Josephine Baker (56 page)

“How could a woman who believed in freedom turn around and say, my sister, Evita Perón. She was smart, but she was ignorant.”

Insatiable, too. Enchanting twelve thousand people a day was not enough; Josephine had also agreed to play a late show every night at Monte Proser's Theater Café. At that point, it wasn't money (she was already making over ten thousand dollars a week), it was an animal thing; she loved to be close to her audience.

But not always. “For her opening night at the Theater Café,” says Shirley Woolf, “Ned had people from
Time
magazine and
The New York Times
coming, it was unbelieveable the interest she generated. When we got to the club, the big fat comedian Jackie Gleason had just ended his show. Sweating like a pig, he was walking toward his dressing room, and Josephine was standing there, followed by Ginette with all the clothes over her arm. Josephine said to Jackie Gleason, ‘Excuse me, do you know where my dressing room is?' and he said, ‘Git out of my way, I don't even know who
you
are,' and Josephine said, ‘That's it, come, Ginette, we'll go.'

“She went back to the hotel. I had been friends for many years with
Hazel Scott, the pianist who was at that time married to Adam Clayton Powell, and I thought maybe a congressman and a preacher, a big man, could move Josephine. So I called Hazel, and Adam came over and explained that if she didn't go on, she wouldn't be able to work again in any club in the United States. ‘So what?' she said. ‘I'll go back to Paris.'

“You know how many times she said that during our tour? Hundreds. ‘Good, I'll go back to Paris.' But she wouldn't be making forty thousand dollars a month in Paris, would she? And you know she used to send all that money to Switzerland, under the name of Mrs. Kaiser. I had to do it for her, she gave me all kinds of account numbers.”

Still, Josephine won. Because of “laryngitis,” her doctor ordered her to give up all “extra-theater” performances, and that settled that.

On April 6, she was in Philadelphia, at the Earle Theatre. Backstage, she welcomed Evelyn Anderson. “I went up to her,” Evelyn remembers, “and I said, ‘Oh, Miss Baker,' and she said, ‘Oh, Evelyn!' and threw her arms around me.”

Josephine who, during the
Ziegfeld Follies
, had refused interviews to black newspapers, was making amends. Now she went—unannounced—to visit the Standard Theatre on South Street, and talked to the stagehands about the days when Old Gibby had run the place. The
Courier
reported that she “insisted on colored stagehands and musicians” wherever she worked. (The
Courier
did
not
report that, for this particular tour, Sweets Edison was the only black musician who had been hired.)

Josephine also paid a call at a New Jersey jail to comfort the Trenton Six (six black men indicted—though many believed they were framed—for the robbery-killing of a shopkeeper). “Have confidence,” she urged, “that justice will prevail.” Two of the defendants were veterans who had been entertained by Josephine in army camps abroad. “They were so moved by her remarks,” reported the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, “that they broke down in tears.”

On May 20, Josephine Baker Day was celebrated in Harlem. A motorcade carried the honoree, blowing kisses, past thousands of cheering bystanders wearing buttons (courtesy of the New York branch of the NAACP) that said
WELCOME JOSEPHINE BAKER
. Little kids ran alongside her open limousine, and, sitting beside Bessie Buchanan, Josephine smiled.

Other old friends—Maude Russell, Alberta Hunter—were in the caravan too, but Bessie was the one acting proprietary. “Like she was Josephine's mother,” says Maude. “I mean, we all came up together, Bessie Allison was dancing for ten cents with anybody at the Savoy, and then honey, as soon as the owner married her, her butt went up on her back.”

At the Golden Gate Ballroom, Ralph Bunche, a recent Nobel peace prize–winner, presented Josephine with an award for her work against prejudice in the theater, and the French consul was so impressed he went home and wrote a long letter back to the Foreign Ministry. He said Josephine was a heroine. Not only had she broken the color bar in Miami (“a colored artist dared, and the whites surrendered”), but she had reminded people that she was a French citizen, and “in our country racial problems do not exist.”

