Josephine Baker (67 page)

She, along with Stephen Papich and the rest of the company, had fled to San Francisco, where they were playing the Alcazar. A rumor spread that Taub was sending someone to attach her costumes, so every night after the final curtain, Josephine's wardrobe, even headdresses, were put on ropes and pulled into the fly space high over the Alcazar stage. A search party invading her dressing room wouldn't be able to find so much as a paillette.

Fearful of Taub's long arm, Josephine requested an interview with the FBI. During that session, “she volunteered that she had never been a Communist and was pleased by the treatment she had received in the United States.” Except for the treatment she had got from William Taub. She was in San Francisco “to publicize her château in France for the tourist trade.”

Then she and the cast took off for Montreal and a club called the Faisan Bleu. There a bunch of French-speaking detectives grabbed her and Papich and took them to jail.

“The owner of the Faisan Bleu gave us seventy-five hundred dollars to ransom Josephine,” Don Dellair remembers. “When we got to the jail, there were paparazzi all over,
click, click, click
, and Josephine was furious because she had been searched. ‘The trouble here is that they don't understand perfect French,' she said, ‘so they don't know what I'm saying.'

“When we get back to the club, it's way past the appointed showtime, and Josephine goes directly onto the stage, and says, ‘I have just come from jail, sorry I'm late, thank you for waiting.' And she does the show in her street clothes. They adored her, they screamed, ‘Josephine! Josephine!' ”

Josephine had told her friend Arthur Prevost, the Montreal newspaperman, that she wanted to go to High Mass at 10
A.M
. on Sunday, and he took her to St. Martin's Church. “After the Mass,” he recalled, “people went to get autographs, and would you believe it, she signed their prayer books.”

When she finally appeared in a Montreal courtroom, she denounced producer Taub as “a bad man” and was so convincing that the judge
issued a warrant for Taub's arrest. “I heard it with my own ears,” says Don Dellair. “The judge said, ‘If this man ever steps foot into Canada, he will be arrested.' Then Josephine told Tommy and me, ‘I have had it with this place, you are coming to France.'

“In Paris, she took us in a limousine to Madame Arthur's place, famous for its female impersonators. We sat down and then Marlene Dietrich walks out of one door, Mistinguett walks out of another door, Josephine out of a third. I had to keep checking to see she was still sitting with us, that's how much that man looked like her, sounded like her, held the microphone the way she held it.

“Later, she took us to stay at Les Milandes. We saw it all, the animals, the grounds, the beautiful château. We met the children, we sat in the bakery/ice cream place where Josephine's sister worked, and just talked. I mean, what can you do in Les Milandes except talk? But Josephine kept traveling back and forth to Paris and leaving us there to swim or play checkers or watch the children being tutored.”

(In his book,
Remembering Josephine
, Stephen Papich wrote that the tutors hired by Madame “usually fled in a few weeks.” A tutor brought in to teach Hebrew to Moïse took off after commenting to Stephen, “Mr. Papich, I think that woman is mad, don't you?”)

“She was fixated on getting an artificial snow maker so she could make money all year round,” says Don Dellair, “she was trying to convince the people around her that it would be formidable. There were tourists that summer, but not many.”

And some of those were not entirely pleased. In August, Josephine got a letter from a countess who had been staying at the Chartreuse for two weeks. “Many times,” this lady complained, “I could not sit in the drawing room because all the armchairs were occupied by a cook or a dishwasher or a waiter.”

Josephine's bombardment of lawyer Dop continued apace. In August, she had “just learned from a trustworthy source” that Jo Bouillon was in Cannes spending a fortune “on hustlers.” She enclosed a check for five hundred francs, explaining, “I could not do better this month.”

I'm sad, reading that. It's high season on the Riviera, in Deauville, all the places where once they would have crowded into clubs to see her, now few came, her husband preferred other company, “and as you know, I do real acrobatics to be able to pay for it all.”

By September, she was beginning to face the truth, Les Milandes was
falling apart. “One employee called me a liar and threw me out of the place, and I
own
it.”

