Josephine Baker (85 page)

“Once I said to him, ‘You know something? You never wanted me, but be careful, because life is going to fool you. You love Marianne and all your other children, you think I'm the bad one, but the day you're alone, the one who will stay with you will be me.'

“When he was dying, he was hallucinating one time, he wanted to kill me, and afterward, he said, ‘Stellina, it's not you, it's your mother.' And he cried. And he said all those things he never told my mother, things he thought and felt and never said. He had lived twenty years with all that inside. He died loving her.”

Excited by the success of the latest Monte Carlo gala, Josephine got in touch with Gerard Oestreicher, an American producer. She said she would like to bring the production over “as soon as you arrange it with James Nederlander.”

It didn't happen. Still, she didn't sit on her hands waiting. She was appearing at the Berns Theatre in Stockholm when she ran into Jack Jordan, who was convinced they were being led by forces they didn't understand. “I had to leave America because I lost everything, and I came to Stockholm to start again. We met. . . . There must be a reason.”

“How strange life is,” said Josephine. “Think! I was crossing the street . . . and you came down another road.”

Then she accused him of lying, stealing, and leaving her stranded in San Francisco. As for the lawsuit, not only did she not owe him money,
he
owed
her
money!

She was on her way to South Africa, where she would tour for a month; after that, she would be appearing at the Palladium in London.

She had asked Dany Revel to accompany her on the South African tour, but Mrs. Revel said no. “My wife is a respected medium in France, and she said, ‘I don't want you to go,
c'est tout noir
.' She didn't see death, just darkness. I felt like an idiot, but I didn't go.”

Josephine shouldn't have gone either. The tour was a flop, houses a quarter full. The star criticized the apartheid laws but, said
Variety
, “she was willing to accept South African money.”

She must have been glad to get back to London, where Dany was playing piano for her, the queen mother was in the audience—it was a command performance to help needy actors—and Josephine was a hit. She wore a new jumpsuit, and told old stories. “I started in 1924, and we were all beginners together—Pablo, Matisse, Hemingway. I used to look after them, picking up their clothes, getting them organized.” As for the bananas, “I wasn't really naked, I simply didn't have any clothes on.”

Two weeks before Christmas, Moïse got married. Josephine did not attend.

“He was the first of us to get married,” Jean-Claude says, “and he wanted his mother at the wedding. It was touching. I remember she was in the kitchen doing the dishes, like a poor old woman with that plastic cap on her head, and Moïse said, ‘Mother, why don't you want to come?' and she told him some kind of story—she had not been introduced to the girl, rules of etiquette had not been respected, whatever. She used any excuses she could think of.

“Moïse was very tense, hyper, and he said, ‘For the last time, will you come to the wedding?' and she answered calmly, ‘No, Moïse.' So he said, ‘From this day forward, I will never set foot in your house.'

“It was so hard, but she preferred that, she preferred putting up a wall to talking, and there was no going over that wall.”

“Moïse is marrying a chambermaid at the hotel where he's a waiter,” Josephine complained to Jean-Claude Brialy. “It is a mistake to get married at nineteen with no experience in life.” (The estrangement from Moïse had its bright side, she wouldn't have to part with any of the jewels she had been keeping “for my future daughters-in-law.”)

“I wonder,” Brahim says, “if she was not jealous of the women my brothers chose. Moïse's wife, Monique, was good-looking, a lovely girl, but Mother was furious.”

Margaret had been planning to fix Christmas dinner, but Josephine protested. “No, Sister, you have worked enough, I'm going to take all of you to a restaurant.” She also bought new clothes for all the children, spending one and a half million francs in a fancy store in Nice. “It was as though she had a presentiment that it would be her last Christmas,” says Joseph Bessone. “Since she came back from America, she had gone nonstop. I told her she had to take more care of herself.”

She didn't, she couldn't. Since America had not responded with a new
offer, she turned her sights back home. No nibbles. Paris managers did not have faith in yet another Josephine Baker comeback.

And then, with her good fairy in attendance, her
baraka
working, whatever it was that always supplied her with a fresh chance, she met Jean Bodson, a patron of the arts. He took her to lunch and confessed that as a young man, he had been madly in love with her. “I own a little theater, not worthy of your talent, but it would be an honor to give it to you.”

They went to check out his theater, Bobino, in Montparnasse, on rue de la Gaîté, and she was satisfied. “Oh! It will be perfect for my farewell. We could maybe move that column, build a staircase . . .”

Monsieur Bodson said he would redo the theater. By the time it was done, it had cost him a million dollars.

Now, every day, in Marie Spiers's apartment, Josephine rehearsed with Dany Revel at the grand piano. He had to go to play at the Hôtel Méridien at 6
P.M
., but he gave Josephine his afternoons. He had written an opening number for her, a song with lyrics that began, “Here I am, back again, Paris, tell me, how do you find me?”

“For three months they were rehearsing,” Marie says, “and while Josephine sang, she rearranged all my shelves. Pierre would come at night to see what she had learned.” (Once again, Pierre was going to be her conductor.)

“She was beginning,” Marie says, “to behave like someone reborn. She even found time to try writing her own life story [no Sauvage or Rivollet to help her this time], dictating a little bit every day to a secretary at Bobino. And she wanted to receive a lot of people again. She told me, ‘It's too small here.' I found her an apartment two doors from mine, and she liked it, except for the bedroom. ‘It smells of death,' she said. I signed the lease, and my son was upset. ‘You are crazy,' he said.”

