Josephine Baker (79 page)

“And when I said, ‘Now here she is,' ” Bricktop recalled, “I saw a theater shake.”

Yvonne Stoney had first worked as a dresser for Josephine at Carnegie Hall ten years before. “It was one of the most fascinating jobs I ever had, because she made most of her changes in front of the audience's eyes, and they were not aware of it. She would be talking to them, and have one arm behind the proscenium, and I am pulling off her glove, and I am under her dress taking off one shoe and putting another shoe on, and she never left the stage.”

Now Yvonne was helping Josephine again, on an opening night when the stage was covered with roses thrown by admirers. “I would say six inches deep, I had never seen anything like it. And when Josephine walked on, they would not let her open her mouth, every time she started, the applause rolled in. I was standing in the wings waiting for her to come and get the top part of her headdress taken off, and as she leaned against the piano, I could see her trembling. I went and got Jack.

“She came off after the first segment, and we got her into the dressing
room, and she was turning blue. The last pill she was supposed to have taken was still there in the ashtray, and I gave it to her. It was like a metamorphosis. When she went back onstage, she was fine.”

She looked ageless, people said, in the skin-colored sequined body stocking, a huge headdress of pink ostrich plumes on her head. “How do you like my Eiffel Tower?” she asked, patting the feathers. They liked her Eiffel Tower, and they liked her. At the end, each person in the theater lit a match, and sang “Happy birthday, dear Josephine.”

Somebody once said that Josephine spent the last two years of her life in redemption. Certainly during that brief stay in New York, she tried to mend some fences. Caroline Reagan's grandson Arthur remembers his family's being invited to Carnegie Hall.

“Out of the clear blue. I was eleven years old, and sitting in the front row, and this woman is dedicating the show to my grandmother and my mother, and we all have to get up and go onstage with her.”

In another spate of reconciliation, Josephine invited herself to stay at her nephew's house on Long Island. “I need some peace, the old arm is getting tired.” Artie drove her to the theater each night and picked her up after the show. “She'd come home and fix her famous spaghetti,” Janie Martin says. “Two o'clock in the morning, she'd eat a plate of spaghetti.”

“She let me know I was her blood,” says Vertel, the daughter of Artie and Janie, who was sixteen at the time. “She didn't act like a big shot.”

Donald Wyatt came to the opening-night party. “I was shocked when Josephine walked into the Plaza,” he told me. “I could see how much she'd aged.”

The New York critics didn't agree. “A body any thirty-year-old could proudly take to a beach resort,” said the
Post's
man, Edmund Newton, while Howard Kissel, of
Women's Wear Daily
, called her voice warm “and, when she wants it to be, velvety, and always bright and joyful.” Booked for four days, she could have played for four years, to judge from the crowds mobbing the box office. This was not lost on Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders, who were already planning for next fall—a sixteen-city tour and a movie.

She phoned me the minute she got home to Roquebrune. “I'm so happy,” she said, “I'm sorry you weren't there, but we go back in September, and you will come with me. I'm taking the children to Copenhagen, why don't you join us?”

I went sooner than I'd planned, because in Copenhagen, she suffered
a stroke. At Rigshospitalet, I was directed to the ninth floor. On the black and white plastic tiles, a little girl was playing hopscotch. Nearby, some big boys and a teenaged girl leaned against the wall.

From talking to them on the phone, reading their letters, seeing their pictures, I felt I knew them. I went to Stellina, who had stopped jumping in order to check on who was getting off the elevator. “I'm Jean-Claude, your brother from Berlin,” I said, and we kissed. I was meeting the children at last, but my happiness was shadowed.

None of them had been allowed into Josephine's room, and when I saw her, I understood why. She lay in a large white metal-framed bed, looking small and lifeless. The left side of her face was twisted, her head was bald except for a few curly white hairs. Her eyes were closed, and she breathed with difficulty; there were so many tubes in her nose, arms, chest, it was like a science fiction movie.

