Josephine Baker (60 page)

“I cannot conceive of Heaven without General Perón,” Evita had said.

“Thank God for making men like Perón,” said Josephine, calling her new buddy the man who had “set the pattern for brotherhood . . .” (If Cain was your brother. Or if you could put out of mind the cattle prods used in his jails, the labor unions and newspapers smashed by his orders.)

So delighted was the general with his new acolyte that he assigned her to “oversee the chain of failing hospitals Eva had founded. The nightclub singer spent two days touring psychiatric and maternity hospitals . . . health-care centers, and a leper colony. Everywhere she went she was appalled by the lack of equipment and the miserable living conditions of the patients.”

Never shy, she turned the sharp edge of her tongue against Ramón Carillo, the minister of health, who wrote Perón in despair: “It is true the Señora Eva Perón called me often to make me aware of deficiencies in our services . . . but she never treated me like the Señora Baker did.”

For three months, Josephine threw her weight around, ordering a brand-new ambulance to “give” to the people, and almost having a
breakdown when it was delivered to her hotel. (She certainly didn't intend to pay for it.) But it wasn't her good works that got her in trouble, it was her big mouth. Interviewed by Perónist newspapers—there was a five-part series in the evening daily,
Critica
—she assured reporters the United States was the only country where Negroes were “treated like dogs.”

“She and I were fussing all the time now,” Carolyn Carruthers told me, “about the terrible things she said to the press.”

And the terrible things she said in three lectures she gave at Buenos Aires theaters. Offering her own revisionist view of World War II, she announced that “we Free French” had liberated France without any help from England or America, then took a swipe at the newly elected president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, predicting that under him, “the colored people will suffer as never before.” She also wrote an open letter to Herbert Clark, who had done an unflattering piece about her in the New York
Daily News
, calling him “a typical scandal monger,” and assuring him that “North American democracy is a farce.”

Suddenly, Winchell had company. American journalists who had been keeping their own counsel erupted into print. Robert Ruark liked Josephine's legs, but didn't like her saying that persecutions in the United States were now “more shocking than before World War II, with lynchings, condemnations without trials and electrocutions. . . .”

How would she know about pre–World War II conditions, Ruark wondered, “since she lived abroad and was wed to a series of Frenchmen.”

Baker: “White men prate of democracy and send the Negro to die in Korea.”

Ruark: “I could have sworn a few white boys were listed on the casualty reports.”

Warming to his task, Ruark said that on her most recent trip to New York, Miss Baker had lived in a lavish hotel suite “and never met Jim Crow socially. She traveled in drawing rooms with her white maid. . . . She hasn't seen any lynchings, nobody treated her mean.”

The columnist called Josephine “an abject liar,” the
New York Post
(more in sorrow than in anger) called her “the pin-up girl of Argentine fascism,” and the Justice Department said it was studying ways to bar her from the United States. In Argentina, Josephine sniffed, “I shall count it an honor to be barred.”

Even her old friend Adam Clayton Powell charged her with presenting
“her own wild imaginings as facts.” Powell spoke of civil rights won in “an unrelenting fight waged by Negro and white leaders during the twenty years when Miss Baker was not in the United States. She never helped us by word or deed.” Neither had she, proud citizen of France, ever protested “the sorry plight of African colonials” under French rule.

Her anti-USA, pro-Perón rhetoric was beginning to have dire consequences in Latin America as well. “At the Opera Theatre in Buenos Aires,”
Variety
reported, “the gross declined noticeably throughout the past week.”

A projected tour fell apart. The Uruguayans didn't want her because of her Perónist views, the Peruvians didn't want her because she “planned to carry out racial propaganda against the United States.” Moreover, Argentina was beginning to pall, she was growing tired of playing understudy to the memory of Evita, and tired of the general, who spent his leisure chasing thirteen-year-old girls.

