THE HEART-RENDING DRAMA OF JOE AND JO, THOSE 50-YEAR-OLDS WITH BIG HEARTS, trumpeted one headline. The divorce announcement made worldwide news. From Japan, Miki Sawada urged Josephine to go slowly. “I remember your husband took such tender care of the children, and they had confidence in him. Abandoned by their natural parents, if they lose a second time, it is too cruel.”
Arthur Prevost also begged for reassurance—“Tell me it is not true”—and Jo Bouillon wrote back, deploring “the disarray in which I find myself. I have worked for eight years to try to realize my wife’s dream.”
In her own letter to Arthur, Josephine described herself and Jo as “only two spokes in the immense turning wheel that is life; the axle is the children. To ensure their happiness and their future, I must say nothing.”
But when it came to her divorce suit, she found her tongue. Some crimes of which she accused her husband:
• He had manifested no affection for her.
• He had not fulfilled his marital duties.
• He thought she was good only for earning money.
Still, she was afraid the divorce might cost her the children. Pierre Dop, her lawyer, assured her the adoptions would stand up in court, but she continued to be anxious. If she died, “Jo would certainly get the children . . . and my fortune, and Les Milandes would find itself with all that gang and their immoral behavior. I want the children to bear my name as well as his. . . . He never wanted those children, that’s why at first he didn’t want to legalize the situation. . . .”
In the beginning, Jo had sent Abbé Tournebise to Josephine to argue against the divorce, but she stood firm. “I’m doing what God tells me to do.”
She talked directly to her Maker, giving herself absolution. The abbé had grown used to it. “In my head, I used to ask God to forgive me when I saw Josephine walking up to the altar to take Communion on Sunday,” he said. “She hadn’t been to confession, but there she was, head bent under a black lace mantilla, as if in a trance.”
Once, in an act of generosity to her fellow worshipers, she had replaced the old statues in the chapel, and asked the abbé to bless the new ones. He walked from one stone figure to another until he found himself confronting an unfamiliar saint. Suddenly he recognized her—it was Josephine gazing down on the earth below with a beatific smile. Screaming “Blasphemy!” the abbé threw the châtelaine out of her chapel. She retaliated by complaining about him to her friend the pope, but had her statue moved into the open air. (Time magazine reported the “fabrication of a startling memorial to herself,” and described a statuary group “depicting La Baker in ancient saintly wraps, arms outstretched in benediction over kneeling figures of seven kiddies of various races. . . .”)
Observation by Josephine to lawyer Dop, after she met Jo wandering the halls: “He seemed to avoid me.”
Why not, considering that she had cast him out? But it worried her that he would sign no papers. Although she owned the land, all commercial enterprises on that land were listed as belonging to the Société Jo Bouillon & Co.; Josephine could not operate them without his permission.
Now bank directors arrived. “If I renounce the divorce,” Josephine wrote Dop, “they are willing to wait for the twenty-nine million I owe them, if not, they want the money now.”
Wait three months, suggested the judge before whom Jo and Josephine appeared. Think about reconciliation.
So they must muddle through the summer, and try to keep everything running, even if it wasn’t running well. On the one hand, Josephine trusted no one—after a party at the château, she would wash the priceless gold knives and forks, the china, and store them in a cupboard to which she had the only key. On the other hand, her suspicious nature did not prevent her being fleeced; she was not as shrewd as the peasants around her.
From the start, the union of Joe and Jo had been a strange one: Josephine out to prove she could ensnare any man she chose, no matter that his appetite led him down another path; Jo up against a tornado.
“Jo was good to Josephine’s family,” says Janie Martin, Artie’s German-born bride. “Jo is the one who suggested putting the little house where Margaret lived in Margaret’s name, ‘so if you die, your sister will have something.’ ” (In fact, says Jacqueline Abtey, “Jo Bouillon is the one who had wanted her family to come over. Josephine told Jacques and me, ‘I would never have invited them, they should have stayed in America.’ ” Once in France, it turned out they had to sing for their supper; Josephine put them to work as soon as they arrived. Margaret opened a pastry shop—the tourists loved her pies; Elmo rented out canoes on the Dordogne; and Richard took charge of the Esso station at the entrance to the park.)
