Josephine Baker (59 page)

“I admire her courage and am inclined to forgive her lack of judgment. I think she was guilty at having taken so long to speak out. The 1950s were difficult. Black veterans wanted to win for themselves the democracy they had fought for abroad, but the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils had mobilized to keep us in our place.”

Fighting for the oppressed when she wasn't buttering up their oppressors—Mussolini, Juan Perón—Josephine was a paradox, but Donald always gave her the benefit of the doubt. Jacques's eye was colder. “She was caught up in the game,” he says. “The sacred fire of the stage was no longer enough for her, she was now deep in politics, writing to de Gaulle, to Malraux, to Eva Perón. But what was the goal she wanted to reach? I don't know if she herself knew. Her black friends were almost white: Bessie Buchanan, Walter White, the big man in the NAACP, he was absolutely white. I could not understand America.”

Like everyone who cared for Josephine, Jacques hung around long enough to be badly treated. “I said, ‘Since I'm here now, let me try my luck.' I wanted to see if I could sell my book,
The Secret War of Josephine Baker
, to a New York publisher, but she said no.

“ ‘You will never get a book contract, you don't know Americans. You come with me.' She still had a few dates to play—not everyone had canceled—and she wanted me with her. She had told me to bring no money when I came from Morocco—‘I will advance it to you and you can reimburse me in France'—so I was at her mercy. I asked her to let me have my freedom, and she started to count out, ‘Two dollars for a room, one dollar for a movie, this much for food, a few extra dollars for
the weekend,' and it came to a total of $130 for fifteen days, and that's all she gave me. After what I had done for her against Winchell!

“We were in her dressing room in Philadelphia, and I looked at her in the mirror and I wanted to punch her face. But I had only two dollars in my pocket. I took the $130 and said,
‘Salut!'
I went to New York and a Jewish friend—I had saved her mother during the war—found me a room. I was happy there, and you know, I met Winchell. The meeting took place at his barber's. It was quite amusing. Winchell was in the chair being groomed, and he said, ‘Major Abtey,
ça va
?'

“ ‘For a sick man,' I said to his assistant, ‘he looks good.' I had been told he was very sick.

“The guy translated, and Winchell smiled. ‘I'm good-looking? Yes, I'm good-looking. Please, wait five minutes.' Afterward, we got into a taxi, and he said he was going to his doctor because Josephine had broken his heart. ‘I'm finished.'

“It was sad, that powerful man. I said to him, ‘Yes, but you have been asking for it a little. You said she did nothing during the war, that she was with the Italians in 1935 and against the French and the Americans.'

“ ‘But it's true,' he cried. ‘I have the newspaper clippings.'

“I said, ‘Listen, Winchell, I don't know about 1935, but during the last war, she was remarkable!'

“ ‘She broke me,' he said, ‘she broke my heart. I, who have done so much for the black cause—'

“I said, ‘Listen, since I'm involved in the story, I'm going to see Josephine and arrange a reconciliation.'

“He said, ‘Yes, you could.' Then, suddenly, ‘No, I don't want it. I have the translation of her book, I have the newspaper articles, I was not at the Stork Club when it happened—'

“It was fantastic, he was like a child, I had to console him. I will always see him in the taxi crying, ‘She broke my heart, I'm a finished man.' ”

Also finished, at least on Broadway, was Roger Rico, fired from
South Pacific
, another casualty of Josephine's night on the town. But she didn't hang around to offer condolences, she was off to Chicago and St. Louis.

In Chicago, Richard, Jr., and his brother Clifford, then teenagers, showed up to see their famous aunt. (Their father, having yielded at last to her persuasion, had already left America to begin a new life at Les Milandes. )

“With Clifford and me,” says Richard, Jr., “she did all this family bullshit—‘Why don't you write your father?' So Clifford said, ‘Don't act all holy, Aunt, you haven't done a damn thing for us,' and Aunt Tumpy, being the great queen, says, ‘How dare you? I'll call the police,' and Clifford says, ‘I'll kick your butt and throw you out the window.' I stayed quiet and let Clifford be the big fighter because I wanted to get next to that glamour, all right? I wanted to get on the stage with Aunt Tumpy at that Chicago theater.”

Faced by these two young nephews, one confrontational, the other starstruck, Josephine may have decided a little family went a long way; when she returned to her hometown, she stayed with a lawyer, David Grant, and his wife.

The Kiehl Auditorium in St. Louis was a big barn of a place with ten thousand seats. “She had come back,” says Richard, Jr. “They had rolled out the red carpet, but the house was only half full.”

Helen Morris and her husband were there. “It was really good,” Helen says. “Tumpy had those beautiful French gowns and feathers and she pranced on, she was the star. After the show, she made a speech. She told everybody to stand up, and she got carried away; it was over an hour everybody standing there waiting for her to finish. She was talking about segregation and all that crap.”

It was a good speech, if too long for a crowd whose feet hurt. Josephine said her heart swelled at the sight of the beautiful “salt and pepper” audience. “I mean by that colored and white brothers mingling.” And she talked about black soldiers fighting in Korea. “These men want to love America . . . they also want to love the white race, but want to be respected . . . they want their wives, their mothers, their children to be happy and at peace here while they are giving their blood over there.

“My people have a country of their own to go to if they choose, Africa, but America belongs to them as much as it does to the white race, in some ways even more because they gave their sweat and their blood in slavery. . . .”

That day, she finally told the truth about her role in the East St. Louis race riot, confessing to having been an observer, rather than a participant. “I was very tiny,” she said, “but . . . I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning Negro homes lighting the sky.”

