Josephine Baker (53 page)

“Famous Negro songstress puts on clothes and marries a bandleader,” said
Life
magazine, adding that the wedding had been “gay but genteel.” No pun was intended.

“We musicians were surprised by the wedding,” said Pierre Guillermin. “We knew that women were not Jo's strength. A few days later, we left on a tour of South America.”

But first, Josephine bought Les Milandes; it was her wedding gift to herself. In a contract witnessed by Jo's brother Gabriel, she stipulated that it was bought with her own funds, and would remain her exclusive property.

There were a couple of reasons why she was once again leaving France. The country was still divided politically, and even though Josephine was a die-hard Gaullist, she sympathized with the disgraced Marshal Pétain. In 1945, he had been condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in the fortress jail on the Île d'Yeu. Josephine felt the marshal should be freed, that “the drama of the great old military man, whatever his weaknesses have been, hides a last secret: the possibility of once again forging in France a union of all men of good will.”

Moreover, Europe was now a sad continent, short of food, houses, jobs, money. The thought of the crazy years between the wars, the years when Josephine had reigned, made people uncomfortable. So did Josephine's marriage. Odette Merlin says that high-ranking military men were disgusted. “
Their
Josephine marrying a homosexual seemed an insult to their manhood. Jo Bouillon's crime was not the worst committed during those shameful years, but many friends turned away from Josephine. I asked her to take me out of her will. I was sad, but I could not understand.”

Jacques Abtey concurs. “From the day she married Jo Bouillon, it was as though Joan of Arc had become small, had cut off her legs, so to speak. The generals and the great French families, they did not come to her anymore.”

But the Argentinians came to her in throngs, as she toured their cities, and the Chileans, and the Mexicans. In Mexico, she found her old friends the Joneses. Lydia and Ed had fled Europe at the beginning of
the war. “We went back to Chicago,” Lydia told me, “but we couldn't take it no more the way our people were treated, and we moved to Mexico.”

In Mexico, Lydia said, Josephine fell “absolutely madly in love” with the composer Augustin Lara, who was married to the actress Maria Felix. “To affirm herself, Josephine still needed that attention from men, to sleep with them, to possess them, and one night when Jo was not around she said, ‘Let's go have dinner with Lara,' but he was crazy about the beautiful Maria, he did not want to be with Josephine, she did not get him.”

If Josephine could not get the man she wanted, she could still go to a bullfight and upstage the bull. The Joneses took her to a
corrida
, and their son George, then fifteen, recalled, “When the
banderillero
stuck the dart in the bull, Josephine just cried and yelled until everybody in the place got nervous.”

“That winter,” says Lydia, “Josephine was having an enormous success in Mexico, packing them in every night, and she begged my husband to bring her back to America. To present her in America. He said okay, and he advanced her fifty thousand dollars, and an IOU to sign, but she never paid him back.

“She was going to open in Boston, but first we stopped off in Chicago for a few days. We were traveling by train, and Josephine insisted on going to the dining car and talking to everyone about the injustice of racism. I told her, ‘You are going to get us lynched.' ”

The Joneses' place in Chicago—they had held on to it even in their self-imposed exile—was as pleasant as Josephine had remembered it from her visit there with Pepito: a ten-acre estate, a pond, a tennis court. “My sister-in-law Jean Starr—she was a great blues singer—invited Josephine to dinner,” Lydia says. “She thought to please Josephine by cooking cornbread and chitlins. Josephine stared at the chitlins. ‘What is this?'

“Jean Starr said, ‘Oh, girl, get out of my face, you know what hog guts are!' ”

In Boston, where Ed Jones had booked a hotel suite, Josephine assigned him and Lydia the maid's room. “Can you imagine?” says Lydia. “She was in the master bedroom with Jo Bouillon, and we were in this hole, and it was our money we were spending presenting her to America!”

