Josephine Baker (80 page)

She is exhilarated rather than exhausted by all this planning. She can't stop. She is going to build a tower of thirteen floors, a floor for each child. With two apartments on a floor. “The second apartment can be rented out for income. You will have your own floors because your sisters-in-law will cause disputes, so privacy is necessary.”

She thinks of everything. “Come on, let's go,” she says. “I want to show you that piece of land we are going to buy.”

There are good days and bad days. When she wants to talk privately, she asks me to come to her bedroom. There she opens a big armoire—she travels with the key—and shows me files. “I have kept a file on each child. You will not believe it, but as they grow up, they develop the characteristics and faults of their race. Look at Akio. Like the Japanese, he'll smile at you and knife you in the back. And Luis, have you noticed what a beautiful black boy he is? He will drive the girls crazy, and in the end, he will fall in love with one who drags him around by the nose.”

She was like a mad scientist documenting lab specimens, a little frightening, and certainly racist.

But other times, we were almost like an ordinary family. She would be happy with her children. One night I took everyone—including Rama—to a restaurant called The Pirate. Preparing to go was like
getting ready for a big wedding, people washing in the bathroom full of Josephine's wigs hanging like dead birds after a shooting spree, and the suffocating smell of Madame Rochas (always perfume, never cologne) seeping from the large crystal bottles with the initials J.B. in gold.

Josephine was dressed in tight white pants, a pretty shirt, and she looked young and proud as we made our entrance into the restaurant. She was greeted by flashbulbs and applause, the orchestra struck up “J'ai Deux Amours,” and we drank champagne and danced and laughed till morning.

Vertei Martin came from America for vacation that summer, and stayed with Margaret. When she was introduced to Josephine's brood, she was bewildered. “I had grown up with Aunt Josephine's records, I had seen the pictures of the Rainbow children, but meeting them was just strange. I thought, how can this white guy be my cousin?

“I saw Aunt Margaret in a very subservient position, the children were very cruel to her, called her la bête noire. I'll never forget her going up the hill every morning to serve those children. She used to scream about those kids, but she did it every day. It was hard to see family treat family like that.

“But Aunt Margaret found solace in Rama: Rama was clean, Rama went to school, Rama loved her mother.”

Aunt Margaret, says Vertel, “would tell me I couldn't wear red. Black people were not supposed to wear red, it was too flamboyant. She was living in the past, and so was Aunt Josephine. My whole black family in France lived in the past. I told them there had been a lot of changes in the United States, but they were afraid of changes.”

At Margaret's house, Vertel met her grandfather again. Richard had brought his French family to Monte Carlo, hoping for a reconciliation with Josephine. He came to the Villa Maryvonne, and one of my brothers of the Rainbow Tribe ran up to the house with the news. “Maman, Uncle Richard is at the gate, he would like to see you.”

Josephine turned to me. “But Jean-Claude, you know I can't see him. I adopt orphans and he
makes
orphans.”

I'm not proud of myself, I could have fought with her, but I didn't. Because Richard had many children by many women, she, the queen, was refusing to receive him, and I was the messenger who delivered the bad word. “Sorry, dear Richard,” I said, “Maman loves you, but she is too busy now.” He understood. More than I wanted him to.

Among the people Josephine did
not
turn away from her door during
that August was the seventy-eight-year-old Michel Simon. The French actor and his German lady friend paid a call, and Josephine received them in bed. She asked Akio and me to bring chairs for her guests and then go away. Intrigued, we listened at the door, and were rewarded for our nastiness. Turning to the German lady, Michel said, “Tell Josephine I still get a hard-on, tell her—”

And Josephine whispered, “
Mais out
, Michel, I have heard.” It was wonderful. Forty-eight years had passed since their first encounter—Michel was never a handsome man, he and Josephine had been called Beauty and the Beast—but their youth still burned in them.

Now Josephine accepted an invitation to go to Jerusalem for the state of Israel's twenty-fifth anniversary. I disapproved; the doctors had told her to rest. When I refused to make the trip, she was amazed. “But Jean-Claude, the whole world will be there, Pablo Casals will perform.” She took Stellina and went.

A lot of the world—the world she valued—
was
there. “Four hundred and fifty international guests,” wrote Terence Smith in
The New York Times
, “sang ‘Hello, Golda, well hello, Golda . . .' to Israel's premier at a torchlit party. . . .”

Bricktop got a wire from Josephine,
HERE I AM IN THE HOLY LAND THINKING OF YOU . . . I HAVE AS USUAL WHEN I AM HERE FOUND PEACE IN MY HEART AND MIND
.

Peace was quickly dissipated when she returned to Roquebrune. One night, she gave me permission to take the oldest children to a discothèque in Monte Carlo. They loved to dance, we went in two cars, had a good time, nobody got drunk, and at 2
A.M
., I decided we should leave. Marianne and one of the boys got into the family Fiat, I took Rama and the others with me. After we dropped Rama, we went home and crept into the house so we would not disturb Josephine or Stellina.

I had just turned out my light when a fury burst through my door. Josephine was screaming, “Where is Marianne? Where is your sister?” (She always brandished the words brother and sister like weapons against us.) Now she continued to yell: “You broke my trust, get up, we are going to go find her!” She was in nightgown and bare feet.

“Mother,” I said, “this is not good for your health—”

“Forget my health! You are the one who is killing me!”

She sat beside me as we took the little road behind the house to go to Margaret's. There, Rama corroborated my story that Marianne had
been right behind us. By the time we got back to the villa, Marianne was in bed.

