Josephine Baker (25 page)

On opening night, all worked perfectly. “You could have heard a fly in that room,” said Suzy Solidor, “when Josephine, reflected in the mirrors and the lights, stood up and danced a sensational Charleston. Mirrors multiplied the sight of her sublime body. All around us, we had thousands of Josephines, reflections and shadows, dancing.”

E. E. Thompson's group was supposed to play for the number, but band member Bert Marshall later confessed they hadn't blown a lick. “If you were black in Paris, they thought you were great even if you were terrible. . . . The band was so lousy that when we went onstage . . . the pit orchestra played for us and we just mimed to it.”

Following the mirror number came a parody of Josephine with the black actor, Benglia, got up to look like her. He wore a short grass skirt, and was partnered by the comic Dorville. (The year before, Benglia had caused a sensation at the Folies by dancing with a white girl. J. A. Rogers, visiting Paris for the
Amsterdam News
, reported that this sight—“of a magnificent Senegalese Negro nude, save for a loin cloth, dancing with an equally striking white woman, similarly dressed”—had caused “the crackers who are here in great numbers to gnash their teeth with rage. . . . In the dance, the woman sat on his knee and caressed him. It sure made the Mason-Dixon folks mad. . . .”)

“Monsieur Derval couldn't do enough for his star,” said Josephine. “He told me to buy anything I pleased and charge it to him. I spent hours at the dressmaker's. . . . I was manicured, pedicured. . . . ‘Perfect,' I murmured, inspecting myself in the mirror. What a revenge for an ugly duckling!”

Other men were as openhanded as M. Derval. “M. Donnet gave me
a cabriolet . . . totally upholstered in snakeskin. A dream of snakeskin, an indigestion of snakeskin.”

Once she had opened in the Folies, Josephine again began moonlighting, working two and three jobs. In the afternoons, she went to Le Jardin des Acacias, a club that featured tea dancing, and there she performed for gigolos and lonely ladies. At night, after the Folies, she entertained in a cabaret called L'Abbaye de Theleme, though she found it hard to dance “between tables in the midst of wild people who devour you with their eyes. After midnight, everybody is wild in Montmartre.”

She put in eighteen-hour days, and the stories she told depended on her mood at any given moment. Though she had remade her body through exercise, she denied being athletic. “I don't train, I never rehearse, I am no machine.”

She said, “I want neither to whiten myself nor to blacken myself,” though she spent hours bleaching her skin.

“Joe wanted at any price to become white,” said dancer Harry Watkins. “She would fill her bathtub with goat's milk, Eau de Javel (which is like Clorox), lemon, honey, and hot water, then plunge into it. In the process, she would burn her pussy.”

Observing his star growing paler before his eyes, Paul Derval screamed, but all he got for his trouble was a scratchy throat. Josephine delighted in torturing the boss. “How many times,” he asked rhetorically, “did the conductor stand, baton poised, at the second when she should have made her entrance, while the stage manager yelled up the stairs, ‘What the hell is she doing?'

“ ‘Dressing!'

“ ‘What do you mean, dressing? She doesn't wear a stitch in this scene!' ”

At that time, a man named Marcel Ballot was her favorite lover and “protector.” Young and good-looking, he made cars, and he moved Josephine away from the Parc Monceau to number 77 Champs-Élysées. “He set me up in an apartment I called my marble palace. . . . In the middle of the apartment there was a marble swimming pool which took two months to build. It cost a fortune, this pool.” Josephine advised everyone to swim every day. “Animals who live on the ground will never be as elegant as fishes.”

The “marble palace” had interiors by Paul Poiret, the Venetian bed “of an ancient doge,” Oriental tapestries. Lalique was commissioned to
create sculptures of Josephine, one as tall as she. When Marcel Ballot came to visit, she said, “He always brought a surprise: white mice with tiny pink noses, parrots who ate the curtains, and finally a miniature monkey who loved to snuggle against my shoulder.”

The story had a sad ending: Marcel died of appendicitis, and his death left Josephine lonely, but strange as it may sound, I think she was destined to be lonely in Paris. It wasn't that anyone was unkind to her, but during those first years abroad, she was always on the qui vive, feeling she had to pass tests in how to speak, how to eat, how to dress. Love seemed less of a problem, but when love was over, the loneliness came again.

Even the heady sensation of being the center of attention at parties began to pall. “People chattered or else crushed to stare at me: I was intimidated.” She remembered behaving “nastily,” drinking champagne and refusing to come into a garden where everyone was waiting for her. “I ran away after midnight, like Cinderella. . . . I got the reputation of being insufferable, surly.”

Two months after she opened at the Folies-Bergère, Josephine's domination of the revue scene was threatened by Florence Mills's arrival as one of the stars—Johnny Hudgins was the other—of Lew Leslie's
Blackbirds of 1926; From Dixie to Paris
. Since the success in Europe of
Chocolate Kiddies
and
La Revue Nègre
, producers like Leslie had found a new market, and so had black American performers.

Edith Wilson, who sang jazz and blues in
Blackbirds
, was one of those performers. “Rhythm,” she said. “That was it. Over there in Europe they didn't have that rhythm. . . . We had some boys that did all kinds of steps—taps, kicks, and all sorts of things. . . . The dancing always stopped the show. This was the show the Prince of Wales used to come to all the time. . . . I used to do a number onstage and he'd do it right along with me. He'd be in the box—they had curtains you could draw so you couldn't see in from the side—and he'd be dancing right along with the show. He used to have himself a ball!”

Blackbirds
opened at the Théâtre-Restaurant des Ambassadeurs (in a roofed-over garden, with tables around the stage on three sides). The first night, a gala special was scheduled for 12
A.M
., so the working show people of Paris could come. Josephine drifted in half an hour late, accompanied by eight white men in tails.

