Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (58 page)

There were crowds everywhere that Josephine went now, drawn by her fame, but also by her spectacular new accessory, a tame cheetah with a gem-encrusted collar,
*
which she took around with her on a lead. Bricktop wryly commented, ‘You couldn’t get within blocks of her, everything stopped cold. The French men and the women too would come running up to her: Joséphine, belle Joséphine, brave Joséphine.’
⁴⁵
Some, however, mourned the old Josephine. Janet Flanner wrote ironically, ‘She has, alas, almost become a little lady. Her caramel-coloured body has become thinner, trained almost civilized … On that lovely animal visage lies now a sad look, not of captivity but of dawning intelligence.’
⁴⁶

But Josephine was moving in step with the times as well as with her own ambition. The economic uncertainties that had ended the Twenties and opened the new decade were dampening enthusiasm for the experimental and the exotic. The black, untamed garçonne of 1925 was no longer a fashionable look, and Josephine’s new incarnation as a diva chanteuse proved far more to the taste of the 1930s public. Almost as significantly, it would provide Josephine with a stronger defence against a changing political culture.

As early as 1927, Josephine had become aware of a shift in Paris. The influx of a new type of American tourist, drawn more by the cheapness of the franc than by the rarity of the city’s culture, was introducing an overt level of racism into public life. She began to hear ‘nigger’ on the streets; a hotel refused her and Pepito entry on the grounds that she might offend their other American guests. Most mortifying was the incident that occurred on the night of Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget, in May 1927. Paris was en fête – trams flew the Stars and Stripes, crowds gathered in the Place de l’Opéra, and at the Folies Bergère it was Josephine who joyfully announced the news of Lindbergh’s safe arrival. Afterwards, however, when she went to a celebratory dinner at the L’Abbaye de Thélème, an American objected loudly to the fact that he was seated at a table next to her, calling out, ‘At home a nigger woman belongs in the kitchen.’

Josephine later wrote, ‘I thought if the floor could open up and swallow me it would be a blessing.’
⁴⁷
But this insult was nothing compared to what awaited her when she left Paris to go out on her 1928–9 tour. In America the Ku Klux Klan had already begun to target any deviation from the white ideal – flappers, jazz musicians, communists and homosexuals as well as blacks. And in an increasingly reactionary Europe it wasn’t only Josephine’s colour that made her vulnerable to attack, but her reputation for promiscuity and nude dancing.

The first stop of the tour was Vienna, and days before she arrived protests were already being organized against Josephine and her ‘brazen-faced heathen dances’. Church bells were rung to warn the pious off the streets when she appeared and supporters of Hitler prepared to demonstrate against her contaminating presence. So effectively did the Church and the Nazi party combine their opposition that the wisdom of letting Josephine perform was debated both in the city council and in the Austrian parliament. Arguing in her favour was the liberal aristocrat Count Adalbert Sternberg, who appealed to the established German culture of naturism by claiming that to attack Josephine was to blaspheme against God, who had created the human body. Even though she was barred from performing in the theatre that had originally been booked, the Ronacher, she was allowed to transfer to the smaller Johann Strauss Theater, where she played for a month to packed crowds.

Still the controversy escalated. In Prague, Budapest and Zagreb, student agitators and Catholic protestors again joined forces, gathering outside the theatre to throw ammonia bombs and chant, ‘Go back to Africa.’ In Munich, Josephine was banned from making any appearance at all; in Berlin claques of Nazi sympathizers were in the Theater des Westens every night, and Josephine cut short her scheduled six months to just three weeks.

Even when she crossed the Atlantic to Argentina, in the spring of 1929, controversy followed, with both the Church and the President condemning her immorality. All this hardened Josephine’s determination to leave the primitivist black imagery of her stage material far behind. Yet even though she was sometimes frightened, sometimes maddened, by these personal attacks, she began to relate them to issues larger than herself. Travelling around Europe she realized there was a world of hatred and evil outside the bubble of her success, a world that in some vague way it was her duty to address.

