Josephine Baker (73 page)

“She did not want to hear him,” says Paulette.

She walked at the head of the line, again in her army uniform, Akio at her side.

“It is hard to believe that those born in foreign countries are more French than those who had the luck to be born here,” wrote Marcel Brandin to a friend. Brandin, Culture Minister André Malraux's chief of staff, said de Gaulle loved Josephine, and had often helped her. Even so, she was “without a
sou
or a roof . . . because she is a good girl and trusts everyone. Artists make bad accountants.”

Now, because of the riots, business was so bad at the Olympia that no accountants were needed; the theater closed its doors until feelings settled. During this time, Robert Kennedy was killed, and Josephine set out again for the United States. (“I thought the most beautiful homage I could pay to that family and to the country that I was born in,” she said, “was to go back and take five of my adopted children. . . . Robert Kennedy knew that the way to freedom for the entire world was through youth.”)

Bruno Coquatrix couldn't believe she'd bought six round-trip plane tickets. “There go her earnings from the show!”

“They stayed at the Hilton Hotel,” says Florence Dixon. “The
funeral was at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Then I brought Josephine and all those boys up to Harlem and gave them dinner. They sat on the floor around the coffee table and they ate. Luckily, I had a big leg of lamb, and some ham, they cleaned it up. There were boys everywhere, they ate everything but the bones.”

Josephine closed for good at the Olympia on June 29, and headed to Les Milandes, where she would endure a long, hard summer. On the Fourth of July, she was taken to a hospital in Périgueux with a minor heart attack. And always, there was the struggle over the home, which she no longer owned but refused to give up. The new owner had got an eviction order for October 7. This did not worry her; in France, a family with children can't be evicted in the winter. She had six months' grace, if she could hang on.

She continued to try to reverse the sale of her castle. “Everyone's out to get me,” she wrote de Gaulle.

“The son of the new owner would come and harass us,” Brahim says. “We ran to the top of the château and threw stones at him. He left, calling us scoundrels and saying he would have the law respected.”

At the end of vacation, the children started back to school, most of them believing—despite Josephine's protests to the contrary—that they would never again live at Les Milandes. Brahim describes their last lunch in the château. “My mother, my aunt Margaret, Uncle Elmo, and Rama were there. And our two ‘uncles,' Monsieur Marc and Monsieur Rey—we could see that for them it was very dramatic.”

“When we first came into the kitchen,” Brahim continues, “my mother was not yet present, and Monsieur Rey told us this was like the last supper of Christ and his disciples. He was crying, and he said, ‘Children, never forget what you have known here with your mother.'

“Now Uncle Elmo was crying, and we were not used to seeing men cry. Then my mother arrived and she was crying too, but we boys looked at each other, thinking, ‘Is it that serious?' We went out and knocked down a wooden cabin we had built so the new owners' kids wouldn't have it.”

Marianne wanted to say goodbye to the trees. “I'll never forget her,” Moïse said, “standing there, arms tight around a scratchy trunk.”

There were to be no more exclusive Swiss academies for any of the children; they were enrolled in less expensive schools around Paris. “It was the same with food,” Brahim recalls, “depending on whether or not
my mother had money. When she was poor, she would say, ‘Well, children, it is Sunday, would you rather do a big breakfast?' Because it wouldn't cost much, bread, butter, jam, chocolate. Sometimes, she would suggest a cafeteria. ‘Self-service, children, is it okay with you?' We younger ones would say, ‘Yes, the self-service is much more fun,' but some of my brothers—like Jari or Jean-Claude—with grand tastes would say, ‘It is not comparable to a steak at the Café de la Paix.'

“There were weekends when she
would
take us to the Café de la Paix with the maître d' and the waiters. For the first two school semesters, we swung between those two lives, and then Marie Spiers found us a little apartment on avenue MacMahon and everything became a bit more normal.”

