Josephine Baker (68 page)

Only Linda Wyatt, seventeen and on her first European trip, found no snake in the garden. To her journal, she confided, “I could stay here a lifetime . . . children of all races and nationalities being brought up as brother and sister, a famous star who is a fabulous person, a castle, two night clubs, pool, tennis court, what more could one want?”

Moulay Larbi's daughter Kenza was another guest that summer. Not much older than Linda Wyatt, she saw Les Milandes in a less romantic light. “For Josephine, it was an abyss. De Gaulle wrote to her. ‘The Dordogne is the worst place for you to be, so come back to Paris where the people love you.'

“It's funny, when she died, I thought about that letter. When I saw the whole Paris in the streets and crying, I thought how right he was. It's a pity she was so stubborn and stayed in that place.

“She would tell me when someone exploited her, lied to her, but with the children, it was different, a deeper disappointment. She was not going to tell me, ‘I failed.' She didn't want to realize it didn't work.

“You know, she was an artist, and it's very difficult for these people to be constant, because their own natures are not disciplined. Children need order, security, they are not made for artists. And these children from all sorts of backgrounds, abandoned in earthquakes, abandoned in a garbage can, they were traumatized children to begin with.”

Josephine was fifty-six years old, she couldn't remember her lines anymore, or see without her glasses; every few months, angry creditors threatened to throw her into the street, her children were without ambition (or at least the kind of ambition she understood), but she was not finished. Again she was about to rise from the ashes, and this time, the rebirth was midwifed by a young man named Jack Jordan. Back in the United States, Jack Jordan had been working to bring Josephine home for the March on Washington.

Louis Douglas's daughter Marion remembers meeting Jordan in New York in about 1950. (Her family had migrated back to the United States in 1937.) “I was fascinated by Jack, he was stagestruck, he wanted to be somebody. He used to go to the Plaza Hotel, and this was when black people couldn't even sneeze at the front door. Jack would get himself invited, and take me.

“At the time I'm talking about, he was very poor, but he would bring a piece of feather or some lace, and put it over my poor little clothes, and we would make the grand entrance at the Plaza. When we walked in, I wasn't getting very loving looks, so I told him I didn't want to go anymore. He said, ‘You're never going to be anybody, because you don't like the Plaza.'

“In 1963, he called and told me he was bringing Josephine Baker back. The March on Washington had been talked about for months
before it happened. Everyone was very frightened that there was going to be bloodshed. When Jack said Josephine was coming, I forgot all about the troubles between her and my father, I forgot I wasn't interested in Josephine, I was very excited.

“Jack had assembled a group. There was Charles Burney, chairman of ‘The Friends of Josephine Baker,' who taught school in Harlem, and he had said, ‘We must have Josephine, this is too important, she has to be part of it.' And there were Juanita Poirier, Sidney's wife, and a young black woman producer named Billie Allen. These were the people who put up the money to bring Josephine over. I was just there for nostalgia. I was the link, Louis Douglas's daughter, part of Josephine's roots.

“We all went to the airport to meet her.”

Bob Bach, a television producer, remembers flying into Washington and looking down at some of the two hundred thousand people beginning to gather. “It was August 8, muggy, with a haze hanging over the city. The plane banked over the Potomac River and the Washington Monument, and we could see crowds coming from all directions, like ants swarming toward honey. I thought, this is going to be tremendous.

“In the VIP lounge of the airport, there were a lot of big stars, and then I saw this woman in uniform, and I said, ‘My God, that's Josephine Baker.' And very quietly, she joined us on the bus to the Washington Monument.”

“Josephine was wearing her uniform with all her decorations,” says Marion Douglas. “She had on the Médaille de la Résistance with rosette, the Médaille de la France Libre, the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, and the Croix de Guerre. Everything. But she said, ‘I'm not
the star, just another sister.' She was so sincere that she was insincere, but I didn't know it then.

“When we got to the place where everyone was assembling, there was a lot of anxiety, because the word was out that the toughs were going to beat the shit out of anybody who marched. It took guts for those actors like Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando to be there, they were perfectly aware that what they were doing by their presence was protecting black people. It took courage for Josephine—for anyone—to be there.

“Jack Jordan was rushing ahead of everybody yelling, ‘Make way for a star, make way for a star,' and I heard people turn around and say, ‘I don't see any star, where's the star?' Nobody recognized Josephine. But when she got up to the platform where the cultural contingent were already sitting, Sammy Davis and Sidney Poitier, they paid obeisance. They were trying to speak this poor sad French, calling her Madame la Bakaire, trying so hard, and she knew she was back, a queen had come home. And when they called on her to speak, she was fantastic.”

“You are here on the eve of a complete victory,” Josephine told the crowd. “You can't go wrong. The world is behind you. I've been following this movement for thirty years. Now that the fruit is ripe, I want to be here. You can't put liberty at the tip of the lips and expect people not to drink it. This is the happiest day of my life.”

It was very simple, Marion says, very moving. “She spoke just a couple of minutes, that's all anybody did, because it was all building up to Martin Luther King. But the fact is, the moment Josephine hit that podium, you knew she was a superstar. She didn't have to work at it.

“After Martin's speech, there was a big crunch, there were no taxis, nothing. Sammy Davis had a limo, and he told Josephine she could join him, but so many people were running after him, trying to get his autograph, he had to leave her and flee in his car. And that's when Josephine changed. When she couldn't get into that car with Sammy.

