Josephine Baker (41 page)

It was all of a piece with the rest of Josephine's life. Being a French citizen, and black, she could have ended in a concentration camp but for having met Jacques Abtey. It was like the opening night of the road company of
Shuffle Along
, when the music stopped, and she jumped out of the line and did her little dance and got the applause. Now the war
has brought the world to a stop, and here she is jumping out onto another stage.

While waiting for orders, Josephine, Abtey, Bayonne, and Boue went boating, hunting, fishing, and en route to the river or the forest, they would pass Monsieur Malaury bent over his anvil. Every time he brought his hammer down, he snarled,
“Un Boche!”

Living in the country, even in wartime, Abtey said, Josephine achieved a kind of tranquillity she had not known before. “I think it brought her closer to real things . . . away from the factitious life of the theater and the music hall. . . . She told me she did not like her profession, that dog-eat-dog world. . . .” (What had happened to “the stage is my God, the theater my life”? The same thing that always happened with Josephine: Whatever role she was thrust into, she acted it with brio.)

In the evenings, the friends sat, their hands on a three-legged table, attempting to communicate with the spirit world. “Josephine did not believe in it,” Jacques says. “When one of us would ask, ‘Spirit, are you here?' she would burst into laughter, and we would say, ‘If you won't be quiet, we'll throw you out.' ”

That October, with German bombs falling all around London, Winston Churchill spoke to the people of France—
“C'est moi
, Churchill,
qui parle!”
—vowing that England would never give up. And he spoke of a morning that was sure to come. “Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn.
Vive la France
.”

It was as inspiring as the speeches broadcast by General de Gaulle, speeches the Germans tried to jam. “We surrounded the radio,” Abtey says, “and listened to that voice . . . calling us to arms in the name of a Free France, an immortal France. The voice warmed us in the darkness.”

In Paris, there were those who believed the darkness had been exaggerated. Many who had fled the city returned. German soldiers on leave walked the boulevards with their French girlfriends; you could smell the chestnut trees instead of gas fumes, because there were so few cars on the streets—and those few belonged to German officials.

Some Parisians who had connections, influence, gold bars buried in their gardens, sat in cafés sipping champagne with German officers. Jean Cocteau drank his Dom Pérignon at Maxim's, right next to the table
that had been Josephine's favorite, and, lifting his glass, offered a mocking toast:
“Vive la paix honteuse!”
(“Long live the shameful peace!”)

By August 1940, the Nazis had banned Negroes and Jews from the French theater—“No longer does Josephine Baker, American singer and dancer, headline Paris cabaret revues,” said an AP press release—and the Vichy government was said to be planning a “purge” of French movies and radio. Sacha Guitry had just completed a revival of his play
Pasteur;
he was the only first-rate French actor to have appeared since the German occupation. Soon, however, he would be followed by hundreds of his fellows.

“Among the French film performers wholly free of the collaborationist taint,” wrote Roger Peyrefitte, “there seemed to be only two genuine stars: Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan, both of whom had earlier escaped to Hollywood. . . .”

Chevalier was singing over German-controlled Radio-Paris (the main radio medium for Nazi propaganda), and Mistinguett was back at the Casino de Paris; at every curtain call she begged the audience to send food and coal around to her house, and her concierge was almost buried under the avalanche of contributions.

When Paul Derval, who had closed the Folies-Bergère and left Paris in the exodus, decided to come back, he found a sign nailed to the theater door. Reading it, he called out a warning to Michel Gyarmathy, whom he'd left in the car: “Michel, don't come!” But it was too late. Gyarmathy was standing right behind him. The sign said,
ACCESS FORBIDDEN TO DOGS AND JEWS
, and Gyarmathy made a joke. “Don't worry for me, boss, I'm not a nude dancer. My religion will not jump out and hit the Germans in the eye.” But he was shocked, he admitted later. “I turned to stone.” (In his book,
The Good Frenchman
, Edward Behr wrote, “Jacques Copeau, the famous theater director and chief administrator of the Comédie Française, insisted that the male
sociétaires
display the proof of their noncircumcision to him.”)

I think of Mildred Hudgins, of Atlantic City, and the signs on the fancy hotels there:
NO DOGS, NO JEWS
. And Mildred saying, “They didn't have to put
NO NIGGERS
, because we knew it.”

One day in October, a courier came to Les Milandes from Captain Paillole (who was in Vichy reconstructing the Deuxième Bureau right under the noses of the Germans). Paillole had agreed that, under the pretext of embarking on a South American tour, Josephine and Abtey, posing as her
maître de ballet
, would get to England by way of Lisbon.

But first, Josephine and Jacques were to come to Vichy. There, Paillole and his colleagues gave a dinner to thank Josephine for her previous services in the cause of freedom, and Jacques got his new fake passport. He became Jacques-Francois Hébert, born 1899. (No man under forty was permitted to leave France, and Jacques was thirty-five.)

Then Paillole gave Abtey and Josephine papers and pictures—“all the information that had been gathered concerning the German army in France.” The photographs, Abtey says, were pinned under Josephine's dress, and as for the written material, “Using invisible ink, we transcribed all fifty-two pieces of information onto Josephine's sheet music.”

“You look good together,” Paillole said. “Good luck.”

“To get to Lisbon,” Abtey says, “we would have to cross Spain. To cross Spain, you had to have a transit visa. Josephine convinced the Spanish consul in Toulouse to grant me one, alleging that she could not leave for Brazil without her ballet master. (Prior to this, she had also pried visas for me from the consuls of Brazil and Portugal.)

“To make myself look older, I sported spectacles and a heavy mustache. Josephine was enveloped in an immense fur coat, her face grave, but shining, as we got on the train that would take us through the Pyrénées. It was November 23, 1940.

