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.’ ”
“In Berlin,” Josephine said, “two things left me with a dream-like impression. One was silent, the aquarium at the zoo, the other deafening, the colossal Vaterland where all the countries of the world have their echo.”
Haus Vaterland was a palace of entertainment with many rooms. In one that could hold six hundred people, Barney Josephson said, “they had American shows, kind of burlesque acts, with dogs, chorus girls . . . Then there was a Spanish room with guitars and flamenco dancers and a Wild West bar with a black orchestra all dressed as cowboys, and a Turkish café that reproduced Istanbul, with belly dancers and strong sweet coffee . . . oh God, you can’t describe it all.”
By the time Josephine opened at the Theater des Westens in Bitte Einsteigen, it wasn’t only “collective lust” that roared unashamed at the theater, it was Nazi sympathizers. Lea Seidl, a singer in the show, remembered the hoots and the catcalls on opening night. “I think they were not only against the Jewish management but against Josephine Baker too. You know, after the first night one of the Nazi critics wrote, ‘How dare they put our beautiful blond Lea Seidl with a Negress on the stage.’ It was already awful.”
Three weeks into the run (which was scheduled to last six months), Josephine disappeared. “She had a very elegant chinchilla coat,” Lea Seidl said, “and I saw her in her coat with a big sack on her back and she whispered, ‘Don’t say anything, I run away.’ And she did.”
(In that period of flux, Berlin audiences were hard to predict. Bessie de Saussure, playing at Haus Vaterland, was hooted off the stage not because she was too dark but because she was too light. “I’m singing, ‘digadoo, digadoo, digadoo,’ and they just carried on like niggers, they yelled, ‘We want a black American.’ The manager had to take me out the back door; those people wanted to hurt me, oh yes.”)
Josephine quit Berlin, but her German tour continued.
Dresden. The citizens of Dresden “were scandalized,” said one newspaper, “to see Germany’s national dances parodied in the convulsions of the ‘coloured girl.’ ”
Munich. Worse than Dresden. “No, Mademoiselle, you will not dance in Munich, this city that respects itself.”
Leipzig. The Crystal Palace, where she played on a bill with an animal trainer who worked with snakes, goats, and crocodiles. One day she found three of the crocs in her dressing room, “tap dancing with their teeth.”
Hamburg. “My best memory of Germany. It’s good American cooking, but a little more grease. I sang, in German, ‘I Kiss Your Hand, Madame.’ ”
The photographs taken at that time show how much she had changed. We see her holding a saxophone in the Berlin Chez Joséphine; the pose isn’t goofy like the old shots on Revere Beach or in La Revue Nègre. She’s a well-dressed young woman in control, no longer a waif you want to take care of. Her eyes are sad, worldly. But she fascinates crowds wherever she goes. And where she and Pepito are going now is back to Paris, the city that isn’t fun anymore because there’s “no money left.”
Many of the French still adore her, though they laugh at themselves for this fixation. “It was so easy for Josephine Baker to have us in the palm of her hand that she got tired of us,” says an article in Chronique du Pingouin. “The good white Parisians are so dumb it was enough for her to wiggle her bottom, and they fell at her feet in adoration. The black idol got tired of humanity lying there like a rug, and left us to conquer new kingdoms . . . secretly hoping to encounter a resistance to match her talent.”
Paris forgives her infidelity, she takes its love as her due. Now she wants to show how much progress she has made in French, she wants to play in French sketches. Unfortunately, the impresarios of Paris are not so constant as the public. News travels fast, they know that on the road Miss Baker has improved not only her French, but also her gift for being unreliable. No big theater offers are forthcoming.
No matter, there are friends to see, dresses to buy, and anyway, Josephine tells Le Journal, she has really hurried back to help Dr. Gaston Prieur, backer of the first Chez Joséphine. He is on trial for fraud, accused of presiding over a syndicate of fake doctors who treat 750 fake patients every day and split the insurance money with them.
“Poor Doctor Prieur,” says Josephine, “what a fine fellow he is.”
Despite Josephine’s presence at his trial, Dr. Prieur drew a jail sentence, a fine, and was told he could not practice medicine for the next ten years.
Then Josephine got herself in hot water. She was riding in a taxi, one of three loaded with her luggage, when the first cab hit and knocked down a pedestrian. All three cabs stopped, but Josephine was unwilling to be held up by some stupid accident. She ordered her convoy to get moving. People surrounded her, indignant. A gentleman intervened on behalf of the wounded pedestrian, whose face was bloody. He got the victim into one of Josephine’s cabs, and dispatched the driver to the hospital. Josephine grew more outrageous. “I’m Josephine Baker,” she screamed at the crowd. “The one you applauded like imbeciles, in the show!”
The horrified listeners advanced as if to attack her, at which point, her driver accelerated and drove off. It is hard to know what to make of such a scene. Josephine was moody, she could be kind or unkind, you never got what you expected. “She was sick,” Pepito declared, after the taxi mishap. “What she said was not what she meant.”
In the spring of 1929, Josephine and Pepito went to Italy to visit his family, then boarded the ship Comte Verde, on their way to South America. Two weeks later, in Buenos Aires, they were again greeted by headlines: THE SCANDALOUS JOSEPHINE.
