Josephine Baker (86 page)

“She talked about the
Revue Nègre
and how Antoine had saved her opening night with his paper helmet. ‘Now,' she said, ‘I work only with wigs. You can put pins in my scalp, even if the blood is running, it doesn't hurt me.' ”

But it did hurt her. She confessed as much to Liliane Montevecchi, then starring at the Folies-Bergère. “I went to see Josephine on a Sunday afternoon. Everybody in the house was crying, and we didn't know why, it was not a sad show.

“Afterward, in her dressing room, she took off her wig and said, ‘I have such a headache. They pull my hair up under the wig to erase my wrinkles.' The few tufts of fuzz she had left had been pitilessly wound around pins, the skin pulled up tight with the hair, but she was willing to pay the price to present herself the way her public remembered her. She had a way to touch people's hearts, this woman. I don't know what it was, I never saw anything like it.”

Olivier Echaudemaison, who was doing her makeup, says she was so tired she would fall asleep while he was working on her. “And when she
woke up, she was totally surprised to see how beautiful she was. ‘I don't recognize myself,' she told me.”

“We had expanded the fifty-minute Monte Carlo show into a two-hour-long spectacle,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne, the director of Bobino. “We had enlarged the stage by covering the orchestra pit, and putting the musicians in the balcony. Mr. Bodson not only transformed the theater for Josephine, he paid her most pressing debts. (Even though no insurance company would touch her, he was willing to take the risk with her.) She was also receiving a substantial salary, plus a percentage of the take, and half the money was sent to her Swiss bank account.”

Dauzonne had known Josephine since he was three years old. (His family had been friendly with Jo Bouillon's family.) “She liked me to come to her dressing room and talk while she got ready,” he says. “Dany Revel had written her opening song, ‘Me Revoila Paris,' and it gave me cold shivers. One of the lyrics was, ‘And maybe, who knows, I will end my life on the stage.' I said, ‘Josephine, I do not like that song.' I found it morbid, looking for sympathy. ‘But no,' she insisted, ‘it's wonderful!'

“Altogether, she played fourteen performances, including previews. On the night of March 29, she stopped the show to announce with tears in her eyes that her son Luis had just got married, but because of her duty to her audience, she had not been able to be with him and his bride.

Luis had indeed made her a mother-in-law for the second time, but she was nicer to him than she had been to Moïse. “A few months before the wedding, I told her that she was going to be a grandmother,” he says. “I think it gave her a certain joy, a certain sense of revenge against her own father; this time the roles would be reversed, this child would be born of a white mother and a black father.”

“I believe she was happy about the baby,” says Luis's wife, Michele. “But she and I didn't talk very much. At that time, I was shy, and she intimidated me. Then she went to Paris, and I never saw her again.

“We had invited her to our wedding, and though she couldn't come, she sent us a telegram saying her thoughts were with us, and she would pay for the wedding lunch. But since she died two weeks later, we ended up paying for it.”

The press gala on April 2 was a triumph; in the wings, she whispered to Jean-Claude Dauzonne,
“J'ai gagné
. I have won.”

Le Figaro
agreed. “For the second time in fifty years, Josephine Baker has conquered Paris which one night in 1925 seduced her forever.”

Six days later came the official premiere, attended by Princess Grace, assorted Rothschilds,
le tout Paris
, with a few exceptions. The faithful Joseph Bessone was missing. “She invited me to the premiere,” he said. I said, ‘I don't like to witness things that pain me, Josephine. You are going to leave your skin at Bobino, do not count on me to witness it.' In Paris, they killed her.”

Backstage on opening night, she herself said the same thing to Jean Clement. “Those amplifiers are killing me, I'm going to die, because there is too much noise, my head hurts. Why do they do that? I have a good voice, I don't need all that noise.”

The “noise” had been added not to augment Josephine's voice but to supplement the orchestra. A company called Festival had done a studio recording of the show—just audio, not video—and the tape was played every night in the theater. Besides fattening the band's sound, it provided a more reliable beat for the dancers. (With applause added, that sound track was released after Josephine's death. “We didn't want to film the show before the opening,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne. “So much was already on Josephine's shoulders.”

