Josephine Baker (69 page)

“I told her, ‘Listen, Josephine, if you do not come down, I will come up and get you and drag you here by the skin of your backside. I don't want to get screamed at for what you're doing.' Then I sent the barmaid's husband to pick her up. Ten minutes later, she arrived. From far away, I could see her sitting next to the driver in his open jeep, her face the face of her worst days, looking 112 years old. But as she came closer, she put on a wide smile, and by the time she arrived in front of the cabaret, she looked ecstatic. ‘Oh, my dear friends, you came, how happy I am that you made this detour to visit me, come, you will see the children,
venez, venez
 . . .'

“The children were down by the pool, and a little girl, not a member of the Rainbow Tribe, had just come out of the water. It was a very hot
day, but Josephine hurled herself toward the child, wrapped her in a towel, and screamed, ‘Who is the assassin who wants to kill this infant? Can't you see she is going to catch a cold because her hair is wet?' And she dried that child in the sun, while the teachers murmured, ‘She is a saint.'

“By now she would travel with old suitcases and cartons held together with pieces of string. I would take her to the airport and ask the porters to take care of her bags, and they would say, ‘
That
is Josephine Baker's luggage?'

“At Les Milandes, she wore dirty work clothes and didn't try to hide that she had almost no hair. Not only had she burnt it off too many times, but wearing those heavy wigs that the hair cannot breathe under also makes you bald. Mistinguett was the same.”

October 11, 1963. Edith Piaf died at seven o'clock in the morning. Jean Cocteau, who heard the news at noon, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. From New York, where she had come to do a benefit performance at Carnegie Hall (proceeds to go to the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLS, and “Miss Baker's International Children's Camp”), Josephine paid her old friends tribute. “Now that they are gone, there is a kind of emptiness that cannot be filled.”

That night, she conquered Carnegie Hall. Her press representative had wired Walter Winchell an invitation, saying Josephine held “no animosity, hopes you don't either, and feels that perhaps her past views were premature.” Winchell wrote across the telegram, “After all the lies she told! Wow,” and gave it to his secretary to file.

At that benefit performance, she showed it all, furs, jewels, feathers, the great heavy wigs. Her quick wit was also in evidence. When a woman in the audience put opera glasses to her eyes, Josephine stopped singing. “Madame,” she cried, “don't peer at me through those silly things! Hold on to your illusions!”

Pierre Spiers, who conducted the orchestra, said the real show took place later, at a supper party given by Duke Ellington's sister Ruth, when Josephine sang “a series of touching Negro spirituals . . . far removed from such show business bravura as the feather headdresses. . . .”

“I asked her what kind of food she would like,” Ruth Ellington told me. “She said soul food, so my cousin Bernice fixed greens, sweet
potatoes, chitlins, ham, fried chicken, peach cobbler. Josephine was wonderful. If you are black and told from the day you are born that you are inferior to the majority of people in your country, that's enough to make you pathologically ill. But she had risen above it. That was what Duke always said, ‘Rise above it.' ”

At Les Milandes, in November, Josephine received a communication to warm her heart. It read:

Dear Miss Baker,

This is just a brief note to express my deep gratitude to you for all of your kind expressions of support. We were all inspired by your presence at the March on Washington. I am deeply moved by the fact that you would fly such a long distance to participate in that momentous event. We were further inspired that you returned to the States to do a benefit concert for the civil rights organizations. I only regret that a long standing previous commitment made it impossible for me to come to New York to witness the Carnegie Hall affair. I was pleased to learn that it was a great success.

You are certainly doing a most dedicated service for mankind. Your genuine good will, your deep humanitarian concern, and your unswerving devotion to the cause of freedom and human dignity will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.

The letter was signed, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Almost every month now, Josephine flew back and forth across the ocean, planning a tour of America for the following spring. She was grabbing for the brass ring one more time; it took a catastrophe to slow her down.

It slowed everyone down. I was living in Germany when President Kennedy was killed. I walked the ten blocks from my room to my job, and the Kurfurstendamm was deserted, like the streets you see in an American western when the bad boys come to town. Behind every window, a candle burned. The man who had claimed,
“Ich bin ein Berliner!”
was dead, and we in West Berlin felt the world had stopped.

“I was not two days in New York when the assassination of the president happened,” Josephine wrote Jacques Abtey (who was attempting to manage Les Milandes now that Jo was gone). She proceeded to review the obsequies as though they were a Broadway
spectacle. “Big success of notables who came for the funeral,” she reported, awarding first place to President de Gaulle, and second to the medal-bedecked emperor of Ethiopia. (She forgot she had once wanted to raise an army against him.) “Of course I went to Washington. There is one month's mourning, and in any case I could not have played before because we need time to get out my publicity. . . . I'm bored, everything has stopped. . . . It is very unfortunate, this national
malheur
, one can do nothing against it.”

Then: “Ask the Spanish maid to make me an embroidered belt, and see that she does it well.”

During her engagement at the Strand twelve years before, she and Florence Dixon had become friends. It was Florence—along with a nineteen-year-old acquaintance, Elizabeth Patton—who had accompanied Josephine on the train to Washington to pay their respects to the slain president.

“At the Union Station,” says Elizabeth Patton, “we asked a porter which way to the rotunda, and he said not to worry, if we walked across the street, we would see the people.

“There were thousands waiting on the line, it was a crisp day, and Josephine kept saying, ‘Look at all the different kinds of people!' There were blacks, whites, Asians, people from all over.

