Josephine Baker (77 page)

“You want to interview me about fashion? About life in France? What
you should write about is your own people's misery!” She lectured them, and she lectured the rich ladies, decrying their Diors, their jewels—“You think I don't recognize Cartier?” Some who were insulted left the table, as Josephine turned back to the half-drowned baby. Lifting him out of his bath, she held him on her hip as she went around collecting money from those still seated at our table. Then she presented the money and the damp baby to his mother. Or his renter.

Happy with her performance, she expected applause. When none was forthcoming, she cried, “Shame on you!” and ran into the street. “Happy birthday!” she yelled back at me as she got into a taxi. I apologized for her—“Her weakness is children”—but the remaining guests were cool. “It must be very difficult to live with her,” said one lady.

Flavio Cavalcanti's show was broadcast live every Sunday; it came out of the old Beira-Mar Casino, where Josephine had worked in its glory days. Now it was a sad, run-down place with dressing rooms like jail cells, all dirty walls and peeling plaster.

Josephine got into a black lace jumpsuit, added a curly wig, glitter under the eyes, and when she was finished she stood studying herself in a big mirror. The last time she was here, she had been twenty-three, drunk with success. Forty-two years had passed, countries had disappeared, others had been born, but she could still look into that mirror and be proud.

“Come on,” she said, “let's go to rehearsal.” By the time we found the rehearsal room, a young singer was already working with the orchestra. We had been due at five, and it was five past. Upset that people wouldn't wait for her more than five minutes, she led me outside into an open courtyard filled with garbage cans. The smell was terrible, the sun pitiless, but we leaned against the cans, and she talked. Not really to me, to herself.

It was like Sidney Bechet returning to a theater in Montmartre thirty years after he had first played there. “You come in the door,” he said, “and you're in the same place and nothing seems to be changed. . . . But all the time you know how much has changed. . . . You don't believe you can go back. . . .”

For four hours and thirty minutes under that killing sun, she talked. About 1929, and Pepito and how she had been attacked as immoral by the president of Argentina, and the fights in the streets, and the theaters selling out every night, and the madness and the music—“How beautiful is the tango in Argentina.

“And Brazil! I was so powerful that the president killed himself because I told him he had sold his country to America. He shot himself with a gun, and the people carried me on their shoulders through the streets, I could have led a revolution, but I left, it was not my country.” (Later, I discovered that a Brazilian president, Getulio Vargas, had indeed killed himself in Rio, though Josephine wasn't there when it happened.)

I could hear Alvero, the pianist, calling, “Miss Baker, Miss Baker,” and gratefully, I got off my garbage can. “Stay here!” she ordered. Then she sent me to fetch some toilet paper. “It's the only way to blot your makeup without leaving spots.” Well, at least I was learning some show business tricks.

I came back with the toilet paper. “Did you know,” she said, “that the dark-haired girl is Flavio's mistress?”

“No, but it doesn't surprise me, she is good-looking.”

“Well, I'm not going to talk to her anymore.”

She must have sensed my growing apprehension. “In difficult moments, you should pray,” she advised. “It helps kill time.”

“Mother,” I said, “it's almost a quarter to nine.”

“So let's go.” A last patting of her face with toilet paper, and we're on our way.

In the studio, there is frenzy. “Where have you been?”

“Never mind where I've been,” says Josephine. “I'm here on time.”

Twenty musicians await her cue, they don't know what she's going to do first, and neither does she, but she knows Alvero will save her. She says a few words to the audience, they applaud, as Flavio's girlfriend walks onstage with a bunch of roses. “Miss Baker, would you answer a few questions?”

“Go away, dirty girl!” says Miss Baker.

The girl, near tears, tries again. Josephine turns her back, and stamps her foot angrily; her high heel comes down on the girl's instep. The girl screams and falls, clutching her bleeding foot. A cameraman moves quickly to Josephine's face; she produces a smile and launches into a ballad.

Backstage, a priest stands with twenty young children dressed in white, each holding a white rose. “They're orphans,” the stage manager tells me, “they're supposed to bring the flowers to Josephine, but it may be better not to send them out there after what she just did to that girl.”

