Josephine Baker (65 page)

Then she went off to tour Poland with a young Norwegian pianist
named Tor Hultin. (If the Western world was tiring of Josephine, a new market had opened for her behind the Iron Curtain.) Tor Hultin remembers that every night before her last song, she made a speech. “She spoke of human values, respect for liberty, and the whole theater, four thousand people, would stand up and scream.

“She and I visited the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and later, during lunch with the minister of culture, Josephine was asked her impressions of the camp. She said it was the most inhuman thing that ever existed in the world. Then she bent to the minister across the table and said in a loud voice, ‘And where are your camps today, Monsieur le Ministre?' I almost choked. Back at the hotel, I said, ‘Josephine, I want to see my wife and children again, you are going to have us arrested.' Don't forget we were there in 1958, the worst time in Polish history.

“She turned to me with that special look of hers, strange, half laughing, half serious. ‘There is no one who dares to touch me!' ”

How many times we have heard that.

“Josephine was interested in everything,” Tor said. “At one press conference, she told foreign journalists that the biggest problem with black people in America was their lack of confidence. ‘They pity themselves,' she said. ‘That will not help them.' She was also concerned about South Africa (‘The white man there doesn't understand he is sitting on a bomb') and the Indians in South America.

“I was with her in Caracas when she adopted—or I should say, kidnapped—little Mara. We met a wonderful Indian woman who was in the government, and Josephine said she wanted to adopt an Indian child, and this woman took us to Maracaibo. It was a one-hour flight, and then we went with a jeep for three days visiting Indian camps, sleeping in tents. The Indians were poor, a lot of sick people and children.

“In one camp, we saw a little boy, maybe eighteen months old. They had made a hole in the sand, and he was lying in it. He looked like those pictures of concentration-camp children, big belly, skin and bones, he couldn't walk.

“Josephine wanted to take him, and the parents were happy, they had nine or ten other children, so she gave them some money and we left. I carried the little boy on the plane, and suddenly Josephine said to me, ‘His name shall be Mara, for a big Indian chief.'

“When we got back to the airport in Caracas, a man in uniform came
walking toward us, he looked like a general, and he seemed angry. I said to Josephine, ‘That man speaks a lot, but I do not understand Spanish.'

“ ‘He wants my autograph,' she said.

“ ‘No,' I said, ‘I think he's a policeman.'

“Suddenly a car came, and we were taken to jail. Josephine screamed for the French ambassador, but we were held for twenty-four hours. The French ambassador was there when we were released, and the ‘general' came to apologize, and would you believe it, Josephine spat in his face. He didn't move. He spoke bad English but he kept saying, ‘Excuse me, it was a mistake.' They thought we had stolen an Indian baby.”

Arriving at the airport in Paris, Josephine was met by Paulette Coquatrix. Mara, the chosen descendant of Chief Maracaibo, was not happy, he was screeching. “Take care of him,” Josephine begged Paulette, “I can't stop him.”

Paulette accepted the baby and, leaving Josephine behind to deal with the press, whisked him off to the Coquatrix apartment. “He still hadn't stopped screaming, so I decided to change him. To my stupefaction, his skin came off with the diaper. Josephine had forgotten to change him, his poor bottom was absolutely raw. Josephine loved children, but did not know how to take care of them.”

Aside from Mara's bottom, things were looking good. Preparations for
Paris Mes Amours
were already in the works (Josephine would make her Paris comeback at the Olympia, the same theater where she had made her farewell appearance), and Jo was home again. When he walked in, Josephine accosted him. “Do you know what Akio wants for Christmas?” “Yes,” he said, “a violin.” “No,” she said. “He told me he wanted for Daddy and Mommy to be more together.”

It was like the old days, an immense tree glittering next to the chimney in the salon, a mountain of toys in front of it. The whole family, Margaret, Elmo, Richard and Artie and their wives, shared a Christmas feast of oysters, turkey and chestnuts,
bûche de Noël
. Tor Hultin, his wife, and two young daughters joined them. “It was fantastic,” Tor says. “Josephine had invited all the children of the village and her employees and their families. There were presents for everyone. The children were playing with Gigolo, Margaret's chimpanzee, tall as a four-year-old child and dressed in a sailor uniform, and I played Christmas songs on the beautiful grand piano that once belonged to Franz Liszt.”

