Josephine Baker (64 page)

So they must muddle through the summer, and try to keep everything running, even if it wasn't running well. On the one hand, Josephine trusted no one—after a party at the château, she would wash the priceless gold knives and forks, the china, and store them in a cupboard to which she had the only key. On the other hand, her suspicious nature did not prevent her being fleeced; she was not as shrewd as the peasants around her.

From the start, the union of Joe and Jo had been a strange one: Josephine out to prove she could ensnare any man she chose, no matter that his appetite led him down another path; Jo up against a tornado.

“Jo was good to Josephine's family,” says Janie Martin, Artie's German-born bride. “Jo is the one who suggested putting the little house where Margaret lived in Margaret's name, ‘so if you die, your sister will have something.' ” (In fact, says Jacqueline Abtey, “Jo Bouillon is the one who had wanted her family to come over. Josephine told Jacques and me, ‘I would never have invited them, they should have stayed in America.' ” Once in France, it turned out they had to sing for their supper; Josephine put them to work as soon as they arrived. Margaret opened a pastry shop—the tourists loved her pies; Elmo rented out canoes on the Dordogne; and Richard took charge of the Esso station at the entrance to the park.)

During her war with her husband, Josephine buried lawyer Dop in details. “The situation is becoming more and more difficult. A waiter came and asked me for glasses with the “Joe and Jo” engraving on them for the hotels and restaurants. When I refused, he was extremely vulgar toward me. Another worker told me his boss was Monsieur Bouillon, not me. . . . How can people treat me with so little respect?”

I was exhausted just working my way through the blizzard of papers. Where did she find the strength? Running around the world performing, coming back to this or that hotel room and firing off ten, twenty letters a night, sinking herself in potatoes, tobacco, cows, nurses, children, paintings, contracts. Even for a woman who never slept, the output was prodigious. Why didn't she make herself sick with all those fulminations? Maybe because she only wrote them, she didn't have to read them.

“She attacks me on all sides,” Jo told a friend. “She has no confidence in me, but she wants me to stay. Even if I was the big boss, I could not live in a desert; I would want to put in the personnel I thought would be good for the place, but she claims my people are thieves . . . pederasts.”

Josephine pawned her jewels (one more time), sold the avenue Bugeaud house in Paris, and wrote a fairy tale.
The Rainbow Tribe
, illustrated by Piet Worm, is beautiful. The cover shows a little black one-eyed hen looking up at eight children sitting in a tree. On the title page are the words “This book was made in Les Milandes, where Kott-Kott found her happiness.” Kott-Kott, the hen, travels the world searching for her lost eye, and comes to rest in a place where no one laughs at her anymore; this was Josephine's tribute to Willie Mae. She was convinced that some rich producer would want to make a movie of it, and her money worries would be over.

It never happened.

Part of the problem was Josephine's own inconsistency. When a respected Austrian producer offered her a picture deal, she said no, she could not permit her children to be exploited. (The producer was too polite to mention the gaping tourists outside the windows.)

No sooner had she got off her high horse than she was writing to the cultural attaché at the American embassy in Paris. Could he put her in touch with “an American film company like Walt Disney”? A movie about Les Milandes and the children and universal brotherhood was crying to be made, but it must be made “by a very big company with a lot of authority. . . . I will give the world rights to this company, but of course they have to pay me. . . .”

Broke though she was, Josephine could not stop spending. She ordered ten walk-in refrigerators from America, and was shocked to find one of them being used as a chicken coop. Told they couldn't be made to work on French electrical current, she was appalled. “There is racism even in kitchen equipment, it has to stop. The Japanese are much more intelligent, you will see, they will inundate markets all over the world with machines that can run without discrimination.”

She was right, but how did she know?

September 24, 1957: With school desegregation being threatened by white mobs, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine black students on their way to Central High.
Shortly thereafter, Arthur Prevost wrote a newspaper piece headlined
NO LITTLE ROCK IN DORDOGNE
. There were pictures of Luis and Akio in class in Castelnaud, along with a statement from Josephine: “No incidents when my little ones went to school for the first time, no matter what the color of their skins.”

