Josephine Baker (45 page)

In the 1926 Folies-Bergère after emerging from her famous Crystal Ball. She never tired of looking at herself in a mirror.
(Courtesy Shubert Archive)

A rare photo of Josephine flahing. The tigress is in her element, but who is she stalking this time?
(Roger-Viollet)

Parodying the greate Pavlova. She never liked ballerinas on point. “They look like silly little birds . . . dreadful.”
(Studio Piaz)

In 1932 at the Casino de Paris, singing “Si J'Etais Blanche” (“If I Were White”). She hated being black, but she never forgave whites for the racial injustices she had suffered at home.
(Studio Piaz)

Do you have a light? Cross-dressing at the Casino de Paris.
(Studio Piaz)

The “Electric” Fairy: Celebrating the modern convenience of electricity, Casino de Paris, 1930.
(Roger-Viollet)

A 1927 Folies-Bergère pose inscribed to her friend Mildred Hudgins, whom she had first met in Philadelphia in 1921. Not all memories of home were bad.
(Walery-Paris)

In Offenbach's
La Creole
, 1934. Her introduction to the “legitimate” theater. “Now I spoke French,” she claimed, “at the side of strictly French actors.”
(Studio Piaz)

First flying lesson with instructor Demay, 1935.

On her twenty-first birthday, she got her driver's license.

Infectious joie de vivre draws a crowd on the streets of Paris, 1926.

From left to right, Mildred Hudgins, “Count” Pepito, and a friend celebrate with a pensive Josephine at Chez Josephine, her boîte in Montmartre.

On St. Catherine's Day, when unmarried French girls don hats and search for husbands, she played the innocent virgin with designer Paul Poiret and his models.
(Courtesy Christiane Otte)

A blooming Josephine, inscribed to her friend Miki Sawada.
(Courtesy Emi Sawada-Kamiya)

A prickly version of the banana costume in the
Ziegfeld Follies
of 1935. Her return home was less than triumphant.

Josephine and her pet baby pig. She had a lifelong love of animals, from the exotic to the domestic.

The temptress in New York. She loved the photographer, Murray Korman, because he lit her so that she looked white.