Josephine Baker (48 page)

Bal à Tout Coeur, Cannes, 1973. At far left, that's me in mod dress, Rama (Margaret's daughter), a beaming mother, Marianne, Luis, and Janot.
(Courtesy
Hörzu
)

I can almost hear her say once again, “Il faut, il faut!” “One must always do better!”
(Ludwig Binder)

Josephine with her benefactors, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco.
(Robert de Hoe, courtesy Photo Archive of S.A.S., the Prince of Monaco)

Escorting “Maman” backstage at the Pimm's Club, my discotheque in Berlin, 1970.
(Erika Rabau)

Au revoir, but not adieu! At La Madeleine, France mourns—but Josephine is still the Queen of Paris.
(Above: Pellepam—SIPA Press; right: UPI)

The first time Josephine read a report of her own death, she was more than five thousand miles from St. Louis, lying on a chaise among the flowering trees that perfumed the roof of Mohamed Menebhi's palace. It made her laugh. In an interview for
The Afro-American
, she told Ollie Stewart, “There has been a slight error, I'm much too busy to die.” She said this, he reported, with “a gay smile and a French accent . . . her face uplifted toward the eternal snows of the nearby Atlas peaks.” She also asked Stewart to help her find Carrie, through his newspaper. She said she hadn't been able to reach her since the outbreak of the war. “I cannot locate my mother. I know she still lives in St. Louis, but where?”

(Josephine hadn't been in touch with Richard, either, but then, he himself had been gone from St. Louis. “My father was drafted into the U.S. Navy,” his son Artie says. “He went to Great Lakes, Illinois, and I hate to say it, but with six kids in the family, that was the best thing
that happened to us, when the money started coming in. The war did quite a lot for black people.”)

Two weeks after Josephine talked to Ollie Stewart, her appeal was answered; his newspaper ran the headline
AFRO FINDS JO BAKER'S MOTHER
. It hadn't been all that hard. “Mrs. Carrie Hudson-Martin” [
sic
], said the story, was “living at 4324 Garfield Avenue rear, this city.”

All was well, and Josephine spent the last weeks of her convalescence not only enjoying the luxuries provided by Mohamed, but beguiling his three daughters.

“I was Josephine's favorite,” says Hagdousch, who was then sixteen years old. “I loved her like a big sister. She had her own quarters, and my father invited her every day to his table. She lived in a different world from the other women, my father's wives and concubines.

“She would play with the children of the house, help feed them, put them to bed. Once she wanted to adopt a little child of one of the servants, but she had a relapse of her intestinal problem, and had to be transported to the hospital at two o'clock in the morning. My mother said, ‘Thank God that happened,' and went right away to get the child so Josephine wouldn't take her.

“In the beginning, she used to take us with her to visit the
souk
, but afterwards, she liked to go by herself.”

At the market of Djemaa el Fna, Josephine, dressed Moroccan-style, except for a face veil, wandered among snake charmers with their flat-headed cobras, and mingled with crowds listening to storytellers. Vendors hawked snails and oranges, there were baby falcons for sale, and rugs and leather, and everywhere the smells of curry, lemon, mint. She was Cinderella, with a clock that never struck midnight.

In 1990, I visited Fadila Menebhi, the eldest of Mohamed's daughters. She was living with a cot, a lamp, a radio, no flush toilet, in the ruins of what had been Josephine's wing of Mohamed's palace. But Fadila was merry, her eyes that had seen so much of splendor still danced in these dilapidated surroundings. “Tata Joe,” she said, offering a photograph of Josephine covered in white fox and feathers. “We called her Tata—it means Auntie—because she was part of our family.”

In January 1943, the Allied chiefs were holding meetings in a suburb of Casablanca, at the Anfa Hotel, but General de Gaulle was not happy, because Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt wanted him to merge his Free French forces (fighting the Battle of North Africa,
even as the politicians wrangled) with the forces of the Imperial Council, another Resistance group headed by General Henri Giraud.

Roosevelt asked if de Gaulle would be willing to shake Giraud's hand “before the camera” (the photo op is older than we think) and de Gaulle answered, “I shall do that for you.” It was the only time during the entire conference that he permitted himself to speak English.

A scant month later, Josephine found herself in the Anfa Hotel. It happened when Sidney Williams, a black American Red Cross official, having heard she was in Marrakesh, phoned and asked for her help. He was in charge of opening a service club—the Liberty Club—for blacks; the army at that time still practiced segregation. (“For me, as for many French and Moroccan men,” said Jacques Abtey, “it was a surprise to find that skin color continued to be so important in the country of freedom and equality. We had thought racial prejudice existed only on the other side of the Siegfried line.” President Harry Truman was to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.)

