Josephine Baker (55 page)

“She was expecting four hundred,” says Michel Gyarmathy. “Over two thousand came. They almost broke the place down, there was not enough food for everyone, and at the end, Josephine went to hide in her
bedroom. I was afraid because when you have people who come from miles away, they expect something, and the prices were exorbitant for the country.”

Despite the mob scene, Josephine was elated. There had been card games, footraces, dancing, drinking, volleyball. “Can you believe it?” she said to Jo. “They managed to get here without a proper road . . . without a train. It proves they'll come . . . we'll move ahead with the soccer field. . . .”

At home in Beynac, Henri Chapin, the carpenter, was also reflecting on the events of the day; he and his wife felt sick. “Josephine had put a dancer from the Folies at the cash register,” he says. “And we watched him. For every thousand francs he took in, he would put seven hundred francs in his pocket, and we could say nothing, he was Josephine's friend and she had confidence in him.”

Worse was to follow. Josephine's nightly decapitation as Mary Stuart was painless, an illusion. Her illusion that she could turn Les Milandes into a business that would pay for itself was something else again. Financially, she was already beginning to bleed to death.

Les Milandes devoured francs the way its fireplaces devoured wood. (The fireplaces figured prominently in booklets calculated to lure tourists.) “Winter has come,” Josephine wrote for public consumption. “I'm in the big salon, in front of the high chimney with its coat of arms, and clear flames dance around black oak logs. Curled in an armchair . . . in my half sleep, I perceive a whisper. . . . The walls around me . . . my old stones are speaking.”

The old stones could have told a thousand stories, going back to the Lord of Castelnaud, François de Caumont, who in the year 1489 abandoned his family's twelfth-century château and built a new one to please his young bride.

Now Josephine, the most recent lady of the manor, was planning to add to its legends. There would be a museum tracing her beginnings from a basement in St. Louis. Her sister Margaret would run an “exotic” bakery on the premises. There would be a modern farm, and above
each stall, the resident cow's name would be written in blue neon. Pigs would happily sun themselves right up until they were killed and eaten. At which point, Josephine would shed no tears. An old fighter, she knew what life was.

She also knew she would need great infusions of money in order to realize her ambitions. It would be profitable for everyone, she assured her neighbors, if she could turn Les Milandes into a Deauville or a Cannes complete with casino. The problem was, she couldn't get a casino license. (“We were afraid of the risks for our young people,” says Leon Burg, president of Sarlat's Court of Commerce.) With fallible human beings thwarting her will, Josephine took her case to Pope Pius XII, bringing away from the Vatican a papal blessing for her project.

It still didn't get her a casino license.

So she went back on the road, and mailed home instructions to Jo: “Plant geraniums along the terrace.”

By mid-October, the season over (Les Milandes would close until Easter), Jo could join his wife on a major tour, which would start in Mexico. En route, they stopped in St. Louis to try to convince Josephine's brother Richard that he was needed in France. “Tumpy told me, ‘If you come, I will give you this and that,' ” Richard said, “but I wanted to wait a little bit, and see what Mama and Sister had to tell.”

A St. Louis paper ran an interview that featured Josephine groping for words in English. “What's wonderful about my public is that they're
fidèle
. You know, loyal.”

In Mexico, six months of success, “and after that, we went to Cuba,” says Roland Gerbeau, who was once again singing in the act. “Josephine adored white mice, and in her dressing room, she would have five or six of them under her bathrobe. The robe would be tied at the waist over her naked body, and she would let the mice run free between her breasts, and she would catch one in her hands and play with it, then put it back on her breast. I found that bizarre. The Castro brothers came to see us, they were unconditional admirers of Josephine.”

Fidèle
, Fidel; it was fated.

At Havana's chic Hotel Nacional, Josephine found herself turned away (management was afraid to lose the business of rich white Americans), and oddly, she did not protest. “There are other places where I will be welcome,” she told Roland, and moved to a hotel owned by a friend.

