Josephine Baker (76 page)

“All that concerns the Resistance and General de Gaulle is like a sword that pierces my heart,” she said, in a letter to the conservator of the Jean Moulin Centre. “When we refer to those years, 1939–45, we evoke a name . . . joined to that era the way the links of a chain are welded together.”

In Berlin, I had been calling friends, asking them to help get Josephine work. All advised me to forget it. “She's playing dates in little bars, how do you expect anyone to present her in a leading theater?”

It was true, she was taking any kind of job. A summer tour in Italy had gone well? She would call me, reproach in her voice that I had not been able to stimulate the same enthusiasm for her in Germany, while neglecting to say the producer of the Italian tour hadn't paid her.

But then she would have Stellina send me a drawing—it was addressed to “janclode de berlin” and bore the legend “I love you very much”—or have Marianne write, saying, “Dear Big Brother, Maman tells us how kind you are.” How could I turn away?

Early in December, the Pimm's Club would celebrate its third anniversary, and I was going to put on a charity show to help orphans in Berlin and Israel. I decided to star Josephine, who expressed her delight on paper. “My dear little Jean-Claude No. 2, thank you for what you are doing for me . . . And for abandoned children in Berlin and Israel. You know my little Moïse has been in a kibbutz there for the past six months, but I'm going to have him come back because there is an epidemic of cholera. . . .”

I built a tent over the parking lot, put down red carpet, installed gold chairs and an antique sofa for the mayor and his wife; I knew the mayor's presence would appeal to Josephine, she was crazy about titles, even if the title holder was an ex-dictator or an unfrocked priest.

I met her at the airport, still accompanied by her cardboard satchels. Why didn't she use the leather cases I had given her? Because a saint who lived for brotherhood did not require such ostentatious luggage.

But she didn't mind getting into my Mercedes.

My cousin Jacqueline Angonin (Nadette's sister) had offered to act as Josephine's dresser. “She was double my age, but marvelous,” Jacqueline
says. “Oh, that body. I will never forget her arms. I tied her into a wide rubber cinch that laced in back; she kept saying, ‘Tighter, tighter.'

“She needed that show life, she lived off it, when she hit the stage, she exploded.”

The night of the gala, Josephine waited in the Pimm's Club kitchen while I introduced “the Universal Mother, my mother, our mother.” On her way to the stage, people grabbed at her hands. Her dress was daring, a kind of fishnet in gold, loosely draped, and she had glued sequins under her eyes to cover the bags; it was, I thought, a gorgeous act of bravado.

After the cheers died down, she told the audience she had overheard two girls talking in the kitchen. “One said, ‘You know, Jean-Claude's mother is here.'

“ ‘Oh? Who is that?'

“ ‘Josephine Baker.'

“ ‘Well yes, but who is that?'

“ ‘I don't know. I can only tell you my parents always talk about
their
parents' honeymoon trip to Paris when they went to the Folies-Bergère, where Josephine Baker was dancing naked with a girdle of bananas. . . .' ”

She paused. “Well, little girls, it is already three generations . . . but during all those years, I have been happy . . . because I love people . . . because I need people . . .”

Behind her, the violins began as she started to sing “People.” She brought the room to tears.

I was almost in tears for quite a different reason. Right before her entrance, noting the TV camera and lights, she had stopped short. “What is that?” I told her it was the crew from the TV news show, she had rehearsed for them that afternoon, and even asked that they bring lavender gels through which to shoot her. Her face set in hard lines. “If they want to film me, I want five hundred marks before I go on.”

I was panicked, she was balking, and the TV people were leaving, outraged. (They refused to let me pay her out of my own pocket.) It was beginning to be clear to me why no big producers were fighting to present the famous Josephine Baker. And yet, she was wonderful. At the end of the show, she called me onstage to take a bow with her. Later, we held a press conference at my apartment, and Josephine talked about her children. She produced an old wallet full of pictures; to my dismay, she had to peer at the back of each photograph to remind herself of the
child's name and age. As she spoke to the reporters, she held on her lap Marcel-Roger Cicero, the two-year-old son of Eugene Cicero, the show's pianist. “Children are the most wonderful gift on earth,” she said.

