Josephine Baker (71 page)

Josephine's brother Richard had also come back into her life. He now had three children—Patrick, Guylaine, and Alain, all born out of wedlock, whom Josephine had never seen. “I was three years old when my father married my mother,” Guylaine says. “Before that, we were never invited to Les Milandes. Afterward, Aunt Josephine relented.

“Sometimes my mother would dress us in our Sunday clothes, and Aunt Josephine would come pick us up in her big car, and we would be so excited, we would jump all over the upholstery while my mother was telling us to sit properly.

“ ‘Let them be, let them be,' Aunt Josephine would say. ‘This is my blood, these are my children.' ‘
Non
, Madame Josephine,' my mother would say, ‘these are
my
children.'

“We loved the ride up to the château, and we played in the park at Les Milandes with our cousins. There were fights and kisses—I remember Marianne was very haughty—and at four o'clock, we had delicious ice cream and cake in the kitchen. Otherwise, we were never allowed inside.

“At some point, Aunt Josephine told my parents they had to give her one of their children. ‘It doesn't matter which one.' She said she had adopted many children, but it was not the same. ‘My brother's children have my blood.'

“My father refused, and my mother said, ‘Even if I had fifty, I would not give one away.' Aunt Josephine said, ‘You can have more children, me, I cannot have any, and you would not miss one.' From that day forward, she wanted nothing to do with my family, we didn't exist for her. Only once, she sent my father a signed picture of her with her long ponytail, not even a note with it. We children did not miss her, we barely knew her, but when she appeared on TV, my father would ask us not to make noise. That was the way he followed his sister's life, through newspaper articles and her TV appearances. He would be sad after he saw her like that, he would say absolutely nothing.

“From Sarlat, we went to live at Baillargues, four hundred miles from Les Milandes. We never saw Aunt Josephine again.

“Of my grandmother Carrie's three children, my father is the only one who found happiness; he was generous, amusing, he liked to have
a good time. He would invite us to play cards with him, and the winner could have a sip of beer. He would dance with us, we played horse on his back.

“We were lucky children, we had the love of two parents, my father was good in his skin, he never spoke about color or discrimination. In his half-French, half-English, he used to tell us about Tumpy—that's what they called Aunt Josephine back home. He said once he and she and Aunt Margaret stole a pack of cigarettes and sneaked under a bed and lit up and Grandma smelled the smoke and found them. She made them smoke the whole pack. ‘We were sick for the whole day,' my father said. He still laughed when he told us that story.

“He said the family was poor, but never missed a meal. He was upset with Josephine that she wrote books telling how they were starving. ‘I don't know why she does that, it's not the truth, we had good food.' He always told us about the chicken my grandmother Carrie would cook.

“Everyone adored my father. He would walk through the town, and you would hear, ‘
Bonjour
, Richard,' ‘
Bonjour
, Monsieur Martin,' from everyone. My father was not famous, but on the day of his death, we did not know where to put the flowers.”

In July 1966, Josephine and the Rainbow Tribe set out for Cuba, and a visit with Uncle Fidel. Before they left, Stephane Grappelli paid a call at Les Milandes. Grappelli, who had played in the thirties with Django Reinhardt at Bricktop's, was a friend of Jo Bouillon. “We both played the violin,” he explains simply. “Josephine took me all over the property, and when we came back to a salon on the second floor, we had a bottle of champagne. We started to talk, and I could feel she was trying to pump me about Jo, what he was doing and so forth.

“For an hour, we spoke of him. The bottle was empty when I left. She said she hoped the next time we met, it would be with Jo. Her eyes were filled with tears, she was incredibly quiet for a woman so vibrant onstage.

“She accompanied me to my car, and I must have turned back fifteen times to wave goodbye. Then I had to face front because the road was winding, and my last look was through the rearview mirror. She was still standing there. Suddenly, I saw her raise her arms like an eagle unfolding his wings.”

Raise your arms in triumph like de Gaulle, it will chase the blues away, it will win cheers from an audience, even an audience of one.

Fidel Castro was celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of his revolution, and the Baker-Bouillons spent several weeks as his guests. “Mother gave three concerts for Castro,” Jari says.

Jean-Claude pieces out his brother's memories. “First we arrived in a splendid villa on the ocean. And I remember enormous insects like tarantulas, even inside the house. There was strong sentiment against Yankees. Everywhere in Havana you could see huge posters, some one hundred and fifty feet high, showing Americans torturing the Cuban people. But there were only American cars, or the remains of American cars. Not one was whole.

“We saw Castro three times. He indulged in speeches that flowed like a river, running on for four, five, six hours under the glaring sun. And we would be under the presidential dais listening. But we understood next to nothing—he spoke in Spanish—so we sat there stoically, sweat dripping.”

“Without anything to drink, not even a glass of water,” Jari adds.

The night before the Baker-Bouillon family left Cuba, Castro came to the beach house he had loaned them. “He kissed us,” Jean-Claude says. “We had to call him ‘Tio Fidel,' Uncle Fidel. All of Mother's friends were ‘Uncle.' Like Claude Menier, the son of the chocolate family—he was an elderly gentleman, very soft-spoken, one of his arms paralyzed, stiff, twisted, like a tree branch, with snakes coiled around it. He had pythons, boas, and we called him ‘Uncle Petit.' He had white hair, Castro had black hair, a black beard, and he always wore a military uniform. He was very impressive.”

“The children were thrilled,” said Josephine, “they knew him from television.”

At the end of August, the family left for Argentina. “We went to our father,” Jari says. “We hadn't seen him for a long time. It was
la recherche du père
, we wanted to see how he lived, worked. Mother left us with him and again went back to perform.”

