Josephine Baker (54 page)

It wasn't possible. She had too many reasons to keep moving. After all, wouldn't the date in Milan pay for a soccer field? She was possessed by the notion of modernizing Les Milandes, building an amusement park that tourists would pay to visit. In 1940, a wandering dog had discovered a cave at Lascaux dating back to Cro-Magnon man, its walls painted with pictures of cows, bison, horses; that this nearby wonder could attract two thousand visitors a day convinced Josephine she could lure equal numbers to her kingdom. If she built it, they would come.

“When she bought the château, it was in terrible shape,” Georges Malaury agrees, echoing Maryse. “Barely water, barely light. She wanted to do a casino and a
guinguette
, which is a little bar-discothèque, and a swimming pool in the shape of a J, but there was no water here. There is the Dordogne, the river down there, but the people didn't want to let her go through their land, so to make a well, she had to buy everything. She bought a big farm of a Monsieur Dartin, who never wanted to sell to her because she was black, and because she was show business. Then one day he fell off his bicycle and died, and the family sold to Josephine.”

In the end, she got five of the seven houses that surrounded the château, and was in the throes of designing her own little Monte Carlo when Carrie, Margaret, and Elmo arrived in Le Havre.

On November 3, Jo went to the pier to pick up his wife's family, whom he later described as “three round-eyed gaping figures without a word of French.” (Helen Morris remembered that Carrie and Margaret had their teeth pulled “and new teeth put in because they wanted to look good for the French people. I saw poor Tony Hudson a couple of times after that. He was very sad. He thought she would come back, but she never did.”)

Jo drove the newcomers directly to Les Milandes, where “they fell into Josephine's arms. . . . The important thing was to get everyone settled down in the château as quickly as possible.”

Josephine, to help to pay for all the reconstruction going on, was still
working nights in Paris at the Club des Champs-Élysées, a cabaret the American dancer Katherine Dunham remembers well.

“This little man,” Dunham says, “he was prince of one of those African states, took me to the club to see Josephine. She came over to our table, but seemed upset. I got up and danced with the prince, and then I realized why she was glaring at us. He had tennis shoes on, and she was trying to make that club go on a snob level.”

Bobby Mitchell once witnessed the rivalry between the two prima donnas. “It was on the Riviera. Dunham was there with the then Aga Khan, the big fat guy. And she showed up at the Casino in Monte Carlo wearing these emeralds, earrings, necklace, bracelet, all matching. Then Josephine swept in (she always made a big entrance), took one look at these emeralds, and sparks flew from her eyes.

“So she disappears up to that hotel, the elegant one, the Hôtel de Paris. And she comes down, and she's got these diamonds on that she wasn't wearing before, and she makes sure she sits next to Dunham at the table, and every time she reaches for anything, there are these diamonds glittering. And Dunham sits back with this marvelous posture of hers and keeps adjusting the bloody emeralds. It was so funny, those two out-bitching each other.”

By March of 1949, Josephine was rehearsing for
Féeries et Folies
(Derval had broken his rule—this title had fifteen letters) at the Folies-Bergère. France was still recovering from the traumas of war, the tourists were returning, there was an exhibition of sixty-four Picassos at the Maison de La Pensée Français, but Josephine was a nervous wreck. She had been, she said, “dreaming for months about the show, then . . . seeing the scenes we have conceived taking form, starting to live—it's wonderful. . . . But one day, the doors will open, the public will come and judge . . . and I worry, I have stagefright. Was I right to change a formula that had proved itself? I tremble, I feel my heart pound. . . .”

She wanted to offer Paris a new Folies-Bergère; there would still be naked girls, but Josephine the war heroine would cover her body with thirty different costumes, and play many famous women of history—most of them French. She would start with Eve (nationality unknown), mate to Fred Rey's Adam, go on to the Empress Josephine, and finally she would personify the unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots. But she demanded a lot of reinforcement from her director. “Michel, I'm too
old. First, there was an infatuation with me, then I did the war, but I'm forgotten now.”