Josephine entertained at the opening of the Liberty Club. “She was sick,” said Donald Wyatt, an associate of Sidney Williams, “but she came.” Black himself, Major Wyatt met Josephine for the first time that night.

It was twenty years since she had performed for an all-black audience. Seeing those boys out front, time fell away, she was in Philadelphia at the Standard. Makeup could not disguise the gauntness of her face, her skinny legs shook under her long dress, but when she sang, the response of the black soldiers was so wild that she cried.

After her performances at the Liberty Club, General Mark Clark invited her to a reception at the Anfa Hotel. Flanked by Mohamed Menebhi and Moulay Larbi, she made a grand entrance into a room filled with top brass, American and English, including generals Patton, Anderson, Alexander, and Cunningham. “That night Josephine was reborn to life,” Jacques Abtey said. “Her life as a star.” But the day's activities took their toll; on being introduced to General Patton, she fainted in his arms.

Next evening, having been invited by Mohamed, Donald Wyatt came to dinner at the Menebhi palace. He remembers every detail of his first Moroccan meal. The old female servant bringing basin, soap, and water to guests seated on pillows around a low table, the women of the household gathered on the balcony, hidden by shadows, “looking down
on us. Mohamed explained to me that in this society, women's purpose was to serve and give men pleasure and children. But Josephine did not come under these restrictions.”

Wyatt was fascinated by his host. “Mohamed's father had served as ambassador to the Court of St. James, Mohamed's mother was a black concubine. Mohamed was darker than Josephine or I, witty and well-educated; I think he put himself in debt to win Josephine's affections, building a costly addition to his palace for her.”

In time, Donald Wyatt, Jacques Abtey, and Mohamed Menebhi became such fast friends that they referred to themselves as the Three Musketeers, and, during the same period, Donald forged a brother-sister connection with Josephine.

“Having seen the almost miraculous impact she'd made on the audience,” he says, “it occurred to me she might be willing to help in my work with black soldiers. She now believed she had been allowed to continue to live because she was destined to be the instrument of change in international affairs. Her doctor still wanted her to take it easy, but even if she didn't sing, I realized she would be wonderful just talking to groups of men. A lot of the black troops were angry because they'd been trained to fight and then when they got to Casablanca, they'd been sent to unload ships along with the Moroccan stevedores.

“She agreed to go with me. VD was rampant in our camps, the medics lectured on the risk of syphilis if the soldiers kept patronizing prostitutes, the chaplains preached abstinence, but it took Josephine to get through to the men. ‘I want you to look at me,' she said, ‘as your mother, your sister, your sweetheart. I'm your family. You are going around exposing yourselves to these diseased girls and you can't miss getting sick. As for getting mad because of race prejudice, wait till the war is over. I will come back to the States and join in the fight to break down segregation, but let's win the war first.'

“They cheered. Even Josephine wasn't enough of a hypnotist to keep them celibate for the duration of their stay in Morocco, but the VD rate did go down.”

Meeting those boys from home was a shock to Josephine. “In order to further her own ambitions, she had pushed out of her mind the lot of black people,” Donald says. “Now she was being very dramatic—‘My people, oh! my people, I have abandoned them!' ”

She, who had been accused by so many blacks of turning her back on
them, was suddenly reborn. A life of service beckoned, Georges Guignery's prediction that she would wind up broke seemed to charm her. “This time, I'm really on the straw,” she said. “But isn't it magnificent?”

To be sure, her idea of destitution included life in a palace, forty-eight trunks full of clothes (twenty-eight had grown to forty-eight because every time she came back from Spain or Portugal or Les Milandes, more clothes came with her), and any number of precious stones stashed with Ahmed Ben Bashir in Spanish Morocco. (“She entrusted my father with a significant amount of high-quality jewelry,” says Bachir Ben Bachir, “including a big collection of gold and diamond men's pocket watches on gold chains. She was shrewd enough to know it was better to have it on neutral ground during the war.”)

At Mohamed's palace, old theatrical costumes were taken out of garment bags and remade; it wasn't just that Josephine was thinner, but moths had eaten holes in some of her finery. By May, she began to tour American military camps with Fred Rey. Fred had been interned in Morocco (bounced from the Foreign Legion because he was Austrian-born, and so considered an enemy of France) but Jacques Abtey pulled strings, and Josephine had her dancing partner restored to her. Although now she too appeared to consider him an enemy. “That little bastard,” she said, “he oils his body before we go on, and I slip all over him.”