Josephine Baker (10 page)

Though business was good there, Memphis wasn't memorable to Josephine, she never spoke or wrote much about it. New Orleans was different, New Orleans and the beautiful Lyric Theater where Bob Russell's troupe next landed. An ad in the
New Orleans Item
heralded their arrival: “Beginning Monday BOB RUSSELL and His 25 Hottest Coons in Dixie.”

Two T.O.B.A. members, a Mr. Boudreaux and a Mr. Bennett, owned the Lyric. Bennett was a friend of the racing car driver Barney
Oldfield, who had given him a ring set with two three-carat diamonds, which he'd pawned for a thousand dollars to invest in the theater. A showplace that stood on a corner, the Lyric had arched windows, a white marble foyer, dressing rooms of marble and oak. The stage, which could be raised or lowered by hydraulic power, was thirty-eight feet deep; seven hundred patrons could sit on the lower floor, eight hundred in the balcony, and there were twelve boxes on each side.

Josephine wrote about this pleasure palace and the city that contained it. “There are the French and the Blacks. That is the origin of the creoles. Huge theatre with real orchestra, many musicians: happy! I thought I was coming into high society. . . . It's fashionable there to eat crabs with rice, corn cut in it, and a little green vegetable called okra. . . . And . . . I saw the Jones family again. . . .”

Hired by Mr. Russell for the New Orleans leg of the tour, the Joneses had shown up with instruments and prop trunk. “After we had fallen into each other's arms,” Josephine said, “Mrs. Jones suggested that I move in with them and split the costs. It seemed like a good idea. . . .”

What seemed like a bad idea was Clara Smith's greedy consumption of sweet-potato pies. She ate too many, “and she made me eat them too. As I had a sweet tooth, I loved sugar . . . and I fell sick.”

Sick, maybe, but not too tired to explore the city. “The piano player had told me that it was a musician's paradise and he was right. . . . I had never seen so many people, bars and dance halls. . . . ‘This is nothing,' the piano player insisted. ‘You can't imagine how it used to be. One parade after another; bands competing in the streets to prove they were the best. But Storyville's [Storyville, New Orleans's legalized red-light district, had thrived between 1897 and 1917.] been closed down since the war. It's simply not the same.' ”

The ways Josephine remembered the rest of her tenure with Bob Russell were wonderfully creative. One variation went like this: She was fired in New Orleans, so she hid in a packing crate and was shipped on the train with the rest of the luggage, and after she was discovered, Mrs. Russell went to bat for her, and Mr. Russell agreed she could remain with the company until they got back to St. Louis. Then came a list of miseries endured. Fleabag hotels. A gas heater that rendered our heroine unconscious and caused the rest of the company to think she was suicidal. Work unending. It was Mrs. Kaiser's house all over again. “I sewed, brushed costumes, polished shoes, ironed, dressed hair, hooked
and unhooked clothes, fastened, buttoned . . . hung up, laid out, packed, unpacked.”

In a different story, when the Russell company came to St. Louis, Josephine found her mother in a basement apartment, “her lovely teeth completely yellow and destroyed by tobacco! My stepfather continued to lie down all day and spit on the floor. . . . In a corner there was a crate full of coal, the water used to wash is frozen. Dirty curtains . . . You can't take garbage out after six o'clock, it brings bad luck. So all the garbage is pushed under the bed.”

This tale has Josephine going without a bath for a month in the Martins' hovel, and having to say no to her little sister (“she had only one eye and she was despised”) when Willie Mae begged to be taken on the road.

The only difficulty with any of these marvelous fables is that the Russell company didn't go back to St. Louis, it went directly from New Orleans to Philadelphia, and even about Philadelphia, Josephine was not exactly candid. “I started in Philadelphia,” she contended. “In a small theatre: the Standard Theatre, in a bad revue. I made ten dollars a week. In fact I earned nothing because they nearly never paid and I was always hungry. I was hollow, hollow enough to fall. Teeth came out of my mouth. I thought about New York, big money . . .”