During her war with her husband, Josephine buried lawyer Dop in details. “The situation is becoming more and more difficult. A waiter came and asked me for glasses with the “Joe and Jo” engraving on them for the hotels and restaurants. When I refused, he was extremely vulgar toward me. Another worker told me his boss was Monsieur Bouillon, not me. . . . How can people treat me with so little respect?”
I was exhausted just working my way through the blizzard of papers. Where did she find the strength? Running around the world performing, coming back to this or that hotel room and firing off ten, twenty letters a night, sinking herself in potatoes, tobacco, cows, nurses, children, paintings, contracts. Even for a woman who never slept, the output was prodigious. Why didn’t she make herself sick with all those fulminations? Maybe because she only wrote them, she didn’t have to read them.
“She attacks me on all sides,” Jo told a friend. “She has no confidence in me, but she wants me to stay. Even if I was the big boss, I could not live in a desert; I would want to put in the personnel I thought would be good for the place, but she claims my people are thieves . . . pederasts.”
Josephine pawned her jewels (one more time), sold the avenue Bugeaud house in Paris, and wrote a fairy tale. The Rainbow Tribe, illustrated by Piet Worm, is beautiful. The cover shows a little black one-eyed hen looking up at eight children sitting in a tree. On the title page are the words “This book was made in Les Milandes, where Kott-Kott found her happiness.” Kott-Kott, the hen, travels the world searching for her lost eye, and comes to rest in a place where no one laughs at her anymore; this was Josephine’s tribute to Willie Mae. She was convinced that some rich producer would want to make a movie of it, and her money worries would be over.
It never happened.
Part of the problem was Josephine’s own inconsistency. When a respected Austrian producer offered her a picture deal, she said no, she could not permit her children to be exploited. (The producer was too polite to mention the gaping tourists outside the windows.)
No sooner had she got off her high horse than she was writing to the cultural attaché at the American embassy in Paris. Could he put her in touch with “an American film company like Walt Disney”? A movie about Les Milandes and the children and universal brotherhood was crying to be made, but it must be made “by a very big company with a lot of authority. . . . I will give the world rights to this company, but of course they have to pay me. . . .”
Broke though she was, Josephine could not stop spending. She ordered ten walk-in refrigerators from America, and was shocked to find one of them being used as a chicken coop. Told they couldn’t be made to work on French electrical current, she was appalled. “There is racism even in kitchen equipment, it has to stop. The Japanese are much more intelligent, you will see, they will inundate markets all over the world with machines that can run without discrimination.”
She was right, but how did she know?
September 24, 1957: With school desegregation being threatened by white mobs, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect nine black students on their way to Central High. Shortly thereafter, Arthur Prevost wrote a newspaper piece headlined NO LITTLE ROCK IN DORDOGNE. There were pictures of Luis and Akio in class in Castelnaud, along with a statement from Josephine: “No incidents when my little ones went to school for the first time, no matter what the color of their skins.”
Her little ones may not have been discriminated against, but they were certainly confused by the life they led. Between club dates, a speech on brotherhood, and a visit to a doctor, Josephine would squeeze in a few days at Les Milandes, where she fought with, fired, cajoled her employees, then turned her ferocious attentions on the children. Guilty for having been gone so much, jealous of whatever affection they might have developed for anyone but her, she focused like a laser.
“Sometimes when she arrived home from the road,” Jari says, “there would be a reunion around the kitchen table. She would take us, one by one, on her knees. But we were in a hurry to get down, it was embarrassing, too much love, a bit exaggerated. What she could not give us while she was away, she wanted to give us all at once. It was tout ou rien, then she would leave, and our normal life would start again. Our father would go away too, but when he came back, it was more normal. He cared about our work at school, he was there to answer questions.”