February 1953 found her again in Havana. Three times she had postponed her arrival there, and now her contracts with Montmartre Cabaret, the National Casino, and CMQ-Television (which had signed her for two weeks at fourteen thousand dollars) were canceled. “We can't be at the mercy of her whims,” said one producer, but the truth was that her campaign against North America was making potential employers uneasy.

She settled for a couple of weeks' work in a small neighborhood movie theater (a run-down former burlesque house), which thrilled Walter Winchell. By appearing at this “emporium of bump and grind,” he wrote, “Miss Baker has publicly acknowledged that her professional day is done.”

An audience with President Batista went badly, he refused to enroll in her crusade against America, and the next day, she was arrested. Military intelligence officers seized books and pamphlets from her rooms, took her to headquarters, and interrogated her about her Communist leanings. She said she didn't have any. Like a criminal, she was fingerprinted and photographed with a number across her chest. She never forgot the number, 0000492, one more thorn in her martyr's crown.

It was time to go. Spring was coming back to France, and so was Josephine, tired, angry, and empty of pocket. With creditors prowling around, Jo was getting cold feet about the transformation of Les Milandes,
but the iron-willed Josephine simply hit the road again. Switzerland, Rome, then Paris for the annual Bal des Petits Lits Blancs, a charity ball to raise money for sick children. She performed with Lily Pons and came down into the audience to kiss Charlie Chaplin. Had not she and Charlie both been thrown to the lions by a wicked United States where the dollar was king?

In June, Josephine came to London for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “She and my wife and I walked from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace, down the Mall,” said Harry Hurford-Janes. “And she turned to us and said, ‘All this will be swept away one day.' You know, the queen and everything. Well, it probably will, but it was strange how she admired and yet envied the royal family. For years, she sent them Christmas cards, and they were all acknowledged, and then she used to put these acknowledgments out in her apartment.”

Harry remembered going to the House of Lords with Josephine, and passing a black speaker, a Communist, haranguing the crowd in front of Hyde Park. “She went up to him and said, ‘My friend is white, I am black and white, why are you Red?' Then she invited him to come to Les Milandes; she wanted to de-Communize him.”

Toward the end of October, in an uncharacteristic show of selflessness, she wrote to Colette Mars, who was sailing for New York to play the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel.

“Do not paralyze yourself with fear which doesn't serve you but takes away your talent,” she advised, confessing that only the night before, she herself had been fearful, opening at the Drap d'Or, a small cabaret near the Champs-Élysées. (It was the best she could get now, she was considered to be washed up.) Stage fright, she told Colette, “is allowed to me because I'm much older than you.”

Thelma Carpenter was working in a club not far from the Drap d'Or, and she saw Josephine often. “She didn't know how to be happy,” Thelma says, “but I could make her laugh, I entertained her. Before Christmas, she took me to the Galeries Lafayette. She wanted to buy Jo something.

“Now, she'd had husbands before, but Jo was gay, every queen in town knew him. And he was in the country, at Les Milandes, with his lover. When you'd call on the phone, the lover would answer and say he was “Madame Bakaire.”

“We go in the men's department, and we're trying on dressing
gowns, trying to decide what would look best on Jo, and she says, ‘What should we give my wife-in-law?' and I say I would give him poison, and she laughs. I think she saw she was in a ludicrous situation, but she came from that old school that said a woman's gotta have a man, any kind of man. And maybe a regular man would have wanted too much of her, I don't think she cared that much about sex. Anyway, she had done so much for herself, she
was
a man.

“I remember asking her about Germany because I knew she'd been in Berlin in the twenties. ‘We worked with no clothes on,' she said, ‘so to keep us warm, they gave us cocaine. It was wide open in Berlin, it was a wicked city.' ”

Suddenly, it added up. Everything Count Harry Kessler had confided to his diary: Josephine rolling naked on a floor, Josephine dancing for hours “without any sign of fatigue.”

“Pebbles to make my tired body gay.” It's a line from the old melodrama
The Shanghai Gesture
, uttered by a character called Mother Goddamn. She is recounting the sufferings inflicted on her as a young girl in a brothel. “But,” she says, “I survived.”

