Josephine Baker (87 page)

“It was not until the next day that I realized my mother was dead. I had been drinking while she was dying at the Salpêtrière. For years afterward, I felt guilty. At the same time, we always believed she was immortal, Mother, she had survived so many things. But that moment I'll remember all my life, Marianne telling me of Mother's death, with a sign of her arms, in the dawn.”

Brahim Bouillon: “She was always going away, and so she was just away again. I only realized later that this time she was dead. At the villa, our first reaction was, Are we going to be separated? Is Daddy coming back? Since the person who had brought us together had disappeared, we were wondering what would become of us. Rumors started that Princess Grace would take Stellina, that our father would come back and divide the family.”

Me, as soon as I could get on a plane, I flew from America to Paris, and went to my apartment. Mara and Jari joined me there, and I tried to comfort them, but we were numb, we didn't understand she was gone. For us, she was still somewhere in the world, getting ready to go onstage, or making a speech about brotherhood.

I didn't want to go to the Salpêtrière and see her lying in a wooden box, and I was bitter toward those I thought had killed her, the frivolous jet-set delinquents who had dragged her around so they could be photographed with her. My brother Jean-Claude shared my feelings. “With age,” he says, “people become infantile again, she wanted once more to be the twenty-year-old Josephine. That is why she let those people charm her.”

But Jean-Claude and I both knew we could not entirely blame “those people.” Josephine had been their avid accomplice. “For the past year,”
Margaret said, “her whole talk was of Paris, where she wanted to be.”

Before leaving my apartment, Jari gave me a ticket for the funeral at the Madeleine. A ticket for a funeral? I was thunderstruck.

When I arrived at the magnificent many-pillared church on the morning of April 15, no one asked for my ticket. In fact, there were no crowds, the church was quite empty. The showman in me was disturbed by the poor turnout.

I sat in one of the front pews reserved for family, and a priest came up and said, “My son, she told me on her deathbed how good you were to her.” Oh my God, I thought, on her deathbed, she talked about me?

The service began, with no more than twenty or so mourners in the vast domed space, but when the priest began to speak, everything became clear. He was eulogizing some other lady, one Madame Fougère. I was at the wrong funeral. I sat there fighting the urge to grin. “Maman,” I thought, “even now you are teasing me.”

Meanwhile, Josephine rode for the last time through the city. The procession started from the hospital, stopped in front of Bobino (its marquee lighted in her honor, her name blazing in the gray day), then wound its way to the church. The skies matched the somber mood of the people thronging the sidewalks and massed on the broad steps of the Madeleine; in pictures it looks as though flocks of birds had settled there.

Thousands of mourners turned out. Only three thousand could be seated in the church. Madame Fougère's actual son and friends having departed, another crowd filed in. There were Margaret with Jari and Mara (they were the only two of Josephine's children to come to Paris), and then suddenly, kissing each other, Alain Delon, Sophia Loren. It's not a funeral, it's an opening, with stars and photographers. I have a vision of Josephine, arms raised, palms up, calling out, “How do you like me?” and I say to myself, “Well, here she is!”

“If she had died before Bobino,” said Jean-Claude Dauzonne, “it would have made three lines in the papers; as it was, her funeral was almost a national event.”

Princess Grace arrived, and General de Boissieu representing the Legion of Honor. I saw Michel Guy, the minister of culture, and General Vallin. Madame Derval, the widow of Paul Derval, was there with Michel Gyarmathy.

Jo Bouillon, whom I had not yet met, appeared to be a man in pain. Arriving from Buenos Aires, he had spoken briefly to the press. “Too many memories come back,” he said, “the past grips my heart.”

All around us, there was an unchurchlike din. We could hear buzzing from the gallery, whispering on the main floor, and the sounds of flashbulbs popping as pallbearers carried the heavy ebony coffin up the aisle. The thing was like a Rolls-Royce, and again I had to fight the nervous impulse to break down and laugh hysterically. What a show, I thought; wherever she is, she must be laughing too.

As the press frenzy grew, Canon Thorel addressed the crowd. “Brothers and sisters, don't forget you are in the house of God.” He gave the photographers five minutes more, then the church was still.

