Josephine Baker (61 page)

At least part of that would be changing very soon. Josephine was going to Japan. She had decided to seize the moment. No big contracts were coming her way, the Casino and the Folies no longer fought over her, she felt vulnerable to the future. But she always had a new plan. Enter Josephine, the Universal Mother. If young men no longer wanted her, a brood of abandoned babies would make her feel needed again. She was going to turn the world into a better place, not only by fighting from public platforms, but in her private demesne.

In the spring of 1953 she had written to Miki Sawada (who was by then running an orphanage) and ordered a child, as you would a takeout dinner. “I would like you to find for me a Japanese baby of pure race, a healthy one, two years old. I want to adopt five little two-year-old boys, a Japanese, a black from South Africa, an Indian from Peru, a Nordic child, and an Israelite; they will live together like brothers.”

No more dolls out of the garbage can for Tumpy, she would have unbroken ones, healthy, perfect. She asked for the Japanese baby's papers to be prepared at once. “Because I want to take him away with me. I will need a little kimono, because I would like him to live in his national costume so he will not forget his ancestors and his motherland. He will, of course, be raised in France. I would also like his first name to be Japanese.”

She left Paris for Tokyo with Ginette, her wardrobe mistress, and trunkfuls of new dresses by Christian Dior.

Except for fallen petals under the trees, the cherry blossoms were finished, but the azaleas, pink, white, orange, red, were coming into bloom when Miki Sawada fetched Josephine from Haneda Airport.

They drove to Oiso, a town forty miles outside of Tokyo, to the Elizabeth Sanders Home (named for an Englishwoman whose money helped start the place). It was in this villa near the sea that Miki had begun to save abandoned babies of American soldiers and Japanese girls.

Although she was born a child of privilege, Miki's comfortable life had been shattered by the war—a son killed, her husband stigmatized as a criminal by the American army. “My father could take no job,” says Emi Sawada, “our possessions were confiscated. When we lost the war, we lost everything.”

Including the villa in Oiso. But Miki got it back. First, she won permission from occupation authorities to set up an orphanage, then she started raising money to rescue Eurasian infants.

It began, Emi told me, on a train. A package fell from an overhead luggage rack onto Miki's head. “My mother opened it, and discovered a newborn baby boy wrapped in newspapers. He was black, a child of the occupation.”

After that, Miki Sawada started taking in children nobody wanted. The first was found in the Imperial Palace plaza in the dead of winter. “The mothers used to leave them at the door,” Emi says. “There was no help from the Japanese public, these were impure children, children of the enemy still occupying our country.”

Between 1948 and 1954, Miki welcomed more than a thousand foundlings, and struggled to find money for milk, medicine, clothing, rice. When Josephine came in 1954, it was not only to adopt a child, but to give a series of free performances for the Home. Informed by an American officer that her friend was a Communist, Miki was stunned. “I had never heard of anything so ridiculous. She owned a castle!”

Because of American displeasure with Josephine, even her costumes were held hostage. Instead of arriving in Haneda, they had been unloaded in Hong Kong. She performed her first shows in Japan wearing one of Emi's kimonos. (Forty years later, a woman named Laura Flannery told me there had indeed been a cabal against Josephine. While a CIA employee in Tokyo, Flannery had found a file describing a scheme to destroy Josephine's reputation. “I asked why the agency would lie about a woman trying to adopt babies, and was told she was a leftist who went around the world talking down the United States.”)

In Hiroshima, Josephine visited a peace monument. “She stopped,” Miki recalled, “at the little store in front of the Atomic Bomb Memorial Hall, and put her hand on the shoulder of an old man. It was covered with raw-looking red keloids. . . . Tears ran down her face. ‘This is unforgivable,' she said. ‘The countries that think they have won the war have lost something precious in the process.' ”

After twenty-three concerts, she left Japan with two orphans. “First she had a Shinto ceremony performed for them,” Emi says. “I think she wanted to show her sincerity by putting these children in the care of the old gods.”

At the ceremony, M. Martin, director of the Air Force, stood proxy for the children's father. (Jo did not yet know he had become the lucky daddy of
two
little boys.)

The older child, Yamamoto Akio (who would be called Akio), had been born on July 7, 1952; the younger, Kimura Teruya Seiji (who
would be called Janot), had been born on July 15, 1953. They wouldn't be legally adopted until 1957.

“When Josephine went with Mrs. Sawada to the orphanage,” Ginette says, “I stayed in our hotel in Tokyo. When she came back, she said, ‘Look, Ginette, look at the two beautiful children I have, my first two children, I'm so happy.' Then we started to take care of them, give them bottles, all of that. It was a new part for her. I went to the Shinto ceremony; Josephine made me the godmother of Akio.”

Both Akio and Janot had been born of white fathers, though Miki Sawada said that, during her visit to the orphanage, Josephine had spoken with—and comforted—two young women with babies fathered by blacks. “One of the mothers spent a long time with Josephine under the trees in our garden . . . and returned home looking considerably happier and with renewed courage.”

Still, Josephine had not selected for herself a baby with a black father. I don't really know why, except that maybe, in choosing abandoned children born of white men, she was choosing the little Josephine to nurture and make whole. (She would in time adopt black children, but never an American one.)

“On our way back to France,” Ginette says, “we spent five days in Saigon. It was an eleven-hour flight from Tokyo. Josephine sang in a cabaret, and also went to military camps to entertain the French soldiers who had been wounded fighting in the infamous battle of Dien Bien Phu.”

Then it was time to go home.

A stewardess aboard the Air France Constellation remembered Josephine's asking to have the babies' bottles warmed in the galley. “She came there to change the children. She seemed satisfied, soft.”

