Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (29 page)

But if Josephine was learning sophistication as an artist, the show itself was ironically being criticized for aiming too high. Reviewers panned
In Banville
for offering ‘too much art and not enough Africa’.
²⁰
They scorned Blake and Sissle for wanting to have a symphony orchestra playing alongside the band, and a chorus line that aped the high-precision ‘Kick and Tap’ routines of the British Tiller Girls. It was, they said, too much like a mimicking of the ‘white man’s’ style, and the public, it seemed, agreed. Takings at the box office declined, and despite the show being renamed
Chocolate Dandies,
a title with a more obviously black spin, it folded in the spring of 1925.
*

These were hard times for the black arts community, which still remained captive to the expectations and definitions of the American Establishment:
^†
jazz music and jazz dance might be all the rage amongst white critics and audiences, but if Sissle and Blake wanted to write Broadway musicals, if Katherine Yarborough wanted to sing European opera, if the violinist Will Marion Cook (a talented graduate of both the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and the National Conservatory) wanted to be more than a ‘nigger with a fiddle’, their aspirations were quashed. For Josephine, the closure of
Chocolate Dandies
felt particularly precarious. She was owed $1,235 in unpaid wages, and for the first time since leaving home she had no immediate prospect of work. Other cast members were heading up to Harlem, and because she had nothing better to do, she followed them there, her small cache of savings tucked into the pouch she kept tied around her waist.

In some ways she was pleased by the move. She rented a room in a lodging house on 7th Avenue and 133rd Street, owned by her former idol, Mama Dinks. Close by was Tillie’s Chicken Shack, reputed to serve the best fried chicken and hot biscuits in New York state, and around her was the most entertaining community she had ever lived amongst. Harlem was exceptional in America, a black district that, despite its violence and chronic unemployment, refused to regard itself as a ghetto. Originally its wide streets and elegant brownstones had been intended for white families, but a downturn in the market had resulted in much of the area being bought up by black property developers. By 1925 blacks from as far away as the Caribbean regarded it as a place of opportunity. And with this eclectic influx came a variety of theatres, restaurants, churches, bars and beauty parlours, and an even more exuberant variety of music. During the 1920s some of the great musicians lived and worked out of Harlem, including Sidney Bechet, Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, and on every street there were clubs and bars playing blues, spirituals, ragtime and jazz.

‘It was the gayest place that America ever produced,’ declared the writer Anita Loos. And that was the view of the many thousands of young white Americans, who came flocking up to Harlem during the 1920s to experience its energy and exoticism for themselves. Some were genuine music lovers, to whom jazz was the sound of the new America: writers like J.A. Rogers, who likened its restless tempo and strident harmonies to the music of ‘modern man-made jungles’
²¹
and Gilbert Seldes who claimed that it contained ‘nearly all the gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power of our lives’.

Other white tourists sought more illicit sensations, like the tawdrily erotic cabarets that offered ‘tantalizin’ tans’ and ‘hot chocolates’, or the brothels that promised ‘slumming hostesses for inquisitive Nordics’. There was also the party crowd who ventured up from Zelda and Scott’s Manhattan, coming in flocks to dance the Charleston and the Blackbottom amongst ‘real’ black people in the Savoy and Cotton Club. Ironically, even in these Harlem clubs the professional dancers who performed in cabaret slots were subject to the paper bag test – they were required to be dark enough to look authentic, but not so black that they looked threatening.

The same test naturally applied to any performer hoping to be hired by any of the venues in central Manhattan, who were also cashing in on ‘the negro vogue’. The Plantation Club, located just above the Winter Garden Theater, was typical. Meticulously refurbished in a faux Southern style, it boasted a painted décor of cotton plants and watermelons, a white picket fence around the dance floor and a ‘black Mama’ cooking waffles in a log cabin. A changing roster of black acts played there, with headlining stars including Florence Mills and Ethel Waters. The clientele, of course, were white.