In front of the altar on a purple cushion were Josephine's military decorations, and everywhere flags of the army of France, and flowers. A heart of red roses said “From Daddy and the children,” and there was a bouquet in the shape of a Star of David, but none of us knew who had sent it. Afterward, people who had not been able to get into the church came to pray for her, and each took a flower as a souvenir.

During the homily, the canon said Paris had suffered a blow to the heart with Josephine's passing. True, she had been a great sinner, “but aren't we all?”

At the end, we followed the coffin out of church, our steps echoing on the stone floor. Behind us, we heard sweet silvery notes rising from a harp. One last time, Pierre Spiers was playing for Josephine “J'ai Deux Amours.” The sound mixed with sobbing, sublime and unreal.

We emerged into a sea, a crush, of people. It was the first time I had ever understood why Josephine enjoyed crowds. In spite of the fear that you're going to be crushed, you're drunk with excitement. “All her life, Josephine looked for love,” said Lydia Jones, watching the scene on television. “Even on the steps of the Madeleine, she was still looking for love.”

“After a blinding sun, it was a total darkness,” says Jean-Claude Dauzonne. “We reimbursed Marie Spiers, we paid for the hospital, the funeral. I wanted Josephine one last time to come down the great steps of Paris, the steps of the Madeleine. It almost did not happen. We had to pull the priests' ears. At first they did not want to welcome her because of her ‘past.' But Mr. Bodson was very generous to the church, and I told them, ‘Think of the publicity it will give you.' Then they relented.”

Unlike me, Princess Grace had found the events of the day unseemly. From the beginning, she had thought the funeral should be held in Monaco, so a compromise had been reached: there would be one funeral
in Paris, another—more dignified—in Monaco. (To me, it's always seemed as though the princess kidnapped Josephine's body.)

Josephine's body was dispatched to Monte Carlo, to the Athanee, a funeral parlor. At home in Roquebrune, Marianne seemed to have aged overnight, changing from wild girl to composed young woman. She kissed me and said, “How strange life is, Maman is gone, but we get back two brothers and our father.” (Moïse was once again welcome, as was I.)

Falling into my arms, Stellina cried. Jo Bouillon still wasn't sure who I was, but Stellina introduced us. “He is our brother from Berlin. He had a fight with mother a year ago, but she loved him.”

“I left with ten children bearing my name in the family book,” he said. “I come back, there are twelve, and they tell me you are the thirteenth, so please feel at home.” (He had just been informed by Marie Spiers that Josephine had registered Noël and Stellina as Bouillons.)

The second funeral was set for Saturday, April 19, and on the eighteenth (a sad birthday for me), Mara and I stood guard beside her coffin at the Athanee. A steady stream of mourners came by, people from the region, chic Monte Carlo ladies, veterans dressed in their old regimental colors. Some could hardly stand, but they were there to give Josephine a last military salute. “She was one of us,” they said. Old peasants with leathery faces and knotty hands, the kind of men I had grown up with, walked past, crying, and I knew they cried seldom. When their cows died, when hail ruined their harvests, not for women. But they cried for Josephine.

I remember a young blind girl brought by her mother. She had the child touch the coffin, as though she believed Josephine had special healing powers. I marveled at the way all these people had been changed by her, and I brooded, blaming myself for having killed her. If I'd begged forgiveness for the interview I never gave, if I hadn't been so stubborn, I would have been there to force the little blue pill between her teeth. (“My first reaction when I heard Josephine died was, somebody forgot to give her the pill,” says Yvonne Stoney. “I knew it, I just knew it.”)

We stood there, Mara and I, his heart filled with anger, mine with guilt.

Richard and his family came to Roquebrune. “We went to Josephine's house, but we weren't welcome,” Guylaine says. “Jo said he and his children were having a family reunion.”

“Not even my father was invited in,” adds her brother Alain. “Jo Bouillon was very hard.”

Once again, I saw Richard being turned away from that house, but I had to respect Jo's authority, his duties were not easy.

All the arrangements for the ceremonies were being handled by Princess Grace, and this funeral was more personal (no press allowed in the church) than the first. Jack Jordan came to say goodbye, and Jacques Abtey too.

