Josephine Baker (88 page)

“I have always admired Mother as a great artist, but she was also the mother hen. Sometimes she wanted you to mature, become an important person; at the same time she tried to keep you a child.

“But once she passed away, life was different, we grew up. Like with green fruit, it was the time to ripen.”

“She brought Paradise on earth,” says Yvette Malaury. “If we are still here taking care of the castle, we don't do it for the owner, we do it for Josephine. Even when I am tired, and I have to climb the stairs to show the château to the tourists, she is the one giving me the will to go on. I hear her voice in my ear,
‘Allez, allez,'
and I keep going.”

Jacqueline Abtey thinks Josephine is taking bows in Heaven. “She probably sat down directly, without being invited, at St. Peter's right (unless she pushed her natural temerity and went directly to God himself). And she must be laughing, she must be thinking we are not so far from the truth about Josephine, she must be sending us some powerful and meaningful glances. A quick pirouette, and she will disappear behind the great curtain of Eternity, where all light is truth. The devil wouldn't have claimed her, he would have been too afraid she might convert him!”

As she had converted multitudes. Think of that young girl, newly arrived in Paris, Caroline Reagan's “bird of paradise.” Jean Vergne, the great chef, remembered in his seventies his days as a fifteen-year-old apprentice in a restaurant kitchen, scrounging up pennies to go with his friends to see Josephine Baker,
la Perle Noire
, on the stage of the Folies-Bergère. “Ah, Josephine,” he says, still smiling at the thought. “We were hungry kids, we wanted to bite her, we wanted to eat her raw.”

Six months after we left her on the altar in the Monaco cemetery,
France-Dimanche
ran an indignant headline:
EVEN A DOG DESERVES A BURIAL
, it proclaimed, over a piece that said Josephine's body was still awaiting inhumation.

For all this time, it had been stored in a stone shed where the gardeners kept their tools. It was left to Madame Armita to explain the delay. The princess, who had extended to Josephine the privilege of burial in Monte Carlo, was still considering various samples of black marble, but she had not yet decided on the right stone for the tomb.

On October 2, 1975, Josephine was finally laid to rest. I stayed away. I didn't want to see her put in the ground, I preferred to think of her lying under the sun of the Riviera in her little Greek temple.

Marie was there though, and Jo and the children, and faithful Jacques Abtey. “None of her ‘good' friends from the old times,” says Jacques. “But that's life, you understand. It was hard for me to grasp that she could just disappear like that, after having done all she had done. There was the hole in the earth, and the princess of Monaco standing motionless, facing me across the open grave for an hour. We were waiting for the priest to come, and he was late.”

It was strange. She was buried exactly fifty years after she first danced onto a Paris stage. Fifty years to the day.

Petite Maman,

It's over. Or is it? We still live together every night at Chez Josephine. For seven years, people have come trooping into my restaurant, and every so often, one of them asks, “Is Josephine cooking tonight?”

I laugh, thinking that you're probably cooking up something somewhere, but that would take too long to explain, so I just say, “Yes, in spirit.”

You took your secrets with you when you left us. The sixty containers stored for you in Marie Spiers's name were sold by Jo through a Paris auction house, your treasure scattered to the four corners of the Earth. But the safe in your Paris apartment was already empty, your last will had disappeared, and most of the fabled jewels that had been stashed in a Monte Carlo bank vault were gone too. I hope Margaret got them, God knows she earned them.

Any other gems that surfaced were disposed of by Sotheby's in
Zurich. (Again, not under your name, because of all the financial claims still pending against you.) Even those few baubles amazed Jari. “The diamonds,” he said. “I didn't think she had kept so much.”

For me,
you
were the diamond. I loved you. When you were cruel, I blamed your actions on a racist society, and the injuries you had suffered. I wanted the verdict of history to read, “Guilty, but with an explanation.”

We were both bastards, and in a way, I liked that; it made me a brother to little Tumpy.

“Maybe she did to us what had been done to her,” says Jean-Claude number one, trying, like me, to figure out his life with you. “Maybe she broke down inside, asking herself, ‘Who do they think they are? I did not live in a castle when I was a little girl, I lived in misery, and they should have a taste of it.' ”

Jean-Claude remembers your devising an embarrassing punishment when one of the children stole a few pennies for candy. “Nobody confessed,” he says, “and our mother had to break the pact that bound us. Like the master in slave times. So we were forced to march through the village with signs that said,
I
'
M A THIEF
hanging around our necks.

“Another time she locked me in the coal cellar of the château. It was dark, there were rats, and she would come and scream through the basement window, ‘Confess!'

“Elvira and Caroline had survived so much hardship, and then had to adapt to a new life after slavery, and our mother must have lived with all that in her head, with a history of things not really buried, only covered by the ashes of time. Everybody was satisfied with the fairy tale of Josephine Baker coming out of poverty, sailing on a boat to stardom, but she had to live with her ghosts.”

When I showed your birth certificate to Jean-Claude, it suddenly became clear to him why you always called Fifi, that little dog, “Freda.” It is hard for us to understand how you could joke about your given name with a dog, but not share your past with us.

Trusting no one but yourself, you kept your own counsel, Mother. No wonder you fled St. Louis; Bob Russell's private railroad car was the golden coach that carried you to the ball. But why did you bury the springtime of your life? Why, over the next half century, did you pretend that the radiant girl I saw in pictures on the walls of the Hudgins' house, and in Fredi Washington's scrapbooks, never existed?