Her little ones may not have been discriminated against, but they were certainly confused by the life they led. Between club dates, a speech on brotherhood, and a visit to a doctor, Josephine would squeeze in a few days at Les Milandes, where she fought with, fired, cajoled her employees, then turned her ferocious attentions on the children. Guilty for having been gone so much, jealous of whatever affection they might have developed for anyone but her, she focused like a laser.

“Sometimes when she arrived home from the road,” Jari says, “there would be a reunion around the kitchen table. She would take us, one by one, on her knees. But we were in a hurry to get down, it was embarrassing, too much love, a bit exaggerated. What she could not give us while she was away, she wanted to give us all at once. It was
tout ou rien
, then she would leave, and our normal life would start again. Our father would go away too, but when he came back, it was more normal. He cared about our work at school, he was there to answer questions.”

Still, during Josephine's short stays at Les Milandes, the public was fed a picture of domestic bliss. On a Sunday afternoon, Josephine, Carrie, and the children could be seen in the front row of the audience as Jo conducted the grand orchestra of Sarlat, or there might be a conference about racism led by Josephine, while movie cameras rolled and flashbulbs exploded. “It was terrible,” says my brother Jean-Claude, “because we always had to keep our eyes open while the lights were blazing into them.”

October 18: Since Jo and Josephine could agree on almost nothing, the court made several decisions for them. Jo would be permitted to stay in the Maury house, personal souvenirs would be divided, and the children awarded to Josephine. Jo could visit them on Thursdays (not a school day in France) and two Sundays a month, but in Josephine's absence, Carrie was named their guardian. If you enjoy paradox, consider this woman who, in order to follow a pair of laughing eyes, had, time after time, forsaken her own maternal duties. Now she was being appointed by law to cluck over chicks who weren't even hers.

The day the bank sent a sheriff to attach the furniture, Josephine met
him at the front door and slapped his face. With the imprint of her fingers on his cheek, he struggled for control. “Madame Baker, one day you will pay dearly for that.”

She slapped strangers, and she slapped people she knew. Once, when the melons in the fields were overripe—customers in her restaurants were not ordering melon—she told the head gardener that he and his men should eat the fruit before it rotted. Two days later, she came into the kitchen where the grounds crew was having lunch, shrieked, “What! You are eating my melons!” and slapped the head gardener in the face. To the delight of his assistants, he rose and slapped her back.

Artie Martin says his imperious aunt thought of herself as a monarch. “She liked me because I had been a military man. ‘You know how to rule people,' she kept telling me. She didn't say manage, she said rule.”

Somehow, even after her scene with the sheriff, her lawyers were able to reassure the bank, as they would several more times before the end, but the situation remained ugly.

Jo's inquiring about Carrie's failing health evoked a diatribe from Josephine. “He is like a murderer drawn to the scene of his crime.” He had, she said, created “a kingdom of immorality, only a red light is missing.”

Sweden, Germany, Holland, Denmark. Crowds everywhere, and Dop commended her on refilling Les Milandes' coffers. “We were able to pay November expenses and salaries, and even a million francs of our debt to the bank.” But he was concerned about her health. “Take care of yourself.”

She was as concerned as he. “I'm everywhere but at home, and daily in a situation that makes me tremble, my mother sick, my children separated from me.”

Still, she hatched grandiose schemes. To tap into the pilgrim trade (Lourdes would be memorializing its hundredth anniversary in 1959), Josephine was already planning a huge celebration of her own. She would have a monument to many gods built on a hill; there would be a Christ, a Buddha, a Moses, a Mohammed, and a voodoo god, each thirty-five feet tall.

From Berlin, she wrote Dop that her opening was sold out. “I had been afraid because some newspapers carried terrible stories. They said that since the separation, we had divided the children, the white stayed with Monsieur Bouillon, and the black with me.”