Brialy, Levasseur, Dauzonne arrived from Paris; so did Maguy Chauvin and Marie Spiers. There was some whispering that a young woman hidden behind a heavy black veil was Stellina's birth mother. Princess Grace wore black, with dark glasses and a single strand of pearls, and the coffin lay inside the sanctuary, a prerogative generally reserved for royalty.

Just before the funeral, there had been a wedding in St. Charles, so we entered a church decorated for a celebration of life, not death, there was rice all over the floor. And in the silence—no jostling, no commotion here—the voices, pure and sweet, of a boys' choir rose in farewell to the woman who, the bishop reminded us, had wanted “the unity of God's children.”

At the cemetery, to my surprise, the coffin, rather than being put in the earth, was hoisted onto an altar in the open air in the midst of a kind of Greek temple held up by four columns.

Then the family went back to the Villa Maryvonne, and I prepared lunch with a touch of feast about it because it was Mara's seventeenth birthday. We were worried for him, his grief and anger were remorseless. Marie Spiers, helped by Maryse Bouillon and her friend Jacky Ducos, set the table on the terrace, and after lunch and birthday cake, Jo Bouillon asked me to come with him to Josephine's room. It was still the only place in the house where one could talk privately.

I said I was sad that Josephine's blood relations had not been invited to lunch, and Jo said he hadn't known what to do. “When I left France, Josephine and I had friends in common. Each time I came back, more of them were enemies. I was afraid her family might want something, I felt I had to protect our children.”

Jo told me he was worried about the depth of Mara's grief. “Please speak to him, I only want his good. They are all my children and I am going to try my best for them.”

Eighteen months ago, in this same room, Josephine had asked me to
help with Jean-Claude, and here again I was being asked to be the big brother, just like at home in St. Symphorien, I had been the big brother to my sisters. In a strange way, that's the only part of family life I do well.

I took Mara up to the hills above the villa, and heard him out. He was furious with Jo—“He abandoned my mother!” I told him Jo had come back to try and finish Josephine's job. “We're not here to judge.”

We went home, had dinner, turned on the television, and there was Josephine. Prince Rainier had made a gift to France of the videotape of her last Red Cross gala, and tonight it was being shown nationwide. We had been feeling drained, the spirit of the house gone, and suddenly she was there with us, so alive the room was filled with her.

Jo recognized that the older children needed to talk about their mother as much as the younger ones did. They had all loved Josephine, and fought with her, and wanted to understand what had just happened to them. He suggested we all go upstairs and out onto the terrace. It was a soft night, the moon shone, and the bay of Monte Carlo shimmered at our feet the way Fredi Washington had described it on her first visit in 1926, “as if someone had thrown a handful of diamonds into the water.” There was something jarring, out of kilter, about grief in the midst of so much beauty.

“Josephine touched us deeply,” Jo said. “She hurt us, but we have to forget that, she wasn't aware of it, she was a very special human being, difficult to explain, and we are going to miss her a lot, but we have to be strong because she would have wanted it.”

Then he told us a story. “We had just got married when your mother went on the road. It was after the war, and France had nothing. The Milandes château was in such bad shape we could not live in it, there was no money or material to repair it, so while she was away, I restored a little house on the grounds. I cut the wood, I painted it, hung curtains in the front windows, made a sign that said
J
'
AI DEUX AMOURS
, and put it over the front door.

“When Josephine came back, I picked her up at the train station, and driving home, I told her I had a surprise for her. I couldn't wait to see her reaction to the nest I had prepared for us. Well, she came in, dropped her coat, and started off to see her newborn piglets. I said, ‘Josephine, have you seen what the sign says?' ‘Yes,' she said, ‘it's very nice.' She was already running toward the farm.”

His voice was trembling. You loved her, and she hurt you, that was the price you paid for being with Josephine.

Jari, the most reasonable of all of us, doesn't quite agree. “She never hurt me. When we older ones were five, Daddy and Mother talked candidly to us. They said we were adopted, that our parents could not provide for us, and that Mother had taken us since she could not have children of her own. It helped us later on when we were growing up with a black brother, a yellow brother, a red brother. You were not shocked, you understood this other little child was from a family who could not feed him, and after a few months, he was your brother.