I believe you thought about New York and big money, Mother, and I also believe your explanation of why you left home. “You cannot,” you said, “do anything with your family on your back.” But most of what you said about Philadelphia was nonsense. It was in Philadelphia that you became Josephine Baker.

She met him in Philadelphia—Billy Baker, the pretty boy with fair skin, the one the Duchess called “trifling; he was lazy, half the time he didn't want to work.”

The Duchess (remember the waitress who quit the Green Dragon speakeasy when the body count got too high?) was then employed by Billy's father in his restaurant. “Josephine,” she said, “was nothing but a little snip, no more than about fifteen years old, and they eloped someplace.”

The someplace was Camden, New Jersey, right across the river. In Camden, you could get married on the spot, no questions asked, so long as you brought two witnesses with you. These facts were verified by Billy Baker himself in 1934, after a reporter on the
Chicago Bee
tracked him down for a piece on “Forgotten Husbands of Famous Women.”

Billy said he had first set eyes on Josephine when she was playing at the Standard. “I was living with my father at 1520 South Street. Because
of her youth, Joe and I had difficulty securing a marriage license in Philadelphia but undaunted in our plans, we went to Camden.”

Where the Reverend Orlando S. Watte united in wedlock William Howard Baker (twenty-three years of age; Colored; Birthplace, Gallatin, Tennessee; Father's name, Warren Baker; Mother's maiden name, Mattie Wilson) with Josephine Wells (nineteen years of age; Colored; Birthplace, St. Louis, Missouri; Father's name, Arthur Wells; Mother's maiden name, Carrie Martin). Each said it was a first marriage.

Mother, I love you! You are daring, you get what you want. You aged yourself four years, gave your father's name as Arthur Wells—poor Willie Wells, all that remained of him in your history was the temporary borrowing of his name—and covered your tracks. You were still doing the same thing fifty-two years later, when a journalist asked about your husbands. “I have been married thousands of times,” you told him, “because every man I loved has been my husband.”

I'm glad you said it yourself, Mother. Imagine if
I
had claimed you loved thousands of men!

It was on September 17, 1921, that Josephine vowed to love, honor, and obey Billy Baker. Indeed, Billy, not Willie Wells, would be Josephine's first legal husband, but she would die without knowing it. (In Camden in 1921, the fact that she was a minor did not invalidate her marriage, even though she had not produced evidence of parental consent.) Just five months earlier, on April 25, she had opened with Bob Russell's company at the Standard. They had a tough act to follow—the Billy King players had been thrilling Philadelphians with an onstage bullfight and “The Triumphant Return of the Shah of Persia on His Camel”—but Josephine wasn't intimidated, she was in paradise, dancing across the very stage where the Shah's camel had so recently galumphed.

“I had learned,” she said, “that when I rolled my eyes and made the very faces that had earned me a scolding at school, the crowd would burst out laughing.”

Appearing at the Standard on the same bill with Josephine was Maude Russell, the wife of Sam Russell. (They were not related to Bob Russell.) “Oh, Lord,” says Maude, “everybody knew Sam Russell. He worked in blackface like all the comedians then. To be funny, you
had
to wear blackface. He and Sandy Burns had a comedy act called Bilo and Ashes.”

Maude confirms that the fledgling Josephine was a crowd pleaser.
“She did her act, and I said, ‘Where did they get
her
from?' She was a ugly little thing, but she was funny.”

If Maude wondered where Bob Russell had got Josephine, she knew exactly where Josephine had got her act. “Mama Dinks. Dinks was never nothing but a chorus girl, but she was a
star
chorus girl. All her mouth was gold, she had funny legs, she could bend them way back, she did those antics, walkin' like a chicken, lookin' cross-eyed, and then she'd go offstage bowlegged with her butt stuck out. And Tumpy—she was introduced as Tumpy—copied Dinks.

“She was nothing but a kid, and the people was crazy about her. ‘Tumpy! Ah, come on, Tumpy! Dance some more, Tumpy!' And those audiences were rough, if you wasn't any good, honey, they would boo you off the stage!”

