and ask Piaf to come and sing in her stead. Can you imagine how surprised all those chic people were when Edith showed up with her stained little dress? And when, at the end, she would take off her black beret and go from table to table passing the hat?”

The night the journalist Pierre de Regnier visited, Josephine was on, and he loved it. “Everything is pink, the mirrors, the leather, the glasses, the lighting.” Josephine sang and distributed funny hats. “It amuses the guests. . . . At 4
A.M
. when a few customers start to leave . . . you can find Josephine doing washing in her dressing room.”

“She would wash Jacques Constant's dirty laundry, his socks, underwear, shirts, in the sink of her bathroom at Chez Joséphine,” says Manouche (a beauty who became the mistress of Paul Carbone, the Al Capone of France, and bore him a son).

A successful stage director, Jacques Constant was, according to Manouche, “a Don Juan with a nice tail. He had slept with our Josephine Nationale, as we called her, and she was in love with him. When she was doing his laundry, she was a very big star, but she never fully understood that. At the same time, she was flirting with Jean Lion, the good-looking, blond, blue-eyed one that she would marry later on. Josephine loved to do
partouzes
, orgies.”

I've thought a lot about Josephine and her sexual conquests. Sleep with me, show me you accept me, and after that, maybe we can be friends. She used her body as a weapon against the world because it was the only thing she trusted, it had got her where she was. But scrub the makeup off the mythical Josephine of the stage, daring, modern, free, the one feminists claim as their own, and underneath, you find the little girl from St. Louis who had so much to prove. They can say what they like about her voracious carnal appetites; I think the primary object of the game was power.

She played a different—nonsexual—power game with poor Paul Derval, and he always lost. Once, she canceled a Sunday matinee, using illness as an excuse. “She was with me in her apartment at avenue Bugeaud,” says Maurice Bataille. “That apartment she kept for herself.” Like her first hotel room in Montmartre, the ceiling was mirrored; so were the walls. “That Sunday,” Maurice told me, half embarrassed, half amazed, “we had sex nine times.”

A week later, Josephine again failed to show up at the theater. She phoned Derval to say she was in the country, had shot a fox, and would send the fur to Madame Derval. “I hope she'll like it.” She also said she would return in two days. For another five thousand francs.

“She came back,” Michel Gyarmathy said, “with her ménagerie of monkeys, goats, dogs, and said, ‘On top of all this, I have a zebra.' We were relieved to see she'd had him flattened before bringing him into her dressing room.”

Made into rugs, or living and breathing, she adored animals “the way humans adore them,” says Gyarmathy, “making them prisoners of our caresses.

“One night, we couldn't find the most malicious of her monkeys. As the curtain rose, Josephine, all in feathers, walked out onto the apron of the stage to explain to the theatergoers that the show could not start until we had found her baby ouistiti. Then we saw the orchestra fall to their knees, searching under their seats, calling
‘Petit, petit, petit.'
It looked like a gathering of Muslims at prayer in the mosque. When at last the darling was found, hanging onto the neck of a terrified lady in the audience, the revue began in a thunderous atmosphere.”

The company didn't have to put up with Josephine's animals for long; during one of her disappearances, she had signed a contract to appear in London in December.

Derval couldn't believe his ears. “My dear Josephine, you have no right to leave me, I have a contract, you owe me two more months of work—to be exact, nine weeks.”

She was the injured one. Did he want her to break her word to the people in London? He gave up.

Jean Lion, the flame with whom Maurice Bataille was then sharing her, rode horses, flew planes, hunted. But he was not, as reports had it, a millionaire. His company, begun in 1935, consisted of three partners: Maurice Sachou, Albert Ribac, and himself. They were sugar brokers.

“We were the three of us childhood friends,” Albert Ribac says. “We
each put in five thousand francs to begin the business, and we made good money. We had a plane, we had American cars, but that's all. Jean was not a rich industrialist. We met Josephine at her cabaret in the Hôtel Château Frontenac, Josephine and Jean liked each other, and it flattered Jean.