From a cabaret in Milan, she fumed about fines levied against her (“I don't need more fines!”) and about the fact that five of her calves were missing (“I want them back!”). It turned out the calves had been sold—three of them were tubercular—and she became a philosopher. “Like all women in my case, I ask nothing. I accept life as it is.”

For twenty minutes. By November, she was demanding “support for myself and the children. . . . if Jo Bouillon refuses to be reasonable, I am ready for war with open knives. . . .”

In December, she came to final terms with Jo. For fourteen million francs, he sold the Maury house and land back to her, dissolved the Jo Bouillon company, turned over all papers and powers. He would get a down payment, and the rest sent to him in monthly installments. “I bought all of it,” Josephine mourned. “Now I have to buy it all again.”

Two months later, in her diary, another wail of anguish. “I don't know how or where I'm going. . . . I have only a few thousand francs left. . . . I feel so alone and think of the way Christ was abandoned. But I also realize how hard it must be to live with people like me.”

Marc Vromet-Buchet, a family friend who was acting as Josephine's secretary, said local merchants, “tired of IOUs, had slammed their doors in her face. Since she had few visitors now, the family lived in her office and the kitchen, where a log fire burned. We roasted chestnuts in the ashes. It was an incredibly rustic life.”

She could no longer pay insurance for employees on the farm or in the restaurants, and there were twenty lawsuits pending against her. No big contracts were forthcoming either, though in many countries, cabaret and theater owners would book her for a week or two between bigger attractions. They felt sorry for her; pity that she had solicited—and yet despised—had replaced professional respect.

Booked to play Nice for two weeks, she showed up at the apartment of the Abteys, who spent six months a year on the Riviera. “She came in a cab with two of the kids,” Jacqueline says, “and she told me, ‘You pay the taxi.' By the time I got back to the apartment, she and the kids had raided the fridge, it was absolutely empty, they had not eaten for days.

“When there was no money, she would open cans to feed them, and she could not buy bananas anymore for the monkeys. There were
sometimes thirty monkeys, some as tall as people, they cost a fortune, and they were starving.”

“When people read in the newspapers that Josephine needed money,” says Yvette Malaury, “they would come and give it to some employee, and most of the time it ended up in that employee's pocket.”

On August 18, 1961, she got a boost; she was awarded the Légion d'Honneur, which had been a long time in coming. Sixteen years earlier, she had written Donald Wyatt that she expected to be decorated at Les Invalides “when I am stronger”; now it was finally coming to pass.

But it wasn't as grand as her fantasies had suggested. For one thing, it didn't take place at Les Invalides; for another, General de Gaulle was not there (she had asked him, but he said he did not personally decorate anyone) and neither were any of the other top diplomats or military men of France. From Bordeaux had come the consuls of Spain, Morocco, the United States, Italy, and Finland; there were a baroness, a French actress (Gaby Morlay), a few colonels and commandants, but except for General Vallin, none of her old brothers in arms were at her side.

At exactly 12:15
P.M
., General Vallin and various other officials dropped out of the sky over Les Milandes in two helicopters. One of the officials was a black man. Seeing him, the four-and-a-half-year-old Koffi ran up to Commandant Cournal. “Are you my Daddy?” he asked. A band played the “Marseillaise,” and Josephine, in her threadbare uniform (she had filled in the worn places with ink, proving that an old show business horse knows how to improvise), stood at attention.

The courtyard of the château teemed with press, tourists, neighbors, dignitaries from the Dordogne, a few friends from Paris, the children in their best clothes, holding bouquets. (Jo Bouillon was not there. Tracked down by reporters, he was diplomatic; he said he'd had a previous engagement.) General Vallin pinned to Josephine's jacket the Légion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre with palm, and spoke of her wartime services to France and her peacetime role as “moral educator.”

Tears streaming down her face, Josephine responded: “I am happy that this ceremony could take place here at Les Milandes because this is where I first heard the general say all was not lost. . . . I am proud to be French because this is the only place in the world where I can realize my dream.”