“I signed the apartment lease in my own name,” Marie says. “The landlord did not want children or animals, and when he discovered that Josephine and all those children—sixteen people, including Elmo, Margaret, and Rama, plus cats and dogs—were living there, he was furious with me.

“There were not enough beds, and one more time, my friend Doctor Fétiveau came to the rescue, sending some mattresses from his clinic. The apartment had two bedrooms and a living room, there were mattresses everywhere.

“Every morning, Josephine would send her sister to my shop to pick up the money I had taken in the day before, so she could feed all those people at avenue MacMahon. It was hard times for her, but she never complained. She spent hours in my shop phoning the whole world; when I got the bills, it was terrible.”

Josephine's casual way with money—other people's or her own—was no surprise to Marie. “One Christmas Eve, I picked her up at the Hôtel Scribe, and the doorman said, ‘Good evening, Mademoiselle Baker, Happy Christmas,' and she turned to me and whispered, ‘Give me a hundred francs.'

“I gave it to her, but I said, ‘Josephine, you are crazy, we have no money and you give a hundred francs to a doorman.' She said, ‘He has children, it's Christmas, so what?' She didn't know if he was married, she didn't know if he had children, the only thing was, it was Christmas.

“Maguy Chauvin was trying to book her as much as possible, and Josephine would sometimes arrive at my shop between planes, so tired she would lie down on the dressing-room floor and fall asleep. My
customers were astonished to see two legs stretching out from under the curtain. I would tell them to be quiet, and not wake the famous Josephine.”

Tired or not, in work she found salvation. “I always worked, even as a little girl,” she said that year, on a Canadian television show. “And this has been my good luck. Because today, I'm still working.”

She didn't tell the Canadian viewers that her world had crumbled, but harked back to the past that warmed her, the early days in Paris. “Cocteau was a friend, Paul Colin, Fujita, we were young together. . . . I posed at the Beaux-Arts, they wanted to see me naked, so they saw me. What is wrong about admiring what nature and God have created?. . . . Colette loved me very much, I used to visit her after work on summer nights when I lived at Le Vésinet. . . .”

The night of November 6, 1968, was the only time, Marie Spiers says, that she ever saw Josephine “absolutely drunk on whiskey. Because Nixon had won the American election. Josephine felt Humphrey's ideals were close to hers.”

Have you been wondering why she had not sold her fabled jewels in order to keep her castle? I don't have the answer. She hung on to the rings, the brooches, the necklaces and tiaras—“I am keeping them for my future daughters-in-law,” she said—but put everything in Marie's name, in order to escape the creditors still hounding her.

Most of the time, the jewels lay in the vaults of the Crédit Municipal, a state-run pawnshop on rue Pierre Charon in Paris. This was big time, people pawned their Picassos at the Crédit Municipal, and if you missed an interest payment—which rolled around every six months—your belongings were sold the very next day.

“Each six months, as the deadline came close, I would shake,” Marie says, “but she would do a gala here, a concert there, and we would save her jewels.”

In some magic-thinking part of her brain, she still believed she would save Les Milandes too. She kept going back and forth to the ghost château, where only a few faithful guards and some animals remained. But writing to Miki Sawada in Tokyo, she did not mention her travail.

“After these long years of silence,” she said, “here I am again.” She wanted to send Akio and Janot to college in Japan. She said she would like Miki to make sure the boys learned the Japanese language and manners. (Indeed, Akio and Janot spent a year in Japan, where Janot
found it hard to adjust. “When I asked for bread in a restaurant, they would bring me a cup of rice! And you are not supposed to put sugar in the tea; when I did, everyone looked at me.”)

Babies she cherished, babies were easy, but Josephine was finding it harder to cope with her children's growing up, so many of them beginning to rebel, despising the rigidity of teachers and classrooms—“No fun, no girls,” Brahim says of his school—all but the littlest ones, Noël and Stellina, testing the boundaries of their universe.