The staff were relieved I had arrived, the children were without supervision and reporters had been hounding them. I said I would take them with me, and a nurse promised to call if Josephine's condition worsened during the night. As we left, I spoke to the reporters who were waiting outside; I told them Miss Baker was doing well.

I took the children to a restaurant. We were almost in mourning, certainly in shock, trying to reassure each other, when out of the blue, flashbulbs erupted, bombarding and blinding us. I was shocked. This is what it is to be the children of someone famous, I thought. The children were
not
shocked, they were used to it.

Next morning, astonishingly, I found Josephine awake and reading telegrams. She smiled when she saw me, and handed me one of them:
DEAR JOSEPHINE, WE ARE PRAYING FOR YOUR RECOVERY
. It was from some Jehovah's Witnesses. “When I was fighting with God, who wanted me back, I told him I still have so much to accomplish here on earth, and the prayers of the Witnesses were added to mine, and God listened to them. That's why I'm still here today.”

She was weak, and spoke slowly. “You've met your brothers and sisters?” “Yes, Mother, I love them.” “I knew you would,” she said. Suddenly, she turned practical. “How did you hear I was in the hospital?”

I said it was on the news. “Oh my God,” she said, “the Americans are going to cancel the fall tour, no one will book me if they know I have had a stroke, you must call a press conference and deny it, say I fell on some stairs.”

I said I would. By now, she was off on another tack. “Look, Jean-Claude, look at all the people who worry about me.” She waved telegrams from Princess Grace, Jean-Claude Brialy, Golda Meir, the queen of Denmark.

A report to her doctor in Paris from Ole Thage, the consultant neurologist at the hospital, said she had made “a speedy recovery from what we consider a cerebral thrombosis of the right hemisphere.” She had been admitted on July 17 “with a paresis of the left side of the face and the left arm.” She'd had trouble speaking, the left side of her face drooped, her heart rhythm was irregular.

Ten days later, she was sent home with digoxin and an anticoagulant, and I made my first visit to the Villa Maryvonne. I had decided to leave Berlin, join Josephine in her world, since she wanted and needed me with her. I'd achieved success, money, friends, lovers of both sexes, but her idea of universal brotherhood brought me back to my fascination with Abbé Poulot, the wonderfully eccentric religious mentor of my childhood village. I was once again happy to be an altar boy, to serve a cause bigger than myself.

I left everything behind but my new Mercedes 350SL coupe.

The villa at Roquebrune was built on two levels, with a stone terrace that looked over the sea. Josephine called the upstairs, shared by the boys, the pigsty. Broken doors, floors covered with dirty underwear, metal lockers, bunk beds. Downstairs, the only full bathroom was across from Josephine's bedroom. Marianne and Stellina slept in a converted pantry, and Akio had a small room that Josephine asked him to give up for me. I said nothing, but felt odd about displacing him. These kids had enough problems.

One of which was Josephine's flash tempers. Only recently she had expelled Moïse from the house, and he was working as a waiter in a restaurant in Monte Carlo. The older boys and I went down to see him. He had cut his hand very badly, and was just back from the hospital. I found him very nice, good-looking, apparently well-balanced. When we told Josephine that he had been in the hospital, she did not respond. It was as if he did not exist.

Dinner was meager. Pasta with margarine—“Butter is too expensive,” she told me—and for water glasses we used empty mustard jars.

The next day, I went out and bought meat, groceries, and colored plastic tumblers to give a little color to our lunch. Josephine, seated at the head of the table, made an announcement. “Your brother, Jean-Claude,
will read you a letter from Dr. Thiroloix.” Then she handed me the letter.

I started to read, and could barely keep from laughing. “You are murderers, and you are killing your mother,” Dr. Thiroloix had written. When I had finished, Josephine stood up and ran to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Stellina was sobbing, “Maman is going to die.” “Idiot, it's a game,” said one of the boys. The others just looked at me as if to say, “You see the circus we live in?”

I followed the distraught Stellina to Josephine's room. I was stunned by the way she brought order into her home. “They don't care about my health,” she said. Now that Moïse was gone, Jean-Claude had become her obsession. “He's a drug addict, you have to talk to him before it's too late.”

