Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (57 page)

High on the success of his project, Pepito expanded Josephine’s commercial potential and in addition to the Bakerfix endorsement he secured a mass advertising campaign with Pernod. Both of them were getting rich on the profits, but they were also in danger of over-reaching themselves. On 20 June 1927 they orchestrated a large press conference, in which they announced to the world that they had become man and wife. Josephine did most of the talking. She said that she’d agreed to marry Pepito on her twenty-first birthday and that her new husband had not only given her a huge diamond ring, but all the ‘jewels and heirlooms that have been in the family for generations’. The Abatinos were, she assured her audience, the real thing. She’d had them checked out by a private detective and they had ‘lots of coats of arms and everything. I understand they live in a big swell chateau.’
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Smiling at the room with breathtaking deceitfulness, Josephine assured journalists that she had never been married before and that it was all ‘so much fun’.

Of course there were no jewels and no chateau, and there hadn’t been a wedding either – as Josephine wasn’t yet divorced from her last husband, Billy. However, as she started to flaunt her new ring and title around Paris, she believed for a brief moment that the story might stick. In America, at least, it was uncritically accepted, with the
New York World
running the headline ‘N
EGRO DANCING GIRL BRIDE OF
R
OMAN COUNT
’, and informing its readers that ‘Josephine Baker of Harlem adds a noble husband to conquests abroad’. According to
Variety
magazine, her ‘tie up with the count’ was being talked about everywhere. And if the white press gave the story prominence, the black papers ran with it for days, elaborating the grandeur of the match and even inventing quotes from Pepito’s father about his delight in having Josephine as his daughter-in-law.

Rapidly the lie of her wedding became elevated into a story of black inspiration. The previous year some of the French-produced Josephine Baker dolls had appeared in Harlem shops – a source of local pride. Now the
New York Amsterdam Press
boasted that Josephine had ‘made a more auspicious venture on the sea of matrimony than any number of American women within memory’.
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Black girls across America began to dream of emulating Josephine; to them she was all that the movie stars in
Picture-Play
had been to Tallulah. The singer Bobby Short was a child at the time and recalled how mothers and daughters in his hometown of Danville, Illinois, loved to talk over the tale of Josephine’s success, saying to each other, ‘My God, she’s conquered France and now she’s married this count.’
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In Paris, however, reporters digging for extra information rapidly discovered that there was no trace of any wedding ceremony, nor of any noble family called Abatino. They didn’t enjoy being duped, and they made their displeasure clear to Josephine in a spate of vitriolic comment. Some of the attacks in the press were so fierce that she feared she might be arrested, and frantically she began to backtrack, pretending it had all been a joke that had got out of hand: ‘Since it’s amusing to be married I let it out around town that I was – you know how false news spreads.’

It was, in the end, all good publicity. And perhaps that was all it was intended to be, given that Marcel’s book,
Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker,
was due to appear in the bookshops very soon. Three weeks later, Josephine’s stunt was forgiven and forgotten as journalists mined the memoir for new gossip. La Baker was again the public’s darling. However, hubris was always a besetting issue in Pepito’s plans – the Josephine Baker magazine, which he launched, edited by Simenon and featuring photographs of Josephine and her famous clientele, floundered miserably. And he again miscalculated when he judged that this was the moment to push Josephine into the movies.

Offers from Hollywood had been arriving regularly at Josephine’s door, but up till now she had resisted them. Scriptwriters seemed unable to imagine roles for her beyond the black stereotypes she had worked so hard to escape, principally that of the comic plantation nigger girl. But Pepito was keen to persuade her that a film appearance would dramatically enlarge her audience – cinema was now very big business in France, with many of the traditional Boulevard theatres converting to large movie houses – and she finally yielded to his arguments when a script arrived from the French novelist Maurice Dekobra, which she was assured had been written especially for her.