For her part, Josephine was determined to present Jo Bouillon to America—from the stage of Boston's Majestic Theatre. “Ed told her not to do it,” says Lydia. “He said, ‘Just let Jo come on and play, you didn't introduce him in Mexico, so don't be a fool here. This country is not ready to see a black woman introduce her white husband.' ‘Oh yes,' she says, ‘I have to introduce my Jo.' ”

Before the Boston opening on Christmas Eve, almost as an afterthought, Josephine had wired the French singer Roland Gerbeau in Paris and asked him to join her in
Paris Sings Again
, which he was happy to do. But the real excitement in the press centered around Josephine's costumes by Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, and Jean Dessès—no star since Gertrude Lawrence had appeared with such a huge wardrobe, said the
Boston Post
. As for her jewels, they were so valuable, Josephine would be “under police guard while on the stage of the Majestic.”

There was a thirty-three-carat emerald, a sixteen-carat sapphire, and a black diamond that gave off “glints of red fire.” The black diamond got better notices than the show.

“The theater was empty,” says Lydia. “We lost our money, and she never even said thanks.”

“The war had just ended,” Roland Gerbeau says, “and with Josephine's halo as an angel of the liberation, she thought it was the right moment for her American comeback. But the show was not what the Americans wanted from her, she was a French chanteuse, nothing left of her American roots.”

Was the party over? She sent an S.O.S. to Donald Wyatt in Nashville asking him to come north and talk to the Negro press. “She was aware,” he says, “that some black people were still complaining that while they had continued to suffer the effects of segregation, she had escaped to Paris and lived a life of gaiety and luxury.

“When I arrived in Boston, Jo Bouillon was cordial but cool. I don't think he took kindly to my occupying an adjoining room, especially when Josephine came in every night to get my dirty socks to wash in the basin with his.”

Pierre Guillermin: “She was afraid of nothing. She would sing operetta with little trills,
cocoricos
like a rooster, and sometimes the mouth would open and the note did not come out, but she would go on. She was conscious of having been one of the first blacks to come out of the ghetto, proud of it, but she acted superior to white people, as if she
wanted to make you pay for what she had been through. You could feel it, it was her complex.

“We went to New York because she was still hoping to perform there. We had difficulty finding a place where she could stay; it was against the law to refuse her, but we tried all the grand hotels, and when we would say it was for Josephine Baker, they would say, ‘Excuse us, we made a mistake, we are fully booked.' ”

It was the same scenario as when she had come to do the
Ziegfeld Follies
, with the additional humiliation that no one was offering her work. So she decided to play reporter again, to reveal America through the eyes of a simple black woman. That she was not a simple black woman didn't deter her for an instant.

She suggested a series of pieces to
France-Soir
(the biggest afternoon paper in France) which agreed to print them. But for this job, “I cannot be Josephine Baker, star of the music hall. . . . I will be Miss Brown . . . the name seems to me amusing, given the circumstances.”

First she would go to Fisk (at Donald Wyatt's invitation) to speak to the students—“I want to give them courage.” Jo asked to come along. “I said no, I don't want to be with a white. You will stay in New York . . . someone has to come help me if they put me in jail.”

“Miss Brown” would be accompanied by a black journalist friend, Jeff Smith, who had orders not to intervene if she got in trouble. At one stop, the train sat in the station for an hour, Josephine got off, and instead of going into the coffee shop with a sign that said
COLORED
, went into the one with a sign that said
WHITE
, bought a couple of apples, and came out to be greeted by scowls from nervous blacks.

“I found only two friendly eyes,” she told Jeff Smith. “They belonged to a poor hairless dirty dog.” She asked him to explain the strange attitude of the blacks. “You make them afraid,” he said. “Afraid? Because I bought apples?”

By the time they got to Nashville, Josephine's blood was up. When Donald Wyatt met her at the station, she couldn't wait to tell him her newly hatched plan. She would get on a bus in Nashville, and sit up front. “And the bus driver,” says Donald, “would have to stop the bus, and then she was going to protest, and be pushed around, arrested. She would take a photographer and a writer from
Ebony
with her, so people could see what a martyr she'd been. But when she got to the jail, she would pull out her French passport, and then the president of America
would have to apologize to the president of France for doing this to a French citizen.”

Josephine never thought small. It was no police chief or governor but the president of the United States himself who would have to eat crow. Jim crow.