Josephine’s political conscience was both uninformed and sentimental, but it was passionate.
*
It fed the vision of the utopian village that she planned with Le Corbusier and more immediately it inspired her to begin writing a novel about the injustice of race.
Mon sang dans tes veines (My Blood In Your Veins)
was eventually published in 1931, with the help of the ghostwriter Félix de la Camera, and if its literary value was trite, its creation was a revelatory process for Josephine, forcing her to address more directly the abuse of her childhood and the racism of the world she now inhabited. It was a Romeo and Juliet story about Joan, a young black girl, and her childhood sweetheart, a wealthy white boy called Fred. As adults, they are forced into divergent lives, but when Fred has an accident, Joan selflessly offers her blood for his life-saving transfusion. In that act of sacrifice, however, she also symbolically reclaims him, for back in the early 1930s, race was still thought to be ‘carried’ in the blood. There’s an element of revenge as well as romance in the fact that, with Joan’s gift, Fred has been turned into a ‘white negro’, one of her own.
^†

The past that Josephine had battled so hard to escape – the St Louis ghetto, the black touring circuit, the ignominy of the chorus line – was one she no longer wanted to ignore. Several months after she returned to Paris, she received a message from it in the form of a package from Dyer Jones, the St Louis trumpeter for whom she had worked when she was eleven. It contained a good luck charm – a rusty old nail wrapped around with a lock of Dyer’s hair – and a note that said simply, ‘I think of you. Your success has given me pleasure.’
⁴⁸
A year or two earlier Josephine might have tossed away that token as an unwelcome and irrelevant reminder of her former life. Yet like Nancy and so many others of her generation, she was starting to see the world in larger, more politically exacting terms. Just at the point where she finally began to transcend the limits of her colour, and to be embraced as a Parisian chanteuse, Josephine also started to re-embrace her blackness – as both an essential part of her identity, and a cause.

EPILOGUE

On 15 April 1975, twenty thousand people stood on the streets of Paris to watch as Josephine Baker’s coffin was driven in state across the city. Many thousands more watched on television, drawn by the congregation of famous names inside the Madeleine Church, and by the fact that for the first time in French history an American woman was being mourned with full military honours. Josephine had fantasized about such a funeral ever since the spectacular send-off Harlem had given Florence Mills back in 1927. And the fact that Paris staged it for her was a mark of the tenacity with which she had sustained the city’s love during the course of her long career.

It was nearly half a century since she had first been embraced by Paris as its Black Venus. By the time she was fifty she had carefully transmuted her image into that of an ageless diva, armoured with false eyelashes and feathered headdresses. Even at sixty-eight, she was still working that image successfully, singing her now classic repertory of songs into rhinestone-studded microphones and dancing a game vestige of the Charleston.

Offstage, however, Josephine might be unrecognizable. Years of toxic conk applications had burned off all but a few meagre tufts of her hair, and her long, chorus-girl legs required careful bandaging to protect them from cold and strain. But once she had put on her wig and her make-up, some alchemy of stage lighting and adrenalin still summoned up a spark of her youthful self. In her final revue,
Joséphine,
which opened in Paris on 8 April 1975, she was able to sing thirty-four songs and dance a few iconic jazz steps.
*
The reviews were almost uniformly ecstatic.

People spoke of the show as one of the triumphs of her career, and it was sold out for weeks to come, yet three days after its premiere Josephine failed to emerge from her hotel room at her usual time. When anxious staff entered, she was discovered unconscious in her bed, her reading glasses askew, around her an array of newspapers and magazines reporting her success. She died a few hours later. And while the official cause of death was registered as a stroke, those close to Josephine liked to think she had died of happiness.

*   *   *

Among the many telegrams of congratulation that she had received on 8 April was one from President Giscard D’Estaing, sent ‘in the name of a grateful France whose heart so often beat with yours’.
¹
The president’s message was a tribute to a cherished star, but it also reflected Josephine’s status as a patriot and a heroine of the Second World War.