La Sirène des Tropiques
told the story of a young Antillean woman, Papitou, who falls in love with a French engineer and follows him back to Paris in the hope of marrying him. Diverted into a successful career as a dancer, Papitou fails to locate her engineer until after he has become engaged to another woman, at which point she heroically renounces her great love, assuring the audience and herself that ‘sacrifice is the purest form of joy on earth’.
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As a plot line it was hardly original – Tallulah had acted in a dozen similar stories about headstrong young women with hearts of gold – but what was important to Josephine was that the role of Papitou transcended race; ultimately, she was just a girl in love. Or at least that was how the film was presented to her. Later Josephine claimed the script had not been adequately translated for her and that she had been unaware of how many crude jokes about colour it contained. (One especially offensive, and extended, gag involved Papitou falling into a coal bin and causing a terrified elderly woman to believe she’d seen a black devil; then subsequently falling into a flour bin and causing the same woman to believe she’d seen a ghost.)

The crassness of the material was also exacerbated by Josephine’s inability to transcend it. She hated being on set; like Diana, she was tormented by the blinding lights and interminable waits between shots. She was also usually exhausted, having sung at her club until dawn, managing only a couple of hours’ sleep before she had to get up for filming. Fatigue and irritability not only made her behave badly, they also made her difficult to direct.
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At the premiere on 30 December 1927, Josephine wept, unable to recognize herself as this ‘ugly silly person’ up on the screen. No one on set had been able to persuade her to mute her usual performance style, and her comic eye-rolling grin and vibrating energy came across as manic, even freakish.

Josephine was impatient for artistic maturity, and yet it seemed to take so much time and trouble. The divinity of the great stars still dangled unreachably above her. Florence Mills had recently died – officially from a botched appendectomy, but probably from tuberculosis – and most of Harlem had been on the street to watch her funeral cortège pass by and see the flocks of birds that were released from an aeroplane in tribute to
Blackbirds,
her signature show. In jealous anguish, Josephine wondered how she would ever attract such love. Although she was making progress as a singer, even the musicians who played for her thought her voice would never have sufficient power ‘to throw the velvet’, and she was still only performing to a very small, select audience at her club. By the end of 1927, Pepito decided that in order to accelerate her transformation (as well as put some distance between Josephine and her horrible film debut) it was time to leave Paris and go out on tour. In an emotional speech, Josephine announced to journalists that she was going away to be reborn: ‘The Charleston, the bananas, finished.
^†
Understand I have to be worthy of Paris, I have to become an artist.’

The tour Pepito arranged was monumental. Between early 1928 and late 1929 Josephine sang and danced in twenty-four cities across Europe and South America; in each one she also performed in a local nightclub, temporarily renamed Chez Joséphine. Travelling with her and her entourage of staff were fifteen steamer trunks of equipment, including 137 costumes, 196 pairs of shoes, 64 kilos of face powder and 30,000 publicity shots to distribute en route. Exhausting as the schedule was, it gave Josephine intensive schooling in the skills required to be a star. As the centrepiece of the show, she had to be able to hold a performance together in the face of bad stages, inadequate bands or hostile audiences, and she had to learn tough lessons in the art of projecting her voice, body and personality. Offstage she worked with singing and dancing coaches; language tutors to improve her French and manicure her English; conversation classes to coax her into expressing herself more intelligently. Even at the end of 1927, a tang of the feral still lingered around her image; stories that she ate with her hands at mealtimes were untrue, but many believed them. Two years, however, would work a remarkable change, as revealed by the picture taken by
Vogue
photographer George Hoyningen-Huene in 1929. It wasn’t just the sultry choreography of the photograph that registered her new sophistication – the fluid line of her body echoed by the fall of pearls and the silken material held delicately between her hands – what was remarkable was the composure of her gaze and the stillness of her presence. Of the dancer who’d been compared to a kangaroo, a boxer, a monkey and a savage, there was not a trace.