Josephine herself had avoided the press during her brief stopover in Buenos Aires, though one reporter had cornered her long enough to ask why she had gone to Cuba. “Please forgive me for not discussing my trip to Havana,” she said. “I have a tremendous headache.”

She continued to need more help than anyone could supply, even though big businessmen with heavy pockets and soft hearts went on trying to rescue her. Early in 1967, the owner of the famed Club Méditerranée, who had fallen in love with Josephine's “inner radiance,”
came up with a solution. “We proposed,” says Gilbert Trigano, “that Josephine keep the château for her personal use, and we would manage the rest of the property and deal with the people who came from all over the world. But she wanted to do it her way, and that was impossible.”

Still, if you had chanced to visit her
en famille
in the summer of '67, you would not have believed there was anything amiss in her world. Harry Hurford-Janes, who hadn't been to Les Milandes in twenty-one years, spent several days there during that August, and made notes.

“I entered the château by the side door leading directly into a large kitchen boasting an enormous refrigerator with glass doors, a dingy little sink, an armoire painted cream and yellow. A long table was laid for about eighteen (for breakfast it seemed).

“I was glancing around when a door burst open and a little lady of about sixty darts in, hair scraped up on top, in a woollen dressing gown. She greets me warmly . . . reveals that she was a journalist for thirty years, and had taken a domestic job at Les Milandes two weeks ago but did not think she would last much longer. Throughout my stay she was in a state of exhaustion. ‘
Très fatiguée
, M'sieur,' she would say, putting her palm to her forehead every time we met.”

Harry was also greeted by Moïse (“dark and good-looking”), who said Josephine was expected home from Copenhagen late that night, and by Jari (“fair and Finnish”) who took his bags upstairs.

Passing Josephine's bedroom, with the bed once owned by Marie-Antoinette, gilded and hung with curtains of blue silk, he felt himself flooded with memories of a cold winter night in 1946 when he had sat by the fire in this house “while Josephine knitted and we talked of her possible marriage to the Menier chocolate heir, who was delicate and whose family disapproved of his infatuation. In her mind then, it was a toss-up between the invalid and Jo Bouillon. It all came back to me vividly, the long conversations, ‘You are my brother, you are like a rock. But you see' (as if that explained it) ‘you are an Englishman.' ”

During that week, Harry was not the only guest. There was another Englishman known as Monsieur Jack. And a Spanish lady. And a German author who photographed the monkeys and drew Josephine's wrath. “It is like a studio!” she shouted. Belgians, Swiss, French people arrived and departed. Josephine cooked lunch, and monitored lunch.

“There were cries from her,” said Harry, “of ‘Sit up straight, Brahim!' . . . ‘Don't bolt your food!' all in French, with despairing glances at her guests (‘You see what a handful I have!').”

Also present at this chaotic repast was an unfortunate tutor newly arrived from Lebanon to teach the children Arabic. “The older boys asked if they could swim after lunch,” Harry recalled, “and Josephine said they would have to wait. ‘Five children in France have died through bathing too soon after meals!' At this point, the Lebanese professor said it was perfectly in order for the children to bathe as soon as they wished after the meal—it was fish, being Friday—as they would have digested their food by the time they reached the pool.

“Josephine, furious at this reversal of her orders . . . reminded Monsieur that he had been engaged as a schoolmaster, not a doctor. I knew he was doomed, and this was shortly confirmed to me by J. B., who told me he would never have done, as he was ‘playing with himself,' with his hands in his pockets. . . . He would leave first thing in the morning.”

The Spanish lady was concerned about the turnover in staff, she said Margaret was the only one with any authority, “that J. B. was always flying off for engagements and the children ran riot.” This the children were happy to demonstrate by fusing the lights, slamming the doors, seizing Ping-Pong paddles from each other, hitting at the monkeys as they jumped from branch to branch of a tree. But they redeemed themselves by putting on a pantomime that enchanted their mother. “She covered her mouth to stifle her laugh,” observed Harry. “She slapped people on the shoulder as if to say, ‘Isn't it killing?' Between times, she was adjusting costumes, controlling the volume of the amplifier, falling into her seat beside Margaret, convulsed with laughter.”

Every family in France received a monthly stipend for each child; Josephine, with twelve children, got 1,305 francs. In addition, large families got a 75 percent deduction on railroad fares, so when Josephine traveled now, she took the train. And one of the places she traveled to was Le Vésinet. She wanted to buy a house and live there again, she told the mayor, “because there I have known happiness.”

She thought going back would change her luck, but Blanche Guignery says nobody in the village wanted to help. “They were avoiding her. Poor Josephine, here she was on the straw, just as my husband had sadly predicted.”

Still, you aren't on the straw if you don't know it. Josephine continued making plans. Her latest idea was for a College of Brotherhood
to be built at Les Milandes. “We can save Les Milandes and help the world at the same time! . . . Students will learn that all creeds, like all people, are essentially one. And when they have mastered that lesson, they'll go home and preach it to their people.”

Drunk with grandiosity, she solicited blueprints from architects, and never paid a penny for any of them.

In January 1968, the American consulate in Paris refused her a four-day visa to come to New York. She believed it was because she had joined the March on Washington and visited Cuba. She wrote to Bobby Kennedy, and he called the State Department, which put her papers through. Kennedy also sent her a wire saying,
I AM HAPPY TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR REQUEST FOR A VISA HAS BEEN GRANTED AND YOU WILL HAVE IT ON MONDAY
. (His office
did
mention that the delay had had nothing to do with Cuba, or civil rights, it was just that Josephine hadn't filled out the forms correctly.)

Now in possession of a visa, she went to Chicago to speak at a meeting of the West Side Organization on behalf of Martin Luther King (who didn't appear), then came right back to France, where the roof was leaking all over her Oriental rugs. Les Milandes was still in jeopardy, and once again, a powerful tycoon tried to save Josephine.