Josephine Baker (84 page)

Upon my arrival, the first thing I did was get a copy of the “interview” I was supposed to have given. It was nothing but a blown-up version of the item from Suzy's column that had already appeared in London's
Daily Mail
and
France-Soir
. Although the editor of
France-Dimanche
was willing to clear me, Josephine refused to speak to him. She went to Versailles without me—she'd got my invitation canceled (“I don't know that person”)—and stole the show from Liza Minnelli and Nureyev, and I went back to America.

By mid-November, the Palace contract was in Joseph Bessone's office. Josephine was to be paid thirty thousand dollars for her week's work, she was to open on New Year's Eve, and to be in New York five days earlier “for publicity purposes.”

Now to my surprise, her nephew, Richard, Jr., took my place as whipping boy. “Aunt Tumpy used to tell me her children are bastards and giving her trouble, they don't have her blood, whereas I do, so she trusts me.”

In December, Josephine wrote to Bob Brady about their “marriage,” now three months old. “I too regret not having took [
sic
] the communion that beautiful and special day. . . .” She also told him that since I had talked to a “scandal newspaper,” the family had written me off. “Not one of us wishes to see him again, he is a very bad boy. . . .”

I soon learned that was not the way the children felt at all. “I was surprised,” Jean-Claude said. “She'd had you on a pedestal, and I said to myself, ‘It cannot be, she used him and now she is discarding him.' Anyway, I felt a lot of affection for you, and you know, at the time, we were so fed up with her we had almost lost interest in her welfare.”

Jari offered reassurance too. “For me,” he said, “you were the brother who had logic, and who helped us a lot.”

Josephine opened at the Palace on New Year's Eve. That morning, it
rained. The journalist Dotson Rader, working for
Esquire
, covered the final rehearsal. Briefly, he spoke with Richard, who confided that “Madame Aunt” had never had a face-lift. When he saw her, Rader believed it. Her cheeks, he said, “like errant sand dunes invading an oasis, encroached sadly on her mouth when she was not smiling.”

He sketched for his magazine a painful picture of a woman in the twilight of her days, wandering, distracted, working from some deep recess of will; when the body said no, the mind said no, and only the spirit insisted.

She ran out of breath. She forgot the name of her new dresser, and could not remember her lyrics, Rader reported. “Richard, sensing her confusion, brought her a cardboard schedule listing her songs and conversation. She had trouble reading it. She went on, leaning back, her sunglasses catching the stage lights . . . into another medley, and again she forgot the words . . . ‘Smile when you're blah blah blah . . . and then I came back to New York and Billy Brice . . .'

“She had forgotten Fanny Brice.”

Tommy Tune, the dancer/choreographer/actor, was at that opening. “I'd never seen Josephine, and it was not only New Year's Eve, but my night off from a show called
Seesaw
, so I went. There were many old European people in the audience, and this black guy dressed in a turban ran down the aisles passing out roses, and he said, ‘Throw these to Josephine when she comes on, she will love it.'

“And Josephine started on and stopped and said, ‘I can't step on all these beautiful roses,' and I thought, ‘My God, how sensitive, how wonderful. And then somebody came out and sort of cleared her a path.

“My favorite moment in the show was when she sat down on the stage and started to recall this dance that George Balanchine had done for her. He'd said, ‘Josephine, I see you with four men,' and she'd said, ‘Well, I don't know, maybe that's too many men for me . . .' And she just drifted off into this reverie. The piano player was playing soft music, and she went away from us, into some memory we were not a part of. She was so at home on the stage she just went off. And then you could see her thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I'm here at the Palace, what am I doing, talking about Balanchine and those four men, I must go on with the show.'

“You could see her return to reality, it was one of the great magic moments I ever experienced in a theater.”

At the Palace, Dany Revel was her pianist, one of the fixed points in her changing world. He had known her since 1959, played for her in
Paris Mes Amours
. It was Dany who had come with her to the Regal in Chicago. “With her, many times I got tears in my eyes, and that's why I forgave her everything.