On May 12, the beaming new mother deplaned at Orly, a baby in each arm. What had she come back to? Les Milandes going full tilt. “Sometimes,” said Leon Burg, “a truck would be unloaded in front of the château, and its contents loaded onto smaller trucks and driven away and sold somewhere else. But Josephine would get the bill. She helped put Périgord on the world map of tourism, three hundred thousand people came that spring and summer, but the owners of restaurants and hotels in the neighboring villages worried she was going to take all their business. More than once, she had her tires slashed, until they saw there was enough for everyone.”

The place had grown without, it seemed, any rational planning at all.
“You can't believe what went on here,” says the electrician, Henri Chapin. “Josephine had an architect who made no blueprints, he drew on raw walls, and then he would leave, and when he came back, the wall had been painted or papered, and the drawings would be gone. At the Chartreuse, the chic restaurant-hotel, they had done the upstairs rooms, but forgot to allow for the pitched roof; with the roof in place, you had to crawl on hands and knees to get from one room to another. It had to be redone.

“When her employees weren't ruining her, Josephine was ruining herself. I worked three months to build her a water pump, new motors, copper pipes from Limoges, electric cables, and then Jo Bouillon comes to me and says, ‘Stop, we are going to do something else, a water tank.'

“I quit. I said, ‘Josephine, I like you, but I don't like what's going on here.' If we had been near Paris or Marseilles, we could have catered banquets, weddings, but here we were lost. La Chartreuse was too beautiful, too fragile for the country, people broke everything.”

“When she gave a dinner in the grand salon,” says Jacqueline Abtey, “she would go and take the chalice and the monstrance and other consecrated articles from the chapel and decorate the long table with them. I was shocked. And guests would sit under large silver chandeliers, and eat off blue porcelain encrusted with roses. Only four sets of that Bohemian china had ever been made, for the duke of Windsor, the king of Italy, the queen of Holland, and Josephine.

“Her bathroom was covered with gold-leafed tiles; when she needed money, she would have them taken off the walls and sent to the bank as collateral.”

She thought she was achieving what she had first plotted with Le Corbusier, her “little village with little houses, little trees, little roads for people to be happy,” but when she was in residence, not everyone was happy. Subconsciously, she re-created the conditions of her childhood, turning herself into Mrs. Kaiser of dreaded memory, rousing her victims at dawn.

“During the day, a twelve-year-old girl from the neighborhood tended Josephine's sheep,” says Georges Malaury. “Evenings, she worked in the kitchen, washing dishes, cleaning the stove. Josephine would keep her till 11
P.M
., midnight, it was dark, we had no lighted roads, and the child's mother worried. Every night, she would come to pick up her daughter, and wait outside.

“Josephine didn't like that, so one night she goes out and says to the
mother, ‘What are you doing here?' and the mother says, ‘I came to pick up my daughter,' and Josephine hits her. They fought, rolling on the ground, Josephine screaming. It was unpleasant, we heard it across the road.”

“Josephine was terrible,” says Henri Chapin. “She left us independent contractors in peace, but her maids ran when they saw her coming. She would have them carry things from the basement to the roof, from the roof to the basement, just to keep them busy. And she didn't sleep, day and night she kept running, she had a terrible vitality.

“When she started the adoptions, Jo Bouillon would tell me,
‘Dis donc
, I'm a father again of I don't know what.' She used those adoptions as weapons for her racial fight. At the beginning, she put billboards along the road saying
COME SEE LES MILANDES AND ITS RAINBOW TRIBE
. The people all around protested, ‘You don't show little children like monkeys,' so she had the billboards taken down.”

Even the children's nurses were driven mercilessly. Here are excerpts of a letter to a touring Josephine from one nanny: “I have been eight days at Les Milandes, and have not yet found time to unpack. . . . On top of my duties as nurse-assistant, I am a maid of all trades, washing, cleaning, scouring, cooking. Is this included in the job description, and if so, what is the pay? And when during twenty-four hours is the time permitted for rest?”

“The personnel went filing past for years,” says Jacqueline Abtey. “Josephine engaged them like musical acts, wherever she was, and months later, when she was back for a short visit at Les Milandes, she would have forgotten she'd hired them, or she would discover they were no good for the job. It was turmoil, in one year I counted over two hundred nurses. This was bad for the children, they would get attached to a girl and cry when she left, but you could not reason with Josephine. The nursery was badly kept, the odor of
pipi
on the mattresses was almost as bad as the monkey house.”

“People in the village were worried for their children,” Georges Malaury told me. “And they were worried for these children of Josephine when she was away, because Josephine's life had become their life, Josephine's worries became their worries. Jo would seduce young men, and a few families blackmailed Josephine. Most of these boys were working at the château, and suddenly their pay would be a bit higher. For young kids, that place was a sex palace.”

Like the rampant ivy on the château walls, sex ran amok at Les
Milandes. “Josephine's brother-in-law, Elmo, would say he was going to get some grass for the rabbits,” Georges says, “and he would be with a girl, and suddenly he would see his wife, Margaret, running, looking for him. He would jump over a wall and be working next to my father at the anvil when Margaret arrived breathless, a revolver in her hand.”

Richard Martin behaved even more recklessly than Elmo. He loved France, loved “bein' able to walk down the street with a white woman and not bein' scared of gettin' hanged.” When he wasn't working on the farm, or running Les Milandes' gas station, he was chasing girls. He impregnated one—Josephine sent her to Switzerland for an abortion—and he also fathered a baby boy by a sweetheart in Bordeaux.