She also told us that Marshal Tito had given her an island in the Adriatic. Not long ago, it had housed criminals, but soon it would be the site of the College of Brotherhood. (Some of the children had gone with her to check it out. “It was only rocks,” Brahim says, “nothing but rocks. She began climbing around, pointing—‘This will be the sports center, here the club, here the office . . .' When we left, Tito gave each of us a watch.”)

Recently, I interviewed Rajko Medenica, Tito's doctor, who had given the Yugoslav leader cellular therapy shots believed to slow the aging process. “Tito was a bon vivant,” the doctor said, “and for him, your mother was one of the greatest figures of the artistic world. She visited him on Brioni, his favorite island, and he asked me to come there. He said, ‘I would like for this lady to stay exactly as she is now.' I can't remember how many times I gave her injections.”

Maybe cellular therapy supplied her with strength for the demon housekeeping she practiced. Her last night in Berlin in my apartment, she redecorated. When I got up in the morning, I found my housekeeper sitting speechless on the sofa. The living room had been remodeled. Josephine had managed to move a couch, a big TV set, even a Biedermeier secretary. On top of the secretary, she had set a blue crystal vase holding a red plastic rose that an admirer had given her the night before. I was in shock. Still, I managed to say thanks and go to comfort the housekeeper, because Josephine had also cleaned the kitchen, which the housekeeper took as a tacit reproach.

After breakfast, she suddenly announced that she was going to go to the market because, she said, “I want to buy meat, butter, and eggs. You know, Jean-Claude, they are much better here than in France.”

“Mother, that's crazy,” I said with a laugh. “By the time you arrive home, you will have an omelet.”

Not liking my answer, Josephine went across the hallway and woke my neighbor, Eugene Cicero (she had already fallen in love with his son). To his astonishment, she enlisted him to accompany her and off they went on a mad food-buying spree—which he ended up paying for, of course.

When they returned, I greeted her at the door dressed in a crazy new outfit I had recently bought on a trip to Carnaby Street, then the fashion center of “mod, swinging London.” I had hoped for a “bravo” from her. Instead, she sneered. “My poor darling,” she said. “Don't you know that fashion, like life, is an endless cycle?” Then, inexplicably, she added, “Oh my God, I hope you're not doing drugs.”

I was puzzled by her remark because I had never done drugs. I wondered if it wasn't my outfit that had caused her snap judgment. I didn't have much time to reflect on that, however, because suddenly she was off on one of her reveries.

“When I was with Picasso and Jeannot [Jean Cocteau], I would go to that whorehouse, and on the third floor, there was an opium tent, and poor Jean would succumb to drugs,” she recalled.

Her amazing story set off all kinds of questions in my mind. “What was the saintly Josephine doing in a whorehouse?” I wondered. And though I knew Cocteau was gay, I was dying to ask her, “Mother, did you f. . . Picasso?” But I knew that if I'd broached that subject, she would never again open up her past to me.

Rushing for the plane, she continued her lessons. “Your introduction last night was very nice,” she told me in the car. “But, don't forget, when you are in a foreign country, you always do two things: You praise the blue sky above and the most famous person of that moment.” Then another lesson. “Jean-Claude, never be ashamed of what you are doing. But do the best. Even if you are a street cleaner, be proud of having the best-cleaned streets in the city.”

At the door of the plane, she kissed me. “You have to come and meet your brothers and sisters. I know that you will love them very much.”

With ten thousand marks and still another new set of luggage (again, gifts from me), she left for Monte Carlo, from which she wrote to Willy Brandt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, explaining that she would be playing Berlin, Munich, Frankfort, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg in January, and that she and I had made this plan together.

“These five great performances are to be given to help poor children of each city and Israel, and to help me pay the rest due on my house. I do not wish another shock like the one that happened to me at the Milandes. We will need your help, tax-wise, organization-wise, publicity-wise, etc. Jean-Claude will certainly contact you either by telephone or by correspondence. Please do try to help us.”