When France went to war against Germany it was not surprising that she should have found the French cause so close to her heart. Her own hatred of the Nazi regime dated back to the treatment she’d received while on tour to Austria and Germany. Yet her patriotic commitment went far beyond that of most of her colleagues: for in addition to dancing and singing for the French troops, Josephine also worked as a low-level spy, trafficking secret information.

At the beginning of the war, when she was still being invited to embassy parties, she was recruited by the French military police to keep her ears open for relevant snippets of war gossip. In 1940, as the German army marched on Paris, the colour of her skin made it unsafe for her to remain in the city and she joined the mass exodus south. But it was from this point that her work became more crucial. Outside German-controlled territory, Josephine was relatively free to move around, and under the cover of touring she travelled through neutral zones like Portugal, Spain and parts of North Africa. Accompanying her was an intelligence officer posing as her assistant, and secreted in her luggage was information from the Free French forces to their allies, much of it written in invisible ink on her sheet music.

Josephine’s actual contribution to the war effort was hardly heroic compared to the dangers faced by members of the Resistance,
*
but it acquired a noble cast when set against the record of contemporaries such as Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier, who remained in occupied Paris and entertained the enemy. When she returned to the city in 1944 she was greeted by cheering crowds, and in addition to a clutch of awards, including the Médaille de la Résistance, she received a handwritten note of thanks from Charles de Gaulle.

According to the jazz musician Alain Romans, Josephine came back to Paris ‘more French than Louis XV1’.
²
Yet she was now determined to do more for those whom she continued to regard as ‘her own people’– the American blacks. In 1936 she’d been given a salutary reminder of the conditions they endured when she was invited to perform in the New York
Follies.
Expecting to be greeted like a returning star, she was informed by the management of the St Moritz hotel that she was only permitted to use the service entrance and that she must stay away from the lobby as they didn’t want to alienate any ‘guests from the Southern states’.
³

After the war, Josephine was determined to use her name to expose and challenge the racism of her birthplace. In 1948, commissioned by the French newspaper
France-Soir,
she travelled incognito around the American South, attempting to use public facilities that were reserved for whites. The arrests, assaults and threats she suffered were written up for the paper in a series of colourfully indignant articles. Three years later, Josephine launched an even more public campaign: during an extensive cross-state tour, she refused to perform in any city that barred her from staying in first-class hotels, and she insisted on hiring black stage crews. She lobbied local businesses for more enlightened attitudes and when, inevitably, she started to receive threats from the Klan, she reported them straight to the press.

At a time when black celebrity activists were scarce, Josephine was embraced as a potent rallying force. Her activities were debated in Congress and, according to the
Chicago Examiner,
she orchestrated ‘the best public race and press relations stunt of the century – if not for all time’.
⁴
On 20 May 1951, officially designated Josephine Baker Day, she was driven through Harlem in a motorcade.

Josephine was entranced by her success: but she was naive and stubborn. To the anxiety of black leaders, her campaigning grew increasingly disconnected from political pragmatism, and even from the truth. Some of the statements she made about America during the early 1950s were so fantastically intemperate, and some of her judgements (including her belief that the Argentinian dictator General Peron was a promoter of universal brotherhood) so bizarre that she became a liability to the very people she wanted to serve. It was only in 1963, when she returned to Washington to support Martin Luther King and the city’s historic civil rights march that she was reaccepted as a beacon for the black cause.

*   *   *

If Josephine had difficulties reading the real world, it was partly because she had been cocooned for so long inside the fairy-tale logic of her career. As the heroine of her own Cinderella story, she thought that the rest of the world should fall into place around her. If she wanted something, or believed something to be true, there were few people capable of denying her. And just as her sense of entitlement distorted and inflated her political judgement, it also gave her an aggrandized, exaggerated view of her personal life, especially her mission to become a mother.