The world knelt at Josephine Baker's feet, but Tumpy was too busy to make peace with her past. A chameleon, you absorbed what you needed, in show business or in life, even if it meant stealing somebody's act, somebody's money, somebody's lover. Discovering you—not the fiction but the fact—I have been shaken as when I was a small boy, and the bigger kids told me there was no Santa Claus.

It was easy for me to love you because I was always so angry with my birth mother, with her passivity and the way she surrendered to other people's rules. One day when I was ten years old, I found her crying in her room. “Why don't you divorce Father?” I said.

“Don't ask me that,” she said. “Without a father, your sisters would never find good husbands.”

You were different, daring, you broke rules, you fought back. I admired that, while my affection for my real mother was tinged with scorn. (I didn't know then of her bravery during the war.) In the end, she died as she had lived, apologizing. She asked me to forgive her for not having been the mother I needed, then gathered a last breath to whisper, “Excuse me,” as she died in the nurse's arms.
Excuse me
. I wanted to scream. I wanted
her
to scream. It was not in her nature.

Neither of you was very forthcoming about the past, but then, I didn't tell you everything, either. You never knew about my aunt Dinette, a beautiful Creole from Madagascar married to my mother's brother. When I was seven years old, she and Uncle Lucien and my cousins came to visit us in St. Symphorien, and those children, true high yellers, were the sensation of the neighborhood. They knew about crocodiles, and gave us presents of ivory and ebony. To me, maybe on some level you were the reincarnation of Tata Dinette, whom I adored and never saw again.

At that time I was called Yan-Yan (my little sister could not pronounce Jean-Claude), but when I moved to Paris, I left Yan-Yan behind. Or so I thought. He stayed with me, despite myself, and in me, you knew him. As I knew Tumpy in you, before I ever heard her name.

For six months after you died, Jo Bouillon remained in Paris. I had offered him the use of an apartment that I owned there, and we went together to the fifth floor of number two villa Dancourt in Montmartre. He could not believe it. My apartment was right next door to the one he had lived in during the war, when he met you.

“Josephine would come there at any hour of the night and wake me
up,” he said. “After a while, I just left the door open. Often in the morning, I would find her fully dressed, sleeping beside me.”

Eventually, Jo returned to Argentina, along with Jari, Akio, Stellina, Noël, and Koffi. I had told him I wanted nothing from the estate, but that I would keep the name of Baker. I said I approved of his decision to try and keep the family together, and I would help as much as I could.

Back in New York, I started a cable television show called
Telefrance-USA
(John J. O'Connor of
The New York Times
called it “The most ambitious, sophisticated weekly production on cable TV.”), and even there, I felt your presence. Because of you, I won an Ace Award for a show called “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Legendary Josephine Baker.”

“Josephine is still here trying to direct things,” Jack Jordan said.

I kept in touch with Brahim and Jean-Claude when I visited Paris, and it was in Paris that I saw Jo for the last time. He was holding your grandchild, Marie-Audrey (Marianne's first baby) and he was happy. He died in Buenos Aires in 1984, with five of the children at his bedside.

As you had predicted I would, I liked New York, and in 1983 I became an American citizen. The three wishes of my childhood were coming true. I did not do my military service, I no longer bore my father's name, and even if there would never be a statue of me like Napoléon the Third on a horse, two out of three wasn't bad.

In 1986, I opened a Chez Josephine in New York, trying to re-create the ambiance of your first club at 40 rue Fontaine. I even have a pig, in memory of Albert, but mine is made of wood.

Fredi Washington, Maude Russell, Evelyn Anderson, Sweets Edison—they all drop in, they feel at home there.

In 1989, Brahim and I went to St. Louis for a “Bal la Baker,” sponsored by Michel Roux, a successful businessman turned patron of the arts, and a one-time employee of yours. “When I was fourteen,” he says, “I spent my summer vacation working at Les Milandes. Josephine got involved with everything; she would tell me how to dress a table even if she didn't know how to do it. She was like Leona Helmsley.”

It was in St. Louis that Brahim and I met our cousins, Richard, Jr., and Clifford, and I begged them to share anything they could remember of your mother and grandmother. “Elvira would always be sitting in a rocking chair,” Clifford told me. “I was only a little kid, I had nothing to say to her, and she had nothing to say to me. My grandmother Carrie's husband, Tony Hudson, was a nice guy, I enjoyed him, but it was a hundred years ago.”

About you, his famous aunt, he was cool. “I would say she was an entertainer, that's all. She was a French citizen, what she did with her life over there was her business. So she adopted children? Fine. She was under no obligation to take care of or support her family here. I had no attachment to those children she adopted, they were her children.

“Entertainers find their lives where their audience is, so why shouldn't she have stayed in Europe?”

“Josephine is the great Cinderella story,” says the actress Paula Laurence, who was a close friend of Bob Brady, and is currently a trustee of the Brady Museum in Cuernavaca. “We have to think of what an enormous inspiration she has been, not just for people of her race, but for oppressed and disadvantaged people all over.

“By her own ambition, by clawing her way through the world, she evolved into that incredible woman, but underneath, she was the same desperate, hungry, impossible to satisfy, rapacious creature she was in the beginning, or she could not have survived.

“She never changed, it was the fight, the challenge that captured her.”

Are you smiling, Mother, or scowling at the way others remember you? Were you happy with my introduction to your movies
Zou Zou
and
Princess Tam Tam
at New York's Film Forum, in the winter of 1989? You broke the theater's box office record, but I can hear you now, demanding, “Why should that surprise you?” (The films, wrote historian Donald Bogle, “provide us with a rare glimpse . . . of the charisma that drove international audiences wild for almost six decades.”)