Josephine Baker (50 page)

General René Bouscat, commander in chief of the French Air Forces, had invited Josephine to stay with him and his family in Algiers, and though Jean and Odette had offered a suite at the St. George, Josephine knew it was better to live with the big boss who could protect her from her enemies. Like Miki Sawada before her, Bouscat's wife, Blanche, became “my little sister.”

D day arrived in June, and under the aegis of Bouscat, Josephine flew to Corsica to sing in the service of Free France. As her plane approached the coast, its motors died, and the pilot had to land in the sea. Nothing suffered but Josephine's costumes, soaked in salt water.

Josephine and Jacques were surprised to be welcomed to the island by Gianviti, their old friend from the homeless shelter on rue du Chevaleret. He was now director of the Corsican police force, appointed by de Gaulle. (Everybody but Josephine and Jacques seemed to be reaping rewards for their loyalty to Le Grand Charles.) Gianviti showed the visitors two antiaircraft guns named “Josephine” and “J'ai Deux Amours.” They had shot down six German planes.

After June 6, it seemed as if every French person in Algeria had been a fervent Gaullist from the beginning, and all of them were claiming
victory and trying to snag seats on the first plane to Paris. Jacques, who had been gone for a short time, returned to Algiers to find Josephine “absolutely changed. ‘I think I'm going to give up show business,' she said. ‘I'm going to retire to a convent.' ‘Bravo,' I said. She looked at me; she was not amused.”

“For a full week, Josephine went around Algiers dressed as a nun,” says Odette. “She was tired of sickness, travel, performing, and political intrigue. Also, Jacques was no longer the great flame he had been when they arrived in 1941, and she had been forced to accept the fact that she could not bear children.”

“I believe she sincerely thought of entering the order,” Jacques says. “We were sad for her, it showed she was not happy in her skin, but one week was enough. She exchanged her nun's robes for her fatigue uniform; she had been made a sublieutenant, and was very proud.”

On August 25, Paris was liberated, and on October 2, along with a whole unit of air force women, Josephine left Algeria for France on a Liberty ship. She came aboard hiding a new dog in her coat; it was forbidden to take pets with you. The dog's name was Mitraillette (French for machine gun; when it peed, it made a staccato sound,
ra-ta-ta-ra-ta-ta
).

One day on deck, air force officer Catherine Egger, struck by a whiff of some half-remembered fragrance, looked around, and recognized Josephine. “I went to her and asked what perfume she was wearing. ‘Arpège from Lanvin,' she said. We fell into each other's arms; before the war, it had been my perfume too. We were soul sisters.”

Catherine Egger took a picture of her soul sister, and in 1982, after watching a TV tribute to Josephine that I had presented on cable television, she sent me the photograph.

Trembling, I hold the snapshot. Josephine is laughing, and again, I can hear her saying, “You! You always want to know about me, and when I am no longer here, you will discover the truth and write my book.” And I see myself shaking my head. “Ah, Mother, you are crazy.”

If Hitler hadn't cast out blacks along with Jews, might Josephine have stayed on in Paris entertaining the conquerors throughout the occupation?

It's possible, but history doesn't disclose its alternatives, and anyway, some have greatness thrust upon them. She came back a heroine of the Resistance, untainted. Few who had remained behind could claim as much. During the four years she was gone, Pétain's “collaboration with honor” had been seized on by many who were willing to accommodate the Nazis, so long as they could continue their own lives.

On August 17, 1944, German forces were retreating before the Allied armies. “In the rue Lafayette,” wrote a journalist, “. . . monocled generals sped past like shining torpedoes, accompanied by elegantly dressed blondes.”

On the nineteenth, the insurrection had begun. Posters exhorted citizens to revolt, people sang the “Marseillaise,” hidden guns were dug
up, barricades built. To redeem their honor, citizens fought (behind ramparts made of dug-up cobblestones, old cars, sandbags, and trunks of chopped-down chestnut trees) in support of General Philippe Leclerc's Second Free French Armored Division. General Leclerc had also asked for—and got—help from two American battalions of field artillery as he moved through Paris.

After six days, the fighting ended. Germans were coming up out of the subways with their hands in the air, and General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris (who had ignored Hitler's orders to blow up bridges and monuments), signed a cease-fire agreement.

Three months later, François Mauriac wrote that the city's deliverance by the Parisians was “the thing in the world we had least imagined. . . . A too cruel contrast existed between the . . . risks of the small number who led the underground fighting, and the apparent indifference of the man on the street, the tradespeople, the sharks of the black market. . . . The resistance was a deaf struggle, carried on in the darkness where men suffered and died alone. . . .”

A new struggle posed new questions. “What was to be done about the searing shame of it all?” asked David Pryce-Jones in
Paris in the Third Reich
, “. . . about the damage to the nation by its loyal serving of foreign interests and its complicity in genocide as well?”

Through an accident of fate—“I didn't choose this moment, moments always choose me”—Josephine had escaped the violence that accompanied the liberation. And when she returned from North Africa, she was, according to Alain Romans (a fellow worker for de Gaulle), “more French than Louis XVI. I said to her, ‘It was very nice of you to save France for us, Josephine.' ”

Traveling to Paris from Marseille in an old Cadillac, she observed that half the windows of a passing train had been blown away, replaced by wood, and all along the route were bombed-out villages.