Gyarmathy told her what she craved to hear, that she was fabulous, and she returned the compliment. “You are to me like Max Reinhardt,” she said, “and the things you propose to me are things I have never done—to dance with bananas doesn't interest me anymore.”

“She was an angel during rehearsals,” Michel says, “first to arrive, last to leave. She rehearsed in Jo Bouillon's underwear, with a towel around her hair, which she had burnt off one more time.”

First to arrive? Last to leave? Here was a new Josephine, except for the burnt-off hair, and this time it was Jean Clement, not Antoine, who was called to the rescue. “Before the Folies rehearsals began, she asked me for some
défrisant
, a kind of French Congolene. I warned her not to leave it on too long, but she did her hair, started to read, and fell asleep. She phoned me, hysterical. ‘
Chéri
, a catastrophe, I'm shorn like a woman collaborator, I can't do the Folies-Bergère.'

“The next day, she came into my salon. Arletty, Edwige Feuillère, la Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec, they were all there. Josephine twirled around, said,
‘Changement de décors,'
whipped off her turban, and laughed like a crazy person. She had only little tufts of hair left. I got the idea to do her the way they do flower arrangements, build a wire foundation with two crowns of hair woven on it for Mary Stuart, and a ponytail for her next number.

“On opening night, I was shaking. I was afraid it would come loose. I had used long pins and turned the few poor hairs around them; it was very painful for Josephine but she never complained.”

The hair didn't come loose.

“I told Josephine, ‘They will cut off your head,' ” Gyarmathy says. “She loved it. She walked up the big black staircase, her back to the public, and at the top the executioner was waiting. I used some Beethoven, I forget what, and she knelt and put her head on the block on the last beat, and the executioner raised his hand with the axe, and
pang
—blackout!

“Then her soul rose to heaven, and the glass windows were lit by blue light, and she sang ‘Ave Maria.' ”

The voice, wrote Janet Flanner, was still “as sweet . . . as a woodwind instrument.” (What Flanner gave with one hand, she took back with the other, saying that at the beginning of her Paris career, Josephine had
“looked Harlem; then she graduated to Creole; she has now been transmuted into Tonkinese, or something Eastern, with pagoda headdresses beneath which her oval face looks like temple sculpture. Her show consists principally of her changing her costumes, which are magnificent.” Flanner also pointed out that Josephine, as the headless Mary, went on to sing Schubert's “Ave Maria,” though it hadn't been written until two hundred years after Mary's death. What's more, she sang it in Latin.)

No nit-picking from Noël Coward, though. He confided to his diary that Josephine was “wonderful as Mary Stuart in a miles long white satin train.” Carrie, too, finally saw her hardheaded firstborn child, Freda J. McDonald, on the stage. Carrie was so agitated she had a nosebleed.

She came backstage wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a black feathered hat, and the photographers were waiting to shoot mother and daughter kissing. Carrie was more unpredictable than that. “It was good,” she said to Josephine, wiping tears from her eyes. “But you're lucky I didn't have a cane. I would have come around and smacked you and all those young girls who don't have enough clothes on!”

In New York, the powerful newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote of Josephine's most recent triumph. “Fans report that she is again the toast of Paree, where a new type of lighting makes her decades younger.”

But it wasn't her youth anymore, now it was her art that pleased the customers. Her pure sweet voice rising to heaven so moved people that they began to applaud before she was done singing. Again, she had gambled and won.

She wrote to Donald Wyatt that Mohamed and Moulay Larbi were in Paris. “We talk for hours, hurry and come so we can be together as a big family. I'm still packing them in every night. Marian Anderson, Katherine Dunham, great, great success here, really our people are
adored
in France, what a contrast from America.”

In May, there were posters all over Paris advertising
Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker
, Josephine's third—and final—collaboration with Marcel Sauvage. This volume not only brought her life up to date, but reprinted the six articles she had done for
France-Soir
. In these pieces, she had once again been hard on her native country, insisting that most Americans would like to see signs on their houses saying,
NO JEWS, NO DOGS, NO NIGGERS
.

