Josephine Baker (40 page)

“Sometimes,” Abtey said, “she would write along her arms, and in the palm of her hand, the things she heard. I told her this was dangerous, but she laughed. ‘Oh, nobody would think I'm a spy.' ”

Almost at once, she had become Abtey's lover, as well as his student. “She was not a crazy sex-obsessed person,” he says. “We could go one or two weeks without having sex.” At first, he worried about whether she was calm enough for intelligence work. Once, out driving, she was trying to tell him something she had heard at the Italian embassy, and she got so nervous she lost control of the car.

As 1939 wound down, she was frantically busy. She had her assignments from the Deuxième Bureau, she was filming
Fausse Alerte
, every night she played at the Casino, and every Saturday afternoon she did a radio show, singing in French and English for the soldiers at the front.

Then it was Christmas again. Josephine had a secretary come to Beau Chêne to send records and pictures to her four thousand “godsons of war,” and to help answer mail. One letter arrived from Maurice Blech, the blond boy who had seen
La Revue Nègre
every night of its first week (the boy she had taken to bed), and she answered it. “You are the last person I was expecting to hear from,” she wrote, going on to tell about her broadcasts, her Red Cross duties (“I'm Chief of Entertainment for Aviators”), her new animals. “Two little white mice that each gave birth to five baby mice . . . they look exactly like miniature little pigs. Thank you for asking me to be godmother of your unit, I accept with joy. Unfortunately, I cannot come and visit you for the moment because our revue at the Casino will last until the end of May. After that, I think I will start again a tour of army bases. . . . I kiss you all affectionately. Your godmother who loves you.”

Jean Lion was now at the front, and Josephine had a new lover, Jean Menier, heir to a chocolate fortune. Their engagement made the front pages, though Josephine's divorce from Lion would not become final until April 1941. Menier gave her a ring, and went off join his regiment.

Early in 1940, Jean Lion was seriously wounded, and Josephine asked Albert Ribac to take her to see him. “She cried all during the trip,” Ribac says. “Both ways. She was screaming, ‘My hero!' As with all great actresses, she was fantastic, capricious, and a pain in the neck.”

On May 10, the Germans hit the Low Countries all along the western
front. The Dutch capitulated in less than a week, the Belgians held out for eighteen days, until King Leopold III ordered his troops to surrender. (In the Cartier shop on rue de la Paix, Leopold's picture was taken out of the window and English Queen Mary's put in its place.) Leopold's decision saved Belgian lives, but put British and French soldiers in jeopardy. “The thunder burst,” says Jacques Abtey. “Thunder in Belgium, thunder over the Dutch. It was the end of the funny war on the terraces of Paris cafés.”

Paris was filled with refugees fleeing before the Germans. Every night after finishing at the Casino, Josephine ran to a homeless shelter on rue du Chevaleret, and did what she could to comfort new arrivals. In times of crisis she was magnificent; petty selfishness abandoned, she made beds, bathed old people, whispered words of comfort, and kept her eyes and ears open.

Abtey had warned her that vermin—an enemy fifth column—always preceded an invading army, and she took the warning to heart. “One night,” said Dominique Gianviti, then one of Abtey's coworkers, “Josephine called us from the shelter and urgently asked us to come. Twenty minutes later, we arrive and find her washing the swollen feet of an old man. ‘Monsieur Gianviti,' says Josephine, excusing herself from the old man, ‘I regret that I'm not a policeman. There are a lot of suspicious people here. Look at that strong guy, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. He should be fighting. And there are two other young ones you should have a look at.'

“A fast examination revealed nothing special. The young men were Belgians who had escaped before the Germans.”

Abtey, knowing that worse days were coming, finally told Josephine she had to quit the Casino. “Pack your things and go to the south of France.”

