Josephine Baker (72 page)

Sylvain Floirat, a kind of French William Paley, owner of the powerful radio station Europe 1, made her an offer she should not have refused. He said he would pay all her debts, 146 million francs, and then, though she would no longer own Les Milandes, she could stay there as long as she lived. She said she had to think about it, and never got in touch with him again.

On February 16, her creditors finally forced the sale of the estate for ninety-nine million francs, but one dissatisfied lender—he thought Les Milandes should have brought more—used a loophole in the law to have the sale annulled, and rescheduled. Another auction would take place on May 3.

It was a reprieve for Josephine, who was working more than ever, mostly in cabarets. They were perfect for someone who wanted to avoid paying taxes, since the owners were often willing to give a performer money under the table. In St. Moritz, jet-setters, expecting a beaten-down creature, were shocked by her confidence as she took possession of the stage. Now there were no new designer clothes, but only Marie Spiers making miracles with sleeves from an old Dior, a skirt from an old Balenciaga.

Though Josephine begged for sympathy from the press and in her speeches, onstage she laughed, reminisced about past splendors, looked like a winner. The empress of Iran, Farrah Diba, vacationing with her children, was so moved she sent a gift of money and a beautiful carpet.

The newspapers followed Josephine's every move. From
France-Soir:
“She will once again run through the world trying to find before May 3 the millions she needs. The children will go back to school, little Stellina will stay with Aunt Margaret, and only the screams of the peacocks will disturb the silence of Les Milandes. The storm passes over the children's heads, they don't know what is at risk.”

Josephine said she realized people might wonder what she had done “with all the money they gave me, especially in 1963, after the plea from Brigitte Bardot. . . . Well, my employees have stolen from me, and suppliers abused my confidence. And then I was not always there, I was singing, working. . . . In my absence, not nice things happened. . . . People said all my sheep had died, but we never found the bodies. . . . I have been abused. . . .”

If the French press was sympathetic, some foreign publications were not.
Constanze
, a West German weekly, sent a reporter to the château, and he accused Josephine of having degraded the idea of brotherhood. “ ‘They don't give me milk for my children,' she will cry to the world, and she expects the world to come to her rescue. . . . For years, her farewells only prepared you for her comebacks. Of course she comes back because she needs money for her children and wants you to admire this poor good hard-working mother who allows herself no rest. . . . 

“I was there when Josephine received her mail. She went to her desk and with a letter opener, she opened them, took out the money, the bills of ten francs, fifty marks, and did not even read the letters, she just counted the money.

“I dared to ask her one question: What will happen to all those letters? She said they would be given to her lawyer. . . .‘Les Milandes must not die! Here my children should find a secure existence.' ”

The reporter was not swayed. “The grass,” he said, “is already growing over Les Milandes.”

The grass may have been growing, but the water was not flowing. The day it was cut off, Josephine came to Paris, and that night, she and Marie Spiers went to a movie. “As soon as it started,” Marie says, “Josephine fell asleep and began to snore. The people around us were upset, but I didn't wake her, I knew she needed the rest.

“Afterward, she wanted to go eat something at the Café de la Paix. She told me how in the old days her suitors would take her there, how glamorous it was, but we could not afford the second-floor dining room, so we ate downstairs. Curious, I asked her, ‘How do you all wash with no water?' She laughed. ‘We fill a basin with water from the Malaurys,' and then she went through the whole process, miming everyone's washing.

“I felt uncomfortable, heads were turning, they had read the news in the morning paper about her water being turned off, and here she's laughing at the Café de la Paix!”

Laughter turned to tears on April 4, when Martin Luther King was killed. That spring of 1968 was terrible. Two months after King's death, Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated, and student unrest (which would lead to riots in the streets of Paris) was already building when Bruno Coquatrix, Josephine's own Don Quixote of the Olympia, grabbed his lance and went into battle. First, he booked the lady into his theater for a fortnight in early April, then, with the record company Pathé-Marconi, he produced a record called
S.O.S. The World's Children
.