I took Jean-Claude to the Café de Paris for a conversation over a couple of beers. “You know she means well,” I said. “She is difficult, and not very logical, but she loves you so much.”

“She is mad,” he said bitterly. “You see how she traumatized Stellina. She can't do that number with me. I never asked to be adopted, I would have been happier in an orphanage, with an ID bracelet, at least I would have known who I am. And I wouldn't have been an object of curiosity, like we all are with her.”

I let him talk. He spoke with the passion of an unhappy twenty-year-old. “She chose pretty babies, none of us are ugly or mutilated. At home, she plays the poor old black mother, and when we open the newspapers, here she is half naked at close to seventy, laughing, drinking champagne with actors, presidents. And always dropping a word about her children, her ideals, human dignity. If she had dignity, she would not treat us as she does. She has used us for her career; if she wants us to live like a normal family, then she must act normal too!”

His outburst floored me. I said I understood, but that she too had endured a hard youth, and didn't know how to show love. “Even with me, she is tough, and I take it.”

He didn't want to take it. “Look at her. She's even too old to be my grandmother, how could I feel like she's my mother?”

I went home and told Josephine that Jean-Claude was not a drug addict, and that I found him very bright. It made her angry. “I knew
you would fall under his spell, you're against me like everyone else, why are you here?”

There was so much that could not be fixed that I turned my energies to matters over which I might exercise some control. The house was dirty, the Italian maid was not doing a good job. Josephine said she knew it. “But she is young and pretty, and the boys sleep with her, so they don't have to go out of the house for sex. It's safer like that.”

Next day, as though we'd never had this bizarre conversation, Josephine brought up the subject of one of the boys (who shall remain nameless). “You have to take X to a girl, because he is very shy, but his body is ready.”

Flabbergasted, I stared at her. Yesterday, everyone was having sex with the maid; today, she wants X to lose his virginity to a stranger, and she doesn't even know if he's interested. It reminded me of farmers in my village taking a cow to the bull when they decided it was the right moment.

“Here are two hundred francs,” she said. “Take him to Nice and find him a nice young girl.”

I didn't know where in Nice one went for nice young girls, but I told X the good news, and two of the other boys and Marianne resolved to come with us. We parked in front of a little hotel—it was the right part of Nice, a few girls were already walking the streets at 3
P.M
.—and I got out and went to a young blonde and told her the story. “Be nice to him,” I said. Then I gave X the two hundred francs, and we all wished him luck.

He was back five minutes later. “We went to a room,” he said, “I sat on the end of the bed, she asked me for the money, I gave it to her, then she said I could go.”

Even Josephine laughed. Then she blamed me for having chosen the wrong girl.

Seeing that many admirers still beat a path to her door fired Josephine's fantasies. “Princess Grace, that filthy American,” she burst out one day. Shocked by this denunciation of her benefactor, I waited for an explanation. It was not long in coming. The prince and princess had decided Monte Carlo needed a new discothèque, the better to lure tourists, and Josephine had thought she was the logical person to front it. “Instead, the prince and princess took Régine, the fat one from Paris.
So, Jean-Claude, here at the Villa Maryvonne, we will build a new Chez Joséphine, and you will manage it.

“And we will kill Régine, the princess will be sorry she did not take me. We will have shops where guests will buy postcards of me, and dolls, and on the top floor there will be the cabaret with glass walls, the only decoration will be the splendid view over Monte Carlo, people will come from all over.”

It never occurred to her that the villa wasn't zoned for commercial use, or that she might be perceived as too old, too sick, too unreliable to run a club. Especially as she didn't plan to entertain. “If I start, I am obliged to continue. Once or twice a year, I'll do a special show, but I'm tired, that is why my United States tour will be my last one. It will bring us three million dollars.”

“Three million?” I say. “Are you sure?”

She's sure. The tour, the selling—one more time—of her story. There will be a movie, and three more books, one about her career (“not my sex life”), one about the famous people she has known, and one about the war. Then, when we come home again, the new club. “You'll be boss, but give some of your brothers little jobs, teach them.”