In addition to her unhappiness with the clamor of the music, Josephine told Jean Clement, she was suffering because “my children are not nice with me.”

Clement tried to tease her out of her mood. “Remember when Mistinguett said to you, ‘Why do you want to adopt all those children?'

“And you said, ‘I have to be an example,' and Miss said, ‘You're crazy. Talk about examples, Christ came to save the world and they crucified him!'

“Josephine was not laughing.”

Until the show began. Then everything changed. That opening night, I had sent her a telegram:
PETITE MAMAN, I KNOW YOU WILL BE A BIG SUCCESS, AND YOU KNOW YOU ARE IN MY HEART. I PRAY FOR YOU. LOVE, JEAN-CLAUDE
. She didn't need my prayers, she couldn't do anything wrong, she was continually stopped by waves of applause. “In her gypsy number, ‘Donnez-Moi la Main,' Dauzonne says, “she went down into the audience, and there in the front row was Arletty, the actress who, after the war, had been censured for falling in love with a German. She was blind now, dressed all in white, and the famous pink follow-spot lighted both women as Josephine took Arletty's hand. ‘How beautiful you are, Madame,
all
of France admires you.' ”

Hippocrates wrote it: “Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”

“People were crying,” says my friend Robert Boutin. “Next to me, Carlo Ponti turned to Sophia Loren and said, ‘
Regarde bien ça
, you won't see it twice in a lifetime.' ”

There were thirty-four songs, and fifteen scenes from Josephine's life as she chose to remember it. It started like a fairy tale—“Once upon a time”—and proceeded to touch on Africa, Louisiana [
sic
], New York, France, the war, the Wailing Wall in Israel; there was even a skit in which she made fun of her bad time at Les Milandes. Dancers dressed as furniture movers came to haul away everything—including the pink sofa on which Josephine lay, showing off her beautiful legs—and soon nothing was left onstage but the star, singing “Au Revoir but Not Adieu.”

At the end of the show, Jean-Claude Brialy came on to read a telegram from Giscard d'Estaing. The president sent Josephine fond wishes
IN THE NAME OF A GRATEFUL FRANCE WHOSE HEART HAS SO OFTEN BEATEN WITH YOURS
.

“She got a standing ovation of more than thirty minutes,” says Robert Boutin. “People were screaming, ‘You are the most beautiful, we love you, Josephine,' and finally, her voice strangled with emotion, she spoke. ‘I had prepared something to say, but I can only tell you I love you and I know you love me.' ”

Thierry Le Luron, then the most brilliant political satirist in France, told me he had gone to the theater that night out of respect for a national monument. “I went there thinking, well, I'm going to applaud the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, it will certainly be a little boring. In reality, it was sublime, people did not want to leave the theater, it was the crowning of Josephine's career.”

At the Bristol Hotel, Mr. Bodson gave the opening-night party, and Princess Grace helped Josephine cut the many-tiered cake celebrating her fifty years as queen of the French music hall. She was wearing a cream-colored silk dress by Nina Ricci, a matching turban with a veil. During supper, the president of the city council presented her with the Grande Médaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris.

“She refused to go home early,” Marie says. “She told me, ‘I will stay until my last guest is gone.' ”

It was 4
A.M
. before she left the Bristol, and next morning, she was still euphoric. She phoned Marie and asked her to come to the theater
that night. For the first time, Marie refused. “Tonight,” she said, “I will sleep.”

The second-night performance, which can be a letdown, was another triumph. After the show, the elated Josephine demanded that Dauzonne take her to Chez Michou.

“I want to see Bobby, that black American boy who imitates me,” she said. Dauzonne refused—“Josephine, in two or three days, you can ask whatever you want of me”—and she was still sulking as he drove her home.

“When I put her in the elevator of her building,” he told me, “I pushed the third-floor button and kissed her good-night. Her last words to me were, ‘Oh, you young people act like old men, you are no fun.' ”

Thursday, April 10, Marie Spiers: “Josephine always called me very early. That morning, I was happy not to receive her call. Thank God she is resting, I thought, and went to my boutique. Around 2:30
P.M
., I phoned her apartment. Pepito's niece, Lélia, was working for her, and she answered. ‘Madame is sleeping.' I said, ‘What? She is still sleeping? Go wake her up.' Lélia left, came back, and said, ‘I can't wake her, and she's snoring.' I called the doctor, and then hurried to Josephine's apartment.”

