Josephine Baker (49 page)

Sometimes, en route from one concert to another, she made it back to Algiers for a day or two. During one of these breathers, she fell in love with the infant son of Odette and Jean Merlin. Holding him, Josephine wept, then marched off to a lawyer's office, where she named mother and child the beneficiaries of her will.

It made Odette uncomfortable. “In time of war, you never knew what might happen, and I barely knew Josephine, certainly not well enough to be her beneficiary.”

Back on the road in Oran, Jacques Abtey says, “Josephine had a good black orchestra backing her up, and at the end of every show, she would sing three anthems, the ‘Marseillaise,' ‘God Save the Queen,' and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,' in which she would be joined by the audience.

“This one night, German planes flew over and started shooting. There was a crackling and sputtering, and the theater—it was just a stage set up outside—was plunged into darkness. Josephine used the unexpected intermission to help herself to the supper the American army had
set out in a tent. The sky was lighted by fire, everyone flat on the ground, and finally, things became so violent she was obliged to throw herself down like everyone else.”

Later, thinking about it, she laughed. “Me, belly down, among soldiers from Texas, Missouri, and Ohio in my 1900 Paris dress, must have been an irresistibly funny sight. Mostly because I kept on eating my ice cream.”

A week later, in Marrakesh, Josephine, Moulay Larbi, and Mohamed were dinner guests at the American consulate, and Josephine was given the seat of honor, at the right hand of Robert Murphy, President Roosevelt's official envoy. Subsequently, Mohamed decided to give a party in his palace to promote racial harmony. There would be French, English, and American intelligence officers, and Donald Wyatt was asked if he could produce some army brass who were black.

“It seemed,” Wyatt said, “that Mohamed had some misgivings about an affair where he and the Berber musicians and dancers would be the only persons of color. I had about a week to get together this black contingent, which was no small feat, as black officers were scarce as hens' teeth in Casablanca. In the end, there were five of us, including Sidney Williams, the Liberty Club director, and Ollie Stewart, a newspaper correspondent.”

Jacques remembers that the party included many diplomats, Donald remembers something worse. “Drinks were served by barmen from the Mamounia Hôtel, and by the time we sat down for dinner, a couple of the younger American officers were a bit tipsy. Suddenly one of them said, ‘I never sat at a table with niggers before.'

“Mohamed jumped up and seemed about to eject the man, but Josephine took him aside, begging him to be diplomatic. Later on, Mohamed got even. When the dancing girls came out, he handed each of them over to a black man, and finally the six of us, including Mohamed, were sandwiched between the girls, snaking round the fountain in a conga line in the center of the room, while the white officers stood looking on. The slight to them was obvious, and Josephine thought it was the cleverest thing she had ever witnessed.”

On May 30, General de Gaulle arrived in Algiers, and in June, Josephine asked French officials if they would send her to Tunisia, where eleven thousand soldiers had been reported killed and five thousand wounded. Word came from headquarters: “They don't need entertainment.”

Stung by the rebuff of her adopted country, she accepted an invitation from the British. “I was asked to secure her services for the British army, that's how I got to know her,” said Harry Hurford-Janes. “I was a second lieutenant, and I traveled throughout North Africa with her. She had been insulted by some British South Africans who were very anti-color, and she said unless I could go with her to keep those people in their place, she wouldn't give any more performances. I found that very attractive.”

In three weeks, they covered fifteen thousand kilometers (nine thousand miles), ranging across Tunis, Lybia, Egypt, and Josephine was moved by her encounters with the men. “They did not know that the Sicilian landing was to come so soon,” she said. “I knew it. And to see them full of enthusiasm, when so many were already marked by the sign of death . . .”

Beirut, Damascus, Cairo. She was working with Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, and Noël Coward. (“She is doing a wonderful job for the troops,” Coward wrote in his diary, “and refuses to appear anywhere where admission is charged or where civilians are present.”) All went well until she clashed in a Cairo nightclub with Egypt's King Farouk. The director of the club came to the table where Josephine sat with her date, an Englishman, and said His Majesty would like her to sing. Josephine declined. Farouk sent another minion: “It is an order, you do not refuse a king.”

