Quel cul elle a!” What an ass! Excuse the expression, but that is the cry that greeted Josephine as she exploded onstage in “La Danse de Sauvage.” (Sixty years later, her friend and sometime lover, Maurice Bataille, would say to me, “Ah! ce cul . . . it gave all of Paris a hard-on.”)
It is October 2, 1925, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, opening night of La Revue Nègre. Everyone is here, painters, writers, music hall stars—Léger, Gertrude Stein, Chevalier—diplomats, princes, expatriate Americans (of whom there are forty-three thousand in Paris). At home, there is Prohibition; in France, drink and sex seem free. For one American dollar, you get twenty-five francs.
The theater is sold out, all two thousand mauve-colored velvet seats. Earlier, a voice has roared a message—“Full! Only folding chairs left”—into the avenue Montaigne. So many flowers arrive that they are put on the street, there is no more place for them inside. Ticket holders walk to the entrance across a red carpet flanked by white rose trees, the men in full dress, the women with bobbed hair, lips and nails lacquered scarlet, arms flashing those narrow diamond bracelets the cynical of the age call “service stripes.”
Backstage, producer Caroline Dudley Reagan paces. She has given herself the role of narrator. “Side by side with my artists.” Years later, she will say of La Revue Nègre’s success, “It wasn’t me, but the phoenix inside Josephine, that bird of paradise. It wasn’t me, but Bechet’s saxophone, and his soul. It wasn’t me, but Louis Douglas, my choreographer. . . . He had already danced in Russia, even for the czarina. . . . Decidedly, God was with me.”
In the first row are students from L’École des Beaux-Arts. They have rented twenty seats for the entire two weeks La Revue Nègre is expected to run. One tall blond boy—Maurice Blech—will come back every night until Josephine invites him to her dressing room, and then to her bed.
The show begins. “On one side of the stage,” reports the man from Le Figaro, “before a curtain on which thick-lipped faces with immense black eyes stand out among the geometric designs in dazzling colors applied by some local Picasso in Tallahassee or Honolulu, eight musicians in red tailcoats take their seats.”
The “local Picasso” is, in fact, the Mexican painter Covarrubias, the eight musicians are Claude Hopkins and his orchestra, and once they begin to play, Le Figaro’s critic loses all objectivity. “The music seems to have captured the echoes of the jungle and to mingle the moan of the breeze, the patter of rain, the crackling of leaves . . .”
The curtain rises to reveal a backdrop of two Mississippi riverboats. Down front is a wharf where people rest in the sun. A man comes on pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowers. It’s Sidney Bechet. He picks his horn off the cart, bends his head to the mouthpiece, a short fat Pan inciting his listeners to revelry, filling the theater with genius.
The chorus girls are young, supple, they laugh as they dance the Charleston (Paris is crazy about the Charleston), but some in the audience are disappointed that the performers are so fair. Because of the word nègre in the title, the French are expecting black Africans, not American mulattoes. These dancers are creamy-skinned, beige-skinned, and for the ten days since they got off the boat they have moved from astonishment to astonishment, going to the Galeries Lafayette where they can try on clothes and no one forbids it, going to the cafés, where they are served politely, walking in the streets, where they are openly admired.
Josephine, the star, is darker than the other girls, a clown with rubber legs and rubber face. She works hard in a sketch about an abandoned bride, singing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (badly, because she is not yet a singer), offering a “darky impression” in blackface. She crosses her eyes, pushes her knees together, does splits, her pants rolled high. She’s part Jerry Lewis, part Chaplin, competing with Louis Douglas (they say he has “talking feet”) for the laughter of spectators already dazzled by music, speed, colors.
The critic Pierre de Regnier describes Josephine as a strange figure “who walks with bended knees . . . and looks like a boxing kangaroo. . . . Is this a man? Is this a woman? Her lips are painted black, her skin is the color of a banana, her hair, already short, is stuck to her head as if made of caviar, her voice is high-pitched, she shakes continually, and her body slithers like a snake. . . . The sounds of the orchestra seem to come from her. . . .
“Is she horrible? Is she ravishing? Is she black? Is she white? . . . Nobody knows for sure. There is no time to know. She returns as she left, quick as a one-step dance, she is not a woman, she is not a dancer, she is something extravagant and passing, just like the music. . . .”