She repaid the Castro brothers' admiration by giving two free concerts to raise money for their cause.

Ninety miles away, in Miami, Willard Alexander, a big-band agent, was making arrangements to bring Josephine across the Straits of Florida to work in a club called Copa City that handled very big acts. This turned out to be good for Josephine, but bad for Alexander, because Ned Schuyler, the owner of the Copa City, took over Josephine's career. “He stole her from me,” said Alexander. “I think he was ‘connected,' involved with the big boys.”

“Ned flipped over Josephine,” says Shirley Woolf, Schuyler's lawyer. “He promised her the world. He even signed a contract agreeing that patrons were to be admitted to his club regardless of color or creed. He figured no blacks would come anyway.” This was at a time when Negroes couldn't go to a restaurant or a movie in Miami Beach; if they were stopped by a policeman after 6
P.M
., they had to produce identity cards and explain why they were out.

Not Josephine. In Miami Beach, she lived in the white-occupied Arlington Hotel, owned by Ned Schuyler's family, and was supplied with a car and a white chauffeur. Shirley Modell-Rinehold (Ned's girlfriend, not to be confused with Shirley Woolf) believed that Schuyler, “being Jewish, felt an outsider in the South and was sympathetic to integration. ‘Baby,' he told me, ‘it's time.' ”

Ginette Renaudin, Josephine's wardrobe mistress, was with her at the Arlington. “It was the first time they had a black person,” she says. “Nothing extraordinary happened, she was accepted. But people would ask me, doesn't it bother you to work for a black? I said, ‘Why? She is a woman like any other, I'm French, and in any case, I'm not a racist. On top of that, I like her very much.' ”

“Eleven black people, including Joe Louis and the singer Thelma Carpenter, showed up at Josephine's opening,” says Shirley Woolf. “And Sophie Tucker introduced Josephine.”

Thelma Carpenter: “Sophie Tucker said, ‘Well, if they come to blow up the place, they'll blow me up,' and wasn't nobody going to mess with Sophie Tucker. Then when Josephine came on singing ‘J'ai Deux Amours,' and drug that fur across the stage, she was just electrifying.

“And how do we know that some of those dyed-in-the-wool crackers hadn't seen her in Paris at the Folies-Bergère? Think how many Southerners were in the army, and over there they didn't fit in with the
Frenchmen, so they had a certain bond with colored people. At home, they would lynch you, in Europe you couldn't get rid of them. In Copa City, this one man turned to me and said, ‘You're real proud of her, aren't you?' and I said, ‘No, she's proud of herself.' ”

Shirley Woolf agrees that Josephine got a wild reception. “The audience didn't know what the hell she was doing—she sang in French, she sang in Portuguese, she sang in Spanish—but they were fascinated. They had never seen an actress who changed clothes so much.” (The clothes, incidentally, were by Balmain and Dior. Ginette, who was not similarly apparelled, had to come onstage too. “She called me out to take a bow. I was all dirty, working in my old blue jeans, but she insisted.”)

Rita Charisse, one of the show dancers, was awed to find herself on the same bill with Josephine. “Walter Winchell brought her roses, and for the whole week she played there, he was outside her dressing-room door, like a watchdog.”

Or a lovesick puppy. Clearly, Winchell adored Josephine; he told the readers of his column in the
New York Mirror
that she had “magic and big time zing.”

“She was more thrilled about Winchell,” Shirley Woolf says, “than about the colored people who came in.”

The audience wept as she told them she considered this her first appearance in her native land in twenty-six years. “The other times didn't count. . . . I am happy to be here in this city when my people can be here to see me . . . and when I say my people, I mean my race.” (Earlier, at a reception given by Miami's Negro community, she had said, “We should not be ashamed to use the word ‘Negro.' It is a beautiful word.”)