He also sent the photographer Hugues Vassal and the journalist Yves Le Roux to get new pictures of Josephine's children, since the S.O.S. crusade was for them. “She would be paid,” Vassal says. “It was a decent way for our newspaper to help them.” “She was happy to see us. She was panicked by what was happening at Les Milandes, but she knew the number of readers she could reach through
France-Dimanche
, and that lifted her morale.”

At the Olympia, the house sold out every night, and the S.O.S. record moved briskly. On it, Josephine sang “J'ai Deux Amours,” “Dans Mon Village,” a new hit, “Merci pour Les Milandes,” and also “Hello, Dolly,” because she intended to do the show with Bruno next year. “I realize I'm sixty-two, but Dolly was no spring chicken either,” she told reporters. One of them, throwing journalistic objectivity to the winds, ended his piece with a rallying cry: “One can find the S.O.S. record at the Olympia or any record shop.
If you love Josephine, you know what you have to do!”

They did it. They did it all over Europe. “It's the little people who are helping to see me through,” Josephine told the journalist Jacqueline Cartier. Bruno Coquatrix also bought newspaper space for an open
letter to his star. “It is pure chance,” he said, “but once more at a critical moment in your life we find you at the Olympia. . . . And once more, it is formidable! You never sang so well, you never were so dynamic! . . . One had to have been twenty years old several times in one's life in order to be able to express such youth and humanity!”

He ended this loving testimonial by thanking her “for being what you are: the greatest. I kiss you.”

The French press could not get enough of Josephine stories.
France-Dimanche
ran a shot of the star emerging from a faint, and said her friends were worried about her being back on the Paris stage, “a hard test for a sixty-two-year-old.” The headline posed a question:
WILL HER HEART STILL HOLD
?

It did, along with her voice and her legs.

She finished her fortnight at the Olympia (she'd be back soon; when Coquatrix realized two weeks could not accommodate all the people who wanted to see her, he arranged for her return on May 15) and set out for Scandinavia. Before she left, she went to Paulette Coquatrix. “All goes well,” she said. “Thanks to you and Bruno, Les Milandes are saved.” “Careful, Josephine,” said the more realistic Paulette. “You think you are the queen there, but you will never be a queen to those farmers.”

“We went to talk to the people Josephine owed money,” Vassal said. “There were two kinds. Some were like creditors since Molière's time, grumpy, wanting to dispossess her because her property was valuable; well run, it could have made a lot of money. Then there were the others who were tender toward her, unhappy to see that no one could really help her, half admiring what she had done, even though there was more than a touch of folly in it.”

That made me think of something Eli Mercier had told me. “Here we do not have bad memories of her,” he said. “She made all of us a lot of money, and the unpaid bills—grocery bills, gasoline bills—are past, it is not serious. When the children were hungry, the poor ones, we had pity.”

From Sweden, Pierre Spiers wrote to Marie. “Every night, I take the money from Josephine. Tell the Fetiveaus they will be reimbursed when we return.” (Dr. Fétiveau, owner of a private clinic near Paris, had helped out with a loan.)

On May 3, Pierre and Josephine were killing time in her hotel room
in Göteborg. “Josephine was not too worried,” Pierre said. “She kept saying, ‘I know God will not abandon me.' ”

She had been able to convince herself that the Bergerac tribunal, sitting that day in the Sarlat courthouse, would not put Les Milandes up for sale at 2
P.M
., that Bruno Coquatrix would be there and in some way be able to stave off her creditors. Every hour that passed made her more confident.

The phone rang at last. She picked up the receiver and heard the voice of a stranger. “I'm really sorry,” the man said, “but my paper wants to do a big piece on the sad news. What was your first reaction to the sale of Les Milandes?”

It was finally over. She had lost.

Gabriel Bureau, the lawyer in charge of the sale, says there was nothing irregular about the proceedings. “Bruno Coquatrix was there, checkbook in hand; his funds were insufficient. He begged the creditors to give Josephine one more extension. But she had received a lot of donations. What happened to all that money? I didn't see it come, I didn't see it go. The afternoon of the auction, few people showed up.”