During Dr. Bunche's tribute to her, Josephine sat on the stage wearing a yellow chiffon Dior dress. In spite of the heat, she looked, Maude says, “cool as a cucumber. We acted as hostesses, Fredi Washington and me and Little Shep, and then all of the
Shuffle Along
girls came up to the stage and Noble Sissle introduced us, and they played ‘Bandana Days,' and we did a little step and got off. Then Josephine got up and said, ‘Oh, I'm so happy to be back in my native America, I wish my mother, a poor washwoman from St. Louis, could see this,' and I thought to myself, she's lying.”

The brass bands, the handshakes, the luncheon, the cocktail party, the ball, Josephine sailed through the whole day, stopping only to change clothes from time to time.

The night ended at the Savoy Ballroom. Bessie had invited a few friends to her husband's place, and Charlie Buchanan told me that at one point a bouncer came in looking alarmed. A black man at the door was waving a piece of paper and claiming to be Josephine's husband. “If you don't believe me, here is our marriage license.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Charlie said, “but I sent the guard to chase him away.” Was it Willie Wells, surfacing after so many years? Was it the elusive Billy Baker?

By June, Josephine was playing Hartford, Connecticut. (It was the very week General de Gaulle chose to visit Les Milandes. He was out of government for the moment—he would call those years away from politics his “crossing of the desert”—and his trip to the château was
noted only by the neighbors. “He came on June 3,” Georges Malaury remembers. “And everybody was asking, ‘Who is that tall guy?' ”)

Georges Simenon traveled to Hartford from nearby Lakeville, where he was then living with his second wife, Denise, and later, Josephine and Jo paid the Simenons a return visit. “She came after a show on Saturday and she left on Sunday,” says Dolores James, then seventeen, and nanny to Simenon's children. “He told me, ‘You must be here to meet this person, she's very famous and you look just like her,' and he went on to explain how this lady went to Europe and was accepted, and color made no difference. And I said, ‘Well, it does here.' In Lakeville, there are black families, but we are of no importance.

“He was giving me a chance, he was saying, ‘Here is someone you can be like,' and when I finally saw her, when she walked into the living room and started speaking French, I said, ‘I don't believe this lady.' At nineteen, she had gone to France, and at seventeen, I was afraid to leave Lakeville. She had complete control over people, she could snap her fingers and everybody jumped. I loved it, because most of my own people were the opposite. White people snapped their fingers and we jumped. And Josephine wasn't light-skinned, she wasn't passing. She was
black
.”

If the young girl harbored any reservations about her new idol, they sprang from the way Josephine dealt with Jo Bouillon. “He was a delightful man,” Dolores says, “but he seemed to be so small next to her. I was confused, here I was, a young black girl, wanting to idolize this powerful black image, yet resenting the way she treated her husband. Like at the dinner table, all the emotion and the eye contact was between her and Simenon. Like Jo Bouillon and Mrs. Simenon did not exist. Are you supposed to treat someone like that because you're a star? I don't know, I'm not a star. But why? He was a human being.

“That Sunday, I went upstairs, and she was standing in her bedroom, nude. It's nice when you're close to fifty and you can say, ‘Look at me, I look better than you, and you're seventeen.' She was not at all ashamed, I was the one that went, ‘Oh, excuse me!' Jo Bouillon was there too, and it was strange. I always felt as a black person, you're there, but you're not noticed. Here's a white person, and it's reversed,
he's
not there. I was trying to take it in, trying to understand how an individual as big as she was could step on someone she slept with, who made love to her.”

“Foolishly,” says Shirley Woolf, “Ned had given Josephine a contract where she agreed to work twenty-eight days a month if he had the work for her. But even if he didn't, she got eighty-five hundred dollars a week. Ned was a sporty man. He thought nothing of chartering a plane to go somewhere, but on the road, Josephine didn't want to fly.”

She was forty-five years old, and there were days when she was bone weary. On June 10, she wrote to Donald Wyatt that “the four and five shows a day are too much for me,” and reproached him for not having been to see her. “Why don't you like me any more?”

Donald was not the most important person in Josephine's life, but he was her conscience. He had brought her together with the black soldiers for whom she was a lodestone, comforted her when she mourned that, for twenty years, she had turned her back on her people. “I think,” he says, “she had come to realize that a performer's acclaim fades when the curtain falls, and she wanted to go down in history among immortals like Lincoln and Gandhi. She wanted to convince the black community that she had not deserted the fight for equality, even though she had lived so long outside the arena.”