I say, “Send them out right now.” One by one, the children walk on
and hand Josephine the roses. She stops singing, seats the little ones in a half circle around her, sits down with them, her back to the audience, and says, “You are not alone anymore because I am your mother and I love you very much.”

After several moments of discourse (on brotherhood, freedom, the Rainbow Children), with blood still on the stage, she begins to sing, “People, people who need people, are the luckiest people in the world . . .”

The audience gives her a standing ovation, but Flavio refuses to acknowledge her when she comes off, he is too busy screaming, “Never again will I have her on my show, I don't give a damn about Josephine Baker, that fucking bitch, and her fucking Rainbow Children.” His English is perfect.

Afterward, I ask her why she behaved so badly. “I don't like young girls with old men,” she says. “At a certain age, one should stop having sex; your brothers and sisters will never be able to say they have seen me with a man since Jo left me. Never.”

I tell her Flavio isn't that old, she says, “Be quiet!”

(Jacqueline Abtey confirms that in Josephine's later years, there were no more adventures with men. “She surrounded herself with women, nurses, secretaries. A lot of young girls were in her entourage, so people talked, but by then they had seen so much that nothing could surprise them.”)

Before leaving Rio, Josephine insisted we go to a Macumba church in the hills beyond the city. Long ago, she said, she had been made a goddess of the Macumba. We took a cab through terrible slums, the driver trying to maneuver according to the goddess's instructions—“It's around here, take a left, no, a right.” We were lost, it was getting dark, and she was explaining to me that in the old days the Macumba had offered human sacrifices to their gods. “Today”—a note of disdain—“they use chicken or goats!”

We finally gave up and came back to the hotel, Josephine disappointed but glad she had tried.

Next on the tour, Pôrto Alegre. The producer and Alvero flew there direct, but Josephine and I took a puddle jumper that made four stops. Why? Because Madame wished to meet the press at every landing.

On our way to the airport, we passed a pet shop, and she spied three monkeys in the window. “We can't leave them in that terrible place, they'll die.”

“But Mother, we will miss the plane.”

“Jean-Claude, don't be so cruel, they are crying for help! Driver,
momento, por favor
—” and we were out of the cab, and into the store. Josephine chatted up the owner—how much were the monkeys? how was his mother?—though the poor man was easily sixty-five and had surely lost his mother long ago. Down on the floor in the back of the shop was another bunch of monkeys in a cage, tiny ouistitis, no bigger than Parisian sparrows, with tails twice as long as their bodies. There were twelve of them, some going bald. Once Josephine discovered them, new negotiations over price ensued.

After an incredible amount of bargaining, she got the monkeys—I paid for them—and the two largest birdcages in the store. We put the twelve ouistitis in one, the three larger monkeys in the other, and we left, me with a cage under each arm. A mob had gathered outside, faithful viewers who had seen Josephine on Flavio's show. There were requests for autographs, children to be kissed, before we could leave.

On the plane, another circus. She didn't want the air conditioning, it would be bad for the monkeys. She was feeding them mashed bananas through the bars, talking softly to them. “My little darlings, you are so beautiful, don't be afraid anymore.” After a while, she fell asleep.

When she awoke, she wanted to discuss—again—the Rainbow Tribe. “You have to come home to your brothers and sisters, they are growing up, and it's so hard for me alone. Am I a good mother, Jean-Claude? Do I give them what they need?” (These were questions I was not equipped to answer, never having seen her and her children together.) “They miss a father,” she said, “we need a father at home.”

She talked about Jo Bouillon. “On our wedding night, he came to our bed crying, and confessed he was gay. He said he had married me because I was a myth.”

Not knowing what I know today, I grieved for her. But I wasn't the only one. Dear Maman, I swear
you
believed—100 percent—that you were reciting the facts.

If Josephine was pouring her heart out to me, so was I to her. I told her how upset I was with my own mother. I wanted to buy her a chic apartment in Dijon, but my mother wouldn't hear of it. She wanted a more “humble” place. In fact, she'd found one already and had fallen in love with its draperies.

“Jean-Claude, you want to make her happy?” asked Josephine. “Buy her the place she wants.”