Carrie did not leave her bed. There is a picture of her taken that day,
lying against white pillows, her eyes far away. Is she homesick? Does she think of Arthur Martin? Tony Hudson? Willie Mae? Does she have a premonition that this will be her last Christmas?

After the holidays, Josephine took to the road again. On January 8, Charles de Gaulle became president of the Republic. On January 12, Carrie died. Josephine was in Istanbul, but did not come home. Dop had wired condolences, and she responded, “Your telegram did me good. . . . I'm completely upset.” Maybe she was, at that. Once she had told Jo, “You're never sure about your father, but you know you came out of your mother's belly.”

At first, Carrie's body rested in a borrowed niche in the Malaury family's vault, to the disapproval of Georges's grandmother. “I do not want to spend eternity next to a
négresse
,” the old lady kept saying. “If you do not remove her from my vault, I will curse you from the beyond.”

In time, the removal was accomplished.

André Rivollet said Carrie had quit her home in America “for truffle country; now she rests forever next to an Italian count she never knew.” (Or, rather, next to his heart. According to Maryse Bouillon, it was Jo who had suggested that Pepito's body, after having lain in the basement of a church for twelve years, should be moved to Les Milandes for a proper burial. But this was not dramatic enough for Josephine; she decided that she would bring back only his heart. Which she had put into a heart-shaped coffin and consigned to a grave, while the servants crossed themselves and remarked on how kind she was.)

Carrie left her son Richard her Bible. In its pages, he found a small picture of Tony Hudson.

“Josephine's mother was lonely,” says Leon Burg. “She is buried here in the little cemetery of Les Milandes, with Jo Bouillon's father, Pepito's heart, and the little girl of Arthur and Janie Martin. My wife and I go sometimes to put some flowers on the right side of the cemetery where they lie. We put white flowers for the baby. The wood crosses fell long ago, you have to look under the leaves to find them.”

The children missed Carrie. “I know she adored us,” Jari says. “When Mother got angry and sent us upstairs without dinner, Granny would sneak us food.”

As a member of the family, Jo's niece, Maryse Bouillon, had seen some of the darker side of life in the château. She was on the scene when
Carrie, Margaret, and Elmo arrived from St. Louis, and describes Carrie as “imposing, a grande dame. She and my grandparents used to take long walks together, and they talked, she in American, they in French, and they understood each other perfectly.”

Maryse says she never saw any affection between Josephine and Carrie—“Carrie was a kind of prisoner there”—and she wasn't surprised that Josephine was away when Carrie died. “She was always away when people died, she was away for my grandfather, for my grandmother, for her own mother, for the little girl, Artie's little girl. Josephine was never there, never.”

Margaret was the person most crushed by the loss of Carrie—“I had lived with Mama all my life”—and the next time Josephine came home, she brought her sister a child, her own answer to any life crisis. Born in Belgium, the little girl's name was Anna Balla Rama Castelluccio. Margaret called her Rama.

Paris Mes Amours
, Jo Bouillon said, was going to be billed “as a rescue operation.” In fact, Bruno Coquatrix was spending a fortune on new costumes, and Paulette had brought in André Levasseur, a talented young designer, to work with Josephine. “She would stand for three hours having fittings, and not complain,” Paulette says. “Once, I stood in for her, and the clothes were so heavy they made me giddy. I had not realized you could walk in anything that heavy.

“For us, and for Josephine, this show was a very big risk.” (George Reich, who choreographed
Paris Mes Amours
, puts it more bluntly. “In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been, Coquatrix took a big chance.”)

For the run of the show, Josephine had rented a little studio at 4 rue Saint-Roch. Harold Nicholas was in Paris, and she asked Bruno to hire him. “I did a Caribbean number with her,” Nicholas says. “We had fun, I will always cherish the memory.”

George Reich's memories of Josephine were less sweet. Reich not only choreographed
Paris Mes Amours
, he used dancers from his own company—Ballets Ho!—to support, as he put it, “the old star in a new sauce.”

