Josephine Baker (74 page)

When Pierre introduced her, I handed her the mike, and crouched on my knees behind the makeshift curtain, feeding her the long cable as she needed it. She had already started talking to the audience before she came on—“Ooh la la, I'm not ready, in the old days it was easier, only a few bananas, but today my children have eaten those bananas”—and then she walked through the curtain, stumbled as she tried to step up on the band platform, and fell back.

I jumped up as if on a spring, and holding out my hands, touched her back and pushed her forward. It looked very easy, almost a ballet step, part of the act. The audience, which had gasped, now sighed with relief, and Josephine, still talking—she might lose her balance, but never her aplomb—turned around and gave me a wink. It was a sign that cemented our liaison.

Trying to reach the people, she went to material she thought would be surefire, telling how she had brought the Charleston to Berlin in the twenties. As Pierre started “Yes Sir, That's My Baby,” she began to move her head, her pearls swinging around and around until suddenly they broke, and flew all over,
ploup, ploup, ploup
. People laughed derisively, but she finished the show. Then I helped her pack the cardboard suitcase, and since nobody came for an autograph, we headed for my 280SL Mercedes coupe, brand-new and smelling of leather. “How do you like it?” I said. “Oh, I like the Mercedes,” she said airily. “When I was here the first time, they gave me one
free
—the seats were snakeskin, and I had ermine covers put on them.”

I loved that. She was saying, “Okay, kid, you made it, but I did it
before you, and I didn't even have to pay for it.” (How different from my birth mother, who had refused to get into my car, telling me I could have bought two houses in our village for the price of “that German automobile.”)

My friend Heinz Holl owned a chic restaurant; I took Josephine and Pierre there, people recognized her, and she was happy. The pain of a few minutes ago was not even mentioned. We tried to catch up on the last ten years, but her real enthusiasm was, as always, for the future. She said she needed only to be represented in the right way, and there was no limit to the money that could be made in this rich Germany. Pierre backed her up. “If a good producer could be found, Josephine could once again move big crowds.”

At the Pimm's later, Josephine took over, telling Rex, my disc jockey, to play faster music so people would sweat, and drink more. “Look at that energy,” Pierre said. “In France, nobody wants her, she is unreasonable, but try to see if some of your German friends can do something.”

I took her to her hotel at 2
A.M
., but she wanted to go on talking about the children. She had a brown manila envelope full of scribbled notes about her finances—money to pay grocery bills, boarding schools, her account with Marie Spiers—and pending lawsuits. The envelope was also stuffed with money; she had just been paid in cash by Schultheiss, and she was trying to translate deutsche marks into new francs.

She was also full of plans for “our German tour.” I was dumbstruck. Did she believe what she was saying? At five, I went home, put five thousand marks in an envelope, grabbed two black leather suitcases, and went back to meet her for breakfast. She hadn't slept, she was still carrying on about how I should arrange the tour. “Don't trust anyone, all producers are crooks.” She accepted my leather suitcases and the envelope full of money—
“Merci, mon chéri”
—and I took her and Pierre to the airport.

She was counting on me to change her life, and I was happy to have the assignment. Later, I looked in the Pimm's Club guest book. She had written, “For my little Jean-Claude the second, with a kiss from your second mother, Josephine. 1968, Happy New Year.”

Now Josephine, coming back to France, was once again faced with hard reality. The furniture at Les Milandes was auctioned off on January 19, 1969. (The first auction had been real estate, the second, the
contents of the houses.) All the beautiful things bought with Pepito, all the presents from the great of the world. “They even sold my wedding jewels,” she complained.

It was a heartrending story, but not entirely true. During the weeks before the furniture auction, Josephine, Margaret, and a few friends had managed to spirit away sixty packed containers, some of them, says Marie Spiers, “as big as a room.” Again, everything was put in Marie's name, and she was left to pay the monthly storage costs.

Even without furniture, Josephine had continued to camp out parttime at Les Milandes. At night, there were phone calls threatening to kill her cats. On March 7, she left the château with Margaret, Stellina, and Noël to join the rest of the children for the weekend in Paris.