So many times, at the last second, Josephine had been saved. So many times, she had used the press, Leon Burg recalled, “to make her creditors look like the bad guys. Men who had been patient for years saw their names and faces dragged through the papers as if they were murderers, when the truth was they could have bankrupted her long ago.

“Les Milandes was sold legally, for very little, because the few friends of Josephine who were there did not dare to bid it up. My cousin and I had enough money, but we were afraid of gossip, of people's saying, ‘They claim to be Josephine's friends, and they profit from her misery.'

“We should have bought it and given it back to her, I still regret that we didn't. But the reason not many people came was that we all thought Josephine had been saved, that was the impression we had got from the press, and from Bruno Coquatrix's S.O.S. campaign.”

The château, the farm, the hotels and restaurants, the amusement park, the forest, a second run-down château on the grounds where Josephine kept her sheep—everything went. Only Margaret's house and the Maury house (which couldn't be sold until the last Bouillon child came of age), and the chapel which belonged to the community of Castelnaud, were exempted. The land and the buildings—sold in twenty lots—brought 125 million francs, less than a fifth of their assessed value. A man named Jean-Marc Joly bought the château.

Sent by Josephine, Akio was the only family member to witness the auction. “It reminded me of wild beasts attacking a defenseless animal,” he said. “I've never seen such unfeeling faces.”

André Rivollet found Josephine's defeat inevitable, the logical end to her
folie des grandeurs
. “She went bankrupt with Les Milandes, its moat, its travelers' inns (one for the rich, one for the poor), its housing with showers and radios for the workers, its zoo of wild beasts, its dance hall in the middle of nowhere. The dream collapsed, her megalomania, her generosity, turned her into a victim.” Her attempts to be the Universal Mother seemed to Rivollet equally quixotic. “Disappointed by the men she had chosen, she adopted children as a prism for her ego, children she exposed to green pastures, not life.”

“They had been like on death row for too long,” said Georges Malaury's mother, Henriette. “Now peace had come at last.”

Still in shock, Josephine spoke to Hans Vangkilde, a Danish radio interviewer. “To me, money has never been very important,” she said. “I suppose that's the reason Les Milandes is lost. But I had such hope. . . . I have found many people throughout the world interested in brotherhood. Maybe not enough of them to unite . . . but it will happen one of these days. . . . It's a question of time, that's all. . . . Will I go on? How can I stop? If I could stop, I wouldn't.”

On the very afternoon of the auction at Les Milandes, the student revolt began in Paris, after the rector of the Sorbonne called in police to break up a noisy meeting of undergraduates. The rector's act, said Janet Flanner, “violated the sanctuary of the university, maintained over centuries.” Trouble spread, teenagers burning automobiles, digging up paving stones and piling them into barricades, occupying public buildings
(like the Odéon Théâtre, because classic plays were “dated”). Tear gas, clubs, arrests were the response of government security forces. A general strike would follow.

This was the situation when Josephine returned to Paris and the Olympia on May 14. The streets were on fire? Josephine would burn brighter. “She was unique, the only one, every day, she got standing ovations,” said Sy Oliver, the American trumpet player and arranger who was working with her. “I had seen
Shuffle Along
in Zanesville, Ohio, and I still remembered her at the end of the chorus line. When I told her that, she was amused. She didn't seem depressed, she was preoccupied with what we were doing, with the music.”

On May 13, there had been an antigovernment parade, almost a million people marching. Cries of “De Gaulle, assassin!” and “Charlie, resign!” rang through streets the general had once entered as a liberator.

Gaullists may have suffered the odd pang of guilt—the educational system did need renovation, ten million union workers were seriously underpaid—but on May 30, they counterattacked, holding their own march. Bruno advised Josephine not to go. “Cool down, or you will lose one million people who will not come to see you.”