“It started to get a little nippy, and there was a delicatessen nearby, so Florence stayed in line to keep our places, while Josephine and I went to get coffee. As we waited in the delicatessen, we watched a television set overhead; the police in Dallas were taking Lee Harvey Oswald from one prison to another, and as they moved him, Jack Ruby walked up and pulled out a gun and killed him. We could not believe we were standing there watching this while waiting to go and view President Kennedy's body.

“Josephine was distraught. ‘This is what I'm talking about, all this violence.' Everybody in the delicatessen said the same. ‘It's horrible, why didn't they have more police guarding him, now we will never know if this is the man who actually killed Kennedy—' We took the coffee and left the shop, and as we got closer to the rotunda, we saw Jacqueline Kennedy and the children coming down the steps, and they had little blue coats on, and she was all in black, and Josephine said, ‘How tragic for her, she is such a young woman to have to go through this.'

“It was about four in the afternoon by the time we were allowed to
go in.
‘Mon dieu,'
Josephine said, ‘look how small the casket is.' Because the rotunda is so high-ceilinged everything beneath it looks minuscule.”

A quick Christmas trip to France, then back to the States to rehearse
Josephine Baker and Her Company
. This time Josephine brought Kenza with her. “I was in Paris,” Kenza says, “and she said, ‘Come, it will be all new for you.'

“The opening at the Brooks Atkinson was fabulous.”

It was her first Broadway appearance in twelve years, if you didn't count the evening at Carnegie Hall. And she was the biggest draw in town, if you didn't count the Beatles.

She told a reporter for
The National Observer
that before the March on Washington, she had always been afraid of white Americans. “I didn't want to be around them. But now that little gnawing feeling is gone, for the first time in my life I feel free. . . . I came back wearing my Resistance uniform for the March.”

Some, commented the interviewer, would argue that she had come back “as a beneficiary of others' pain and blood. She returned when the hard part of the battle was over, and this is why many cannot forgive Josephine Baker. . . .”

Many could, however. She still drew crowds. “She never had any money, and she owed money, right?” says Shirley Herz, then her press agent. “We were to open in Philadelphia, and the sheriff or somebody decided to impound her costumes, so she had Florence Dixon and me pack as many as we could in suitcases, and we went out the revolving door of the hotel just as the sheriff or whoever it was came in.

“Her producer got the thing settled, but it was exciting, she was always one step ahead of the law. One day she called me—‘I need somebody else for the show'—and I suggested the dancers Geoffrey Holder and his wife, Carmen de Lavallade, and that's how they got involved. When she went back to Paris, she took them with her.

“In New York, she was living at the Navarro, and she was always having stomach pains, all she'd want was these hot towels. She was involved in politics because it was the start of the civil rights movement. The fact that she was being accepted on Broadway meant nothing, she wanted to achieve more than that.

“She was so complex a person that nobody really knew her. She didn't want to belong to the black world, and she didn't really belong in the white world. Florence Dixon and Bessie Buchanan, who were around
her all the time, were both very light-skinned. If Josephine had been Florence's color, if she could have passed, she would have. Yet her fame came with being this wonderful exotic black woman.

“She used men to achieve what she wanted—in a way, she castrated men—but she was only comfortable with women, she was surrounded by women.”

Carmen de Lavallade says Josephine could be incredibly generous. “Geoffrey and I were added into the show in New York, and when we got to Paris, we reopened at the Olympia. Josephine was always pushing me forward, telling me to take longer bows. She was so secure, so proud in what she did, a younger woman didn't worry her. She knew who she was.

“Once we went to her château right after the show. We rode for hours, got there early in the morning. She was so tired, but then all the children came in, and I will never forget Josephine, her arms around Moïse, talking to him, and sleeping at the same time. Just sort of hugging each other at the kitchen table, tired as she was, it was beautiful.”

By the end of May 1964, Josephine was in West Germany trying to borrow four hundred thousand dollars from German banks in order to save Les Milandes. “Periodically,” said a news story, “Josephine goes back to work, but despite recent engagements in the United States and at the Olympia, which netted $60,000, she just can't seem to make ends meet.”

“Ideals cost a lot of money,” said Josephine. Not
our
money, muttered her neighbors. She had slapped one too many mailman, fought with one too many worker, she had even taken on the new priest who had replaced Abbé Tournebise when he retired. To be sure, the new priest had started the fight. When she'd popped into the Les Milandes chapel to ask if he'd like any help, he had answered abruptly, “I don't need help from a woman when I don't know where she got her money.” A major brawl ensued, the priest ringing the church bell for assistance as Josephine attempted to haul away a statue of Christ she had bought and paid for.

“Every night now,”
France Dimanche
informed its readers, “eleven children pray to God to save their house and their mother.”

Jari says it wasn't so. “We never read those newspapers, Mother did not show them to us. But we knew something was happening, because
now she wanted us to sleep in her room with her. Marianne would share her bed and we boys would bring our mattresses and sleep on the floor.

“She tried to reassure us that everything was fine. If the king of Morocco had invited her to visit, she would say, ‘We are going to move to Morocco. Or to Algeria. We will live in the desert and start all over again.' To her, the desert meant purity, no contact with materialistic society.

“She liked to see us playing in her costumes, she directed us as if we were performing in a serious show. We swam in the dresses, walked like ducks in her shoes, and laughed, we were all clowns, it was such fun.”

In Paris, a committee formed by Bruno Coquatrix and full of famous Baker enthusiasts—François Mauriac, André Maurois, Gilbert Becaud, Brigitte Bardot—tried to convince Josephine she should sell her castle, “house her children more modestly,” and put any money from well-wishers into a trust fund.