It was a direct answer—and a good one. My mother was the happiest and proudest after she moved into that apartment.

From Rio, she had wired the French consul in Pôrto Alegre, telling him what time we would be getting in, orchestrating her arrival. Still, she worried. “Will he be there?”

When we landed, we could see from the windows that there was a welcoming committee, a group that included the consul and an accordion player. Josephine told me to sit still while everyone else deplaned. Let those who were waiting for her wonder, “Is she coming?”

She would create a little suspense, hang back just long enough, then, at the right moment, appear in the doorway, start down the stairs. When she hit the bottom step, I was to follow. Her descent was simple, dignified, accompanied by the “Marseillaise” on the accordion.

“We are so proud to have you here, Madame,” said the consul. “You bring us a breath of France.”

She was thanking those gathered to honor “a poor old woman like me,” as I finally appeared with the monkeys. “My son, Jean-Claude” was introduced. I can still see her, happy, tired, charming everyone with that velvet voice.

At the hotel, we had a big suite; she gave the smaller room over to the monkeys, and hung a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door. Under the words
DO NOT DISTURB
she wrote “the monkeys.”

The rehearsal in Pôrto Alegre was a disaster. The musicians couldn't read the charts, Josephine forgot words, missed cues, lost the beat, and the theater was only half sold out, an embarrassment, because the French consul and his wife were coming.

I helped Josephine dress: red velvet gown with black fox hem and sleeves, and over this, an embroidered coat so tight she couldn't peel it off by herself.

The music started, “Paris Mes Amours.” Josephine talked to the people: “How do you like me? . . . I love you . . .” But one by one, musicians were putting down their instruments and shuffling off the stage. She was too hard to follow, so
adiós
. Only Alvero remained at his piano. Momentarily stunned, Josephine called for me. “Jean-Claude, come quickly, help Mother do her striptease!”

The audience laughed, as she introduced me. “This is Jean-Claude, the thirteenth of my twelve adopted children, the oldest.” Polite applause. I began to wrestle her out of the coat—it took all my strength
to undo the hooks and eyes—while, for the benefit of the audience, she caroled to me, “Turn your head, you're too young to see me strip!” Then, in a fierce whisper, “What are you doing? Why does it take you so long? Hurry, you good-for-nothing!” In time, the coat was separated from the wearer, and she sent me off with it. “Go now, let Mother work,” she said, to more laughter and applause.

She made it through the rest of the show. Alvero didn't fail her and she didn't fail herself; she was never better than when she faced a challenge. The finale was corny but effective: rudimentary drawings of her (dancing naked with bananas; in an air force uniform; with twelve children) dropped down from the flies in a traveling version of the Jorama. As the last picture descended, Josephine fell to her knees and, gazing skyward, bawled, “IIIIII did it MYYYYYY WAYYYYYY . . .” The audience clapped till their hands must have hurt.

On her way to the dressing room, worn but victorious, she said, “You see? They love me, it's just bad organization, we should have been sold out!”

She seemed to enjoy the havoc she created, like a pyromaniac who starts a fire, turns in the alarm, and then is first on the scene to try to put out the blaze. She was a sorceress and a mischief-maker and she could always make me laugh. On a night when an elderly gentleman in Pôrto Alegre invited me to visit some old ruins, she muttered to me, “Be careful, he wants to show you
his
old ruin.” How could I be irritable with such a woman?

The next day she was flying to Buenos Aires. She had asked me to come with her. Much as she missed Jari, it was almost as though she was afraid to see Jo by herself. But the two weeks' tour through Brazil had almost killed me. I said I was going back to Rio for a week's vacation. She understood, and gave me motherly advice. “You're a good-looking boy, so be careful, there is a lot of syphilis in Rio.”

At the last minute, somebody had told her she couldn't take monkeys out of the country without a permit from the Board of Health. She went mad. One monkey she could have hidden under her coat, but not fifteen. She called the French consul, who called a colonel in the cavalry who was also a veterinarian, and willing to help. He came to the hotel, and she served him tea and apologies. “Monsieur le Colonel, I'm so sorry to disturb you, but Monsieur le Consul was kind enough to tell you of my little problem. It's really nothing, just a few monkeys . . .”