One can make the case that Josephine was no Sojourner Truth, slave-born, God-driven (“Children, I talk to God and God talks to me!”), traveling the country, braving the fury of mobs to preach abolition and women's rights. But who was? One can make the case that Josephine had grabbed at the chance to live in a country that offered her honors and rewards. But who would not have? And though the civil rights movement began without her, she came to it fairly early. After all, it wasn't until 1958 that Arkansas schools were desegregated, and here she was pushing for integration in 1951.

Josephine was a public person, and she made public scenes, in hotel lobbies and restaurants and trains and waiting rooms and sometimes, even, from the stage. When Willie McGee, convicted of rape in Mississippi, was executed, she paid for his funeral, and talked to her audience about his death. “They have killed one of my people,” she said, adding that a part of every American Negro “died a little with him.”

“We were in the Paradise Theatre in Detroit that day,” says Stanley Kay, who was playing drums for her on the road. “And she came down from her dressing room and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Sweets,' to Sweets Edison, but she never said anything to the rest of us. Finally, I went up and knocked at her door and said, ‘Josephine, I'm white, but
I didn't execute Willie McGee.' ‘You're right,' she said. ‘I was upset, please forgive me.'

“Between shows, she liked to watch the movie, so she would put a robe on, and go to a box—from backstage, you can get to the boxes—and sometimes when we were traveling by train, I would get off in a station and buy hot dogs or ribs or ham hocks and a six-pack of beer, and we'd have supper together, and we'd talk. I asked her about being with royalty, talking with kings; it was like she was telling me about Cinderella, and I was eight years old.

“I didn't think she was the best singer in the world, or the best dancer, she was what we call a shake dancer, but she could put it all together, she knew how to get the audience to come to her.”

On that tour, a gangster friend of Ned Schuyler's was traveling with the company. “His name was Tony,” says Shirley Woolf. “He was avoiding the police. Somewhere between Evanston and Chicago, I was talking to him in the train corridor when a dining-car waiter came up and said, ‘Excuse me, ma'am, I was married to Josephine Baker.' Tony opened the door to Josephine's compartment and shouted, ‘Hey, Joe, one of your husbands is outside.'

“She refused to come out. She could see him through the glass panel, and she said, ‘I don't know that man.' He meant as much to Josephine as a grain of sand. When she said goodbye to someone, she meant goodbye, not
à bientôt.”

By this time, Shirley was managing every detail of Josephine's daily life, so it was inevitable that they would clash. It happened in Washington, D.C. “On the first of July,” says Shirley, “she was working in an armory, seventy-five hundred seats, and we were sold out. That afternoon, she went off with some people from the NAACP, and I said, ‘Joe, you have to be at the armory by seven,' and she said, ‘Oh, I'll meet you back at the hotel at six.' Well, she marched in at quarter to eight, and I said, ‘Where've you been?' and she said, ‘Darling, one of your people insulted me.'

“One of
my
people? Some NAACP members had convinced her to go into a segregated dining room and order a Coca-Cola, and the waiter had said, ‘We don't serve Negroes at the tables,' and she said, ‘I want to speak to your boss.'

“The boss's name was Schwartz, and she said to him, ‘Mr. Schwartz, I fought for your people in Israel, and you won't serve me a Coca-Cola.'
She told me this story, and announced, ‘I'm not going on tonight.' I said, ‘There's a bus strike and a cab strike in Washington, and there are seventy-five hundred people waiting for you who had to double up in cars, and you're not going to show up at the armory?' She said, ‘No, I'm not, darling.' In the end, she went and she played, but she was horrible to the audience. ‘Here we are in the capital of your country, and you wouldn't serve me a Coca-Cola,' she told them, and she went on like that.

“Next morning, we get up. We have to catch a plane. She's opening in California July 4. She's sitting in the bathtub and she says, ‘I don't fly.' I say, ‘You have to fly. The Fourth of July is a very important holiday, it's like Bastille Day in France.' She says, ‘I don't care, I'm not an American.' I say, ‘Please, you promised, get dry,' and I give her a robe, and she takes her hand and slaps me across the face.