Josephine Baker (42 page)

His son, Bachir Ben Bachir, says the feeling between Josephine and his father, whom she had met in 1935, “developed into a physical relationship” during the war. “My father could not speak French, but she could speak Spanish. She often spent time with him at his palace in Tetouan, where she met Spanish government officials. She taught the high commissioner the merengue and also passed information from the Americans to my father, and my father tried to convince Franco to let the Americans use the Spanish Sahara as a military base.”

But that would come later. Now, even as Josephine arrived in Lisbon with her music scores for Captain Paillole, General Rommel's troops were marching into Libya.

“The pro-Germans were jubilant,” she said, “the rest of us heartsick.” From Lisbon, says Bachir Ben Bachir, “she contacted my father and told him she needed a safe-conduct pass to give her more flexibility. She got the document, and with it, could go all over the world, even to America.”

Where she went with it was to Les Milandes, still in the Free Zone. Henri Chapin, who had escaped the Germans and come home to Beynac, was now working at the château as an electrician, along with his
friend Coudert, a stonemason. “From time to time during the war,” Chapin says, “Josephine would arrive to see what we had finished, and tell us what else she wanted done.

“In the kitchen of the château was a big table, and she would come with a suitcase full of money, bills of all different currencies, and she would dump it out on the table and say, ‘What do I owe you? Pay yourselves, and keep the accounts straight.' And she would be walking around totally naked. At the beginning, we were very surprised, you know, we were young men, but then we got used to it.”

Even on a flying visit, she managed the odd escapade. “One of her lovers would come on a motorcycle,” Georges Malaury remembers. “And he would hide it in a wooden shack down the road. But there was no gasoline during the war, so while he was with Josephine, the local guys would go siphon off the gas. What's he going to say? ‘While I was having sex with Josephine, somebody stole my gasoline'? And he was doing black market, so nobody felt sorry for him.

“My father was in the underground, he had a radio transmitter in the tower of the château and he transmitted to England. One time the Germans came—Josephine had just arrived—and she greeted them in German, saying, ‘There's no maquis here, I'm Josephine Baker, let me entertain you.'

“They later killed the
chef de gare
of the railroad station, poor man. He said, ‘I was in the first war against your country, I have a wooden leg, fuck you,' so they shot him.”

In Lisbon again, Josephine found that posters advertising her concerts were plastered everywhere. She stayed in the city through March, gathering documents by day, and by night singing to sellout crowds that provided her with much-needed cash. (She couldn't get funds from Monsieur Bondon in Paris; it had become as difficult to move money as it was to move human beings.)

Then she returned to Morocco, messages from Paillole fastened in her bra with safety pins.

Although she came close to death there, I think the years in Morocco were among the happiest of her life. It was a country that had always been, in the words of the British writer Gavin Maxwell, “xenophobic and mysterious, guarding splendors and horrors that the wildest travellers' tales could not exaggerate.” (Among those tales were accounts of salted human heads displayed in public.)

By 1912, most of Morocco (except for a few Spanish enclaves, including the ports on the Mediterranean) had become a French protectorate, but it remained a land out of the Arabian Nights. And wasn't it queer that Josephine, who had spent her childhood dreaming of kings in golden slippers, should find herself there? In a place where, even more amazingly, racial discrimination did not exist? Thami el Glaoui, pasha of Marrakesh and the most powerful tribal chieftain in French Morocco at that time, was himself black.

“Most harems in Morocco had women of all colors,” says Bachir Ben Bachir, “and their children were recognized by their fathers, with full inheritance rights.”

Yet I wonder what Josephine thought about the rights of those Moroccan women confined, no matter what their color, to seraglios? For that matter, what did those women think of her, a female sitting down to dinner with the men? A female untrainable as a wild bird in the art of subservience?

In Marrakesh, she could not stay with her old friend, El Glaoui, though he had offered her his hospitality many times before the war. Mohamed Hedidech, now chief concierge of the Hôtel Minzah, still remembers how, sixty years ago, Josephine's arrival would thrill the whole city. “She was so beautiful,” he says. “She would come by boat to Tangier and stay overnight at the Minzah, and next day, two Rolls-Royces would be waiting outside, one for Madame, the other for her trunks. El Glaoui liked pretty women, and he was generous.”