She said Americans had killed their souls, theirs was “a world of lost people, it is only money that counts.”

She said, “You know I do not like what makes life theatrical, I'm not a novelist, it's hard for me to invent, I don't know how to lie.” Four lies in a row.

Her resentment of light-skinned blacks, the high yellows she had envied and hated when she started out, was here in print. “Twelve thousand white Negroes with blue eyes are born every year in the USA, they are the most terrible adversaries of the blacks. I am on the side of the ‘niggers.' I take no glory from it . . . I didn't choose it.”

In this book, she also permitted herself a diatribe against American Jews. Interspersed with lines like “I have been married to a Jew, I have nothing to reproach him with,” and her expressed admiration for Israelis in Jerusalem “looking like prophets with long curls” was her complaint that “blacks cannot work on Broadway without the intervention of Jews.” As for boxers managed by Jews, “many of them don't receive a tenth of what they make for their broken noses.”

But
Les Mémoires de Josephine Baker
was in French; what American was going to read it? And anyhow, Josephine was a fabulist, you couldn't hold her to strict account as you could a tailor who measured slipcovers.

The Folies closed for the month of August—it was traditional—but Josephine and Jo didn't stop working, they began another tour. They didn't stop fighting, either. Jean Clement, who went along to do Josephine's hair, had a ringside seat. “She was jealous of the boys around him. They had a big battle in Switzerland, and Jo left, and Pierre Spiers, a respected conductor, came to replace him.”

Josephine and Pierre Spiers became friends right away—he was the one who brought her voice down, he said, “You are too old now for that little bird voice”—and to surprise him, she sent for his wife and three-year-old son, Gérard.

“The night we arrived,” says Marie Spiers, “little Gérard walked onstage with a big bouquet for Josephine. Pierre, in the orchestra pit, could not believe his eyes. And then Josephine picked up Gérard and threw him to his father. ‘Pierre, here is your son.' I almost fainted, seeing my baby flying through the air.

“Josephine adored Gérard; she even asked Pierre if she could adopt him. ‘I will be a good mother to him,' she said, ‘and you and Marie can come to visit.' ‘You are crazy,' Pierre said.”

“On the tour,” says Jean Clement, “Josephine had taken a little basset hound because the dog could bark ‘J'ai Deux Amours.' So here we go with that dog, and Josephine made him sing the song all the time and people were laughing in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Egypt.”

That fall, Josephine was back in the Folies, and reunited with Jo. “I have,” she said, “the husband I love who understands that existence is not an operetta.”

But at Les Milandes, it
was
an operetta. “I remember she had just bought a Peugeot from a garage owner in Sarlat,” Georges Malaury says, “and she promised to pay him, and he came one day, she was not there, the next day she had no money, the third day he came screaming. So she told her maid to let him come up. She was in her bath, and here came that old man—the village still talks about it—and she stood up, dripping, while the maid held the checkbook, and Josephine signed a check. When he came out, he said to my father, ‘I got my money with interest—I saw that fabulous body, bless God.' And in those days, the check was good.”

The mad preparations for the grand opening on September 4 spared no one. Michel Gyarmathy, summoned to Les Milandes to “get some rest, you need it,” was roused by Josephine's “ringing a bell at 5
A.M
. and waking everybody, including the hens. I don't know where she found the energy. We went to Bordeaux and bought fishermen's nets, she wanted the
guinguette
decorated like a boat.”

Madame Carrier, owner of the Grand Café in Sarlat, loaned Josephine trays and glasses. “I must say,” she told me, “things were moving. You never know with show people, but we thought it might be good for the region. Jo Bouillon had formed a committee of neighborhood men to help open the park. The officials, the press, the bishops, church choruses, had been invited for a hundred miles around. There were to be banquets for three different sets of people, the most important would have dinner at the château, the others in the fields or the
guinguette
. A parade had been planned, people came by bus, car, bicycle, and foot. My son Alain had done a poster of her for the opening of the park—he was a student of Paul Colin—but she turned it down. She thought she looked too Negroid.”