Holding in one hand a message sent by de Gaulle, she circulated among the guests. “You will see, everything will go well now,” she said.
“I will keep Les Milandes. No one can do anything against me, I have the
baraka
.” She had learned the word in Morocco; it meant she had an angel sitting on her shoulder.

Her euphoria was brief. When lawyer Dop had the temerity to ask payment for his faithful service, she gave him the gate. “I don't know how I can keep working with you, since one always has debts to his lawyer, as business keeps going.” Six months later, she begged him to come back. “Only the old friends like you can I trust.”

In the summer of 1962, she decided to put on a production of
L'Arlésienne
, the Bizet opera, in her backyard. Seeking encouragement, she paid a surprise call on Jo Bouillon in his new apartment near Paris. For all the world as though they were still the best of friends and she had not accused him of every crime but serial murder, she cross-examined him. Did he think her plan could work? He said of course. The heroine of
L'Arlésienne
was a dedicated mother, just like Josephine. The tourists would love it.

She had already made up her mind to do it in any case, not with an orchestra, which cost money, but in playback. “But suppose my lips move when they shouldn't?”

After the first performance, she wrote to Jo that the audience had been wild about it, some had wept.

Now Bruno Coquatrix, a normally wily man, in an apparent lapse of sanity, agreed to move the production to the Olympia. There the cast—except for Josephine—would do their songs and dialogue live.

“But Josephine could not remember her lines,” says Paulette Coquatrix. “Since she was incapable of staying in sync with the record, her performance was one of the most comic things I have ever seen on the stage. The public as always adored her, they laughed and at the same time made excuses. ‘It must be the man who's running the machine.' Even the press was kind.”

But she knew. The blow of another failure, one she could ill afford, was compounded by her increasing sense that the center was not holding. While the younger children were still at home, attending the local public school, Akio, Jari, Luis, and Jean-Claude were now at boarding school in Switzerland. It was the right thing, but she missed them.

When she got the phone call with the worst news of all—Les Milandes had been seized by creditors, and would be sold at auction on June 7, 1963—she was playing in Copenhagen. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “Fifteen years of fight, hope, and suffering.”

As usual, a miracle happened. A group of Danish hotel men paid off her most importunate creditors. The headlines read,
SAVED FROM RUIN
. The hotel men had come, had seen, and had pronounced Les Milandes wonderful, it simply needed reorganizing. Josephine agreed. “I know I'm not a businesswoman, I can't run six hundred acres of land, a château, hotels, restaurants and take care of eleven children. When those Danish men left, I had their promise that in a few weeks they would tell me what to do.”

Truthfully, many people in France were growing tired of the auctions, the farewells, the tin-cup approach to child rearing, they didn't see why Josephine and her family needed to live in a castle with servants when their own families didn't live that way. Besides, Josephine's vow to be led by the conservative Danish gentlemen died with their departure. Like mad King Ludwig, her schemes grew wilder. She didn't want local visitors, she wanted rich Americans. Next year, she would fix it so tourists weighed down with dollars could fly into Bordeaux, transfer to helicopters, and be set down in Les Milandes. She would build them a 130-room hotel. “I can die in peace,” she said. “I have won.”

It was not clear just what.

The Wyatts, who hadn't seen her in years, came to visit with their daughter Linda, Josephine's godchild. (Josephine had hundreds of unofficial godchildren all over the world, in addition to honorary brothers, sisters, uncles. If she liked you, you would become a member of her extended—and extended and extended—family.) She put the Wyatts in the Marie-Antoinette suite at the Chartreuse.

“At the restaurant,” Donald says, “there were waiters in tuxedos, but the place was almost empty. I remembered sadly when we first came back to reopen Les Milandes after the war, and the people were bowing, so happy ‘Madame Josephine has returned.' Now, like the hotel, the cabaret was almost empty, though it was the high season.”

Marian Wyatt, being a mother, thought more about the children. “It was not a family. They had people to take care of them, but they did not have the love and understanding of a mother and father who were there. Oh yes, I felt sorry for them.”