Josephine got up to dance with the Englishman. The king ordered the orchestra to stop playing. The music was finished, Josephine was not. “His Majesty should have understood,” she said sweetly, “that if I broke rules, it was only to be happy.”

A few days later, in the name of Franco-Egyptian friendship, she participated in a royal evening. Still, she had faced down a king. He was fat, but she was tough.

It was not only Farouk with whom Josephine locked horns in Cairo; she and Jacques Abtey also fought. “I had told her,” he says, “if she had an adventure with anyone else, she couldn't work with me anymore. Because a woman talks when she has her head on a pillow. But she had an affair with this English guy, I could smell it.” (Despite the fact that they were allies, the French, the English, and the Americans all spied on each other.)

Jacques describes Josephine's Englishman as tall, handsome, and attached to the British embassy. “We were staying at Shepheard's Hotel,
and she didn't want me to come to her room, she said ‘I have a headache.' I went and knocked at the door. She opened it a crack—‘I don't want to see you!'—and closed the door on my nose. I put my foot in, pushed past her, and she said, ‘You get out!'

“The tall guy was standing next to her. She repeated, ‘Get out!' I hit her. Pom! She fell on the floor. I said to the guy, ‘You can come here too if you're interested.' He didn't move. I would not let a woman be treated that way in front of me. He left, and now Josephine was angry he had not come to her defense. She sulked for three days, but she never saw the guy again.”

She sang in Tripoli, Tobruk, Alexandria. On July 14 (four days after the Allies invaded Sicily) Algiers, now the capital of wartime France, celebrated Bastille Day for the first time since 1939.

After reviewing a military and civilian parade, General de Gaulle addressed the crowd. “For one thousand five hundred years, we have been France, and for one thousand five hundred years, the fatherland has stayed alive in her pain and in her glory. The present trial is not over, but now, from far away, the worst drama of our history is drawing to a close.”

Friday, August 13, there was a great gala at L'Opéra d'Alger. “Everyone knew de Gaulle would attend, and Giraud too,” said Raymond Boucher, then an officer in the French navy. “It promised tension. Many artists would be present, some who had escaped occupied France. Josephine Baker was expected, and it was the first I had heard about her since the reports of her death. I was part of General de Gaulle's guard, and it was a thunderous coup for us to have Josephine Baker to draw the people.

“Sometime during the show, a list of French artists who were considered collaborators was read aloud. I remember the names of Chevalier and Danielle Darrieux being disparaged, and it made me sad about Danielle, I have to confess I was a little bit in love with her. You could feel hatred in the theater, but when Josephine appeared, everybody stood up, people were crying; she was a symbol.

“The high-ranking Americans supported Giraud, but when they saw Josephine on the side of de Gaulle, she authenticated, a little bit, the Free French.

“Giraud did not show up that night.”

Five hours before the performance, Jacques Abtey says, “Josephine
got the idea to have a great tricolor flag falling from the ceiling of the Opéra, with an immense cross of Lorraine sewn on it. Odette Merlin helped her find fabric, and Josephine took it to the mother superior of a convent, who mobilized the nuns to sew the flag.”

She made her first entrance dressed in a long white gown, sang “J'ai Deux Amours,” and halfway through strangled on the words. “I can't,” she said, pointing toward the box where de Gaulle was seated. “
He
is there.”

Soon, she was there too. During the intermission, she was invited to join the general. “He introduced me to Madame de Gaulle,” she wrote later. “He seated me next to her, in his own seat. I can still see Madame de Gaulle . . . discreet and simple, in her grey lisle stockings, her little flat shoes. She called me, so kindly, ‘Nasty little Gaulliste.' General de Gaulle is a great, tall man. . . . I like when you have to raise your head to look at a man. . . .”

“He gave her,” says Jacques Abtey, “a tiny cross of Lorraine, gold, very beautiful, designed by Cartier.” He laughs, because this story brings back another memory. “When Josephine and I first worked together, she gave me a military I.D. bracelet in pure silver, with my name on it. Misspelled. Inside, she'd had engraved
PFQA: Plus fort que l'amour
. Stronger than love. I told her, ‘Listen, you cannot want me to wear that with my name on it, I'm a spy.' She took it back and said she would have Cartier erase the name. I never saw it again.”