“In her own way, she was looking for perfection. She once stopped in the middle of the street and said, ‘You understand, Dany, in life one can always do better.' To survive a long time, a hardness is needed. She dared to cut people out of her life, she tired everyone.”

The New York Times
's Howard Thompson raved about the show at the Palace, saying Josephine still had “luscious, honeyed tones in the middle register and hearty top ones belted out when she chooses. . . .”

Now Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders filed a $1.5-million damage suit against her, charging breach of contract in San Francisco. But in the teeth of lawsuits, she was unregenerate. After the last show at the Palace, she stole the costumes again. “I've never seen anything like that in my life,” Richard, Jr., says. “She heard someone's coming with a warrant to take her costumes, and she calls up my brother Artie, and he brings his truck from Long Island. A sheriff came backstage later, but the costumes were gone. I said to Aunt Tumpy later, ‘You are the biggest crook in the world!' ”

As with Thelma Carpenter's “biggest gyp on the Nile,” there is a certain amount of admiration in the description.

“From the Palace,” Dany Revel says, “we went to the Raffles Club. I thought that was a step down, it was a private club, not ideal.”

In the three weeks between her closing at the Palace and her opening at Raffles, she flew to Cuernavaca, and Bob Brady. But something went wrong between them. My own theory is that she discovered he was not so rich as she had believed. In any case, during the afternoon of January 15, she wrote a farewell note on paper with his letterhead, Casa de la Torre, and begged a favor. “One night, I was very ill, and you stayed near me, please do this again tonight. I only have pure thoughts, I probably will not come here again, so I would like to be near you one more night.”

She calls him “my husband,” tells him to throw himself into his painting and not drink too much, and announces her intention to sneak away “like a thief in the early morning . . . I won't be able to say goodbye.”

Josephine is being so dishonest. She had started the game with him before our trip to Mexico—“He is gay,” she had told me, “but a great host.” Meaning, there would be free food, free beds, good company, nice parties. And when she's had enough, she's gone.

His letters to her were destroyed—after a fight with Richard, Jr., fearing blackmail, she burned them—and since he died before I could talk to him, we don't have his side of the story. But it seems to me he wasn't treated much better than I, though he did get a fond notice of dismissal.

People who didn't love her, who treated her as a business proposition, got a better deal. With Jimmy Nederlander, she showed up on time, she talked to the press, she signed autographs.

At Raffles, there was no Jimmy Nederlander to temper Josephine's whims, and little structure of any kind, so the show was pretty much a mess. The club, in the basement of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, was doing no business.

“And everybody was serving her with subpoenas,” Richard, Jr., marvels. “I said, ‘Aunt Tumpy, stop signing those autographs, you gonna sign one, we gonna go to jail.'

“We were living at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South, and Aunt Tumpy was cooking rice all the time. And we had sweet rolls so stale we had to put water on them to soften them. She had been making thousands of dollars a night at the Palace—she would go to Armani and buy clothes, she bought that teacup puppy, Fifi, that cost five hundred dollars—and we were living in poverty.”

Florence Dixon recalls those winter afternoons through a rosy haze. “We would sit on the floor of her apartment at the Navarro, and Josephine would put out pictures of the kids, and pictures of the Christmas dinner, with Sister there. I was spellbound.

“She didn't want anybody to know about her medical condition. We used to go to a lab and have her blood tested. She was supposed to send reports back to her doctor in France, but I don't think she ever did.”

“Aunt Tumpy was very suspicious,” Richard, Jr., says. “At the Navarro, she suddenly got the idea that terrorists were going to attack us, and suddenly I was moving trunks from one hotel room to another. She was suspicious of you, too, Jean-Claude. She said, ‘He is scandalous, he is using my name, after all I have done for him, like he was a son of mine. Do you know, he tried to sing in my show?' ”

I had finally made the acquaintance of Richard, Jr., outside of Raffles. Loving his father, I was happy to meet him, and we had a brief, friendly conversation. He told me of his troubles. “All the time at the Palace, and now at Raffles, she's complaining, ‘Jean-Claude wouldn't do things that way,' and I've been saying, ‘Why don't you get him back if he's so great?' ”

He thought I should make peace with his aunt. I said no. “She'd have to ask my pardon on her knees.”

