Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (56 page)

Sem’s caricature showed her in elegant evening dress but with a monkey tail swinging from her bottom and a fly buzzing obscenely around its tip. In the face of such hatefulness it was no wonder that Josephine still chased after any beauty fad that promised to magic away the darkness of her skin, rubbing herself with lemon juice, and bathing in a mix of goat’s milk and bleach that, according to her fellow dancer Harry Watkins, ‘burn[ed] her pussy’ every time.
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It was no wonder, too, that she began to yearn for a lover, a Parisian Prince Charming who would protect her from condescension and abuse.

For a few weeks she believed she’d found him in a rich young playboy called Marcel, who promised her both love and luxury. He installed her in a large apartment on the Champs-Elysées with an interior designed by Poiret, a marble swimming pool and a double bed that had once been slept in by a Venetian Doge. However, when Josephine began to hint at marriage, even to imagine herself having a baby with Marcel, his interest suddenly waned. With another of her lovers, Georges Simenon, she suffered a similar disappointment. Simenon (not yet famous as a crime writer) had offered to help Josephine with her unwieldy correspondence and she had fallen in love with him, drawn by the emotional sensitivity that lay beneath his gangsterish façade. Their affair lasted long enough for her to hope that Simenon might leave his wife for her, but while Simenon liked to boast that Josephine was the only woman in Paris who could match his sexual energy, he never considered her marriage material.

To Frisco, Josephine’s desire to be loved was very affecting. He observed how childishly happy she could be made by a thoughtful present or a simple romantic declaration. Yet no woman could take as many lovers as she did without acquiring a reputation, especially if she was black and if she danced as Josephine danced. There was no doubt, too, that many of the men who had affairs with her exaggerated her sexuality to enhance their own. A composer she met in Berlin claimed she was ‘a beast for sex, looking for the perfect penis’,
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while an Austrian actor swore to the nightly queues of men outside her bedroom, all waiting to service her. It was even rumoured that some nights she worked in a bordello, simply to satisfy her remarkable appetite.

When Hemingway described dancing with Josephine at the Jockey Club in Montparnasse, it was as though he had bagged some fabulous prey. She was ‘the most sensational woman anybody ever saw … Tall, coffee skin … legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles … she was wearing a coat of black fur, her breasts handling the fur like it was silk’. Initially she had been dancing with a British officer, but when Hemingway cut in he boasted that ‘she slid off him and onto me’ and ‘everything under that fur instantly communicated with me’.
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Josephine had, in fact, become part of the city’s itinerary: wealthy American students in Paris were said to follow a well-beaten path, starting with Maxim’s, going on to Le Bal Tabarin to watch the cancan girls and ending up ‘wherever Mlle Bakaire was holding forth.’
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And Mlle Bakaire was becoming ubiquitous. Despite Josephine’s love affairs and her earnest attempts to penetrate Parisian society, she was now working an average of ten hours a day. She began at a
thé dansant
club called the Acacia, which had been recently taken over by the small, stout American socialite, Elsa Maxwell.
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Maxwell prided herself on setting trends, claiming to have been the first to ‘discover’ Bricktop in Paris, and to have invented the scavenger hunts that had the youthful elite of London and New York racing through the streets in furious, nightly competition for clues. Now, in Paris, she focused her attention on women her own age, who were no longer young or slender enough to feel comfortable in fashionable nightclubs. The Acacia offered ‘taxi’ partners for hire, willing young men who would steer her clientele gallantly around the dance floor, and a special opportunity to watch celebrity dancers like Josephine away from the usual evening crush.

From the Acacia, Josephine moved on to the Folies, and then to a series of clubs and cabarets, where she danced from midnight until dawn. It was an exhausting regime but as she confided to the young writer Marcel Sauvage, it was only when she was performing that she felt sure of being loved. Sauvage had initially come into Josephine’s life to help her write a short biographical preface to
Le Tumulte Noir,
a collection of lithographs by Paul Colin, including several of Josephine herself. He had stayed on, however, when he realized how many stories she had to tell, and what kind of market there would be for a full-length memoir of her life.