As soon as they had gone, the new owner changed the locks. “I have been patient long enough,” Monsieur Joly said.

Josephine alerted the press and rushed back, arriving at nine Sunday morning to play out the last act. She got in through a window, and before Joly's guards knew what had happened, she was barricaded in the kitchen with the devoted Madame Boudoir and a little cat. From there, she talked to the journalists staked out in the courtyard.

“I will not leave,” she said. The journalists were thrilled, they passed her food through the window. All day Sunday and Monday, she stayed in the kitchen, resting on a cot. The nights were hideous with racket, the new owner had his men make noise so she could not sleep.

On Tuesday morning, the water having been cut off, Josephine headed out of the house toward an auxiliary tank. Eight of Joly's henchmen caught her, but she broke away, ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the iron bar across the front of the stove, and hung on. Her enemies followed, wrestled with her, and threw her out into the rain, hurling a doll of Stellina's and some canned goods after her. They handled her, a reporter said, like a bundle of dirty laundry.

Across the road, Henriette Malaury had been arguing with her husband and her son. Elois and Georges had got their hunting guns and wanted to go to Josephine's rescue, but Henriette, afraid of what might happen, stopped them. “I did not want to have to cry over them in jail for the rest of their lives. We called the police.

“It was very cold, the rain didn't stop. My husband and I walked over and asked Josephine to take refuge in our house. She refused. She said she wanted to stay on her property.”

Which she did. She sat at the top of the stone steps leading to the kitchen. Even on that raw gray day, there were signs of spring; the vines that arched around the door were putting out new leaves. Josephine wore an old nightgown, a nightcap, and heavy glasses, the little cat sat on her knees, her feet were bare. Around her were the cans of food and some bottled water. For four hours, she stayed there in the driving rain.

Did she think of Tumpy, rummaging through the garbage pails of rich white people? What a ride that little girl had taken; even now, she could look around and know she had created her own Shangri-la, and wasn't that a victory for Elvira's scrappy grandchild?

“I went and got a bowl of warm milk and a blanket,” says Henriette Malaury, who was Jean-Claude's godmother. “I forgot that a few months before, in the press, she had accused us of refusing to sell milk to her. We always gave her the milk free, but Josephine would say anything as long as she looked good in the story.

“I put the blanket on her legs to give her a little warmth until Monsieur Dumont came.”

Dumont, the public prosecutor, took Josephine back into the château, and they were sitting in the kitchen discussing options—she could sue Joly for illegal entry, assault and battery, duress—when she began to feel sick. Her arms were numb, she was flooded with nausea, they were the same symptoms she had suffered with the last heart attack. An ambulance was called, and she was taken to the Périgueux hospital. “If I die tonight,” she said, “I want to be buried in the pink nightgown of my agony.”

She didn't die; instead, she was once again propelled onto the front pages of newspapers around the world. Over the years, the two most famous pictures of her have been the one with the girdle of bananas and the one sitting on those stone steps, a poor old lady alone in the rain.

It was Pierre Spiers who'd insisted Josephine be moved from Périgueux to Dr. Fetiveau's clinic near Paris. “When the ambulance got to the clinic,” Marie says, “reporters were already there. I was shocked when I first saw Josephine. Her hands were swollen, her skin was gray. I thought it was the end of her. Then the doctors gave her an electrocardiogram and a blood transfusion, and later on, she laughed and told me she felt like a superwoman. ‘They gave me
electricity
!' ”

She had agreed to open in a Paris club called La Goulue on March 27, and she intended to be ready.

La Goulue had been a restaurant that the movie and theater star Jean-Claude Brialy decided to turn into a supper club. “I had seen Josephine in her farewell show at the Olympia,” says Brialy, “and I contacted her with an offer. She accepted, and said she could sing ten new songs, some old hits, but I would have to help her with music and dresses. I asked all the grand couturiers, but they said, ‘She is too old, she is forgotten.' Then Jany Six, who had a boutique on rue Godot de Mauroy, a street of prostitutes, said she was willing to dress Josephine free.