Still, during Josephine’s short stays at Les Milandes, the public was fed a picture of domestic bliss. On a Sunday afternoon, Josephine, Carrie, and the children could be seen in the front row of the audience as Jo conducted the grand orchestra of Sarlat, or there might be a conference about racism led by Josephine, while movie cameras rolled and flashbulbs exploded. “It was terrible,” says my brother Jean-Claude, “because we always had to keep our eyes open while the lights were blazing into them.”
October 18: Since Jo and Josephine could agree on almost nothing, the court made several decisions for them. Jo would be permitted to stay in the Maury house, personal souvenirs would be divided, and the children awarded to Josephine. Jo could visit them on Thursdays (not a school day in France) and two Sundays a month, but in Josephine’s absence, Carrie was named their guardian. If you enjoy paradox, consider this woman who, in order to follow a pair of laughing eyes, had, time after time, forsaken her own maternal duties. Now she was being appointed by law to cluck over chicks who weren’t even hers.
The day the bank sent a sheriff to attach the furniture, Josephine met him at the front door and slapped his face. With the imprint of her fingers on his cheek, he struggled for control. “Madame Baker, one day you will pay dearly for that.”
She slapped strangers, and she slapped people she knew. Once, when the melons in the fields were overripe—customers in her restaurants were not ordering melon—she told the head gardener that he and his men should eat the fruit before it rotted. Two days later, she came into the kitchen where the grounds crew was having lunch, shrieked, “What! You are eating my melons!” and slapped the head gardener in the face. To the delight of his assistants, he rose and slapped her back.
Artie Martin says his imperious aunt thought of herself as a monarch. “She liked me because I had been a military man. ‘You know how to rule people,’ she kept telling me. She didn’t say manage, she said rule.”
Somehow, even after her scene with the sheriff, her lawyers were able to reassure the bank, as they would several more times before the end, but the situation remained ugly.
Jo’s inquiring about Carrie’s failing health evoked a diatribe from Josephine. “He is like a murderer drawn to the scene of his crime.” He had, she said, created “a kingdom of immorality, only a red light is missing.”
Sweden, Germany, Holland, Denmark. Crowds everywhere, and Dop commended her on refilling Les Milandes’ coffers. “We were able to pay November expenses and salaries, and even a million francs of our debt to the bank.” But he was concerned about her health. “Take care of yourself.”
She was as concerned as he. “I’m everywhere but at home, and daily in a situation that makes me tremble, my mother sick, my children separated from me.”
Still, she hatched grandiose schemes. To tap into the pilgrim trade (Lourdes would be memorializing its hundredth anniversary in 1959), Josephine was already planning a huge celebration of her own. She would have a monument to many gods built on a hill; there would be a Christ, a Buddha, a Moses, a Mohammed, and a voodoo god, each thirty-five feet tall.
From Berlin, she wrote Dop that her opening was sold out. “I had been afraid because some newspapers carried terrible stories. They said that since the separation, we had divided the children, the white stayed with Monsieur Bouillon, and the black with me.”
She also said she was recording a song for a film in Berlin, and would get one million francs for it. “I’m deeply grateful to God. . . . I’m going on stage now, it is the last show, I’m tired. Good night. Kiss my little ones.”
Two weeks later, she sent Dop an obituary of Jean Lion, holder of the Légion d’Honneur, the Croix de Guerre, the Croix de la Libération, dead in Paris of the Asian flu. Dop would see, she predicted, that Lion “is quite a different personality from Monsieur Bouillon.” She spoke of the fallen hero in the present tense. “The dead,” she said, “are always part of the family.”
On December 18, great joy. She had been informed that she too would be given the Légion d’Honneur. “It is moral support to think that France loves me so much.” On the same line, she wrote, “Save electricity.”
And she kept on making speeches. In a church in Frankfurt, she talked about her children. “They belong to you just as much as they belong to me. You have the same responsibility as I have to take care of them.”
Listen up, world. Josephine is willing to share her burden with you.