White powder to make cold blood run hot. But Josephine survived. Long enough to grow tired of men. They were deceivers ever; the older they got, the more they used young girls as shields against age, and dropped them without pity. She had collected many grievances against the male sex, starting with her abandonment by the man who had fathered her and left her a child of bad luck.

I can identify with that, because I too was conceived as a child of bad luck. I can hear the villagers whispering behind my mother's back,
“Pauvre Luce, elle a pas eu de chance.”

Josephine could no longer conquer with the laughter of her
croupe
, nor as a war hero either. Her uniform had been consigned to the closets of Time, the soldiers who had dreamed of her had gone home to their sweethearts.

Her growing distrust and contempt for men—with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle—caused her to offer ever more insults to her hapless husband. Because it was in the fifties—nobody can remember the exact year—that she took as her companion a gorilla.

Maryse Bouillon: “She called him Bubu. He was as tall as a thirteen-year-old boy, it was frightful, everyone feared him.”

Yvette Malaury: “She dressed him like a man, with trousers, a shirt,
and tie. Yes, like a man. And she and the gorilla would walk down the street together, occasionally making appearances at the
guinguette
. People would say, ‘It's a scandal!' She had become fond of that gorilla. When Jo Bouillon came back and tried to enter her bedroom, she told him, ‘I don't need you anymore.' ”

Georges Malaury: “He was a beautiful animal but people were afraid of him. And let me tell you, man to man, he had a big tool.”

Georgette Malaury (Georges's sister): “Josephine did not treat him like an animal, but like a human being. He was jealous of anyone approaching her. In the end, she had to have him shot. She could have given him to a zoo, but she was always hasty.”

Eli Mercier: “He became wild, and escaped in the park. They killed him in the park.”

Incidentally, Bubu was the name of one of Josephine's partners in the 1930s casino show
Paris Qui Remue
. An M. Maccio, dressed as a gorilla, stood next to Josephine as she sang “J'ai Deux Amours.”

In February 1954, Josephine went to Denmark and played a second-rate Copenhagen nightclub called the Harlem. She also lectured in the National Museum, under the auspices of a French organization called LICA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme), in the National Museum on “Why I Fight Racial Discrimination.”

“There is good and evil in all people,” she told her audience, adding that they must wonder why she was “joining the crusade for the freedom of humanity, instead of satisfying myself with my theater life, where doors are opened freely, where people are always friendly, and where there are few disappointments and obstacles.”

A definition of theater life not recognizable to most performers, but let it go. She talked about South Africa, Japan (where, she claimed, whites discriminated against the Japanese), Germany, where the “innocent babies of colored American soldiers who had been stationed there and white German girls . . . had already created a problem.” It was against the background of this problem, she said, that she had decided “to adopt my five little boys.” (Nowhere else have I found any record of Josephine's giving this reason for going into the Mother business.)

But mostly, she talked about the United States: how the actor Canada Lee was hounded to his death, how a Burmese judge was turned away by a restaurant in Washington, D.C., how two colored people in the South were killed because they used a toilet reserved for whites.

She said three-quarters of the world was composed of colored people, “and these peoples are uniting. . . . I am afraid of revenge, because nothing is more horrible than revenge which has its roots in hatred.”

On the face of it, there wasn't much in the lecture that a human being with an ordinary amount of goodwill could fault, but the Danish foreign minister, a Mr. Hansen, was taken to task by the American ambassador for having extended formal hospitality to someone promoting “anti-Americanism in Denmark.”

Mr. Hansen said he didn't think Josephine wanted to injure the United States, though he had, in fact, asked her why she hadn't included “any mention of racial discrimination in the Soviet Union,” and she'd said she preferred to talk about places she had personal knowledge of. The American ambassador replied that he doubted Josephine had personal knowledge of South Africa or Japan, both of which she had mentioned in her speech.