“We had to hold the curtain for her,” Johnny Hudgins said. “She was
wearing this white ermine floor-length coat, and a black velvet evening gown with a hood around her face, it made her look almost white. She got the best table, right down front, it was decorated with a model of a ship lighted by hundreds of little bulbs.”

After the performance, Josephine went backstage. Florence Mills's dressing room was at the end of a corridor, Johnny's close by. He had opened his door and was waiting. Josephine glanced in but didn't stop, she went straight to Florence. “Ain't never asked for me,” Johnny said, fifty years later. “To this day, it hurts my heart.”

Back in St. Louis, the Martin family's hearts were hurting too. They hadn't heard a word from Josephine since she'd gone abroad. Then, “about six months after she left,” her brother Richard said, “she wrote and told us she was in France and everything was going very good. Then she started sending money. Three hundred dollars a month for the next ten years. She would write, but she wouldn't send pictures, only money. Now we knew about her success, one newspaper said she was the richest Negro woman in the world. The family was proud. She bought a baby grand piano for my little sister, paid fifteen hundred dollars for it. She was a very good daughter and sister.”

She could also be a very good friend. She loved Florence Mills, even when reviews comparing the two of them were not always favorable to her. “You take a coconut with its fiber, its crust, its lumps,” said one critic, “and then you take an ivory ball with its paleness, its smoothness, its caress for the eyes. That's the difference between Josephine Baker and Florence Mills. One is a rat who kicks, with so much spirit! The other is an island bird.”

A rat! A lumpy coconut! But it was only one man's opinion; Paris remained loyal to its lady of the bananas. And now Josephine had a playmate from home. Bessie de Saussure had abandoned the Club Basha (“Bechet was gone, so the business had dropped”) and shown up in Paris. “When we came to Europe,” she told me, “we didn't look at black men, and the black men didn't look at us anymore. We all went with the white people. You know, darling, I was too white to be black, and too black to be white. That was the problem of my life, and I must have had a lot of talent to have survived it.”

Bessie stayed at Josephine's apartment, and the two tooled around the city “looking at babies. We wanted children so bad, and we went to doctor after doctor, but if something's wrong, you can't have a baby.
We'd say one day we're going to adopt some. Joe did, too. Believe me, she couldn't stop.

“One afternoon, we went to a club called Joe Zelli's Royal Box in Montmartre. They had gigolos there, and we danced with them. Zelli's is where Josephine met Pepito.”

The French people wanted to learn the Charleston, the American girls wanted to learn the tango. “So we hired Pepito to give us private lessons. We liked him and Josephine invited him to escort us to a chic party given by some Rothschilds. Pepito said he did not have tails, so we gave him money to buy them. When we went to pick him up for the party, Joe and I looked at each other. This was not a new tailcoat, it was an old one, very worn. We said nothing, but we knew he had taken us for a ride.”

Ride or not, Josephine was smitten. “And that's how it started,” Bessie said.

It's easy to forget how young they were. Josephine had just turned twenty around the time Pepito came into her life.

His real name was Giuseppe Abatino, he was born November 10, 1898, the fourth and last child of Sicilian parents. His father was an infantry colonel, his mother a well-educated woman whose family had some means. Pepito spoke not only Italian but good French, English, and German, and Josephine thought he looked like her idol, Adolphe Menjou, with “eyes at once gay and serious behind his monocle, his mouth ironic but tender.” He had served as a second lieutenant in the Italian army, he had worked in Rome as a minor bureaucrat, and he was in Paris on holiday, visiting his cousin Zito, a gifted caricaturist and a friend of Josephine's.

When, after this vacation, he went home, Josephine pined. “Why couldn't I fall in love with an
orphan
?”

She threw herself into her work, and M. Derval complimented her on
the new vigor of the banana dance. “It's good for an artist to suffer,” he said.

Then, one night, Pepito reappeared. “I can't live without you, you're looking at your new manager.”

She thought it was a terrific idea. “At last I had someone to help me fight my battles.”

Opinions of the liaison varied. “Josephine died a lady who knew about books and paintings,” Bricktop said. “Pepito taught her everything. And the first thing he taught her was that she shouldn't talk to me. Because the first time she came in my place with him, I said, ‘Joe, what are you doing with that guy? He can't even buy a beer.' ”

According to Christina Scotto, Pepito's sister, when Pepito met Josephine, “she was a little savage. She did not know how to behave at table, she ate with her hands.” (Signora Scotto also confided to a friend that “in bed with Josephine, you can't promise, you have to deliver.”)

Arthur Briggs, a black Grenada-born trumpet player, told me flatly that Pepito was “no good. He'd go to tea dances and dance with ladies and they'd tip him between fifty and one hundred francs. In those days, you could live two weeks on one hundred francs. We all knew what Pepito was, but Josephine fell in love with him, it was just one of those things.”

A lady who didn't want to be identified except as “Mrs. G.,” and who was well acquainted with Pepito, recalled that he dressed “with style, but in a showy way, bright colors, pomade, diamond rings. He spoke French with an Italian accent, and he most certainly came to Paris to seek his fortune by making love to aristocratic grandes dames.

“I do not know what kind of an interest he had in Josephine at first, whether romantic, physical, or material. In any case, he endeavored to educate her, and to teach her proper manners. This was not easy, since she lived by whims. She could be jealous, tender, passionate. She would scratch him, bite him, and beg forgiveness on her knees.

“Pepito managed her affairs in a sensible manner. He always appeared calm, and checked the outbursts of his protégée. They complemented each other.”

Barely five foot six inches tall in his elevator shoes, Pepito understood the need for illusion. He hired a real countess, a down-on-her-luck blueblood, to give Josephine lessons in how to speak, how to behave at table (she drank from a finger bowl the first time one was set before her).