Josephine Baker (28 page)

In fact, says Simenon, Josephine personifies humor “from her slyly slicked-down hair to her colt-like legs whose curves are blurred by perpetual motion. . . . Everyone everywhere rushes to see her. . . . When she is not the focus of thousands of opera glasses, she is the object of naked eyes or quivering fingers. How could she not laugh? . . . She shakes her pretty breasts, which are not large but softly contoured, and she explodes . . . but it is her eyes that laugh most.”

He speaks of her upcoming tour. “They will talk about that
croupe
in Berlin, in Vienna, in Moscow. The incense of desire spreads. Three million, ten million, fifty, and when we get to a billion . . . ! All of this because of that
croupe
which laughs, in a woman who laughs . . . and who possesses at the same time a most voluptuous body, no matter how it is adorned—gold lamé, bananas, or pale-pink plumes.”

Laughing
croupe
safely hidden under a traveling suit, the artist and her manager leave for Vienna with all the recordings (some twenty-four songs, including “Dinah” and “I Want to Yodel”) that she has made since 1926. They also take along the Six Baker Boys (a white band), Pepito's mother, his cousin Zito, a secretary, a chauffeur, a maid, a typewriter, two dogs, 196 pairs of shoes, assorted dresses and furs, 64 kilos of face powder, and 30,000 publicity shots for the fans. It is the end of January 1928.

I had no talent,” she said, looking back a long time after. “My body just did what the music told me to do.”

As if that were not a gift. But in 1928, she no longer valued her genius for jazz dancing, she wanted to be respected as an actress, play Marie-Antoinette, do something as important as Lindbergh had done—“He was a real hero, what was a dancer draped in bananas beside him?” She was angry with the fickle French, with the critic who had said it would take a cyclone “to make Mademoiselle Baker stop wiggling in the same old way.”

And though she herself was weary of wiggling, how could she stop, when huge sums were being offered her to continue? Indeed, on the first step of this “world tour” (in two years, it would cover twenty-five countries), when she and Pepito arrived at the Vienna train station they were met by journalists who told them of wild excitement in the city. “I found the capital flooded with leaflets denouncing me as the ‘black devil.' ”

Armed guards escorted her from the train to her hotel. (A week earlier, students had thrown tear-gas bombs in a theater playing the jazz opera
Jonny Spielt Auf
, because a black character bragged about his conquests of white women.) A petition to ban Josephine's “brazen-faced heathen dances” was circulating, and there ensued a debate in Parliament led by a man who said citizens were being asked “to pay 100,000 shillings to see nudity when 100,000 workmen are walking the streets of Vienna searching for employment and food.”

None of this was exactly what it seemed to be. In the wake of World War I, Austria-Hungary's last emperor had been banished, his empire dismantled; a socialist government now ruled Austria, with workers and farmers—most of them fearful of a Marxist revolution—embracing the notion of union with Germany. The seeds of Hitler's idea that blacks were inferior to Aryans—in
Mein Kampf
, he called them “half-apes”—had found fertile ground.

Josephine was supposed to have opened at the Ronacher theater, but the city council said no. Apparently unconcerned, she traveled to the Alpine pass of Semmering, where she played in the snow and indulged in a bit of tea dancing because “I don't want to put on weight.”

When she returned to the city, Catholic priests were still preaching against her. Ostentatiously, she began attending services every day, giving alms to the poor outside the church doors. But the authorities remained unconvinced of her fitness to entertain a population as moral as the Viennese; she still had to appear before a committee that would judge her act. (Pavlova had been dancing in the city, and offered her assessment of jazz dancers: “Do they need technique? No. Grace? No. Talent? Very little.”) Diaghilev, who was also in Vienna, offered Josephine advice: She should audition by dancing on toe.

She did, and was granted a work permit. Meanwhile, Pepito had managed to book her into the Johann Strauss Theater, and on March 1, she opened. Across the street, the bells of St. Paul's clanged out to warn those sinners clutching tickets in their hands, as policemen escorted the star through the stage door. “An army of policemen,” she said, “impassive and zealous, like a maître d'. They were expecting the revelation of the devil.”

Pepito thought they were expecting something else. “They expect you to appear stark naked.”

She came on in a long gown, buttoned to the neck, to a “second of
total silence and surprise,” and began to sing a blues song called “Pretty Little Baby.” The applause that followed was wild; it seemed the theater would crumble. “Then I started to dance, the way I have always danced.”

Next morning, a rude dose of reality.
Der Tag
compared her to Jezebel. Josephine laughed it off. The people who counted were those who bought tickets, and every night for a month, the sold-out theater had to turn some of them away. “What I like about success,” she said, “is not so much the astonishment, but the love in it.”

There were press conferences—one in the Grand Hotel so filled with flowers that she remembered the smell of white lilacs and mimosa long after she forgot how hard it had been to answer questions posed in a foreign language.

But there was a scene she would
not
forget. On a night when she came out of the Pavillon Cabaret, where she had been moonlighting, a young man ran up to her, pulled out a gun, and shot himself, falling dead at her feet. He was later identified as a Yugoslav singer named Gabor, but it couldn't be established whether he had died of love for Josephine or because he couldn't get a job in the theater. “I was haunted by the look in that young man's eyes,” she said.

Still, the show went on. “The day I miss a performance will be the day I'm put in my grave.” Those who couldn't get tickets to see her onstage could catch her driving through the streets of Vienna in a cart pulled by an ostrich. (A wit observed that ostriches had been more than kind to Josephine, since so many feathers had been plucked from their tails to decorate hers.)