It was no small accomplishment to draw bravos on a bill that blazed with so much talent: Butterbeans and Susie, who were popular comics; Alex Lovejoy, a much-admired actor; Maude herself, who could dance till she set the house to screaming. “I was featured!” she says. “I wasn't a chorus girl.” Clara Smith had stayed behind—she never came north if she could help it—but Dyer Jones was still with the company, so Josephine still had a surrogate mother.

Dyer watched over
all
the chorus girls. “She would care for us children,” Lilly Yuen says, “and look after us that we don't do foolish things.” Lilly, half Chinese, half black, nicknamed “Pontop,” reminds you how young they were. “We all used to play out in the alley between shows.”

Most of the cast ate at a boardinghouse called Mom Charleston's. Mom set out good food—greens, fried fish, chicken, corn pudding, peach cobbler—all for seventy-five cents.

By 1921, Philadelphia was already a big city with more than 134,000 black residents. It boasted Independence Hall, and an interest in theater that dated back to the 1720s, when wandering players drew crowds to the outskirts of town. But for Josephine, its appeal lay in the fact that it was only eighty-three miles from New York City.

As it happened,
Shuffle Along
, playing the Dunbar, a few blocks from the Standard, was headed for New York City. Josephine heard from Wilsie Caldwell, a former Dumas classmate who was in the Broadway-bound show, that the management was looking for more dancers, and she asked Wilsie to help her get an audition.

Next thing she knew she was doing her routine for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. (Sissle and Blake were the elegant vaudeville team who had joined forces with Miller and Lyles, a comedy-dance act, and created
Shuffle Along
, the musical designed “to put the Negro back on Broadway.”)

The way Josephine described her audition, Mr. Blake had said nothing, while Mr. Sissle had said she was too young, too small, too thin, too ugly. And too dark. “ ‘Can you even dance?' he asked me. ‘No, but it doesn't matter . . . I watch, I dance without knowing . . . without dancing.' ”

Whatever Noble Sissle may have said to Josephine, a letter he wrote to the dancer Willie Covan indicates clearly that it was only Josephine's age that had made him turn her away.

“I will always remember her,” Sissle said, “leaving us without a word, her eyes full of tears. . . . The last we saw, she was walking in the street under heavy rain. Her clothes were all wet, so was her hair. She did not even open the big umbrella she was carrying. We felt so sad for her, but we were heading for Broadway, and the law was, you had to be sixteen to perform onstage there; on the road, nobody cared.”

Josephine recovered fast. Next week, at the Standard, the sun was shining again. The Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, and her five Jazzoway Dandies, had come to play. The months flew by. Bob Russell and his troupe left town, but Josephine stayed behind and joined Sandy Burns's stock company. (In addition to the touring players who came and went, the Standard always featured a resident stock company.)

Sandy Burns bragged about the caliber of his people. “It's not every company that has girls in the chorus who can put over a number, or talk,” he told the
Chicago Defender
, “and from the ovations my girls receive week in, week out, they must be pleasing and making good.” Among those they pleased, of course, was Billy Baker.

Sketches changed weekly, guest artists appeared and disappeared. There were the Whitman Sisters, who played banjos and sang. “Sister Mae” headed the group, and had a low opinion of theater managers. Most of them, she said, “feel that any kind of show is good enough for a colored audience . . . their only desire is to have a comedian and a few half-naked girls on hand. . . . If these birds pay you a living wage, they want you to guarantee that it will not rain or snow during the week you are booked with them.”

Once in a while, an exotic newcomer like Esther Bigeou, “The Singer with the Million Dollar Smile,” would come along to entrance Josephine. Esther sang in French.
“Avez vous du boeuf rôti, de l'agneau, du porc, des petits pois, ou des pommes de terre?”
she would croon. “The words,” said one reviewer, “flow from her lips so naturally that it seems like the careless warbling of a bird.” A carnivorus bird. For those who do not speak my native tongue, permit me to translate. “Do you have roast beef, lamb, pork, peas, or potatoes?” is what Esther was inquiring of her audience.