Josephine Baker (75 page)

Besides, Grace had already heard good reports of Josephine from Miki Sawada's daughter.

Emi Sawada-Kamiya: “My father had been restored to favor, and in 1952 he was Japanese ambassador to the United Nations. We lived at 988 Fifth Avenue, and Grace Kelly lived in the same building. I used to meet her in the elevator with Oliver, her black poodle, and we became friends.

“In 1958, she invited me to spend several months in the palace with her. I was there for the birth of Albert, it was a great joy to everyone. During that time, I was corresponding with Josephine, and she wrote that she admired Princess Grace, and she sent me
La Tribu Arc-en-Ciel
, the fairy-tale book about the Rainbow Tribe. I showed it to Grace and to Princess Antoinette, Rainier's sister. They became very interested in Josephine's work.”

Emi describes the princess's life in Monaco as difficult, constrained by protocol and a lack of privacy. Eventually, the princess bought an apartment in Paris, and it was in Paris that she recruited Josephine to star in Monaco's Red Cross gala. (“It was the princess of Monaco,” says Madame Armita, “always in accordance with His Highness the Sovereign Prince, who made the choice of the principal artist each year.”) Josephine not only agreed to perform, she refused a salary—“It's for charity.” (Still, she could keep all the clothes being made for her.)

A few days before the gala, there was a screening of
Zou Zou
. Pepito's old friend, Arys Nissotti, supplied the print. “It was to be an evening to help Josephine Baker and her children, who no longer had anything,” says Georgette Armita. “The princess personally organized it. It was difficult, because Josephine was a little forgotten, but the princess called her friends, and the entire evening's receipts were given to Madame Baker.”

“The screening was in an open-air theater,” Jari says. “And Mother was complaining: ‘It is such an old film, I do not like to see myself in it.' But since it was organized by the princess, we all had to go. It was funny because Mother would always fall asleep during a movie, and that night, one of us had to give her a little poke every time we saw her head falling, since she was seated next to the princess.”

“Josephine's great joy during our stay in Monte Carlo was not the gala,” says Marie Spiers, “nor the shows during the rest of the week—for which she
was
paid—nor playing to millionaires and movie stars, it was that we had been invited to spend an afternoon at the palace.

“The boys wore white trousers, blue blazers, white gloves, and Marianne and Stellina were in white dresses. We were led into the gardens, and the prince went to his zoo and picked up a little lion for the children to play with.

“Josephine was a big success in Monte Carlo, and the children were a tourist attraction on the beach, but we had no money, so she went off to do a gala in Venice. When I joined her there, I found she had taken a splendid suite in the Royal Danieli. The minute I saw her, I said, ‘You are not being serious, I warn you, I have no money left.' ‘Ah, Marie,' she said, ‘everyone was so charming to me, I was obliged to take an exclusive suite.'

“That night, as she went onstage, the producers of the gala came to me. ‘Madame, we would like to do something for Josephine, but we are afraid to offend her, can you help us?' I could not believe my ears. I said, ‘Well, I know she will object, but why don't you pay the hotel bill?'

“After the show, I told her what had happened. She said, ‘You see, Marie, you should not have worried.' ”

Feeling welcome in Monte Carlo, Josephine started to look around on her own for a little house. She found a villa in Roquebrune, on the French side of the border between France and Monaco; it was a modest place, but since she didn't have the money to buy even a modest place, she called the Red Cross.

“She got me on the phone,” says Georgette Armita. “She told me her problem, I told the princess, and the princess decided to help Madame Baker.” She made the down payment, and then had the house put in the name of a Real Estate property company, to be administered by the Red Cross. Josephine would never again be evicted.

She left Monaco knowing she had a home to come back to, and indeed, when she and the children returned in the fall, the Villa Maryvonne was in perfect readiness. “The princess was president of the Red Cross,” Madame Armita says, “and we had furnished the house. Beds, dishes, whatever was needed. We even took care of finding new schools for the children.”

Stellina would go to class with Princess Stephanie, all was right with the world.

The way Josephine seduced people was to make them think she owed everything in her life to them.

She did it with me, she did it with the Grimaldis. Her Christmas card for the year 1969 was a fairy tale about three “adorable” children living in a castle not far from “twelve tiny tots who were blown together by a soft wind as a symbol of universal brotherhood. . . .”

It was part inspirational and part boot-licking, as she attempted to bind herself and her family ever more tightly to the rulers of Monaco.

The little villa in Roquebrune that looked out over the bay of Cap Martin was far from the paradise that she proclaimed it. With four bedrooms, two baths, twelve children, it was crowded, and the mostly adolescent tribe was no longer manageable.

Perhaps it never had been. The children grew up with chaos the only thing they could be sure of. “Life was somewhat more normal when we moved from Les Milandes to Paris,” Brahim recalls, “and Roquebrune
was even better. There were palm trees and the swimming pool at the Sporting Club (as guests of the princess), but it was the beginning of another time; the older boys were growing up and there were unbelievable fights. That was when my mother started to say, ‘No long hair, no bell-bottoms, no flowered shirts.' ”

It wasn't easy to assert one's individuality in the teeth of Josephine's decrees. “Bell-bottoms are for homosexuals,” she would announce. “Most of her friends were homosexual,” Brahim says, “but if we opposed her, her reaction was to slap us or scold us. ‘One does not argue with parents, one respects them.'

“One time we called her because she was on TV, she was dancing the Charleston, half naked, and she came and turned off the set. She was furious. We thought we could make a point that she had broken all the fashion rules so why couldn't we be a little bit free. ‘What about you, Mother, in the days when you greased your hair and wore bananas?'