During the months on which Marcel collaborated with Josephine on this book he came to know her better than anyone else in Paris. She regarded him as her confessor and concealed little. Often, when he arrived at her apartment, she was wandering around naked (she always felt most comfortable without clothes). She made no attempt to clear up the muddle of newspapers, clothes, records and expensive objets d’art that lay in heaps around her, nor to regulate the noise. This, Marcel recalled, was constant: the parrot squawking, Albert the pig grunting, music playing from a gramophone and, at frequent intervals, Josephine chattering on the telephone in her mix of American and pidgin French.

When Marcel had first suggested to his publishers that he should write Josephine’s memoirs they thought he was joking; in 1926, it was only the distinguished and the elderly who were regarded as appropriate subjects. But Josephine wasn’t just a dancer, Marcel argued, she was ‘a phenomenon’
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– everything about her life would be of interest to the public – and in writing his book he prefigured the formula of the modern celebrity memoir. Alongside the story of Josephine’s life he added the kind of random facts that he knew would fascinate her fans – lists of her most extraordinary presents and famous admirers; tips on beauty and lifestyle; even the recipe for her favourite meal, corned beef hash and hot cakes with syrup. Marcel also knew better than to challenge the fantasy logic of her recollections: he was her storyteller, not her historian and uncritically he wrote down everything Josephine invented for him, from her ‘Romeo and Juliet’ parents, who’d had to run away from their families in order to marry, to her own instant Cinderella transformation from starveling child to beautiful star. He allowed her to contradict herself at will. At one point in the memoir she boasted of her dedication to her art – ‘To live is to dance, I would love to die breathless, exhausted at the end of a dance’ – while at another she berated the ‘artificial life’ into which her talent had forced her, promising that some day she would turn her back on the ‘sad choices’ she had made and retire to the country: ‘I’ll marry simply,’ she declared. ‘I’ll have children and lots of animals. I love them; I want to live in peace among children and animals.’
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This notion bore little relation to Josephine’s actual life, however. Even as she painted this picture of imagined, saintly calm she was busy forming ambitious plans for her career, and doing so with the help of her latest lover, a man who styled himself Count Pepito de Abatino. She’d met Pepito through his cousin Zito, an artist who drew caricatures at Zelli’s bar. Somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, he was a thin, sallow Sicilian, yet to Josephine’s uncritical eyes he was the very image of an Italian count: his high forehead framed by dark, slicked-back hair; his expression given an air of intellectual dash by the monocle he affected. From a certain angle, Pepito reminded her of the film actor Adolphe Menjou (the handsome support to Rudolf Valentino in
The Sheik
). And his manners, too, seemed as polished as any movie star’s as he gazed at her through his monocle as if she were an object of rare beauty, telling her she was the greatest dancer he had ever seen, writing her elaborate love letters and pampering her with exquisite care.

In reality Pepito’s breeding was as much an accessory as the yellow and white spats he favoured. He’d invented his title after he abandoned his modest trade as a stonemason to make a new life for himself as a dance partner and gigolo. Josephine’s friends saw through his façade. Bricktop dismissed him as a ‘bum’ and a ‘fraud’,
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distrusting his over-perfumed pomade, his flashy rings and bright clothes, and assuming that his intentions were simply to fleece Josephine for money. However, Josephine herself wasn’t too concerned about the truth of Pepito’s pretensions; what mattered to her were his promises to advance her career.

It was precisely because Pepito was a self-made creation that he was able to understand and help her as he did. Unlike all the other Pygmalion figures in Josephine’s life he knew, from experience, how precarious her transformation felt. She might look like a star, even act like a star, but she didn’t yet have the confidence of one and she wanted guidance in refining the way she talked and conducted herself.

Peptio was ready to offer her that guidance, and even more ready to help Josephine expand the range of her performing options. She was growing tired of the Charleston and the ‘banana dance’ and impatient to progress in her ambition to become a singer like Mistinguett. So far, however, none of her producers had made good on their promises to give her voice a trial and it was Pepito who sat Josephine down and told her she needed to make her own way. She needed to hire herself a singing teacher and she needed to find herself an independent platform.