Behind closed doors, the drama played out. “The doctor told me it was very bad,” Marie says. In the bedroom, Josephine lay on her left side, one hand to her head, the plastic shower cap she had been wearing still in place. Her glasses had fallen to the floor. The bed was littered with newspapers, their front pages extolling her latest comeback. She had been reading these love letters when she collapsed.

“When I arrived at her place, I knew what had happened,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne. “It was the same way I had found my mother; she'd had a brain hemorrhage. Dr. Thiroloix chose the Salpêtrière hospital because it had the best emergency room in Paris, and we called an ambulance. Then I left to go to the theater; we told the radio and TV that Josephine had been hospitalized for exhaustion.”

“The ambulance attendants asked me to remove Josephine's ring,” Marie says. “It was the one with Pepito's crest, she had never taken it off since he gave it to her. The driver ran all the red lights, with the police helping us. Jean-Claude Brialy and André Levasseur were in the ambulance, but Brialy wouldn't sign Josephine into Salpêtrière, he said,
‘Marie, you put this in your name.' So I signed, accepting responsibility for Josephine's bills.”

Stellina Bouillon: “I was in my aunt Margaret's house, on Easter vacation from my school in England, and I had a dream that my mother was very bad, and I started crying and said, ‘She is going to die, she needs you.' And Auntie said, ‘Okay, if we don't have news by midday, I'll go to Paris.' ”

Luis Bouillon: “With my Fiat coupe 124, I drove Aunt Margaret to the airport. On our way there, she asked me to stop by the Banco di Roma. I stayed in the car while she went inside.”

Later, having arrived in Paris, Margaret realized she didn't even know where Josephine was. She went by taxi from hospital to hospital until she came to Salpêtrière. “I could see,” she told me, “that Tumpy could not make it.” The doctors conferred—if they operated, there was a 70 percent chance that Josephine would be permanently impaired—and Margaret made the decision. “Don't you touch my sister.” (Later she told Florence Dixon, “If she had lived and been unable to talk or walk, she would have lost her mind.”)

Marie Spiers and Margaret kept vigil through the night. Once, Margaret said, squeezing Josephine's hand, she thought she felt Josephine squeeze back.

At 5:30
A.M
., on Saturday, April 12, Josephine died.

“She gave a few little sighs, then one long one, and it was over,” Marie says. “I think deep in me, I was expecting it. What she had been doing was beyond her strength.”

For two days, she had lain unconscious. Princess Grace knelt beside the bed, praying, as a priest gave Josephine the last rites. “She claimed many religions,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne, “but she had told us she was a Catholic. And that she did not want to be photographed dead.”

The fiction she had created lived on. Her death certificate said she was the daughter of Arthur Baker.

Margaret and Marie had dressed her in the clothes she'd worn to the opening-night party at the Bristol. “We wanted her to go to Paradise the same vision we had seen after the premiere,” says Alexandre. “In death, she had a great serenity, she seemed like she was sleeping.”

“I chose the most gorgeous coffin in Paris,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne, “lined in pink, of course, since she always asked for a pink gel over her spotlight. Before we closed the lid, Margaret said, ‘How beautiful you are, Sister,' and she began to sing a spiritual.”

Margaret had not telephoned her brother Richard. “My father's French was still bad,” says Guylaine, “and he and my mother were listening to the radio, and the announcer said, ‘Josephine's light burned out this morning,' and my mother said, ‘My God, Richard, your sister just died.' He was destroyed.”

Jean-Claude Bouillon: “I had come home very late, it was 6
A.M
., and Marianne was sitting on a low wall outside the villa, and I knew immediately that something weird was going on. The sun was rising, the light coming up, and she said, ‘You know about Mother?'

“And she made a gesture with her arms meaning, it's all over. I went up to her, she was crying, and I was looking at the sky, and I did not understand.