Josephine Baker (57 page)

“When I get up off the floor, I say, ‘How dare you?' and she says, ‘Darling, I love you like a mother.' Of course she got on the plane, but not until she ate my heart out.”

She had canceled an appearance in Atlanta after being turned down by three hotels there and warned that she couldn't bring Ginette—“People told her I would have to black up. ‘If you want to keep your wardrobe mistress, she will have to dye her skin' ”—and now there was a backlash against her new activism. She'd had threatening letters, and at the RKO Hillstreet Theater in Los Angeles, she was greeted by a man shouting, “Why don't you go back where you came from?” The audience froze as Josephine walked to the stage apron and looked out. “I
am
back where I came from,” she said. “And you—where do you come from?” She got an ovation.

Encouraged, she went out and made a citizen's arrest in a country where she was no longer a citizen. She challenged a Dallas corset salesman who had uttered insults “directed not at me as a person but at my race.”

“I was having dinner in the Biltmore Grill with Frankie Laine,” says Shirley Woolf. “Josephine had just walked in, and this Dallas character said, ‘I didn't know they allowed niggers in here.' So we all went down to the police station, and she filed a complaint.

“They kept the corset salesman in jail overnight, and the judge fined him a hundred dollars and made him apologize, so she got great satisfaction. I didn't see anything so great about it, but listen, I was the one who had to get up at six o'clock in the morning to go to court at eight.”

“We played a big benefit in California,” says Stanley Kay, “and all the Hollywood stars came out, and they talked, they were rude. I said, ‘Gee, Joe, I feel bad,' and she said, ‘They didn't come to see me, they came to see one another, it's all right, I don't care.' ”

While in Los Angeles, Josephine came face-to-face with a bit of her youth. “I'd just got married,” says Caroline Reagan's daughter, Sophie Reagan-Herr, “and I was living in Santa Monica, and these beautiful announcements had been in all the papers that Josephine was coming to Los Angeles.

“I didn't know whether she had bad memories of me because of my mother, but one morning I phoned her hotel and woke her up. ‘Oh, my little Sophie,' she said, ‘why don't you come to the show?' The warmth coming across the telephone was wonderful, so we went to the theater—my husband, my little stepson, and I—and she had left us seats in the front row. She had an act that, I see now, looking at pictures of
La Revue Nègre
, was a sort of remembrance. She had a wheelbarrow full of vegetables, and she picked up a small cabbage and threw it to me. It was a pun—in France, my little cabbage,
mon petit chou
, is a love name.”

In San Francisco, where she played the Golden Gate Theater, Josephine had a reunion with Thelma Carpenter. “She had noticed,” says Thelma, “the city didn't have any colored bus drivers, so one morning, she drags me down to the bus depot, and finds the man in charge of hiring. Why, she wants to know, could so many Negroes qualify to drive trucks in the army, ‘but cannot qualify to drive your city buses?' He denies there's any policy of discrimination. So here stands Madame Bakaire, red scarf tied around her head, ain't got the makeup on, ain't got the ponytail on, and after he gets through talking, she says, ‘Monsieur, you're a nasty little man,' and we walk out.

“Only a queen would do that. I used to call her the biggest gyp on the Nile, because who was the gyp on the Nile but Cleopatra?

“Ned and Shirley nurtured her, babied her, took care of her, there was nothing she wanted that wasn't given to her. She was appreciated, she got her money, pay or play, she never had to worry with Ned Schuyler.”

Had Josephine dallied with her handsome, free-spending manager? No, says Shirley Woolf. “She flirted, but Ned was on the needle, he was pretty far gone. It was an interesting time, and I have no regrets. Toward the end of that summer, we went to Paris with Josephine. Ned bought
me a ten-thousand-dollar wardrobe, and we stayed at the Crillon. It was all very nice for a kid from Brooklyn.