“We called a press conference, and that was the day Josephine heard the new owner of Les Milandes had changed the locks, and she left Paris. Wednesday night, her picture was in all the papers, in the rain with her little cat. The heart attack followed. But at the Fetiveau clinic, she was getting better every day, asking to have the dress rehearsals there! She still had the IV in her arm, and she was telling us, ‘In two days, I will be up!' ”

She told me the same thing when I called her from Berlin.

“It was all free publicity,” says Jacques Collard, the manager of La Goulue. “Before then, we had tried a few acts, an opera singer, an all-woman orchestra, but nobody came. We racked our brains to think who might be able to make this place work, and someone suggested Josephine Baker. The night of her opening,
le tout Paris
was there.

“During the dessert, she made her entrance on the arm of Jean-Claude Brialy to resounding applause. Josephine went to the mike, thanked everyone, but said she was too tired to sing, she had got out of her bed just to be with her friends.

“The next night, she did her act. I have to tell you it did not work at all. Again, no one came. Even Josephine could not bring people into that club. But while the main room was empty, the bar was packed, mostly with gay people—Josephine was very much loved by the gay world—and she would talk with them, push champagne. She got excited every time she sold a new bottle. She liked to talk to those boys, she always said, ‘They are my children.'

“During her stay with us, she learned of the death of Henri Varna. I believe she was sincerely moved, it was a part of her youth that went with him.”

In Germany, I heard that my friend Gert Pempelfort was leaving for Paris, and being concerned about Josephine's most recent illness, I asked him to go see her.

He went. “She had become an old lady trying to hide the years with all that makeup and powder,” he told me later, “but she had such a big personality it did not matter, there was a family feeling in that room.”

“When she was at La Goulue,” says Georges Debot, a journalist and gossip columnist who covered the nightclub scene, “I was living across from her on avenue MacMahon in a ground-floor apartment, and evenings she would come and knock at my window, and we would share a taxi to the club. My concierge asked me, ‘Who is that old black woman who comes and knocks on your window every night?' and I told her it was Josephine Baker, but she did not believe me. Josephine would say, ‘Ah,
chéri
, it is my liver and my head, I will not be able to sing tonight; with all the children and the noise, I have to sleep with earplugs.' But she would come on stage all smiles, singing; it was extraordinary.

“Once we left the club together at about 2
A.M
., and a little girl was standing outside selling lilies of the valley. Josephine was appalled. A nine-year-old on the street at 2
A.M
.! She gave the child some money and said, ‘Go to your mother and tell her Josephine cried.' Then, turning to me, she said she would like to adopt the little girl ‘but I already have twelve, I don't know what to do anymore.'

“Business at La Goulue was so terrible, I did some free publicity during the last two weeks of Josephine's run, hoping it would bring in more people. She took it very badly. I was no longer ‘
mon petit
Georges.' She came to me and said, ‘Thank you, Monsieur, for your kindness in announcing our closing, thank you for the sorrow you have given me.' ”

“Jean-Claude Brialy was very good to this old lady,” says Jacques Collard. “But Paris was just acting sulky.” Once again, however, Josephine's good fairy came to her rescue. Grace Kelly dropped by La Goulue with André Levasseur, who had designed her wedding gown, as well as Josephine's costumes for
Paris Mes Amours
.

Grace and Josephine had never met before, but they were like a photograph and its negative image, white daughter of a bricklayer, black daughter of a washerwoman. Both had shaken off the dust of home to become royalty abroad—Josephine, queen of the music halls; Grace, princess of Monaco. Both had been promiscuous—and ambitious—in their youth; one had married into a castle, the other had bought her own. Both had cried over their fathers; Grace couldn't please hers, Josephine couldn't find hers.

Both enchanted Charles de Gaulle.

It was inevitable that they become friends. “The princess had a great admiration for Josephine Baker as a fabulous talent,” says Georgette Armita, then secretary of Monaco's Red Cross. “And she was very moved by her situation with so many children.”