“One day, the three of us partners were in our office on avenue Matignon, and Jean said, ‘What would you say if I married Josephine Baker?' ‘You would be a fool,' we said. ‘What's the need? You already sleep with her.'

“But Jean had political ambitions, and he thought Josephine's popularity could help him.”

On November 30, 1937, they were married. Only a week before, Josephine had spent the night with Maurice Bataille, and in the morning, he confronted her. “I've heard you are going to marry Jean, is it true?” She laughed. “Oh no, that's gossip for the journalists.”

She had dissembled as well with André Rivollet. He and his mother had spent many hours “as a family” at Beau Chêne, where “poplars, privets, spindle-trees shadowed white statues. . . . I can see Josephine running to her bedroom. She hummed from her balcony, and one day roses landed at my feet. They smelled of musk, cedar, and ambergris. She had sprayed them with Oriental scents! Josephine caressed my mother, signed her letters, ‘Your black daughter.'

“One day a friend said, ‘Congratulations, I heard of your forthcoming marriage. At a cocktail party yesterday, Josephine Baker announced, “I marry Rivollet.” ' I thought he was kidding me. A few days later, my mother asked me to take her to the Folies for the first time in her life. During intermission, we went to Josephine's dressing room. Josephine was peeling off her false eyelashes, and she invited my mother to sit. A bell sounded. Time to change costumes. I moved discreetly into the corridor. My mother stayed in the dressing room, making small talk.

“I'm a few steps away from the stage, naked women brushing past me with fragrant thighs. Suddenly Josephine appeared beside me, a goddess with huge eyes, tiara, gold nipples. ‘Wait!' she said. ‘I am going to ask your mother for your hand right now.'

“ ‘Look, Joe,' I said, ‘you'll miss your entrance, we'll talk later.' I tried to break free, but she held me with her gold nails until the stage manager pulled her away. . . . The discipline of the music hall put a stop to her attack.

“Where had that proposal come from? I had the explanation a few
weeks later. An anonymous phone call, a woman's voice saying, ‘Josephine Baker gets married tomorrow!' And the voice adding that I should use my influence to stop the madness, saying the future groom's only virtue was his good looks.

“I was puzzled, and ran to the Folies that evening.”

Rivollet asked Josephine about the rumor, and she denied it. “She pulls her kimono around her body . . . tears fill her eyes. ‘You know all about my life, how could you believe . . . if I were to marry anyone, it would be you.' ”

The next day, at lunch in Neuilly, he heard the news from Jean Prouvost, the owner of
Paris-Soir
. “Josephine Baker got married!”

“I was hurt in my pride,” Rivollet admitted, but gave himself reasons for Josephine's action. “She had searched high and low for a white husband. Too many potential lovers, not one potential husband. Eventually I realized that she believed she would be legitimized if she married a white man.”

On their wedding day, Josephine and Lion arrived in his village of Crèvecoeur-le-Grand to traditional sounds of greeting—hunters firing shotguns, percussion caps being thrown under the feet of horses and cows and geese, not to mention the more modern sounds of photographers' shutters clicking and reporters yelling out questions.

Jean Lion's parents were Jewish, they were bourgeois, they had not harbored dreams of their beloved son's marrying a black woman, but they were dutifully present for the ceremony, and the entire population of the village cheered the couple as they made their way into the city hall.

He was twenty-seven, she was thirty-one; Paul Derval and Georges Lion (Jean's brother) were the principal witnesses. On the wedding license, Josephine gave her parents' names as Arthur Baker and Carrie McDonald. The mayor of the village, Benjamin Schmidt, pronounced himself delighted by the goings-on. “Heretofore, the prominence of our village has been confined to a fifteenth-century château and our famous black chicken hatcheries,” he said. “Hereafter, it will be known as the village La Belle Baker chose for her wedding.”