The projected German tour was entirely in her head—it was never going to happen—which didn't stop her from suggesting that I should contact not only Willy Brandt, but also the the jet-setting Krupp munitions heir, who lived on an allowance of nine hundred thousand dollars a year. “He is very interesting and very generous,” she said. (She had not forgotten the largesse of his father and his grandfather when she had first come to Berlin with
La Revue Nègre.
)

In March 1971, she was in Berlin again to perform at a gay ball. She had to work with a strange pianist who didn't know her routine, the show was terrible, and she was angry with herself. “Next time,
mon chéri
, you will be in charge,” she told me as we fled the place.

Again, we talked till all hours. She was planning a tour of Brazil, but was concerned lest the Brazilian producer go broke as the Italian one had done the year before. I advised her to have the money put in escrow in Paris before she left.

Then I showed her the phonograph record I had just made. It was my first, and for the liner notes, in the time-honored tradition of show business, I had lied about everything. I claimed to have gone to Paris (after the death of my father) to study acting with Michel Simon and dancing with Roland Petit. “Do not go into show business,” said Josephine. “The artist's life is very difficult and ugly.”

This was strange, coming from someone who looked so happy onstage. I hadn't yet read her early memoirs, in which she had talked about the disillusion of “this artificial life . . . The work of a star disgusts me now. . . . What this star has to do, what she has to bear . . . disgusts me. Bad things, sad things. I want to work another three or four years, and then I will leave the stage. . . . I will have children . . . but if one of my children one day wants to go on the stage, I will strangle him with these two hands, I swear it.”

On April 12, she wrote to thank me for a check of one thousand dollars. “I am sending it off right away to the Foundation for the future school. . . . A thousand million kisses from your second Mama. . . . See you in Rio.” (She had invited me to be her companion in Brazil, and I'd said yes.)

I was at the Rio airport to meet her, but she was in a foul mood. I said the city was magnificent, she snarled, “You know nothing!” She hadn't set foot in Brazil for twenty years, but had already made up her mind about it. “Nothing has changed, the skyscrapers may have got
taller, but the misery of the people has only dug deeper into the earth!”

Her Brazilian producer had spread a red carpet on the tarmac, there was French champagne in a VIP welcome room where she was to meet the press, but she wouldn't move toward the red carpet or the journalists. A pretty young girl with long black hair came up to her and explained that she was the assistant of Flavio Cavalcanti, on whose live television show Josephine was booked to appear. “It's the most popular show in Brazil,” said the girl.

Josephine grabbed her by the arm, said, “Let's go to the hotel,” and left me to take care of the producer.

We followed her to the Savoy, where she spoke a few words—“I'm an old woman now, but still fighting for human rights”—and begged to be excused. “My oldest son, Jean-Claude, will stay with you.” Then, to me: “You know what to say, but don't talk too much.” I was brilliant; I gave the “I'm happy to be under the skies of Brazil” speech, and asked everyone to understand that Josephine was exhausted, a brave old lady fighting with so much courage for brotherhood. When I joined her in her suite, she was drinking fresh sugar-cane juice. “It's good for the body.”

My birthday was the next day. I woke to find her standing beside me with a little box; it held a gold tie clip from H. Stern. “As soon as I'm rich again,” she said, “I will put a diamond in it.” That night, we were among twenty people invited to dine with the owner of
Manchete
, Brazil's most important weekly magazine, and I dressed in hot colors to match the hot music, the hot sun of Brazil. Josephine took one look and redecorated me, choosing a blue suit and a white shirt. “We are representing France, we must be elegant.”

The restaurant was on the beach; Josephine wore a long multicolored caftan and went barefoot, we ate lobsters and drank champagne. At that time of the evening, beggar women carrying babies sauntered along the sidewalks of Copacabana. There were stories that they rented the babies in order to evoke sympathy and bigger tips. One of the women came right up to our table, whereupon Josephine yelped, dropped a lobster claw, plucked a naked child from the stunned woman's arms, and demanded that a waiter bring her warm water. He fetched a lobster steamer in which she proceeded to immerse the filthy infant. Then, forgetting the baby, she wheeled on the journalists in our party.