When the “Marseillaise” was played, ending the evening, the huge flag and its red cross of Lorraine was unfurled; it fell eighteen feet, while the audience screamed.

It took the United States and Britain until August 24 to recognize the French Committee for National Liberation, and five days later, General de Gaulle was finally acknowledged by the British, the Americans, and the Russians as “Chief of the Resistance.”

The rest of the year, Josephine was back on the road, driving herself relentlessly for the troops. “I wanted them to take away a vision of Paris, a breath of France.” With her on this tour went Jacques, Fred Rey, and Mohamed, who was recruited because his name could open doors in the Arab world. The four traveled the Middle East in two jeeps.

Rey recalled driving along while Josephine, in her army overcoat and helmet, bent over her knitting. “The blazing heat of day, the cold nights, sand fleas . . . the desert strewn with the twisted remains of tanks . . . In
that cruel landscape we took turns keeping watch at night to ward off the scavengers who preyed on corpses and would have preyed on us as well.”

In Jerusalem, the troupe checked into the King David Hotel. Josephine was thrilled by the city. “Here you breathe God's presence,” she said. She went to the Wailing Wall, and keened along with the old men. “Before leaving Judea,” she said, “the last thing I saw was the house of Mary Magdalene, the great sinner.”

“We were vagabonds of the road in the service of France,” Jacques says, and indeed, Josephine not only entertained, she preached the word of de Gaulle. At the Grand Hotel in Beirut, she auctioned off her gold cross of Lorraine and raised three hundred thousand francs for the Resistance.

But when the tour was done, Josephine, back in Algiers, found she was in trouble. She had gone from pillar to army post reproaching ambassadors and generals who—she felt—were not ardent enough in their support of de Gaulle, warning them if they weren't sensitive to the aspirations of native populations, France would lose its influence.

Her outspokenness—“Sometimes we struck, we never retreated,” says Jacques—had resulted in complaints to the Foreign Ministry that she was playing politics instead of sticking to show business. (Truthfully, she didn't see much difference, both were dog-eat-dog enterprises.)

Even some Free French thought she did their cause more harm than good. They called her and Jacques adventurers and their “intelligence mission in the Middle East” ridiculous. “Are you really arrogant enough to think you can do better than the professionals we have in those places?”

Taken aback, Josephine still had no regrets. “I have had several close calls in enemy air raids,” she told a correspondent for an American newspaper, “and sometimes I'm bone tired, sometimes I don't feel well, but whenever I'm tempted to chuck it all and hie myself off to some quiet nook, I remember France, my race and my resolve and I gain fresh strength to carry on.”

She said this resolve had been born on the day she read how the Germans were welcoming all visitors to Paris “with the exception of Jews and dark-skinned people.” After that, she would sometimes wake from a dream that “crowds of Germans and other prejudiced nationalities were breaking down my door to grab me. . . . When soldiers applaud
me, I like to believe they will never acquire a hatred for colored people because of the cheer I have brought them. I may be foolish, but it's the way I feel.”

While she was singing, Paul Poiret was dying. The man who had changed the history of fashion, interior design, theatrical costuming, who had been one of Josephine's first French friends, was now old, poor, largely forgotten, yet his spirit still blazed.

“The winter of 1943–4 in wartime Paris was dire,” wrote Palmer White. “But Poiret had work to do. . . . Rain, snow, sleet or shine, he would be painting outside in the city he loved, grey, hushed and invaded though it might be. He did not see the Nazi flags, the soldiers of the Occupation, and the German signs in the car-less streets.”

Ankles swollen, suffering from Parkinson's disease, his heart failed; he gave up the struggle on April 28. The funeral took place May 1. Once, Palmer White said, “fifty articles would have been written about him, in May 1944 only two appeared. In
Beaux-Arts
the reporter wrote: ‘On that May morning, in the sun-drenched, ravaged capital, I would have liked to see, weeping over his grave, one beautiful young woman, a passerby, a Parisienne.' ”