In Prague, more mobs. Gathered to greet her at the railroad station, they stampeded, smashing windows, and she took refuge on top of a limousine. In the theater, she had never feared a crowd (“It is a duel between them and me . . . my heart becomes hard as my fist, it's a matter of winning”) but she was afraid of this crowd, “its curiosity, its affection. . . . I was holding Pepito and . . . he disappeared, swept away and I was alone among hundreds of raised arms waving hats. . . . I was like a cork floating on the water.”

It was the same in Budapest; she leaped onto an ox cart to get away from the citizens massed to welcome her. “They tore my dress apart, they wanted to see me naked.”

And again she had to audition for government officials. “The once
gay Hungarian capital is going through a prudish phase,” said a press report. But Josephine, “wearing a few feathers, with one mad Charleston won a verdict in her favor.”

Still, there were obstacles. Christian Nationalists, led by a man named Schayer, requested that the “indecent black devil” be prevented from exhibiting herself. In a burst of brilliance, Pepito invited Herr Schayer to monitor each performance, for which he would be paid 4,400 francs a night. After that, for a full month, Josephine was protected by her former adversary.

She loved Budapest, she loved the violins, and the sunset on the Danube. As homage to the country, she played a sketch in which she spoke Hungarian.

Then came a mishap which, for all her cleverness, she was not able to avoid. It began with a poetry-writing cavalry officer, Andrew Czlovoydi, whose attentions to her enraged Pepito and led to a duel. The men met at dawn in St. Stephen's Cemetery. Josephine, according to one report, “devoted herself to screaming,” but after Pepito was nicked in the shoulder, everyone agreed that honor had been satisfied. The papers printed mocking headlines:
REPUTED HUSBAND AND OFFICER FIGHT OVER HARLEM SINGER. BATTLE CALLED OFF WHEN COUNT GETS SCRATCH
.

They sometimes doubled back to hit a good date again, never certain what lay in wait. In Zagreb, the show closed after people hurled missiles and screamed, “Long live Croatian culture!”

Holland was more restful. “The Dutch,” Josephine said, “eat well, laugh a little and have very good hearts. . . . There are wonderful cheeses, tulips, chocolate. Can you imagine, I danced the Charleston in yellow wooden shoes?”

“Mrs. G.” remembered coming back to Josephine's dressing room in Amsterdam. “The director of the theater walked in to discuss a matter of lighting. . . . He was a big solid Dutchman, rather solemn. . . . Their conversation moved . . . from
andante
to
furioso
. . . . It may be that the composure of the Dutchman roused the dark forces asleep in the volatile Josephine. . . . All hell let loose. A masterful slap landed on the plump pink cheek of the Dutchman. She finished off the job by making a terrifying face at him and sticking out the longest pink tongue. . . . Pepito managed to appease her wrath and convince her to go onstage.

“I was even more flabbergasted when half an hour later she came back beaming from her success and jumped to give a kiss to the very same director, who remained as stupefied as before.”

Scandinavia, Josephine reported, was “very clean, very correct, though there was one unpleasantness.” At the Swedish border, a guard told her she must abandon her two dogs. “Captain,” she said, “I have never abandoned anybody, and certainly not a dog. My dogs come with me, or I don't enter your country.”

A minister from the health department was called, and passports issued for the dogs, on condition that they never leave Josephine's room. She was up at five one morning, walking them in the street, when a policeman chased her back to her hotel. A few days before, the dog named Phyllis had given birth to two puppies, and all four animals were barking.

Josephine produced two dog passports. “What about these others?” asked the policeman. “Oh,” said Josephine, “they're not dogs yet, they're only samples, and I hope you don't want me to put them back where they came from.”

In Oslo, she marveled. “It is so strange, you enter the theater and it is still daylight, you come out and it is still daylight. I went fishing under the midnight sun.”

In Stockholm, she played before the king. “But if you asked me how he looked, I couldn't tell you. When I dance, I dance, I don't look at anyone, not even a king.”

This is vintage Josephine; she talks of playing for the king, but doesn't mention that Crown Prince Gustav-Adolf, then a young man of twenty-eight, was also present. I have heard how, after seeing her perform, the crown prince invited Josephine to the palace, and led her through a secret door into a room with a four-poster bed covered in precious furs. She lay down, naked, and the prince summoned a servant who came in with a silver tray heaped with jewels, and one by one, the prince covered Josephine's body with diamonds, emeralds, rubies. Every time I go to Stockholm, someone tells me this story; it is by now part of the country's folklore.

I'm laughing, because there's an old African saying: “To love the king is not bad, but a king who loves you is better.”

It was in Copenhagen that she told an American reporter she was homesick for New York. “I wish I could fly over right now and see the lights of Broadway.” But even if she went back to America, she would keep her home in Paris. “Anyway, I would have to return to Paris for new clothes.”

Doesn't everybody?

Josephine says she is tired—“When I left Paris, I weighed 137 pounds, now I weigh 115, and I don't drink or smoke”—and she is hoping to get some rest in Berlin.

There is to be no rest for her in Berlin. She hires little black boys to hand out flyers proclaiming that she is the world's favorite actress. She studies German songs, and she opens a new Chez Joséphine at number 53 Behrenstrasse. In Paris, she says, there is no way to live anymore. “There is no money left.”

There isn't that much money in Berlin, either. My friend Barney Josephson, who owned the New York club Café Society, was staying at the Adlon Hotel. He remembered the rates changed every day, as the value of the mark fell. “It was terrible on Friedrichstrasse, you would have twenty girls on each corner fighting for who would get the next client, people begging in front of the Adlon for food.”

The American actress Louise Brooks, in Berlin to play Lulu for a movie version of playwright Frank Wedekind's
Pandora's Box
, also observed the number of women selling their bodies on the streets. “Sex was the business of the town,” she said. She didn't blame economic conditions, but human nature. “Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. When Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: ‘They rage there as in a ménagerie when the meat appears at the cage.' ”