“I told her I thought it would be counterproductive,” Donald says mildly. “I said black people had been sitting in the back of the bus all their lives. ‘And you come here too good to sit where we sit.' I said the ending would be bad, because her being French gave her protection she would not have if she was just an ordinary black person living in Tennessee. She thought about it, and she didn't do it.”

“At Fisk, though she was not highly educated,” Donald says, “she could discuss any topic with the students.”

She told the young people that in France, marriage between blacks and whites was not frowned on. The students were astonished.

From Nashville, she went home to St. Louis, spent one weekend there, and announced to Carrie, Richard, and Margaret that they must come live with her at the château. “At first my husband, Elmo, said no,” Margaret told me, “but then he changed his mind.”

Richard refused. “I couldn't leave. In 1936, Josephine had bought me my first truck, now I had four, I transported coal, I was a contractor, with employees.”

Surprisingly, Carrie agreed to emigrate as long as Margaret came with her. “She was willing to leave that good-looking husband, Tony Hudson, behind,” says Helen Morris. “Tumpy said he was too young for Carrie, he looked like a white man.” The reunion in France was set for the fall, giving everyone time to make arrangements, and Josephine returned to New York.

Where there were still no job offers, but there were lots of old friends. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she went to have tea with Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Lucienne Boyer (both Piaf and Boyer were enjoying successful singing engagements in New York clubs). Sometimes Lucienne's husband, Jacques Pills, would join the ladies. Lucienne knew he had been one of Josephine's lovers, but wasn't jealous. (“
All
the women were crazy about him,” she told me. “They ran at him with their bare breasts.” Jacques, she said, used to tease their small daughter, Jacqueline, telling her, “You know, you could have been a little Baker.”)

Another of Josephine's former lovers, Ralph Cooper, was now running the amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre, and one Friday, Josephine
and Jo went up to Harlem to take a look. Ralph ensconced them like royalty, in a box, and at one point during the show, he introduced the legend to the audience. They didn't stop applauding until Josephine came down to the stage to receive her ovation.

She returned to France with enough money—mostly from South America—to get the rest of her jewels out of hock. (Boston hadn't seen the whole array by any means.) In March, eleven thousand copies of Jacques Abtey's book,
The Secret War of Josephine Baker
, were shipped to bookstores, and in April, Josephine opened at the Club des Champs-Élysées.

Bernard Hilda, the club's owner, found himself awed by her continuing ability to seduce the public. “I watched her many times, and I asked myself, why? Why does she get applause at the exact moment when she needs to catch a breath? And one day I understood. First of all, she looked at the people way in the back, in a cabaret. Then slowly, she raised both arms, and everyone was hypnotized, they applauded. And when she had got what she wanted, she slowly lowered her arms, and bent her head. She had obtained that second which was absolutely necessary to her.”

“I sang again at the Club des Champs-Élysées with a big white feather fan to chase away the bad memories,” she wrote. “The King and Queen of Belgium came to see me, incognito, which means that everybody recognized them. . . .

“Ali Khan and Rita Hayworth, sitting near the orchestra, very nice . . .

“Emperor Bao Dai, his hair as black as mine. He froze, listening to me, holding a matchbox in his delicate fingers. . . .”

It was during this engagement that Maryse Bouillon turned eighteen, and Josephine gave her a birthday party. “She bought me my first evening dress, by Dior. The next day, she tore it to shreds. I still don't know what I had done.

“From an artistic point of view, Josephine was a very great lady, but in life, she was jealous, mean. I think she had been too spoiled by what she had done, by the people surrounding her, and absolutely deformed by her own success.

“I think she loved herself, but I wonder if, deep inside, she ever loved anyone else. Even Pepito, who had been her Pygamlion—I don't know if she loved that man.

“My uncle Jo dropped everything to take care of the Milandes. The
Milandes was my childhood, I knew it without plumbing, no central heating, still a medieval castle. And I witnessed its transformation. Josephine was never around, the children did as they pleased. Margaret was elderly, overwhelmed by them, and they talked back, they were awful to her. Jo faced all that, and also managed to collect some money to leave to the children. He tried to bring some sense to the Milandes, he tried to slow Josephine down.”