For Pepito, however, success came at a price. As Josephine shed her St Louis accent and social awkwardness, she inevitably began to outgrow her lover. He remained necessary to her in certain ways – as a professional advisor and a compliant ear to her worries and complaints – but she could no longer take seriously his flashy rings and spats, his carefully assembled stock of compliments and small talk. He began to seem almost pathetic in contrast to the men who were beginning to pursue her, among them Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the irrepressible Feodor Chaliapin, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, the Swiss architect who called himself Le Corbusier.

Josephine and Le Corbusier had met in South America and become lovers two months before the end of her tour. The architect was far from her usual type, with his thick pebble glasses and long, clever face, but she was both flattered and captivated by his brilliance, listening raptly to his vision of architecture as an agent of social transformation, and posing willingly for the erotic sketches he drew of her. They met again, by design, on the boat travelling back from Rio to Bordeaux, and it was during this voyage that Josephine developed the idea of one day using her money to build a village in the French countryside, where people of every colour and class could live in a Corbusian-style utopia.

That vision would resonate in Josephine’s imagination, eventually inspiring the ‘rainbow tribe’ of orphans she began to adopt, and the home she made for them in a rural French chateau. She and Le Corbusier would continue to correspond affectionately on the subject, although in romatic terms their lives would separate; the architect was returning to his fiancée Yvonne and Josephine was returning to Paris, which she claimed was her one true love. To the journalists who clustered round her, she declared she had, as promised, made herself worthy of the city: ‘I have grown up. I am a woman.’
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Now that Josephine considered herself fully formed as a performer, she was ready to stake her rivalry to Mistinguett – her idol and her nemesis. She no longer had the platform of her club; Prieur had failed to find a replacement singer to sustain the business at Chez Joséphine, and he subsequently went to prison, having finally been convicted of insurance fraud. However, the Casino de Paris, where Mistinguett had just been performing, was ready to offer Josephine a starring slot in its next production,
Paris qui remue
(Bustling or Swinging Paris). This show was being themed in response to the city’s forthcoming Exposition Coloniale, and Josephine was obviously a natural fit for its exotic, African scenes. But while she would be required to dance glossy variations of her old numbers like Danse Sauvage she was also, crucially, being allowed to sing.

The Casino’s owners, Henri Varna and Oscar Dufrenne, had quelled their reservations about the ability of Josephine’s voice to fill a theatre and commissioned the songwriter Vincent Scotto to provide her with a light romantic ballad. The result, ‘J’ai deux amours Mon pays et Paris’, turned out to be another milestone in Josephine’s career as her Danse Sauvage. Scotto worked carefully to flatter her modest range, and Josephine sang the material with a poignant, yearning lift in her voice that transformed it into something intensely personal, the story of her own life. Audiences loved her, and not only did the song become one of the highlights of
Paris qui remue,
which ran for an exceptional thirteen months, but when it was recorded it sold three hundred thousand copies. Critics professed their amazement at this new Josephine: ‘She left us a
negresse,
droll and primitive, she comes back a great artist’; ‘The beautiful savage has tamed her instincts’.
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Again, her transformation was registered by commerce, and high-quality products like de Sévigné chocolates and Vitus radios began to solicit her endorsement.

But for Josephine, the greatest affirmation of all was the reaction of Mistinguett, who now regarded her as a genuine threat. The fifty-five-year-old singer was beloved in Paris – Maurice Chevalier claimed she had become the city’s ‘symbol of gaiety and good humour and courage and heart’
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– yet her growing hatred of Josephine was tainting her image. She insulted ‘la petite nègre’ to anyone who would listen, and when she saw Josephine at a film premiere she called out recklessly, ‘Well, Pickaninny, why don’t you come up and salute me?’
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Josephine, reacting with instant fury, stalked over and lashed out with her nails, while Mistinguett, no less a street fighter, retaliated. But to the delighted crowds watching, it appeared to be the older singer who was having to battle hardest for her reputation.