I thought I was out of her life, but I wasn't. The manager at Raffles had made me welcome—I found out later that Josephine had told him to take care of me—and I went there almost every night, and stood at the bar. It was an exercise in masochism. She wasn't happy with the way the maître d' introduced her, and one night she reprimanded him in front of the audience. “That's it!” he said to me. “From now on, she can introduce herself!”

She never approached me and I didn't go to her, but a mutual friend, Jocelyne Jocya, was determined to effect a reconciliation, and prevailed on both of us to show up at the Village Gate where she—Jocelyne—was singing. “I have arranged everything for Sunday, Josephine's day off,” she told me. “I have reserved a front table, you will arrive first, then she will come with Bessie Buchanan and Florence Dixon. The champagne is on ice.”

Still, I fought with myself. If I gave in, Josephine would once again be getting away with murder. “She wanted to dominate, and make you afraid at the same time,” Jacqueline Abtey had said. “When I discovered that, I knew it was time to leave her.” Not being as smart as Jacqueline Abtey, I came to the Village Gate, sat at the table down in front, and waited. At midnight, I got up and went home.

Jocelyne says Josephine arrived a few minutes afterward, and was sad that I'd left. But she never called:

In April, with Richard, Jr., she went west to appear at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a weekend. “I thought, my aunt, the big star,” Richard, Jr., says, “and then we went into that ballroom and it was empty. Only a few people came, Nina Simone, Lou Rawls's mother, Eartha Kitt, Diana Ross.

“Diana Ross is sitting there with her friends, and Aunt Tumpy goes up to her and cups Diana Ross's face in her hands, and kisses her on both cheeks.”

Diana Ross has told me a less tender version of the face-cupping story. “Josephine came, stood in front of me, put her fingers into my hair, and pulled hard,” she says. “I guess she wanted to see if I was wearing a wig.”

“I was getting sick of the whole mess,” Richard, Jr., says. “I finally just left California and never saw Aunt Tumpy again.”

Back home on the Riviera, Josephine went to Joseph Bessone and said she wanted to buy a large property in Monaco. “I told her,” he says, “the princess has been very generous with you, and I know she doesn't expect you to pay off the mortgage on the Villa Maryvonne, but if I were you, to show my gratitude, I would take care of that.

“Josephine paid off the mortgage. The princess was once again generous, she refused to take any interest.”

In June, Sammy Davis, Jr., who was to headline the opening show at Monaco's new Sporting Club, withdrew in a fit of pique. He was replaced by Burt Bacharach, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Bill Cosby, and Josephine. The princess could always count on Josephine.

Her nephew, Richard, Jr., could not. At that time, she thought of him as an enemy who was planning to write a scurrilous book about her. “He told me he had frightful things to say about me and my sister,” she confided to Florence Dixon. “He threatened to unveil the true Josephine Baker. The lack of family feeling among some of the young is deplorable . . . that boy is only thirsty for money and glory.”

It was a thirst with which she was familiar. By mid-July, she and Dany Revel were back from a tour of Japan, and she was planning for the 1974 Red Cross gala. Again, in that act of cannibalism practiced by aging stars who feed on their own legends, the spectacular was to be a retelling of Josephine's life story.

Jean-Claude Brialy had agreed to act as master of ceremonies on opening night, and Josephine wove dreams. If the show were a hit, why not move it to Paris?

Marie Spiers came to spend her vacation in Roquebrune. “As soon as I arrived, Josephine said, ‘Give me all your money, I need it,' and she took me and Christina Scotto (who was also staying with her) to Italy to buy beauty products. She claimed they were less expensive than in France.

“The Red Cross show was an absolute triumph. Afterward, again with my money, she went to Israel to cry at the Wailing Wall, and to
comfort Golda Meir, who was no longer prime minister. She took Stellina.”

Of all the children, Stellina, being the baby, was now closest to Josephine. “I was lucky,” she says, “I think I had a wonderful mother, I never tried to judge her. I had ten years with her, and after she died, ten years with my father in Argentina, but for me he was a stranger.