“My heart sank,” she said. President Yrigoyen denounced her, and on opening night, the theater was filled with Josephine supporters fighting Josephine detractors. It made her angry to be used “as a banner waved by some in the name of free expression and by others in defense of public morality. . . . What did I care about Argentine politics?”
In her dressing room, hearing Pepito tell the theater manager he feared for her safety, she cried, “That stage is mine, no one can keep me off it!”
Demonstrators had put firecrackers under the seats; they exploded as Josephine came on. Hoping to appease the hotheads, the orchestra played all the tangos of the world. The show was, of course, a tremendous success. Two hundred performances, twenty-five hundred seats, sold out every day. “I have never made as much money,” said the director. He should have thanked President Yrigoyen.
And so to Chile, by train, through the Andes. “The train goes up and down, women fainted. We were at an altitude of 3,200 meters, and stewards ran from one car to another to give oxygen to the fainting ladies. Through the window, I see we are in the clouds, I see an eagle, his scream more piercing than any siren I have heard.
“Maybe twenty thousand people were waiting for me in Santiago, it reminded me of my arrivals in Europe. I was rescued by the station chief who drove me away in his old Ford, like in the movies.”
Brazil she found breathtaking, São Paulo where they spoke Italian, Rio, a city of “lights, hundreds of different orchids, thousands of monkeys playing. Ah! what beautiful films you could make here, my dream is to film in Rio.”
She loved the food—“I recommend Feijoada, black beans with burned bread, sausages and smoked pork, a marvel”—she loved the Beira-Mar Casino where she played, her only complaint about Rio was “its one stupid skyscraper.”
Thousands of miles to the north, New York, which had more than its share of stupid skyscrapers, was again talking about Josephine. Because on Sunday, September 20, La Sirène des Tropiques had its premiere at the Lafayette Theatre on Seventh Avenue. The crowds were huge; even His Honor, James J. Walker, the mayor, showed up. “The first time,” said the Amsterdam News, “that such a high official of this city ever decided to enter one of the local playhouses.”
Most people thought the mayor could have saved himself the trip. One columnist wrote that Josephine’s performance was hard to describe. “The closest I can come to telling what it is like is to say that five minutes of her acting in an American studio would cause the director to hit her in the head with the camera.” Her dancing was patronized too. “She is a spirited comic hoofer, but even in her hottest moments she isn’t any hallelujah.”
There was a hint that American blacks were starting to look at her more critically. She had been the pride of Harlem, Shuffle Along had made her a star, yet she had abandoned America and her language and her people. Even some who had lived vicariously through her triumphs were having second thoughts.
But what Josephine didn’t know didn’t hurt her. She was busy in South America, and anyway, she had already said that La Sirène was a rotten movie. (Even so, it was a big deal at the Booker in St. Louis. The Argus carried an ad heralding the arrival of “The Film Which Captured the Hearts of a Million Parisians,” and urged customers to turn out for “The International Sweetheart of the Screen . . . See Josephine . . . With the Noted COUNT PEPITO D’ALBATINA [Sic].”)
Just before Christmas, Josephine and Pepito boarded the French liner Lutetia, sailing from Rio to France. I have a painting by Covarrubias of the star and her consort on deck in the moonlight; he made Pepito taller. The architect Le Corbusier was also aboard; Josephine seems to have had a penchant for famous architects. She was already friendly with Adolf Loos, whom she had taught to dance the Charleston, and who had designed a great house for her. The plans still exist; they show a façade of black and white marble, an interior that included a swimming pool lit by the sun coming through a glass roof, and a three-story-high cylindrical tower. The house was never built.
Once she met Le Corbusier, she went off in another direction. “She wanted,” he said, “to build a little village with little houses, little trees, little roads for people to be happy. She was mad to do this project, the Josephine Baker–Le Corbusier project, near Paris.”
That village wasn’t built either, but Josephine found herself fascinated by the architect. “He was a modest, fun-loving man and we quickly struck up a friendship.”
For friendship, read love affair. She came to his cabin and he sketched her, nude. She was, he wrote in his journal, “a small child, pure, simple, and limpid. . . . She has a good little heart. She is an admirable artist when she sings, and out of this world when she dances.”
It was true, she sang well now. All the singing lessons, French lessons, German lessons, Spanish lessons, the lessons in table manners, all the steps Pepito had taken to turn a great clown into a lady had borne fruit. Though many were convinced he had moved in the wrong direction, it being easier to find a lady than a great clown.
She sang to Le Corbusier—“Her Negro songs were beautiful, what a dramatic sensibility”—while he drew. They were inseparable throughout the voyage. No longer inclined to fight duels, Pepito knew Josephine would go her own way, but he also knew he was necessary to her.
Was she still necessary to Paris, though, that was the question. In her absence, other black performers had put down roots there. Alberta Hunter was having success as a singer, but she wasn’t flamboyant like Josephine, she could not be observed buying up half of the city on shopping sprees. “Alberta?” Arthur Briggs said. “She never spent anything but an evening.”
You could hear Maud de Forrest (of La Revue Nègre) at the Melody Club, Florence Jones (of Chez Florence) and Bricktop still reigned in Montmartre, and Lew Leslie was back with Blackbirds of 1929, starring Adelaide Hall, whom he billed as “The New Josephine Baker.”
The old Josephine Baker, sailing for France, walked the decks of the Lutetia “with a secret joy and a little fear. I’m going to find Paris again, I’m going, once again to try my luck in Paris.”