She also said she was recording a song for a film in Berlin, and would get one million francs for it. “I'm deeply grateful to God. . . . I'm going on stage now, it is the last show, I'm tired. Good night. Kiss my little ones.”

Two weeks later, she sent Dop an obituary of Jean Lion, holder of the Légion d'Honneur, the Croix de Guerre, the Croix de la Libération, dead in Paris of the Asian flu. Dop would see, she predicted, that Lion “is quite a different personality from Monsieur Bouillon.” She spoke of the fallen hero in the present tense. “The dead,” she said, “are always part of the family.”

On December 18, great joy. She had been informed that she too would be given the Légion d'Honneur. “It is moral support to think that France loves me so much.” On the same line, she wrote, “Save electricity.”

And she kept on making speeches. In a church in Frankfurt, she talked about her children. “They belong to you just as much as they belong to me. You have the same responsibility as I have to take care of them.”

Listen up, world. Josephine is willing to share her burden with you.

Christmas Eve in Germany, she went to midnight Mass and wondered if somewhere Jo was praying. “And begging God to forgive him all the bad he has done.” A theater director in Stockholm paid for airline tickets so the children and a nurse could come spend January with her. She told the authorities she was removing the children from school for health reasons. “The snow is very good for them.”

And while on the subject of health, she was going to send some polio vaccine for Dop's children—“It is very safe.” She thanked the lawyer for news that Carrie's morale had improved—“As you say so well, we have only one mother”—and then got down to business. “I cannot believe that we cannot have peace at Les Milandes when the staff have no worries but to eat well, sleep, and do their work. . . . I have to close my eyes for now but I will get rid of all of them.”

In mid-January, she received a letter from Mohamed Menebhi. He had loved her, sheltered her, and now he was in trouble. (Liberation had brought changes in the fortunes of many powerful Moroccan families. Palaces and lands were taken from those known to have sided with the French.) “I hope you have not forgotten our friendship,” Mohamed wrote, “and the bad hour that comes to everyone as it has to me. I have no friends but you and Jacques. Could you lend me the sum of three hundred thousand francs for a year?”

Josephine forwarded the request to Jacques. “This is from Mohammed, begging for money. I didn't give it to him, but I invited him and his family to come to Les Milandes. . . . Write him if you wish.”

Jacques sent Mohamed five hundred thousand francs. It was a debt he and Josephine owed.

Pressures mounted on Josephine. Not only must she tour to make money, but she must also go back to Les Milandes at least once a month, she told Dop, “because of Jo's accusations that I have abandoned the children for a new career. So this month, I lost 3,250,000 francs in bookings.” Besides money, the children were costing her peace of mind. There had been rumors of child abuse inflicted by various nurses, and Jo was talking of suing for custody. But she had heard he was planning to return to his old job as musical director at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and since “this place is known for catering to homosexuals, it will be a help in our fight to keep the children.”

She also decreed that none of her brood were to spend time in Paris with their father because “Monsieur Bouillon does not have the necessary female personnel to take good care of the children.” (Jo fought back, contending that he, at least, had not put the children on show for the public to gape at.)

The war accelerated.

Dop was instructed to get rid of the “Joe and Jo” ashtrays and order others: ten children in native costumes holding hands in a circle. “We must add the tenth, because when I go to South America, I will get a little Indian.”

But the situation had become impossible to sustain. She was on the road, Carrie was sick, and finally, Josephine announced a reconciliation with Jo. For the second time, she gave a wedding banquet. This one was held at the Chartreuse.

“I was invited,” Eli Mercier says. “There were famous people from Paris, Josephine was dressed in blue, the wine was extraordinary, a king could not have done it better. She had the gold glasses, gold plates, gold tablecloths.”

It was the end of April, plans for the summer had to be firmed up. She wrote Arthur Prevost telling him that “for religious reasons,” she had called off the divorce, and imploring him to give Les Milandes some publicity in his paper. “We are near Lourdes, Lascaux, Bordeaux . . . we are in the center of pre-history, the Middle Ages, Cro-Magnon man.”