“At the Spanish frontier, nobody paid any attention to me . . . the Spanish police and the German plainclothesmen were infinitely more interested in the star Josephine Baker than in the shabby little man carrying her suitcase.

“In Madrid, we were lucky enough to get the last two seats in a plane leaving for Lisbon. When we were alone on the plane, Josephine laughed. ‘You see what a good cover I am?' Then she slept, disappearing into her fur.

“Let me try to explain the importance of what she had just done. If the Spanish or German authorities had discovered my true identity and arrested me, if they had found the information on the music sheets, they would have realized that the French Secret Service had reorganized covertly and was working against them, that we were not respecting the terms of the armistice, and as to the fate that would have been meted out to Josephine and myself, I would rather not dwell on it.

“This woman had undertaken, of her own volition, to cover me to the very end, closing the door behind her and binding her fate to mine. I call that courage.

“Luck was still with us in Lisbon, for the major who had been head
of British Intelligence in Paris opened to us the doors of his headquarters in Portugal.”

Portugal being neutral territory, Lisbon was full of life, light, spies. It was a set for a James Bond movie—beautiful women, war profiteers, people offering jewels, paintings, gold, to get berths on ships going to America. In the streets, Abtey recognized German agents, but they didn't exchange words. At the Hotel Aviz, Josephine was mobbed by journalists (she charmed them) and within one week, there was word that London was pleased with the information Abtey had sent, but that he and Josephine were not to come to England. He was to stay in Portugal awaiting further orders, Josephine was to return to France.

She flew to Marseille, a city in the Free Zone, on December 1. Paillole was waiting to debrief her. Also, quite by accident, she met Frédéric Rey, and together, they decided to put on a revival of
La Créole
at the Opéra.

The Opéra management was blissful, and in the space of two weeks, she and Rey mounted a production.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, Jacques Abtey requested of his British contact that he and Josephine not be considered spies, but members of the Free French forces. Josephine didn't want to be paid, Jacques would accept reimbursement for his travel expenses. “One month later,” he says, “the British put me in charge of setting up—with Josephine—a permanent liaison and transmission center in Casablanca.” (In Casablanca, they would receive information from Paillole, and periodically, Abtey would take that information by boat to Portugal, whence it would be forwarded to London.)

It was Christmas Eve, opening night of
La Créole
, when Jacques rejoined Josephine in Marseille. On the fifteenth of January, 1941, Paillole told them they must leave sooner than they'd expected. “I believe the Germans are going to take over the Free Zone, only the bad weather conditions have stopped them.” (Actually, his belief was unfounded; it would be many months before the Germans finally took over all of France.) In any case, a boat was leaving for Algeria in two days. “It may be the last one. I don't want you to be stuck here.”

Abtey canceled Josephine's last two shows. “The director of the Opéra asked me for a doctor's certificate. . . . The doctor said Josephine had a shadow on her lungs, and should leave this cold country as soon as possible.

“But Josephine did not want to go without her animals. She sent our
associate, Bayonne, to Les Milandes to get them. At a time when it was almost impossible to move around a defeated France!”

Bayonne came back with a crowd. “Bonzo, a Great Dane,” Jacques said. “And Glug Glug, a malicious female monkey, Mica, a suave lion-monkey, Gugusse, a tiny monkey, nasty as the plague, and Curler and Question Mark, two white mice. As soon as she freed them from their cages, it was madness in the room, Josephine laughing, trying to catch one or another. We finally left Marseille on the boat, the
Governor General Guyedon
.”

“Poor darlings,” Josephine said, surrounded by her chattering, squeaking, barking loved ones. “For them, too, it is a great adventure.
Allez
, we all go together.”

“She moved,” observed André Rivollet, “from her Creole yelling to singing the ‘Marseillaise,' then bravely to the songs of the Resistance.”

The didn't travel light, like a refugee with two emeralds sewn in her underwear; twenty-eight pieces of luggage went with Josephine to North Africa.

The crossing was a misery, the Mediterranean wild and choppy, the animals panicked as they ran between wardrobe trunks waltzing around the cabin.

And in Algiers, more aggravation. A policeman armed with a subpoena met the boat. The Marseille Opéra was suing Josephine for having “scandalously abandoned
La Créole
.”

She couldn't believe it—“I would have to pay 400,000 francs in damages before I could enter Morocco!”—but had to stay behind while Jacques went on to Casablanca.

Happily, she discovered the Merlins were in Algiers. Jean was running the St. George Hotel (which would become General Eisenhower's headquarters after the Americans landed), and Odette was trying to
become pregnant. Wanting a second—or fiftieth—opinion about whether or not she could conceive a child, Josephine visited Odette's gynecologist. As usual, the answer was no.

By the time she reached Casablanca, on January 28, there was more bad news. The consulate of Portugal would give Josephine Baker a visa, but refused one to her ballet master.

Abtey and Josephine wondered if his cover had been blown. “We decided,” she said, “that I would have to travel to Lisbon alone. Taking my sheet music, of course.” A month later, she boarded a train from Casablanca to Tangier, first stop of her journey. Tangier was neutral, an international zone, filled with spies and money, and there Josephine spent a few days with Abderahman Menebhi.

During earlier times in North Africa—
Princesse Tam-Tam
had been shot in Tunisia and Tangier, and she had given concerts everywhere—she had made many highborn friends, most of them related by blood or marriage to Mohammed V, sultan of French Morocco. Abderahman Menebhi was one of these. And in his palace on a hill overlooking the sea, she found herself reunited with some of the others, including Ahmed Ben Bachir, court chamberlain to the caliph of Spanish Morocco.