A handsome blond American, he was just back from Hollywood, where he had worked on
Daddy Long Legs
with Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire. “I was thrilled to meet Josephine, but she asked me to partner her in a piece—‘Antinea's Snack'—and I couldn't find the time. I was already dancing in four numbers, besides choreographing the show, and
working in TV. I explained the situation, and Coquatrix understood, but Josephine took my explanation as an insult, and used it for publicity. She dragged out the old story—Reich is white, he refused to dance with a black lady.

“She finally did the number with one of my dancers, he was a beautiful boy, it was a very sexy scene. After the reviews came in, and it was a triumph for everyone, she apologized.

“She was so tired by then with all her problems. She would arrive ten minutes before the show, and everything would be ready. False lashes, wigs, makeup, the wardrobe mistress waiting with the costume in her hands. Josephine would take three steps to the right, and the costume had to be there, three steps to the left, and Ginette would slap the wig on her head. She was like a doll, you wound her up and she went. If there was any change, she was screwed up. She would make her entrance with not a second to spare.

“Each day was a miracle. Between numbers, she would put her head on her makeup table and fall asleep for a minute or two, and they would wake her up for the next number, and she would crawl backstage, still asleep, but when the music started, she would go on and be incredible.

“She never missed a performance, she never missed an entrance, she was a workaholic. Josephine, Marlene, Edith—I have known them all. They were beasts, beasts of the stage, that's all. It doesn't exist anymore. They were the last of the last, they knew how to walk onstage and give you shivers.

“Paris Mes Amours
was supposed to run three months, but Josephine was such a success we stayed for eight, and then left the Olympia to go on tour.”

The theater program carried ads for Les Milandes, (“Capital of World Brotherhood”) and ads showing the Rainbow Tribe drinking Pschitt, an orangeade (“now my nine children have adopted Pschitt, making it a world drink”), and ads showing them wearing “soft, non-shrinkable, color-fast” terry-cloth robes by Boussac, a company that promised
SATISFACTION OR YOUR MONEY BACK
. There were also pictures of a glittering Josephine bending to the rhinestone-covered mike in her right hand. She changed with the times. Borrowing from the art of Clara Smith, she had worked with a handkerchief, and she had worked with an electric guitar before electric guitars were common. Now she had mastered the microphone, using it as a weapon of seduction, voice and machine fusing into a single instrument.

Bill Taub was impressed all over again. Throughout the summer, Josephine held meetings with the producer who had once tried to put her in jail. It was a recurring pattern, she would sue you or you would sue her, but all would be forgiven the minute there was some mutual advantage in a new deal.

No other American producer was willing to touch her, but Taub believed a smart man could still make money presenting Josephine Baker back home. Although, visiting Les Milandes in September, he may have had second thoughts, because she had also invited Premier Khrushchev to be a houseguest. Fortunately, the premier couldn't make it. Despite her apparent tolerance for godless communists, Taub signed her to two “exclusive” contracts.

Oddly enough, I got to meet Khrushchev that same year. But more important, I got to see Josephine onstage for the first time. I had been in Paris for twenty months when the headlines announced that she was coming back to the Olympia in
Paris Mes Amours
. It was thrilling. I had loved her voice on the radio, I had poured out my soul to her while she sat with a towel around her head in the Hôtel Scribe, and ever after, I was sure that when she sang, it was for me, to give me courage and bring me luck at work, so I could get big tips and be able to send money to my mother.

Now I bought a ticket to go and see my very first stage show at the Olympia, one block from the Scribe.

I didn't know you were supposed to tip the usher, and when I sat down, she said, very loud, “Still a farmer, that one!” which embarrassed me. But once the lights went down and the music started, I was lost. I remember nothing but the number where Josephine, dressed like a gypsy, sang “Give Me Your Hand.” I thought of my village, and the gypsies coming, women brightly dressed, barefooted children, dark-haired men; they would park their caravans at the edge of the fields, and make fires in the grass, and cook, and we would smell the strange odors. At night, I dreamed they would take me away with them.