Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (31 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Overnight Josephine Baker’s life had become something like out of the fairy tales that she had absorbed as a child.
Born illegitimate in the slums of East St. Louis, from childhood she was made to feel like an outsider in her own family because she was lighter skinned, while her mother and half siblings were dark. A poor student, she began making funny faces as a defense mechanism. What began as a way of coping later turned into a way for Josephine to make a living. By the age of twelve, she had dropped out of school, living on the streets, scrounging for food in garbage cans. A natural dancer, she learned all the latest steps in the streets of St. Louis. “I was cold and I danced to keep warm, that’s my childhood,” she later wrote. Dancing on the street corner to make money brought Josephine her first success. Soon she was playing vaudeville houses, working behind the scenes as a dresser. By the age of fifteen, she had married and discarded two husbands. It was her second husband who gave her the last name she would use for the rest of her career.
Rejected after she auditioned for a new Broadway musical called Shuffle
Along
because she was too young, too thin, and too dark, Josephine became determined to join the show. When she was offered a job as a dresser, she took it; she learned all the songs and dances, and when a chorus girl took sick, Josephine stepped in. Happy to be onstage, she was a sensation, stealing scenes from more experienced performers. She fed off the energy of the audiences, improvising dance steps, the audience giving her the unconditional love she’d never received at home. Kicking up her heels, Josephine continued to knock ’em dead in the Broadway show
Chocolate Dandies
and performed at the Plantation Club.
In 1925, she was offered the chance to go to Paris and never looked back. She had heard that life was better there for blacks and the two hundred bucks a week didn’t hurt. At first Josephine wasn’t too keen when she found out she was to perform half naked. It wasn’t the glamorous image she was aiming for. She wanted to be seen as a singer, or at least wear a dress. But she soon came around when she realized the alternative was a one-way ticket back home. She was excited, though, when the artist Paul Colin, who later became her lover, used an image of her, rather than the star, Maude de Forest, for the poster advertising La Revue Nègre.
As Josephine shook and shimmied on opening night, her dancing verged on the obscene, titillating some and offending others. Her dancing emphasized her rear end, a part of the human anatomy that had once been hidden by bustles and skirts. She made it an object of desire. One critic called her dancing the “manifestation of the modern spirit.” Another wrote, “She is constant motion, her body like a snake.” People were so fascinated by her mugging, and how little she wore, that the difficulty of the choreography was often overlooked. Josephine used her press clippings to learn French, amused by the high-flown language used to describe her dancing. She was smart enough to know that it was all hyperbole, that they thought she was from Africa and not the wilds of St. Louis. “The white imagination sure is something,” she said, “when it comes to blacks.”
Paris was in the grip of “Negromania”; they were crazy for “Le Jazz Hot” and anything African and primitive. Josephine was the living, lusty embodiment of white French racial and sexual fantasies. She was “the Bronze Venus” and “the Black Pearl.” Picasso, who painted her, called her “the Modern Nefertiti.” They adored her; women bobbed their hair à la Josephine and tanned their skin. Baker wasn’t just a success in Paris; she was a hit in Berlin, where the great theater director Max Reinhardt offered to take her under his wing, to help her become a great actress. It was tempting but Josephine went back to Paris to the Folies Bergère. This time she was the featured star, performing the “Danse Sauvage” wearing nothing but a necklace, a skirt made of bananas, and a smile.
Josephine made the most of her new status as a sex symbol, sharing her charms with whoever struck her fancy, from chorus boys to industry titans. She became a notch on the belt of writer Georges Simenon, test-drove the Crown Prince of Sweden, and hobnobbed with the architect Le Corbusier. Because she didn’t need a man to support her, she could indulge just for the pleasure. Whether it took ten minutes or an hour, Josephine was always in the driver’s seat. She accumulated dozens of marriage proposals and forty thousand love letters in just one year. The ugly duckling had turned into a swan, and now men couldn’t tell her enough how beautiful she was. She lapped up their attentions like a starving child.
Josephine quickly became the most successful American entertainer working in Paris. Photographs of her sold like hotcakes, and people bought Josephine Baker dolls, wearing the little banana skirt, by the thousands. She became a poster girl for the Roaring Twenties in Paris. Soon Josephine added movie star to her list of accomplishments, appearing in three films,
Siren
of
the Tropics
(1927),
Zou Zou
(1934), and
Princess Tam Tam
(1935), which were only successful in Europe. In each one, Josephine played a variation on the noble savage, an exotic creature who sacrifices and loses at love.
But sensing that the city would soon get tired of her shtick, Josephine realized that she would need to reinvent herself if she was going to continue to be a success. She was helped by her manager and lover Giuseppe Abatino, called Pepito, a former stonemason. He played Pygmalion to her Galatea, teaching her how to dress and act in society, training her voice and body, and sculpting her into a highly sophisticated and marketable star. When she moved on from the Folies Bergère to the Casino de Paris she had a whole new act. Descending a grand staircase, wearing a tuxedo, she now sang French torch songs, including her signature number “J’ai Deux Amours.” Josephine had reinvented herself from an exotic savage to a sophisticated French chanteuse, becoming “La Bakaire.”
She played the role of star to the hilt, adding an accent over the
e
in her last name to appear more French. Josephine wore couture and expensive jewelry and she spent hours after shows signing autographs. At night she was chauffeured from one lavish party to the next in a snakeskin-upholstered limo. She once showed up at a nightclub with her snake Kiki wrapped around her neck. Given a cheetah named Chiquita as a pet, Josephine and the animal, wearing a twenty-thousand-diamond collar, became a familiar sight on the streets of Paris and Deauville. She bought a château fit for a princess, but offstage, Josephine, wearing housedresses, lived a simple life in the country with her menagerie of animals.