When Josephine arrived in Harlem, the revue playing at the Plantation was
Tan Town Topics.
Not only did she manage to get hired, she was sufficiently well established to get her own featured billing as ‘the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville’. She was pleased with her new job, and also with the young actor Ralph Cooper, who had become her New York boyfriend. Ralph was handsome and amusing, and the fact that he was working temporarily as a chauffeur meant he frequently had a car in which he could pick Josephine up from the Plantation and drive her around Manhattan. She felt like a queen, roaring through the hot dusty nights in her ruffled taffeta frocks, fake pearl necklaces and big hats.

Once she stepped out of Ralph’s car, however, everything was different. Central Manhattan was still aggressively white. As a black woman, Josephine was unable go into a 5th Avenue store and try on a hat, or choose where she wanted to sit in a theatre. Even at the Plantation Club she only felt secure onstage. White men, and some white women, came to the club expecting to take away a black dancer for the night, and once again Josephine found herself in a situation where she was expected to oblige. It was a brutal reminder of the limits she faced as a black chorus girl, a reminder that however hard she worked on her stage technique, however rigorously she bleached her skin with lemon juice, she was still essentially bracketed alongside the ‘hot chocolates’ and ‘tantalizin’ tans’.

She yearned for real distinction. America’s decade of Flaming Youth had swept so many others to fame: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Tallulah Bankhead, Clara Bow and a host of other flapper actresses. It had made gods of black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. But the only black women that Josephine knew who had risen to eminence were singers like Florence Mills, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. These performers topped the bill of every revue or vaudeville show in which they appeared; they were nationally famous, their voices heard on the record players and radios that were becoming household staples, yet a dancer had no equivalent opportunity for fame and money. Within the formulaic conventions of American show business, the best Josephine could hope for was an occasional solo and her featured spot at the end of the chorus line.

*   *   *

That summer, however, she was offered a completely new platform – in Paris. Josephine had been too young to register America’s entry into the European war, but it was to have a profound impact on her, given the craze for jazz and ragtime that the American forces imported with them to France. Many of the black musicians who’d fought there had opted to remain, rightly seeing it as a more liberal alternative to home.
*
Within a couple of years their music had spread through the clubs of Montmartre and into the bars and hotels of smart white neighbourhoods. In 1920 the song ‘Jazz Partout’ announced, ‘There are jazz bands by day, by night/There are jazz bands everywhere’.
²²
Even classical composers like Stravinsky and Auric were entranced by black music, and its hold on the city was confirmed when the Prince of Wales went on a tour of Montmartre and demanded a collection of jazz records to take back home.

By 1925 white French musicians were complaining of a ‘black peril’. According to one newspaper, they were happy to ‘do that jazzin’ themselves’, but were routinely told by dance hall managers to ‘call again when you have changed the colour of your skin’.
²³
There was a view in France that only black musicians could embrace the soul of jazz, its quintessential modernity and its Dionysiac spirit. Nor did this premium on blackness end with jazz. In the wake of Pablo Picasso’s absorption of African influences into his art, much of French culture embraced a new black aesthetic. The spectacular Exposition des Arts Décoratifs that opened in the spring of 1925 featured an entire section dedicated to African sculpture, celebrating the vibrancy of its line and its expressive simplicity of form. African motifs appeared in textiles, in ceramics, in jewellery. Even black boxers were deemed to embody a primitive visceral nobility. Jean Cocteau, the ultimate aesthete, wrote the libretto of a ballet,
Le boeuf sur le toit,
which was set in a speakeasy and had a boxer as a lead character. He also opened a nightclub with the same name and theme.