“Luis was the first to rebel. He refused to get rid of his flowered shirts, and she did not know what to do. Luis was one of the taller ones, one of the stronger ones, and while he did not quite put it that way, what he meant was, ‘Try and force me, I am no longer a kid.'

“That's when my mother called Maguy Chauvin's husband, and asked him to come over and play the father role. Later on, she would ask Brialy to do the same. Even you, Jean-Claude, had to go through it. But we were too much to handle, ten rowdy boys in two bedrooms, it stank in there.

“Actually, it was eight boys, because Akio slept downstairs, and Jari had already moved to Argentina. The reason for Jari's being sent away was that my mother had found him and a friend in a bathtub, fondling each other.

“She sent him straight to our father. She told Uncle and Auntie she was afraid he would ‘contaminate' us, and we would all become homosexuals.”

“I remember the scene very well,” says Jean-Claude. “It was the night [Neil] Armstrong walked on the moon. Mother gathered us together, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Elmo were there too, and it was like a court-martial.

“She said, ‘Here it is. Your brother is not like you.' She had always told us we were all the same, all equal, now she was saying the opposite, and we did not understand.

“She rendered justice her way, there was nothing you could say. And poor Jari was there with his head bent.”

Jari, that most amiable of boys, says he never felt betrayed or rejected. “I am what I am, I thought it would be easier to grow up around Daddy. He was rational, we were friends. He taught me to be careful; he said in the gay community relationships are short, men are always after novelty. He helped me, and so did my brothers and sisters. They never reproached me for being homosexual.”

“With her own friends,” says Brahim, “my mother gave the impression of having a good time, laughing, but with us, she did not want to appear frivolous. When we played her records, she would say, ‘Children, you can listen to them when I am not around.' She tried to hide her artistic side from us. She wanted us to remember her as a respectable mother.”

I thought of what Kenza had said, that it was a shame the children never knew the real Josephine. They found Jo Bouillon more “normal,” which further upset her. Jo had come for the family's first Christmas at Roquebrune. “He asked us what we wanted,” Brahim says, “and we wanted bicycles or mopeds, which my mother refused to give us—she was afraid we would hurt ourselves—and he bought them.

“She did not say anything on Christmas day, but five or six days later, Luis did not give her a kiss before breakfast, and she slapped his face.

“My father said, ‘Josephine, this is Christmas vacation, do not start a fight,' but they argued, and he left two days later. As soon as he was gone, she took all the bikes and mopeds back to the store.

“My father came back two or three times, but my mother was afraid we would become more attached to him, since he was rational, sensible, very French, Cartesian, whereas one could say that she was very American and extreme. At Les Milandes, she had given us an allowance, and when the public school principal told her we had more money than the other children and that wasn't good, overnight we had no allowance at all. We couldn't even buy chewing gum, and if you tried to beg or borrow, people would say, ‘You're the son of Josephine Baker, you have a castle,' so some of us started to steal.

“We all did our share, and so we were all punished. You can't imagine how many times, since almost every day, someone would break a window, and we would be asked, ‘Who did it?' and no one would say. In a way, this impressed my mother. ‘They are so united they will not give
each other up,' she told a friend. ‘That pleases me even if their upbringing is not an absolute success.'

“I think she must have had mixed feelings toward us when we became teenagers, and the older ones started telling her, ‘No one can hit us anymore, especially not your male friends.' She was losing ground, she stood in front of us in her robe, like a grandmother confronting seventeen-year-old boys. One day, she just gave up. Overnight, we were given total freedom, even Noël, who was only twelve or thirteen.”

Josephine was plagued not only by her inability to control the children, but by the bills that followed her to Villa Maryvonne. She still owed social security for the employees at Les Milandes, she still owed taxes, she had to keep working. That spring, she wrote Harry Hurford-Janes and his wife, Peggy, asking them to take some of the boys for the summer. “Be careful before you answer,” she warned, “because they eat a lot.”

Josephine said she wanted her “four devils”—Akio, Jean-Claude, Luis, Mara—to become “real English gentlemen.” (Moïse, another troublemaker, had already been sent to Israel to work on a kibbutz.)

In August, an AP reporter came to Villa Maryvonne to interview Josephine, and she confessed to having reservations about the Black Power movement.

“I suppose,” she said, “if I go back to the States, they'll say I'm an Uncle Tom. But I would ask the young boys and girls of color what they would do with the white boys and girls who believe in the right ideals. . . . The last time I was in Chicago, a Negro boy told me he wanted to kill all the white people. . . .”

The reporter went away and filed his piece. The star declared afterward that she had not intended to denigrate Black Power, it was just that those words gave her “an impression of separation among human beings instead of unity . . . for years we of another generation felt humiliated when our brothers were called black or nigger. . . .”

She wrote this in a letter that included her most recent—troubled—musings on children. “Very few of us understand our children,” she said. “We . . . have perhaps made great mistakes in bringing them up. . . . Neglect, bad teaching at home, bad manners, the wrong influences, too much freedom, too much money, drugs, too many fine clothes, cars . . . Many parents are . . . slowly realizing that they should say, ‘It's my fault. . . .' ”

On November 11, 1970, Charles de Gaulle died.

“France has become a widow,” President Pompidou declared, and Josephine, weeping, asked Marie Spiers to send a heart-shaped wreath of white roses with a banner saying “From Josephine and her Tribe.”