She shared this advice with the Guignerys. “She came to see us and said we should get ready to move, the Germans were going to invade and occupy Paris,” Blanche Guignery remembers. “My husband was laughing, ‘But my dear Josephine,
c'est impossible
.' She asked us to come and help her move everything out of Le Beau Chêne. ‘Stones I can replace,' she said, ‘a house can be rebuilt, but my souvenirs are irreplaceable.' ”

Trucks were loaded. “Armor from the Middle Ages,” André Rivollet said. “The gold piano, Japanese ivories, Marie-Antoinette's bed, feather
pillows, furniture and linens, everything was piled into vans. Especially linens. Feminine instinct, love for whiteness, a wish for bourgeois security. She was always ecstatic about towels and sheets.” (The Guignerys, following her instructions, would send her belongings after her.) Then Josephine, carrying a cage full of parakeets, got a lift to Paris with a young man driving by. All her life, in peace or war, someone would recognize her, stop to pick her up, and take her where she wanted to go.

She stayed a few days at her apartment on avenue Bugeaud. The life of the city seemed still quite civilized. Theaters were operating—there was a comedy by Jean Cocteau at the Bouffes, and the Comédie Française was playing
Cyrano de Bergerac
—and though there were meatless days, and cakeless days, supper clubs were open. The news that French soldiers were dying in the north and the east was terrible, but also made people proud.

Josephine now transferred her business—the affairs she had been trying to conduct by herself since Pepito died—into the hands of faithful old Monsieur Bondon, who was still with Pernod. Then she went to Jean Lion's office, picked up his Packard, and left the city.

It was the first week in June. “I had told Josephine to go south,” Jacques says, “but she went southeast.” Looking for a house, she eventually reached the village of Cenac. It was château country, three hundred miles from Paris, the farmland of Périgord, where the river Dordogne runs and the earth is rich and black with truffles. The old castles hang over the river, the centuries seem to have passed without touching fields, rocks, forests.

There was even tobacco growing there, like the tobacco of Elvira's youth. She stopped in the shop of the butcher, Guinot, and asked if any of the nearby places was for rent. Madame Guinot said yes, five miles from here. You went along a tortuous little byway, took a bridge across the river, and there in the old stone village of Castelnaud-Fayrac, on top of a hill, was the château Les Mirandes. (Josephine, who couldn't pronounce “r” in the French way, decided to call it the château Les Milandes, which had been its name before the Revolution.)

Driving slowly up the hill along a dirt road, Josephine passed a wood and a little cemetery, so peaceful in the sun that for once she was not frightened by the gravestones. It was like a secret garden, almost welcoming her. She stopped in front of the castle, and Eli Mercier, twenty years old, son of farmers who had been at Les Milandes since 1912,
opened the great iron gate for her. It was the seventh of June, 1940, he says. I asked him how he could be so sure, more than fifty years after the fact. Simple, he told me. “Because on the ninth, I was going to war.”

The place belonged to a French doctor named Males. He was happy to rent it to Josephine (his American-born wife had already taken their son back to the United States), so the deal was made.

On June 3, the Germans had bombed the outskirts of Paris, damaging the Renault and Peugeot factories, and on June 14, without firing a shot, they entered the city. It was queerly still. Two-thirds of the people had fled.

“Hundreds of thousands of refugees . . . jammed the roads south to Bordeaux for a distance of 400 miles,” wrote Louis Snyder. “They used everything that could move—carts, bicycles, taxicabs, trucks, bakery vans, roadsters, even hearses. . . . German pilots in speedy Heinkels roared up and down at tree level over the roads where civilian refugees were trapped and helpless in the traffic jams. Bombs and bullets burst among the automobiles, carts, farm wagons and bicycles, catching humans and horses in a deadly melange of flame and smoke. . . .”

All this Josephine had avoided, thanks to Jacques Abtey. That was the good side of being an Honorable Correspondent.

But Les Milandes grew crowded. Among the cast of characters were Josephine's maid, Paulette, her twenty-two-year-old Polish valet, François (he was later shot by the Germans while carrying messages for the Resistance), an old Belgian couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs, who had met Josephine in the homeless shelter, and any number of Lions. Jean, convalescing from his war wounds, and all his relatives had shown up at the château. Only Albert Ribac, whom they considered a member of the family, was missing. “They were worried,” he told me, laughing. “I had foolishly gone off to the war.”