Despite her bravado, Dany Revel knew that Josephine was worried. “It was her last chance to reconquer Paris. Then one day, we were rehearsing the opening, she was sitting on a chair, and she started to sing, and it was like a phonograph winding down, ‘Heeere IIIII aaammm . . .' I looked over at her, and she had fallen asleep.

“I let her sleep, but wondered about her strength.”

Still nervous that she wasn't quite ready to face the public, Josephine had asked to have the opening pushed back a week. Mr. Bodson was willing, but André Levasseur, who had designed the sets and costumes,
said no, Dany Revel recalls. “She needed a few more days, even forty-eight hours would have given her some time to rest.”

On March 24, the first preview took place. Her doctor had tried to prevent all extracurricular activities, but Josephine could never say no to the press. She permitted a TV news crew to come backstage. She was dressed for the finale of the first act in her army uniform with all her medals and ribbons. “The decorations you are wearing—” the interviewer began. Josephine never let him finish the question. “Won on the battlefields,” she said.

She was asked about her family, and she laughed. “They are growing up. One of my sons, Luis, is getting married.”

Had they been to the show?

No, they were studying. “At this moment, it is good they are not here, because when I'm with them, I forget everything,
tout, tout, tout
. Only my children count. And right now it is necessary that I have peace and tranquillity so I can give myself entirely to the public of Paris.”

How did it feel to be back on a Paris stage?

“Good. Agreeable to find again my family. For me, family is everybody, but mostly the public who made me.”

Heavily made up, without her big glasses, the bags under her eyes no longer hidden behind spangles, Josephine looked straight into the camera. “It is agreeable, because at least I can see what they think of me while I'm still alive.”

The phone rang. Good news can generally wait till morning; at 2
A.M
., it's always something else. “Jean-Claude, you must be strong,” said the voice. “Josephine is dead.”

It was April 12, 1975. I was thirty-one and I'd been living in New York, calling my Swiss bank when I needed money, taking voice lessons, tap lessons, and, like now, vacationing in Miami. I was giving myself the youth I'd never had.

In that room of the Pink Flamingo Hotel, I hung up and like a madman began to sing “J'ai Deux Amours” over and over in a loud, hoarse voice that sounded like somebody else's. Scenes from my life with her rushed through my head backwards, fuzzy and fast, as when you hit the rewind button on a VCR. It was 5
A.M
., not yet light, by the time I had cried myself out and went downstairs to find someone to talk to. A night porter got me a cup of coffee.

I had seen the pictures of her in French newspapers, and reading
about her projected comeback, I had stewed. Maybe she'll take Paris again, I had thought, but it's going to kill her. She had never apologized to me, but my fears for her had proved stronger than my pride. I had taken to phoning again. At first, she would pretend she didn't recognize my voice. “Who is this?” she would say. We would talk for twenty minutes, I would fill her in on Broadway and Hollywood gossip, the latest trend, the newest star, and then, suddenly, she would hand the phone to whichever child was passing by. “Here, it's your brother.”

I wasn't the only one with a premonition of disaster. Marie went to all the previews at Bobino, and was alarmed. “She was very tired. Her doctor said, ‘The heart is sick, but the children are the ones who are killing her.' That's why they weren't allowed to come to the show.”

Josephine was missing her animals, but the management of Bobino was firm. “No dogs; who will take them out?” She asked Marianne to come and bring her a cat, but did not allow Marianne to stay. “She just did an
allez et retour
,” says Marie. Stellina was the only one of the children who spent a few days with Josephine before the opening. “I would go to eat with her in a little Italian restaurant across the street from Bobino,” she remembers. “Maman was working very hard; she was tired, but very satisfied.”

Josephine had convinced doctors, friends, even herself, that the children sapped her strength. “At the end, I think she wondered if she had done the right thing in adopting us,” Jean-Claude says. “She had an illogical life, and she refused to admit it.”

A year earlier, revelation—and with it, compassion—had come to Jean-Claude. “I went to see all her performances for the Red Cross gala. One night, after the show, we went to have dinner, and there were a dozen of us in the restaurant. That is when I finally realized what her life had been, through people like Maurice Bataille, whom she had wanted to marry. He would say, ‘Josephine, do you remember?' and she would say, ‘Oh, stop it, you silly!'

“She bloomed, she became a young girl again, and I was in tears. I thought, ‘This is my mother, she made people happy before I knew her, in another life.'

“We did not go to see her perform at Bobino, because she did not want us there. In Paris, she did not belong to us, she belonged to her audience.”

And to her company. Jean Pierre Reggiori, the youngest chorus
boy—he wasn't yet eighteen—remembers her coming in every day with oranges. “She would say, ‘My children, it's vitamins, eat them.' We adopted her, watched over her on the staircase. She would sometimes stumble, but we never let her fall.”

Once again, the streets of Paris were covered with large colored posters of Josephine, the face retouched, smooth, ageless, the glittering body stocking, the plumes of feathers sprouting from a white turban.

AVEC LE CONCOURS DE LA S.B.M. MONTE CARLO . . . JEAN-CLAUDE DAUZONNE PRESENTE JOSEPHINE
, said the posters. Her first name was enough. For the French, there had been only two Josephines, the wife of Napoléon, and this one.

She had told reporters they would discover four Josephines at Bobino. “One of four years, one of twelve, one of twenty, and of course me. They don't look very much alike, but in the theater, illusion is what counts.”

And she was still sweating to create that illusion. “She astonished me,” says Alexandre, who was doing her hair and wigs. “She would come offstage dripping with sweat, and go to the stagehands. ‘You must be tired, you have worked very hard, have a drink on me.' She was using a lot of perfume, telling me, ‘You know, a woman must always smell good. I have had rains of perfume on my body.'