Her stunning success did not come without its price. She was often the only black performer onstage surrounded by whites. And the racism she had left America to escape often reared its ugly head. During a tour of Germany and Austria, Nazi protesters tried to bar her from performing. Other performers in France, both white and black, resented her success. Although she became more French than the French, there were barriers that she was never able to overcome. Throughout her life Baker was criticized for turning her back on her people. While some gloried in her success, seeing her triumphs as their own, there were others who felt that Josephine had abandoned her country and her race.
After ten years in France, she decided that it was time for her to return to Broadway. Pepito arranged for her to appear in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, making her the first and only black female ever to appear in the show. When the show reached New York, the reviews were devastating. Audiences and critics were used to seeing black performers as either mammies or blues singers; they were not interested in seeing a sophisticated black woman onstage. To them Josephine was just an uppity colored girl. At the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South, where she was staying, she was asked to use the service entrance when she came and went. Josephine blamed Pepito for the whole debacle. He left for Paris and died of cancer before they could make up. Hurt and disillusioned by the experience, Josephine had learned a hard lesson: that America would never look at her without seeing her color.
With Europe on the brink of war in 1939, Josephine was eager to do her part for her adopted country. “It is France which made me what I am,” she declared. The Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence group, was reluctant at first to use her because of the whole Mata Hari debacle during World War I. Josephine convinced them of her sincerity. She would have no official role except that of “honorable correspondent.” Because of her fame, Josephine rubbed shoulders with people with high profiles. She was able to attend parties at the Italian embassy and pass on any gossip that might be of use. She also helped the war effort in other ways, by sending Christmas presents to soldiers and helping people in danger obtain visas and passports to leave France.
When France fell to the Germans in 1940, she fled to her Château des Milandes, gasoline stored in champagne bottles packed in the trunk of her car, with her maid and her dogs. Soon she was joined by Belgian refugees and others who were working for the resistance. Because she was an entertainer, Josephine had an excuse to move around Europe. She smuggled intelligence coded in invisible ink within her sheet music. In 1942, she went to North Africa under the guise of recuperating from pneumonia, but the real reason was to help the resistance. From her base in Morocco, she toured Spain and North Africa, entertaining Allied troops, pinning notes with any information she gathered in her underwear. For her work during the war, Josephine was awarded the Cross of War and the Medal of the Resistance with rosette, and she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by Charles de Gaulle.
Happily married to her fourth husband, she decided to tour America once again, but this time with her own show. She refused, however, to perform before segregated audiences in Las Vegas and Miami. For her pains she was considered to be politically dangerous, demanding, and difficult. But things got worse after she charged the Stork Club in New York with racism. She had come into the club with two white friends and experienced less than stellar service from an indifferent waitstaff. Used to being treated like a star, Josephine was appalled. She immediately got on the horn to the NAACP to picket the club. Influential columnist Walter Winchell, who was there that night, took her to task in his column. He accused her of being anti-American and a communist sympathizer. Her controversial image now threatened her career. Concerts were canceled and Josephine went back to France.
Unable to have children of her own, Josephine adopted what she called her “Rainbow Tribe.” Initially she had planned on adopting only two or three children. However, once Josephine got started, she couldn’t stop, eventually adopting twelve children in all, in various hues and nationalities. Living at Château des Milandes, a sprawling three-hundred-acre estate, with her children and an enormous staff, Josephine had to keep touring to pay for the upkeep. Long before Branson or Dollywood, Josephine cooked up the idea of turning her home into a tourist attraction/theme park, complete with a simulated African village, a wax museum, a foie gras factory, a patisserie, a J-shaped swimming pool, and even a nightclub where she would be the star attraction. But by the late 1960s, Josephine was deeply in debt. Creditors seized the property and belongings and sold them at auction. Until the bitter end, like a tigress protecting her young, Josephine tried to hold them off until the gendarmes had to forcibly remove her. Help came from her own fairy godmother, Princess Grace of Monaco, who offered financial assistance and the use of a villa.
But in 1975, at the age of sixty-eight, when most women are collecting social security, Josephine came roaring back with a retrospective revue at the Bobino in Paris, celebrating her fifty years in show biz. She had already conquered Carnegie Hall and the Palace in New York, and was in great demand from spectators including Mick Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sophia Loren, and Diana Ross. The revue opened to rave reviews but Baker didn’t live to savor her triumph. Four days later, she was discovered lying peacefully in bed, surrounded by her glowing notices. She had fallen into a coma after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Her funeral was held at the L’Église de la Madeleine; she was the first American woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral. The streets were thronged with thousands of fans paying homage to La Bakaire one last time.
 
Billie Holiday
 
1915-1959
 
She whispered a song along the
keyboard
. . . and everyone and I stopped breathing.

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