The irritated Josephine hauled a mattress up to the attic, and slept on the floor. To further escape her in-laws, she often took the Malaury children, Georges and Georgette, whose father ran the blacksmith shop across the road, to the nearby village of Sarlat. “She spoiled us,” says Georgette. “It pleased her to see how ecstatic it made us to climb into her beautiful car. She would do her marketing in Sarlat, and buy us cakes from the
patisserie
.”

Josephine, who had lost touch with both Maurice Bataille and Jacques
Abtey, now miraculously found them both again. First, Maurice. Back from the army, he was a guest of his former employees at their house in Beynac, a few miles from Les Milandes. “My mother had gone to stay with Yvonne and Joseph Robin, who had been our cook and butler,” he says. “The minute I arrived, Yvonne said, ‘You see the château on the hill? Josephine Baker is now living there.' I couldn't believe it. Joseph went up to the château on a bicycle to tell Josephine I was there, and she came right down.

“She said Les Milandes was just like Beau Chêne, Jean Lion and his family had taken over the place. Often, she spent the day with my mother, knitting scarves for soldiers and complaining.”

During the second week in June, the French government had moved from Paris to Tours to Bordeaux. (It would settle finally in Vichy.) While the new premier, the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Pétain (who had been the hero of Verdun in World War I), was preparing to sign an armistice with Germany, General Charles de Gaulle, then undersecretary of war, fled to England to head up a government in exile. Condemned as a traitor, he was sentenced to death in absentia, but on June 18, from London, he addressed his countrymen over the radio.

“Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.” It was a message many humiliated citizens had longed to hear. De Gaulle was asking them to redeem the country's honor, to fight on from North Africa, and among those who listened, thrilled, was Jacques Abtey. He was at La Courtine—a military camp near the city of Agen—with the archives of the Deuxième Bureau, trying to save not only documents, but also the lives of hundreds of patriots and Honorable Correspondents whose names were in those papers, people “who had risked their skins so France would live.”

Unfortunately, de Gaulle's message had not reached all of the French for whom it was intended. “It passed almost unnoticed among most of the population,” Abtey says. In mid-July, he learned that Josephine was at Les Milandes, only ninety miles away from him. “I sent a courier to her, and she came to see me in her Packard. I told her about de Gaulle's call—she had not heard it, either—and how I was going to join him if I could find a way to get to England.”

Abtey and Josephine spent a few days together at the convent of Bonencontre, near his military base. The nuns had fled, but “we found hospitality there. Three monks and their superior lived with us, their
heads in prayer books. And Josephine asked me to obtain exit visas for Jean, his family and friends.”

Jean had handed Josephine the passports—twenty of them, her own not among them—with a request that she use her influence to get the visas, and this had made her furious. “I will never forgive him,” she told Abtey. “It is a shame for him to be so preoccupied with all those people, and not his wife.”

When she came back to Les Milandes with the visas, she hurled them at her husband, threw his suitcase from a second-story window, and showed his family the door.

Toward the end of summer, Jacques Abtey and two fellow officers, a navy man named Emmanuel Bayonne and Joseph Boue, a flier from Brittany, came to hide out at Les Milandes. Josephine was ecstatic. Taking Abtey by the arm, she whispered, “When are we going to join de Gaulle?”

Her question was about to be answered, though Abtey, at that point a frustrated man, didn't know it. “Everywhere,” he recalled later, “the Nazis were watched by our agents, their formations identified, their movements noted . . . but none of this information had reached London, our Underground had been cut off from that city since the surrender. We needed to find a means of reestablishing contact with the British Intelligence Service.”

This problem was solved when an agent of the Deuxième Bureau arrived at Les Milandes, and asked Abtey if he still wanted “to go to the English. We will get you a false passport, then you will go to Lisbon, and from there you're on your own.” (The best way to get in touch with the British was through Portugal, where they had representatives.)

“I had the idea that Josephine Baker should accompany me on this mission,” Abtey says. “She would be an excellent cover. Nobody would suspect an officer of the Deuxième Bureau to be associated with Josephine Baker. But I told her if she came with me, there would be no secrets between us, no flirtations with foreigners who might be spies. She pledged herself to the cause, I never saw anyone with such fire.”