With Ned Schuyler beside her, Josephine was finally set to conquer the United States. As Ahmed Ben Bachir had known how to make her feel like a woman, Ned knew how to make her feel like a star. Even better, her agreement with him specified that she work in America for nine months of each year, but left her free to return to Les Milandes for the other three months.

Her next booking would be at the Strand Theatre in New York. Ned asked Shirley Woolf to hire the band. “I picked Buddy Rich because he and I were from Brooklyn,” she says. “I didn't know he was the greatest drummer in the world.”

Before leaving Miami Beach, Josephine fired off a telegram to President
Truman:
MY HUSBAND AND I THANK THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THROUGH YOU FOR YOUR MAGNIFICENT RECEPTION HERE AND FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO ADVANCE THE CAUSE OF CIVIL RIGHTS WHICH I KNOW IS SO IMPORTANT TO YOU
. She also wired Winchell:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR WONDERFUL WORDS OF PRAISE AU REVOIR FOR A LITTLE WHILE GOOD HEALTH TO YOU AND YOURS
.

On March 2, 1951, she opened at the Strand, with Jo Bouillon—the band called him Jo Soup—helping to make her musical arrangements. She did her act between showings of
Storm Warning
, a Warner Brothers movie starring Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan and, oddly enough, about the Ku Klux Klan. That first day, the line of people waiting to see her stretched for a block.

One critic said the star's gowns “clung to her shapely body like a frightened baby to its mother,” and
Variety
's review was a rave. Even though Josephine managed to “fracture” half a dozen languages as she moved from song to song, “she could just as well have sung 'em in Braille the way the customers ate it up.”

For the
Chicago Defender
, Fredi Washington, Josephine's friend since
Shuffle Along
, wrote a loving piece. “You find your chest swelling with pride because Miss Baker is a Negro. . . . She manages to get 3,000 people, four times a day, to act as though they all know each other and her in particular.”

Phillip Leshing, then twenty-three years old, was playing bass in the Buddy Rich orchestra. “Josephine did not have a great voice,” he told me. “I mean she was not a Sarah Vaughan or an Ella Fitzgerald or even a Judy Garland, but it did not matter, there is a certain magic certain performers have, they completely take over, people become hypnotized. Nobody wanted her to get off the stage, and it was difficult, because there were more people waiting to get in.

“I remember once Josephine invited several of us to come to her dressing room and try some very good reefer. I went down with Harry ‘Sweets' Edison, the trumpet player, and Buddy Rich, and we smoked pot with Josephine Baker. She was funny, she was cute, she sat on the floor, and it was like talking to one of the kids in the band, like the girl singer. We smoked and nibbled on fruit—there was always fruit in her dressing room—but the marijuana didn't affect her performance. Never.

“She had this gorgeous gold loving cup made for Buddy and the band, a trophy, like an Academy Award, with our names engraved on it.
And it was filled with marijuana. She gave it to us after the last performance at the Strand.”

I wonder, had she smoked her first joint in Paris, with the Prince of Wales? Or with Simenon, who used to mix a little hashish into the tobacco in his pipe?

“Eleanor Roosevelt was staying in the same hotel where we were staying in New York,” says Shirley Woolf, “and she had sent flowers with a note—'Would you please have lunch with me this week?' We had lunch in her room, and Josephine was charming, she was flattered.

“Ethel Barrymore came backstage to see her, too. Josephine could have been the Martin Luther King of her time, but she wouldn't listen to anyone, even about things she didn't know. I'm not talking about her show, she did that pretty good all by herself. But in other ways, she was stupid. Once I came into her dressing room at the Strand, and she was being interviewed by a man from the Communist party newspaper, the
Daily Worker
, and that paper was poisonous to everybody. So here was this nice Communist intellectual asking her questions, and she's being very cooperative, and he's writing away. And I said, ‘Why don't you tell him about your good friend, the one you call your sister?' ‘Oh!' she said. ‘Evita.'