“Josephine took us to the Dervals' house, she took me to the Folies, and introduced me as her attorney, we met the duke and duchess of Windsor. I had thought Josephine was popular in Cuba, but not like in France.”

Ned fell in love with Les Milandes, and in their heads, he and Josephine built empires, as the grand renovation continued. Under Jo Bouillon's command, six young gardeners dressed as American sailors bent to their work. (Jo had bought the uniforms from a surplus store in Harlem.) The musical comedy spectacle of the hapless growers stooping for potatoes and lettuces, backsides in the air, straining the seams of their tight pants, had the villagers screaming with laughter. But not in front of Jo.

As always, Josephine was everywhere, challenging her guests, leading forced marches over as much of the six hundred acres as her captives were willing to slog through, pointing out wonders present and to come. “Here, we'll have the first-class hotel, there the African huts . . .”

She couldn't get a gambling license? Never mind, there would be gardens and bars, there would be a gas station and a heliport. “I think she was guided by her
bonne étoile
, her good star,” says Georgette Malaury. “I believe the souvenirs of her youth—the way black people were treated in America, her success in France—marked her. They made her strong, gave her plenty of cheek. But here at Les Milandes, she found calm, she was at the right age, she needed that stop in her life, and again, it was her
bonne étoile
, she always arrived at the right moment in the right place.”

Josephine, however, was not quite ready to settle down. She was like Saint Augustine imploring God for chastity, “but not yet.” After the humiliations of the
Ziegfeld Follies
and
Paris Sings Again
, she had finally seduced America. Copa City, the Strand, the tour—she who was a star all over the world had been recognized at last in the country of her birth. And now she was going back there for some more applause. Ned had arranged for her to open at the Roxy.

She had it in her hands, everything she wanted. And she blew it.

She came to the Roxy like a hero,” says Shirley Woolf.

“Extraordinary Limited Engagement!” boasted the ads. “Ned Schuyler Presents The Exotic Rage of Paris . . . in her only New York theatre appearance this season.” It was a long way from Bob Russell's “25 Hottest Coons in Dixie.”

For the finale at the Roxy, Jo Méhu (he staged the show) recalled that Josephine wore “a cloak made of sixty-six feet of satin, trimmed with fifty-five pounds of pink fox.” And a headdress trembling with pink bird-of-paradise feathers.

Then the feathers hit the fan.

It took a few days. At first, the audiences were perfect, the notices were perfect, Josephine was so buoyed by her reception on opening night that she announced she wasn't going to sing “J'ai Deux Amours” anymore—“I don't need to”—and was scolded by Sophie Tucker: “You put that song back in!” Josephine put that song back in.

On Tuesday night, October 16, along with Bessie Buchanan, Roger Rico and his wife, Solange, Josephine went to the Stork Club.

Here are the bare bones of the plot. The four arrived around midnight, and were shown into the long narrow Cub Room (reserved for VIPs) where owner Sherman Billingsley fed and flattered the famous. On the way to their table, they passed Walter Winchell, who was having supper with Jack O'Brian, the
Journal-American
columnist, and Mrs. O'Brian.

“Josephine stopped and said hello,” O'Brian remembers. “Winchell told her he liked her ponytail.” She and her friends were seated, drinks were served, but no food arrived. After an hour or so, a furious Josephine went to the phone and called Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, to charge that the Stork Club was practicing racial discrimination.

Here are the fleshed-out bones of the plot. Roger Rico, a bass with the Paris Opéra, had come to this country to take over the role of the French planter, Emil de Becque, when Ezio Pinza left
South Pacific
. Rico was offended by suggestions that, since his parents had owned plantations in Algeria, this was typecasting. He felt he was being called a colonialist, and was sensitive to charges of racial exploitation. He wanted to take Josephine—they had known each other for years—to the Stork Club, but asked a friend if it could be done without incident. The friend laughed. “She is an actress, you can perfectly well take her.”