That was all Josephine required of a man, but in 1941, the pasha was in the thick of political intrigue. The French were asking for his allegiance, the Germans pushing for revolution. It was no time to renew romance with such a famous—and outspoken—partisan of France. Nor to have her as a live-in guest. Instead, El Glaoui sent her to the palace of his brother-in-law, Moulay Larbi, which proved to be embarrassing for that gentleman. Because every morning, as soon as the birds started singing, Josephine was up and running around in the buff, going to the kitchen to help the servants cook.

A very old lady named Mabrouka (still employed by Moulay Larbi's daughter Kenza) told me that Josephine loved chicken feet, and her laugh was “crystal clear, like a little child's.”

But for Moulay Larbi, a religious Muslim, it was a danger to have this bare-skinned houri flying through the halls. (Even in the fifties, after the
sultan had converted the state to a constitutional monarchy and changed his title from sultan to king, there were riots when one of his daughters appeared on a beach in a bathing suit.) So Moulay Larbi begged Mohamed Menebhi, yet another of his brothers-in-law, to rescue him. And Mohamed Menebhi offered Josephine the use of a little house he owned in the medina.

Of all the Moroccan aristocrats who lavished favors on her, Mohamed Menebhi is probably the only one Josephine didn't sleep with. And probably the one who loved her most. She had affairs with his brother Abderahman (she had even wanted to marry him), with El Glaoui, with Ahmed Ben Bachir, with Moulay Larbi. But not with Mohamed Menebhi.

“Magnificent,” Jacques Abtey calls him. “Not good-looking, he was small, with an ungrateful face, but noble in his way of behaving, and he gave all his heart to the Gaullist cause.”

Or most of it. He reserved some part for Josephine.

Forty years later, accompanied by Mohamed Menebhi's eldest grandson, Aziz, I visited that little house in the medina. For me, it was like walking up to the front door of Pa Baker's restaurant in Philadelphia, I was convinced I was feeling what Josephine must have felt.

The medina is the heart of the old city, and in its narrow alleyways, women passed silently, their faces masked except for eyes that burned through us like X rays. Aziz led me through a wooden door into a patio open to the sky, water splashing in a white marble fountain. Four rooms surrounded the courtyard; one still held Josephine's big brass bed from France.

It was here she had settled in with Jacques Abtey, and adopted Arab customs. She liked eating with her hands, wearing the loose djellaba, going with her maids to the
hammam
, the Turkish baths, once a week.

“There were three orange trees perfuming this oasis,” Jacques Abtey recalled. “We found there the serenity that detached soul from body.”

But a little serenity went a long way with Josephine. At the beginning of May, Moulay Larbi came by with the news that Morocco might be invaded by German troops. Abtey remembers that Josephine's pet monkeys were jumping from one orange tree to another when she announced, “I should go to Spain and perform there.”

She toured Seville, Madrid, Barcelona, deluged with invitations wherever she landed. “Embassies, consulates, full of interesting people. Coming
back to my hotel room, I made careful notes.” As before, the notes were pinned to her underwear. “Who,” she asked rhetorically, “would dare search Josephine Baker?”

Before returning to Marrakesh, she stopped again in Tetouan to see Ahmed Ben Bachir. “Every time she could get away, she came,” says Bachir Ben Bachir. “She liked to have a tent pitched by the seaside, and drink tea, while musicians played and cooks barbecued lamb. She would swim, run back into her tent, and my father would entertain her. She was a courtly mistress, and she wanted the whole treatment. She asked my father to have his soldiers turn their backs the minute she stepped out of the house. Until she got into the car and dashed off with him.

“He was a bachelor then, about five years younger than she. He put a private Turkish bath in his house because she loved Turkish baths. She used to drink raw eggs after the bath, it was Moroccan tradition. She lived her fantasies there, and always, she had the urge—you can tell from her letters—to get back to my father because he made her feel like a woman, and for a time she could be divorced from the war.”