“Now she's stuck with me, Jack Jordan, Billie Allen. We all went to the Sheraton to get dressed, and then we met at Mercer Cook's house. My uncle Mercer was not yet an ambassador, and Billie Allen was with a guy in the State Department, but he still wasn't a star, and Josephine, in the middle of the night, gets livid. ‘What am I doing at this second-rate party?' she says. ‘I can't hang out with Jack, he doesn't even know how to get to a decent party!' ”

Back home again, in a better—or at least a more high-minded—mood, she wrote to Martin Luther King:

Dear Doctor,

I was so happy to have been united with all of you on our great historical day.

I repeat that you are really a great, great leader and if you need me I will always be at your disposition because we have come a long way but still have a way to go that will take unite—unite—[
sic
] so don't forget I will always be one of your sincere boosters.

Your great admirer and sister in battle, Josephine.

Earlier that summer, Jo Bouillon had left France. He told
France Dimanche
he was going to open a restaurant in Buenos Aires. “It is hard to tear apart one's heart and start again at fifty-six, but I hold nothing against Josephine.”

“She broke his career,” says the pianist Freddy Daniel. “He never walked by her side, always behind her.”

When Josephine returned from the March on Washington, Freddy was already working at Les Milandes. At Josephine's insistence, he had been in residence since June 15. “The personnel in her office were dazed when I showed up. I asked, ‘Where is Madame?' but they weren't sure, they thought maybe Copenhagen. A few rare clients were boring themselves at the Chartreuse, and I asked the staff to help me get the piano from the
guinguette
to the salon of the Chartreuse so I could entertain. Then I asked them to help me fix the roof of the
guinguette
—it was straw, and during the winter, rats had nested in it, half of it was falling on the floor—and to clean up the kitchen, where I discovered dirty dishes that had been there since New Year's Eve. They refused.

“As soon as Josephine arrived, she started to scream because I had had the piano brought up to the salon. Then she said, ‘Ah, but I'm happy you're here.'

“I told her the staff had refused to do anything I'd asked. ‘They said, Madame did not give the orders.'

“ ‘They were right,' she said. ‘If Madame did not give the orders, they did not have to do it.'

“Then she told me, ‘Come,
we
are going to do the cleaning.' I said no. ‘Josephine, I came here to supervise your cabaret, play the piano,
watch over the bar so they don't steal too much from you, but I do not do dishes.'

“ ‘Well,' she says, ‘if Monsieur feels he's too big to do the dishes, I, Josephine Baker, will do them.' And she spent the whole day, alone, cleaning up. Nobody on the staff came to help her, it made me sick.”

Four years earlier, when Josephine's success at the Olympia with
Paris Mes Amours
had brought record crowds to Les Milandes, Freddy had spent a happier summer there. The shows he and Jo had put on then were good—“We had Louis Armstrong, Jacques Brel, as well as Les Petits Rats of the Paris Opéra in the open-air theater. But when I came back in 1963, Jo had left, and Josephine still had 105 people on her payroll. We were always waiting for money coming from Stockholm, Munich, or Berlin, wherever she could get a booking to try to cover the expenses at Les Milandes. We had a very poor season, only on weekends we had a few customers.

“The staff didn't care anymore, they stole from her, they had sex everywhere. There were a few nurses trying to take care of the children, I must say without great competence. Those children needed affection, and they would ask me to tuck them in at night. ‘Uncle Freddy, Uncle Freddy, come put us to bed . . .'

“Sometimes Josephine would go to Paris and buy things at the Galeries Lafayette or Le Printemps. Then the chauffeur drove her home—they drove most of the night—and she would arrive at Les Milandes around 6 or 7
A.M
. All the children had to be waked up and dressed in their best, waiting for her at the bottom of the château's staircase.

“But most of the time she would go directly to the
guinguette
or the Chartreuse with new sets of tablecloths and napkins and matching candles. She would have the tables changed three times—not one or two tables, no, she wanted to see the effect in the whole place—with each different-colored set, and then she would exclaim, ‘But it is adorable!' or, ‘No, it doesn't work, put the blue here and light the candle.'

“Meanwhile, it was 10
A.M
., and the children were still waiting up at the château, so they rolled in the dust, fighting each other. They got so filthy you wouldn't want to touch them with a barge pole. Quick, we would try to clean them up so Josephine would not see them in that state.

“Life was chaotic, full of ups and downs. Josephine wanted me to
teach the children piano, all together in the same room; she had no idea how you learn to play piano.

“It was the same as with the Hebrew lessons. Once, while Josephine was away, a young woman arrived from Jerusalem to teach Hebrew to the children. I told her, ‘Some of them are eleven years old, some are one, they cannot all learn Hebrew at the same time.' It did not last long; when Josephine got home, she put a mop in the girl's hand and asked her to clean the big stone staircase of the château. The girl refused, and was fired.”

It was not just their education that was chaotic, the children's medical care was eccentric too. “When one of us caught a childhood disease—measles, mumps,” says Jari, “Mother would put us all in the same room so we would all catch it, and be done with it.”

That was the year—1963—that Josephine, who was fifty-seven, told everyone she was sixty-four. “It is good that I make myself older,” she explained to Line Renaud, who followed her into the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. “Then they find me formidable for my age.” She also gave Renaud a piece of advice. “Don't get involved in politics, it cost me too much.”

On the rare occasions when she was home, she was beginning to avoid her fans. “One day,” Freddy says, “two buses arrived, full of schoolteachers. They had paid in advance—Josephine gave them a group price—and it was understood that she would welcome them at 4
P.M
., and sing. As always, I was the buffer between her and her guests. When she did not appear, I called the château. After thirty minutes, she came to the phone. ‘What do you want?'