It was possibly not Pepito who engineered Josephine’s debut appearance on record, singing a sentimental little number called ‘Who’. The result was poor; she was accompanied by a mediocre band and her small soprano voice sounded weak and untrained. But it was he who organized Josephine into opening her own nightclub, where she could be fully in control of her material and image. Backed with cash from one of her admirers (a Dr Gaston Prieur who’d grown rich from colluding in medical insurance fraud) Pepito found and purchased a small premises on rue Fontaine, close to the heart of Montmartre, and on 14 December 1926, Chez Joséphine opened its doors to the public.

As so often in her career, Josephine’s progress advanced on the wreckage of other people’s expectations. Just a block away was the Imperial, a club that had just changed its name to Josephine Baker’s Imperial after she’d signed a year-long contract to perform there. Not only had Josephine reneged on the deal, she’d also poached many of the Imperial’s staff – and a sizable chunk of its clientele once her own club opened.

But Josephine felt justified by the superiority and originality of her project. She and Pepito had planned Chez Joséphine as a careful fusion of New and Old World styles. The menu created by their American chef offered chitlins, black-eyed peas and rooster combs alongside steak tartare and plover’s eggs, and Josephine’s own image was pitched somewhere between Harlem hostess and French diva. A report in
Vogue
described her sweeping into the club at around 1 a.m., with an entourage of some few favoured fans, her maids, chauffeur and little white dog. She wore a tulle dress with a blue snakeskin bodice and shoes to match, a diamond at her waist. Her dressing-room walls were covered with press cuttings and photographs of herself, and the dog bore the dark crimson imprint of her mouth where she’d kissed it.

Yet there was an element of homeliness mixed in with Josephine’s glamour. Trotting by her side as she progressed through the club was her new pet nanny goat (Albert the pig wasn’t allowed to appear in public, but was given free rein in the kitchen, growing monstrously fat on leftovers). As she moved between tables she used tricks she’d learned back in St Louis, singling out susceptible men; pulling their moustaches and whispering coarse endearments in their ears. When she started to sing, she mixed raw, poignant blues numbers in among her repertory of romantic French ballads.

She worked very, very hard at finessing her new skills, her own amibitions now driven by Pepito’s. He would sometimes get rough with her, his Sicilian machismo getting the better of him when he considered she was slacking in her daily practice. Once or twice he even hit her. But the regime worked. Patrons came to Chez Joséphine as early as seven or eight in the evening in order to secure a table, and they would wait patiently until the early hours of the morning, when she finally arrived to perform. The Aga Khan became a regular at the club, as did Colette, who also joined the lengthening line of older women taking a semi-maternal, semi-sexual interest in Josephine.

Colette sent affectionate little notes, written on the paper doilies she picked up from her table at the club; she called Josephine my ‘little brown daughter’, and for a while the two women were rumoured to be lovers.
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Whatever the exact status of their relationship, it was a wonderful endorsement. Colette was cherished as one of France’s leading writers and her interest helped mark Josephine as a true Parisian. In the months that followed the opening of her club Josephine felt a distinct social change; invitations began to arrive for charity balls, fêtes and galas. She was asked to open the 1927 Tour de France, and she inspired a new dish, ‘Poulet Joséphine Baker’, at the Tour d’Argent restaurant.

She was no longer the novelty jazz babe from Harlem. Under Pepito’s instruction, she continued to perfect her appearance: a vampish spit curl appeared in the dead centre of her forehead, her skin seemed to grow ever paler and she insisted on the accented ‘é’ of Joséphine whenever and wherever her name was written. When she opened in a new Folies show in April 1927, she was required to dance one retro ragamuffin number, but otherwise she was packaged in a far more classic Parisian style, her costumes including a skirt of marabou feathers and a metallic, low-cut bathing suit with rhinestone straps that followed the contours of her naked breasts. Even her trademark banana skirt was now encrusted with diamanté.