I was a tiny child during the war, and I still remember a night when the Germans rode motorcycles around our house while my mother shook and held me and my little sister Marie Jo close to her in her big bed. As I grew up, my love for my mother was mixed with a kind of contempt because I thought she was so passive, so unlike the bold Josephine. It was only after her death that I learned how she had traveled between the occupied and unoccupied zones, smuggling messages for the underground, defiantly wearing a yellow Star of David on her coat, though she wasn't Jewish.

I wonder if she'd ever met Jean Moulin, a legendary leader of the underground who fell into the hands of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon.

Christian Pineau, another Resistance fighter, recalled the day a German officer brought a man from his cell to the prison courtyard. “To my horror, I recognized Moulin. . . . There was a bad bluish wound on his left temple. A light rattle escaped his swollen lips. . . . Barbie gave him a piece of paper to write down the names of other resistants. Weak and bleeding, Moulin took it, and after a few seconds gave it back. . . . On the paper . . . was a caricature of Barbie. Jean Moulin died of torture, but never gave a name.”

Long afterward, in front of the Panthéon, André Malraux, then French minister of culture, paid homage to this hero. “More than twenty years have passed,” he said, “since Jean Moulin became leader of the people of the night. . . . Young people, think of this man, of the poor misshapen face of his last day, of his lips that never talked. That day, his was the face of France.”

In October of 1944, Josephine arrived in Paris. “She stopped traffic,” Buddy Smith told me. Smith, a black American soldier and musician, said there were “a million people up and down the Champs to see her when she came in. It was a glorious day, as big as the day they liberated Paris. She was in a big Daumier, and that car could only crawl about three miles an hour, so many people were out there. She was in the back, with all the flowers—people were throwing these flowers.”

Despite her triumphant return, Josephine's satisfaction at being back in France was mixed with irritation. Le Beau Chêne, though still in good condition, had been occupied first by Germans, and now by Americans, while her apartment on avenue Bugeaud had been allocated to Jean Gabin, who was sharing it with his current lover, Marlene Dietrich. Josephine felt possessive not only about the apartment, but about Gabin, who had played her brother in
Zou Zou
. “When I think that German cow is sleeping in my blue satin sheets!” she raved.

Many stars who had fought a less honorable war than Gabin or Josephine were having to face the consequences of their behavior. Women accused of nothing worse than sleeping with German soldiers—“horizontal collaboration”—had their heads shaved and their foreheads marked with swastikas before they were marched through the streets.

Brought up before a Governmental Commission for the Purge of
Entertainment, the actress Arletty was asked how a great French artist could have had a German lover. “With your talent!” said the judge.

“My talent belongs to France,” said Arletty, “my ass is international.” She received a reprimand.

In the case of Chevalier, he was able to show he had sung only once in Germany, at a prison camp, on condition that ten French prisoners of war be set free. His name was cleared.

Josephine, her own wartime conduct above reproach, had different problems. On Christmas leave, Jacques Abtey arrived in Paris and was informed by the concierge at the Carlton Hotel that Miss Baker had left for the market at 4
A.M
. (Not being able to move the “German cow” out of her apartment, she was billeted at the Carlton, which had been requisitioned by the military.)

“The concierge told me,” Jacques says, “that for the past two days, she'd been buying meat and vegetables. I thought, I'll be damned, has she become a chef? Indeed, I found her at Les Halles, laced tightly into her big blue uniform coat—she had replaced the French air force buttons with English ones, don't ask me why—and she was gesticulating among the butchers.

“ ‘Jacques,' she screamed as soon as she saw me, ‘you came at the right moment,' and she put at least ten bulky packages in my arms. ‘Take these to that gray Citroën.'

“She had gathered two hundred kilos of veal for needy old people, one ton of vegetables, and one ton of coal. The coal she had discovered in the basement of her building on avenue Bugeaud, and taken away under the strong protest of her tenants. ‘You are rich,' she had said to them. ‘You can buy some more on the black market. This coal belongs to me, my super bought it with rent money.' ”

At each stop, Josephine would announce to the recipients of her largesse, “You see, the Free French and General de Gaulle are not forgetting you.”

“What I did not know then,” Jacques says, “is that she had put her jewels in pawn to be able to do all that.”

Though sometimes she got a little of her own back. When Jacques told her he'd been given one hundred thousand francs to establish a mission in Morocco, Josephine seemed pleased. “ ‘For once,' she said, ‘they have been a little bit generous. Listen, would you be kind enough to lend me that money for forty-eight hours?'

“I said of course, but after two or three days, I was going crazy, I
barely knew the colonel who had advanced me the money. Then Josephine said she was not going to return it. ‘I have done enough for France. She can do this much for me.' ”

“With the winding down of the war, and the restoration of Josephine's health,” says Donald Wyatt, “came an overriding ambition to fight her way back to the top.”

“Poor brave girl,” said André Malraux. “She was saying it is easier to make a comeback than to become a star in the first place.”

But her ambition did not make her turn away from the soldiers who loved her. The War Ministry had been pleased to issue an order for Josephine and a troupe of forty to follow the French First Army through the liberated countries, and she was preparing for the adventure. “She came direct to my salon,” Jean Clement reported. “ ‘You have to do my hair,
chéri
.' ”

Clement's shop on rue Clement-Marot was flourishing. In 1942, in the midst of an electricity shortage, Mistinguett had taken him to the flea market, and they had bought three generators and put them in his basement. “We had six bicyclists (two shifts of three) with their wheels attached to the generators, pedaling to make electricity for the hair dryers. I paid them good money, they had been racers in the Tour de France, and the chic women would go down to the basement and thank them and give them champagne, rare bottles the pedalers would sell on the black market. La Miss and the pedalers, they gave me my start.”