Josephine had no patience and too much responsibility, committed as she was to the grandiose plans she had made for my brothers and sisters when they were babies. This one must be a doctor, this one a lawyer, it didn't matter in the slightest whether they were interested in medicine or law. I, on the other hand, needed nothing from her, I was twenty-five years old, with my own nightclub in West Berlin; she was about to rediscover me, the perfect son.

Pepe Lombard would have been proud of me.

For five years, I had survived in the big capital of Paris, I had learned to give my seat on the subway to old ladies and pregnant women, I had learned how to dress, work hard, get along. I was smart, I could see the power of languages—I had been amazed by Khrushchev's translator—and the sound of English, which meant big tips, was music to my ears.

I went to Liverpool to learn it, waited tables in the old Adelphi Hotel, discovered kippered herring, met Peter Brown and Brian Epstein, who liked a band called the Beatles. Often, we went to the Cavern, a basement club, to hear them, but I was bored; to tell the truth, I preferred the alternative band. Then I had to go home, I had been called up for military service. It was a few weeks until my induction, and my cousin Nadette, who was studying at the Goethe Institute in West Berlin, suggested we hitchhike to Germany. We caught a ride in a milk truck.

Nadette found me a job as busboy at the elegant Maison de France
on the Kurfürstendamm, the Champs-Élysées of Berlin. West Berlin was a kind of Las Vegas then, an in-your-face capitalist insult to the Communist empire.

On my twentieth birthday, walking in the street, I felt such pain I fell down, and woke up in a hospital (I had appendicitis, and developed jaundice), where I stayed for three months. I was excused from military duty because I had to be on a diet the French army could not provide.

Now I got a job in a famous gay bar, the Kleist Casino. Four years later, I had my own place, the Pimm's Club, with a varied clientele, not all gay, not all straight. I did not want any sexual discrimination because I myself was AC/DC, I could tango or I could waltz.

Our Russian neighbors did what they could to destroy our morale, their MiGs flew over, creating sonic booms, families were still separated by the wall of shame, but in the Pimm's Club, there was always a party. Now I wore custom-made shirts, and entertained the rich, the successful, the stars.

Errol Garner, Mahalia Jackson, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Leonard Bernstein, Jessye Norman were my friends. I called the mix of patrons my cocktail of human beings. Mick Jagger propositioned all the women customers, while I tried to appease their husbands and boyfriends. I remember Orson Welles autographing the bare arms of pretty girls; I remember being introduced to Pierre Spiers for the first time. He was on tour with a singer, and we talked about Josephine. I said I had met her when I was a boy.

As Christmas of 1968 approached, the spirits of West Berliners, walled off and surrounded by East Germany, were sagging. City fathers, looking to give the town a lift, organized a fair, and a beer company called Schultheiss hired Josephine Baker to come and perform.

I was thrilled. For ten years, since our first meeting at the Scribe, I had followed her adventures. I suffered when she lost her house. In my head, I talked to her. But was the relationship between her and me real, or had I fantasized it? Would she even remember me?

When she and Pierre Spiers got to town, he phoned me, and I headed for the Schultheiss beer tent. It stood in a bombed-out lot across the street from the war-ruined Church of Remembrance on the Kurfiirstendamm. Inside the tent, there were rows of wooden benches, a beer bar, and at the back, a little platform for Pierre and five musicians. Josephine's dressing room was improvised from a couple of sheets of canvas
behind which were a dress rack on wheels, a mirror on wheels, and a small electric heater.

I found her seated at a collapsible metal table that held her makeup. It was pitiful, what I was seeing. She seemed so fragile in a faded pink negligee, she was heavily made up and wearing a cheap wig. She was talking to Artur “Atze” Brauner, head of CCC Studio. I kissed her, said, “
Bonsoir
, Maman,” and noted that Artur looked surprised at my calling her Maman, but I never called her anything else. He told her I was the darling of Berlin, and I assured her that everything was going to go well. “The whole city is talking about your being here!” We both knew I was lying. It was freezing, and I helped her dress. Her costume was grotesque, a kind of Cossack tunic, seven-league boots, two rows of fake pearls.