She wrote to him when they were apart, asking favors, giving instructions. “Could you send me a visa for my maid, Paulette, still in France? . . . and do not forget to feed the horses, those poor animals could starve to death.”

Amused by that particular note, he wrote back that the horses had got an extra pail of oats in her name, and that he was sorry not to have been with her at a recent concert “to admire your delicious temper.”

But, his son recalls, Ahmed Ben Bachir was also very useful to Josephine in her other life. “She developed a network by which she secured Spanish Moroccan passports for Jews who were coming into the Spanish zone; my father used to go to the high commissioner and say they were Moroccan Jews, but they were really Eastern Europeans who would get passports and go to Latin America. Josephine helped a Rothschild lady in Tangier.”

Once, on her way home from Tetouan and a rendezvous with Ahmed Ben Bachir, Josephine stopped in Casablanca for a consultation with yet another gynecologist. I have been told by Dr. Georges Burou (who attended the royal family of French Morocco) that this man was a charlatan. “He performed a procedure which consisted of blowing air into Josephine's fallopian tubes. He also gave her an injection of Ipedol, a very debilitating drug. After that, he should have prescribed a total rest;
instead, he sent her back to Marrakesh, a 350-mile journey, on the very poor roads of that time. And she developed peritonitis.”

Not knowing how sick she was, she returned to find that she and Jacques had a houseguest, Bayonne, their colleague in the underground. He was still there two days later when Josephine was seized with terrible pains in her belly. Bayonne fetched ice, Jacques held her hands, but it was clear that she needed to be in a hospital. Not in Marrakesh, but in Casablanca, which had better facilities.

“I went out,” Jacques said, “and borrowed a station wagon for Josephine to lie down in. At the Municipal Hospital in Casablanca, the head nurse insisted that Josephine get out of the car and walk. ‘You are crazy!' I screamed at her, and asked our chauffeur if there were another place. He said yes, the private clinic of Doctor Henri Comte, two streets away.”

It was the end of June 1941, and she would not be released from the Comte clinic until December 1, 1942. Her fanatic determination to have a child had driven her to consult so many quacks, to try so many risky treatments, that finally the poor body had rebelled.

“I assisted my friend Comte with that first operation,” says Dr. François Bolot. “Josephine had an abscess between the bladder and the genitals. Comte lanced the abscess, and put in a drain. A few days later, Comte had to go to France, and I supervised Josephine's postoperative care.

“The French captain Abtey often slept on a cot in her room, and when her fever would rise, he would run to get me. He was blond, he had a nose shaped like a saber blade, and I always distrusted him, because in time of war you distrusted everyone, and I was always wondering if he had been put there by the Gestapo or the French police.

“Josephine told us that her ancestors had lived in Louisiana and that after Napoleon sold that province to the Americans, they had moved to the Antilles so they could stay French.”

Josephine wrote to Ahmed Ben Bachir, saying she could not come to him for the August vacation they had planned. “I'm heart-broken. Today, with fever and being in bed, I'm skinny like a skeleton, and it is better that you don't see me like that. When I come out of the clinic, I will go to rest at Les Milandes.” At the time she scrawled these lines, she expected to be sent home in a couple of weeks.

“During those long days,” Jacques Abtey says, “Josephine read a lot.
She was very impressed by the lives of Louis XIV and Napoléon. When someone compared Napoléon's armies to Hitler's, she would get furious. “I like great monarchs! Napoléon was a genius, Hitler is a crazy person.”

Right across from the Comte clinic was the Parc Murdoch, filled with flowers and shadows and palm trees, but Josephine was still too fragile to venture out. “They operated on her so many times,” Jacques Abtey says. “Once she asked the doctor, ‘Why don't you just put a zipper in? It would be so much easier.' ”

She never lost her humor; when a priest came to give her last rites, placing his crucifix across her chest, she laughed. “Not yet, Father.” Doctors, nurses, strangers, were always stopping by to see her. (I often wonder if her many relapses were due to the fact that she was seldom quiet except when she was unconscious.) Even her ex-husband, Jean Lion, appeared. He had been fighting in Tunisia with the French army—he would eventually receive the Croix de Guerre—and Josephine put on jewels and makeup to look beautiful for him.