Black culture was also in the sights of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the modernist theatre which had held the violently controversial premiere of Nijinsky’s
Rite of Spring
back in 1913 and had also been home to the avante-garde company Les Ballets Suédois. In 1925, its impresario, Rolf de Maré, had the idea of importing music-hall acts into the theatre, channelling a fashionable mix of the high and low brow that was currently so dear to Paris. It was while de Maré was scouting for suitable material that the painter Fernand Léger is said to have offered him a critical piece of advice: ‘Get Negroes. They’re dynamite.’
²⁴

It was through Léger, too, that de Maré was put in touch with an American woman living in Paris, who was regarded as a ‘negro’ expert. Caroline Dudley had been raised on French novels, impressionist paintings and an unusually liberal world view. Her father had invited black friends to the family’s Chicago house, and had taken his daughters to black vaudeville shows. Now living in Paris with her diplomat husband, Caroline Dudley had already been toying with the idea of bringing over a troupe of black dancers and musicians, convinced that they would ‘amaze, flabbergast [and] dumbfound’ the public.
²⁵

Once she was offered the resources of de Maré and his producer André Daven, her idea became practicable, and in July she sailed to New York, looking for talent for what was already being called
La Revue Nègre.
Her ambitions were high: she wanted to sign up a top-ranking singer, such as Florence Mills or Ethel Waters, to lead her cast. When both those women demanded fees that far exceeded her budget, Caroline had to rethink, however. And it was on a visit to the Plantation Club that she observed a dancer who ‘stood out like an exclamation point’, and became convinced she had found her star.

Others disputed her judgement. Louis Douglas, who was already hired as a choreographer and dancer for the revue, believed that Paris would not be impressed by Josephine. Her dancing was too eccentric, and her voice wasn’t strong enough to be of any use in the singing numbers. Even less enthusiastic about the plan was Josephine herself. She was very suspicious of Mrs Dudley, who came to see Josephine in her dressing room. She was a tiny birdlike woman, yet her intensity was alarming. She gazed at Josephine, her voice filled with emotion as she described the importance of bringing black art to America. Josephine wasn’t used to talking about art, nor was she used to producers – the people with money and power – being female. Warily she wondered if Caroline Dudley was going to try and get her alone and jump her bones.

Her reluctance also stemmed from a fear of the unknown. Ambitious as she was, part of her was still a little girl from the ghetto. Josephine was unable to project her dreams all the way across the Atlantic to a foreign city, whose language she couldn’t speak and whose people she knew nothing about. With untypical and largely mendacious sentimentality, she told Caroline that she couldn’t possibly think of going to Paris and leaving her boyfriend Ralph.

Undeterred, Caroline returned to the Plantation night after night. She spun enticing images of the success Josephine would enjoy and promised her a weekly wage of $250, double her current earnings. She half promised that Josephine might even sing a serious number or two in the revue. What tipped the negotiations, however, was Josephine’s helpless craving for lovely things. One night Caroline arrived at the club wearing a Chinese-style coat, richly embroidered with gold thread. Josephine thought it beautiful, and when she asked Caroline if she could have it, the older woman spotted her moment. She handed over the coat immediately, and by 15 September Josephine was due to board the
SS Berengaria
to France.

If Tallulah had felt as though she were travelling to Mars when she prepared to cross the Atlantic two years earlier, Josephine was no less stricken. She had never experienced a terror like it, recalling that it ‘grasped my brain, my heart, my guts with such force that everything came apart’.
²⁶
Yet she also knew the value of fresh starts. As she packed her clothes for Paris, she put aside all the letters and notes she had saved, the photographs, the tributes from fans – any memento that connected to her American life. All of them were thrown out with the garbage. When Josephine arrived in France, she was determined to leave the past behind and take only the future with her.

Chapter Seven

DIANA

Josephine’s voyage to Europe was a professional break for freedom, but when Diana had crossed the Atlantic two years earlier it was America itself that seemed a land of possibility. In New York, where she was due to play in Max Reinhardt’s
The Miracle,
the air wasn’t clouded by issues of family and duty. Even though her name and title would bring box office dollars to Reinhardt’s production, America didn’t really care about the nuances of the British class system. If Lady Diana Cooper wanted to go down the extraordinary route of supporting her husband financially, and do so by appearing onstage, no one would suggest she was demeaning herself. If she wanted to economize by dining on corned beef hash in a cafeteria, she could do so without eliciting Chinese whispers of gossip and comment.