At the end, she laid it on a little thick, contending that she had never enjoyed her European success because she could not stop thinking “of the suffering of my people here in America. . . . I was haunted until I finally understood that I was marked by God to try to fight for the freedom of my people. It was then I heard of the atrocities going on in Germany against the Jews . . . so when war was declared, I went into it with all my heart. . . .”

After exhorting her listeners to love one another, she retreated to her dressing room and refused to see her almost-sister, Helen Morris. “I was
pregnant with Lena, my second child,” Helen remembers. “I was very big, very tired. When we went backstage, we asked the lawyer man to tell Josephine I was there, and he went away and came back and said she was not receiving. ‘But we're family,' I said. ‘Tell her it's little Hemmen. She'll receive us.' But no, she didn't. She didn't come by the house either. Maybe her being so famous in France affected her, she could not think rational, like the average person. I didn't hold it against her, that's the way she was.”

Maybe, Helen suggests, it was easier for Josephine to deal with people she didn't know intimately, who demanded no emotional response of her. “She came here one time, and she heard about some woman in Mississippi whose child died, and she paid the whole funeral, bought the family clothes.”

Before she left St. Louis, Josephine sent Jacques a prospectus. “She had cooked up the idea of a nonprofit organization ‘to perpetuate the work and the ideals of Josephine Baker by fostering goodwill and harmonious relationships among all mankind.' She said, ‘Just look, there are seventy-five million blacks in America, if one out of two signs up at a dollar per person, do you see the money we can make?' In return, she was willing to give one free concert a year. I laughed.”

Floating in front of Josephine's eyes were $37,500,000, some for the fund, some perhaps in “Mrs. Kaiser's” Swiss bank account. Right from the beginning, the numbers were skewed—in 1952, there were only 16,749,000 blacks in the United States—but that didn't prevent a meeting of the Josephine Baker World Cultural Society from taking place in New York City on April 7. The star was not present.

Around this time, says Shirley Woolf, “Josephine and I decided to part. Ned was very sick, so it was over. Still, I gave her a nice going-away present. The United States had a treaty with France under the terms of which French scientists and researchers did not have to pay American taxes. Josephine had asked me to apply for it, even though it wasn't for show people. Would you believe she got it? Because she was so ‘unique'! She got a free pass on her taxes!”

Now she signed with Bill Taub, a wheeler-dealer who claimed to have been a confidant of Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, Madame Mao, and Aristotle Onassis. He had first met Josephine in Paris, and while he thought she might find it difficult to make a comeback in her present circumstances—“She was no longer regarded as an entertainer but as a troublemaker”—he decided to see what he could do.

Which was considerable. “In February 1952, I booked Josephine into El Patio in Mexico City and took a full-page ad in
Variety
announcing the show was sold out.”

El Patio turned customers away. Sweet news for a headliner taking home 20 percent of the gross. In her spare time, Josephine made speeches about how she had “personally seen a number of lynchings of entire Negro families.” (This greatly irritated the CIA and the U.S. State Department.)

Then Taub got her a job in Las Vegas—four weeks, $12,500 a week at the Last Frontier; she would open there on April 18—so, after the Mexican engagement, the star, her secretary, maid, two musicians (one of them Sweets Edison), and twenty-four suitcases traveled to the Nevada desert.

“They had a red carpet all the way from the airplane to the inside of the airport,” says Sweets, “and a big sign that said
WELCOME JOSEPHINE BAKER
.

“At that time, blacks were not welcome on the Strip, but she was staying right there at the Last Frontier, and when we came to rehearsal, she asked me how did I like my room. I said, ‘Well, I don't stay in the hotel, they sent me around the west side, you know, in the black neighborhood.' So she says, ‘Oh, no, that can't happen, Mr. Sweets,' and she right away informed the owner of the Frontier that the show would not go on until I had a room. And right before the show, they had me a room, right there on the Strip, you know, yes, yes. And she had a table there in front of the stage every night, in case they would say the joint was full, blacks could have her table. She was a fighter, very much for her people.”

In Las Vegas, Josephine also lined up several experts willing to come to Les Milandes and teach her how to run a gambling palace. By June, she had left for South America; Taub was not with her.

Brazil. “Its name touches my heart because it sounds so soft to the ear,” said Josephine.

Uruguay. Singing and dancing and, when her “artistic schedule” permitted, lecturing. Speaking in English, which most of her listeners didn't understand, she told an audience that most Negroes in the United States were unhappy.

Argentina. She announced she would campaign against racial discrimination, although the country had only five thousand blacks out of a population of eighteen million. The Argentines were baffled, but polite.

Juan Perón received her on October 3 at Government House in Buenos Aires. The general and his late wife (Evita had died in July) had received so many letters from Josephine that they had thought of her as an old friend.

For obvious reasons, Josephine identified with Evita, her “dear sister.” A bit player in movies, Eva Maria Duarte de Perón had risen from “her first soiled love affair . . . to marry Juan Domingo Perón, the strong man of the Argentine government!” confided a blurb on the back cover of a book called
Eva, Evita
. She also “built the most beautiful orphanage in the world, gave her countrywomen the vote, fed the poor, and died at the height of her glory with $20 million in stolen funds nestled in Swiss bank accounts!”

Now the heavily embalmed “Martyr of Labor, Protector of the Forsaken, Defender of the Worker, Guiding Light of the Children” lay in state, holding a rosary blessed by the pope.

Carolyn Carruthers was acting as Josephine's companion and assistant. She remembered kneeling with Josephine in front of Evita's glass-covered coffin. “General Perón had received us just like officials. He and Josephine decided she would carry on Evita's fight for the poor people. He even had the government vote her a special position, we went everywhere in the name of Evita and the general. It was very strange.”