Bessie Buchanan—the one-time chorus girl who would become the first black woman elected to the New York State Assembly—also insisted there would be no problem. “You are French, Josephine.” But Thelma Carpenter, stopping by the Roxy that night, suspected Bessie's motives. “Josephine had done her last show, she was sitting with a hat on her head, naked except for a Hermès scarf tied around her belly like an apron (it covered the scars from her operations) and she said she was going to the Stork Club. I told her not to take Bessie, I said, ‘It's trouble.' ”

Charlie Buchanan thought so too, he blamed Bessie for all that followed. “She plotted everything,” he told me, after Bessie's death. “I spent over four hundred thousand dollars on my wife's political ambitions, just so I could have some peace.”

Paul Bass: “Yes, my sister-in-law Bessie was ambitious. She used Joe and her fame to get where she wanted, up in politics.”

Hycie Curtis (a dancer and longtime friend of Bessie's): “Bessie could sell herself. Even in show business, she couldn't do a damn thing, but
she always got a spot. I figure Bessie gave Josephine bad advice. She knew what would happen.”

Jo Attles: “Josephine shouldn't have done what she did because she just came here to visit, make some money, get out. She shouldn't have come back here and get treated like a secondhand somebody. But her one dream after the war was maybe to come and make a slight dent in America. ‘Let me put my foot in Hollywood. Or my face.' ”

The singer Dick Campbell was a Bessie loyalist. Acknowledging that she might have used Josephine to further her own goals, he still admired her. “I think Bessie wanted to go to the Stork Club and break down the discrimination there. Josephine gave her the opportunity.”

“We were at Walter's table, number fifty, a banquette,” says Yvonne O'Brian. “Josephine was more in the middle of the room. She had on a blue satin dress, and she looked beautiful. She and her friends were drinking champagne, there was no incident. In a place like that—crowded after theater—it takes a while to get food orders on the table. Perhaps there was a delay but I don't think it was on purpose, because Sherman Billingsley wouldn't discriminate against a celebrity. Celebrities were his life.”

Right, says her husband. “Josephine Baker was the star of a show on Broadway, and Winchell liked her. Billingsley would never have done anything against her in front of Walter.”

Be that as it may, says Solange Rico, “When my husband called the waiters, they acted as if they didn't hear him. Finally, he obliged a waiter to come, and the waiter said, ‘There is no steak left.' Then my husband asked for crab cakes. None of them were left either. ‘Very well,' said my husband, ‘we are going to order something else.' But the waiter was already gone.”

This was when Josephine got up and went to the phone. Roger Rico went with her. Again, they passed Winchell's table. “How nice,” Winchell said to the O'Brians. “They're going to dance.” (You couldn't dance in the Cub Room, you had to go to the big room next door where a rumba band alternated with a more conventional orchestra.)

Winchell and the O'Brians left the club to go to work—they were bound for a special late screening of
The Desert Fox
at the Rivoli—while Josephine was calling Walter White. “When she came back to the table,” Mrs. Rico says, “the waiter was serving the steak, but she didn't want it anymore, she wanted to go.”

Bill Harbach, a television director who was in the Cub Room that
night, remembers hearing loud voices coming from Josephine's table. “Mr. Rico was screaming, ‘This is outrageous,' and a big discussion was going on.”

Upon demanding the check, Rico was told that Mr. Billingsley never permitted celebrities to pay. “Until tonight, you have always taken my money,” cried Rico, throwing thirty dollars on the table and stalking away.

As for Josephine, French citizen, she had become Marianne, the symbol of
liberté, égalité, fraternité
. When she was done phoning Walter White, she phoned Billy Rowe, a black deputy police commissioner. Then she and Bessie made straight for Walter White's apartment, where they recited their grievances—not only had Josephine been barbarously handled, but Walter Winchell had sat by and let it happen. (Interestingly, there was no mention of an insult to Bessie, who chose not to make her own African heritage an issue. It was like the old joke “Let's you and him fight.”)