“Electric greens,” writes another critic, “burning pinks . . . what rapture. No rest for the eyes or for the ears.”
But the real sensation of the night—the finale, a “Charleston Cabaret”—is still to come. Suddenly, Josephine, that funny girl, is being carried onstage by Joe Alex, a strong black dancer from Africa. She is naked except for a few feathers tied to her waist and ankles, and she is wrapped around Joe’s body like a vine around a tree in the forest. He is half naked, too, bent over almost double, a hunter with his prey on his back.
First, you feel sorry that the lovely animal is dead, the shape of the body is so perfect, the color, the stillness. Then she starts to come alive, the muscular body begins to move, the music begins to pound. (“The jazz gets stronger and stronger, the blood pressure goes up six points,” a doctor in the audience said later.)
She slides down Joe’s body. Shameless, she seems to be making love to him in front of everyone. Joe has been chasing Josephine since rehearsals began, but he is not real to her. The one she wants to make jealous, Claude, is upstage of them, playing the piano, as their frenzy builds.
For Pierre de Regnier, the “Danse de Sauvage” is “barbaric . . . naughty . . . a return to the customs of the dark ages,” and he tells his readers how Josephine achieves a “silent declaration of love by a simple forward movement of her belly, with her arms raised above her head, and the quiver of her entire rear.”
This is the way Josephine herself will recall the occasion: “The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience . . . I had to execute a dance rather . . . savage. I came onstage and . . . a frenzy took possession of me . . . seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced!”
Some people in the audience scream for more, others rise, wrapping themselves in indignation and little furs, and stalk from the theater, muttering that jazz and blacks are going to destroy white civilization. Josephine doesn’t care. First, she doesn’t understand a word of French, so she can’t tell what they’re saying, and second, she and Joe take the noise as a kind of participation in their ritual, it gives an extra energy to their wild mating dance.
In the wings, André Daven, the director of the theater, knows he has seen theatrical history being made. “It was like the revelation of a new world,” Daven says. “Eroticism finding a style. Josephine was laughing, she was crying, and the audience stood and gave her such an ovation that she trembled, and could not leave the stage. We had to bring the curtain down.”
Backstage, the chorus girls are amazed. Most feel sorry for Claude Hopkins’s wife, Mabel, because Claude has been cheating on her with this crazy Josephine. Besides being amazed, the girls are embarrassed. Lydia Jones remembers the feeling. “We were horrified at how disgusting Josie was behaving in front of this French audience, doing her nigger routine. She had no self-respect, no shame in front of these crackers, and would you believe it, they loved her.”
They did love her. Berenice Abbott, the American photographer, called the night electric. “Josephine came out with these feathers on her tail and this beautiful little body, and people went wild. The French were kind of tired and a little bit decadent, it’s hard to get them excited, but everybody just wanted to leap over the balcony; a great spontaneous combustion took place.”
In Le Crapouillot, Louis Cheronnet wrote that he had never seen anything more sensual than the dance where Josephine “mimics love, the gift of herself, while a black man wraps her in his passionate movements, his frantic desire. . . .”
In L’Art Vivant, André Levinson spoke of Josephine’s having “the splendor of an ancient animal, until the movements of her behind and her grin of a benevolent cannibal make admiring spectators laugh.”
Reviewing for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner found the music “tuneless” and the finale “dull,” but later reversed herself. In 1972, forty-seven years after the fact, she described the moment when Joe Alex set Josephine down on the stage. “She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater.”
It’s all in the perspective. One man’s scream of salutation is another man’s “What an ass!”
The belated Flanner homage continued: “Within a half hour of the final curtain on opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the grapevine up to the cafés on the Champs-Élysées, where the witnesses of her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what they had just seen. . . .”
News tearing through the streets, my God, it’s like Napoléon, when he was fighting. And yet, Josephine’s triumph was real. And she had made it look easy, effortless, so spontaneous that some observers were fooled into thinking the performance they had just seen was an expression of her nature, not a product of her art. They were mistaken. Josephine was not a natural child, she was a complicated, driven nineteen-year-old. She herself had created that “magnificent dark body,” out of will and her need to be noticed. And the day leading up to her conquest of Paris had been one of the worst she had ever lived.