Josephine went to her bedroom and I to mine. Again, I was in shock. It was impossible to live here in any normal way. Next day, Josephine wrote Harry Hurford-Janes: “Marianne is still impossible, I have suggested she go to Jo Bouillon.”

Still, we made plans for our trip to America. I was going to be the master of ceremonies, and sing in Josephine's act, so I must have a tuxedo to match each of her dresses. “Go to Pierre Cardin,” she said, “but tell him he should give you a big discount.”

I went to Berlin to wind up my business there. Soon I would be off to America as Josephine's nurse, secretary, son, agent, buffer between her and the world—not to mention spokesperson for the Rainbow Tribe. My second mother and I would next meet in Paris, where she was to have costume fittings.

In the station waiting for the train to take her to the city, she told a young American reporter that racism was alive in France. At Les Milandes, she said, people had wanted her gone from the neighborhood “because they could not accept a black woman living in a castle.”

The reporter, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., now a distinguished professor at Harvard, was then twenty-two years old, and working for
Time
magazine. He asked Josephine if she had ever felt guilty for having left the United States, for “not being there to participate, particularly during the civil rights era.”

She said she'd often thought about that question, “about running away from the problem. At first I wondered if it was cowardice, wondered whether I should have stayed to fight. But I couldn't have done anything. I would have been thwarted . . . I probably would have been killed.”

In Paris, she stayed at Marie Spiers's apartment, and went for her fittings to the costume house of Raymonde and Catherine. “She had asked for black fox from Revillon, though we could have used dyed rabbit and got the same effect onstage,” Catherine says. “But that was not good enough for Josephine. As soon as she had a generous producer, she would demand splendor.

“We made her a corset dyed in the color of her skin, it gave the impression that she was naked, and on top of that she wore a body stocking of nylon tulle, very strong, and again the color of her skin,
embroidered where it had to be to reinforce the illusion of that fabulous body. (Marlene Dietrich did the same.) The wigs and feathers came from Madame Février, the shoes—size 7—from Capobianco, the money to pay for all of it from the embassy of Morocco, the embassy of Sweden, the Red Cross. She could always get somebody to pay.

“She was what she was. She knew how to profit from everything, from everyone who loved her.”

The night before we left Paris, we—Josephine, Marie, my sister Marie Jo, and I—went to Chez Michou, a famous transvestite club, for dinner. (Michou had started in the female impersonator business by transforming himself into Brigitte Bardot, but he didn't need to put on drag anymore, he was the boss. “I'm the greatest impresario in the world,” he likes to say, “who else can present Josephine Baker, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli in one show?”)

Next morning, I was at Marie's place with two taxis, to pick up Josephine and her luggage. We were on our way to America to make three million dollars.

Since we had some time before our plane left, Josephine led me to Orly's duty-free shops. She was like a child in front of the perfumes, scarves, belts, the fake jewelry. Catching her excitement, I offered to buy her pearls and rubies. “Look at that one, and that one and that one!”

She cooled me down. “Too big, too flashy. If we choose simple ones, they will pass for real.”

I bought her a handful of glass diamonds and emeralds, and learned a lesson. Thanks to her legendary past, she could lend even phony jewels credibility; other women, seeing them on her, would feel admiration and desire.

Air France always treated Josephine not as a VIP but as a marvelous old aunt. We were baby-sat by the flight attendants, and it was like Brazil all over again. With her feet off the ground, Josephine became another person. “
Mon
Jean-Claude, I'm happy you're with me,” she said, “and
that you will be discovering America. It is a great country with great people.” I couldn't believe my ears, I had thought she hated the United States, and here she was sounding like a lovesick girl.

Strictly speaking, we didn't go straight to America, we went to Cuernavaca, where Josephine's friend Bob Brady had been living since 1961. “When you wake up in the morning,” she said, “a servant will be at your bedside with fresh-squeezed juice on a silver tray.”

Bob Brady was a painter and tapestry designer; his house was splendid and simple at once, but Josephine found it hard to breathe in the high altitude. We got her an oxygen tank.

No sooner had we arrived than Stephen Papich flew down from Los Angeles. He was the one who had managed to get her booked into the Ahmanson Theatre. She was to open in two weeks, but the tickets were not moving, and Stephen wanted to discuss ways in which she might help save the show.

He needn't have wasted his breath. “It's not my problem,” she said of the poor advance sales, and though her contract promised her eighty-five hundred dollars per performance, she now wanted ten thousand dollars, and twenty thousand dollars on a matinee day. This ensured that her producers would go broke.

Being determined not to go broke herself, however, she took a step she thought would guarantee her future. In Mexico, she married Bob Brady. Not formally. Often, she gave herself absolution without the interference of a priest; why not marry the same way? It was Brady, a handsome homosexual (Josephine believed he was also very wealthy), who is said to have suggested the union. The idea suited Josephine. No sex, but plenty of money, at a time when she didn't want the one, and craved the other.

“You are my good husband in spirit . . . without any ties,” she told Brady. “It would not work otherwise because I am a nomad from the desert . . . it will be a pure marriage without sex because sex spoils everything.” She suggested exchanging their vows “before God, and not man—in church Sunday morning alone. . . . No one must know about this . . . even we . . . must not speak about it again.”

We did indeed go to church that Sunday morning. The Mass was celebrated by Sergio Mendez Arceo, known as “The Red Bishop.” (He was a friend of Fidel Castro, and brought animals and mariachi bands into the cathedral to make the farmers feel at home.) After the service, Josephine bawled him out. “I talked about you with the Holy Father,”
she said. “He wants you to stop all that nastiness.” The bishop just smiled and gave her his blessing, as she knelt to kiss his ring.