Christmas Eve in Germany, she went to midnight Mass and wondered if somewhere Jo was praying. “And begging God to forgive him all the bad he has done.” A theater director in Stockholm paid for airline tickets so the children and a nurse could come spend January with her. She told the authorities she was removing the children from school for health reasons. “The snow is very good for them.”
And while on the subject of health, she was going to send some polio vaccine for Dop’s children—“It is very safe.” She thanked the lawyer for news that Carrie’s morale had improved—“As you say so well, we have only one mother”—and then got down to business. “I cannot believe that we cannot have peace at Les Milandes when the staff have no worries but to eat well, sleep, and do their work. . . . I have to close my eyes for now but I will get rid of all of them.”
In mid-January, she received a letter from Mohamed Menebhi. He had loved her, sheltered her, and now he was in trouble. (Liberation had brought changes in the fortunes of many powerful Moroccan families. Palaces and lands were taken from those known to have sided with the French.) “I hope you have not forgotten our friendship,” Mohamed wrote, “and the bad hour that comes to everyone as it has to me. I have no friends but you and Jacques. Could you lend me the sum of three hundred thousand francs for a year?”
Josephine forwarded the request to Jacques. “This is from Mohammed, begging for money. I didn’t give it to him, but I invited him and his family to come to Les Milandes. . . . Write him if you wish.”
Jacques sent Mohamed five hundred thousand francs. It was a debt he and Josephine owed.
Pressures mounted on Josephine. Not only must she tour to make money, but she must also go back to Les Milandes at least once a month, she told Dop, “because of Jo’s accusations that I have abandoned the children for a new career. So this month, I lost 3,250,000 francs in bookings.” Besides money, the children were costing her peace of mind. There had been rumors of child abuse inflicted by various nurses, and Jo was talking of suing for custody. But she had heard he was planning to return to his old job as musical director at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and since “this place is known for catering to homosexuals, it will be a help in our fight to keep the children.”
She also decreed that none of her brood were to spend time in Paris with their father because “Monsieur Bouillon does not have the necessary female personnel to take good care of the children.” (Jo fought back, contending that he, at least, had not put the children on show for the public to gape at.)
The war accelerated.
Dop was instructed to get rid of the “Joe and Jo” ashtrays and order others: ten children in native costumes holding hands in a circle. “We must add the tenth, because when I go to South America, I will get a little Indian.”
But the situation had become impossible to sustain. She was on the road, Carrie was sick, and finally, Josephine announced a reconciliation with Jo. For the second time, she gave a wedding banquet. This one was held at the Chartreuse.
“I was invited,” Eli Mercier says. “There were famous people from Paris, Josephine was dressed in blue, the wine was extraordinary, a king could not have done it better. She had the gold glasses, gold plates, gold tablecloths.”
It was the end of April, plans for the summer had to be firmed up. She wrote Arthur Prevost telling him that “for religious reasons,” she had called off the divorce, and imploring him to give Les Milandes some publicity in his paper. “We are near Lourdes, Lascaux, Bordeaux . . . we are in the center of pre-history, the Middle Ages, Cro-Magnon man.”
Then she went off to tour Poland with a young Norwegian pianist named Tor Hultin. (If the Western world was tiring of Josephine, a new market had opened for her behind the Iron Curtain.) Tor Hultin remembers that every night before her last song, she made a speech. “She spoke of human values, respect for liberty, and the whole theater, four thousand people, would stand up and scream.
“She and I visited the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and later, during lunch with the minister of culture, Josephine was asked her impressions of the camp. She said it was the most inhuman thing that ever existed in the world. Then she bent to the minister across the table and said in a loud voice, ‘And where are your camps today, Monsieur le Ministre?’ I almost choked. Back at the hotel, I said, ‘Josephine, I want to see my wife and children again, you are going to have us arrested.’ Don’t forget we were there in 1958, the worst time in Polish history.
“She turned to me with that special look of hers, strange, half laughing, half serious. ‘There is no one who dares to touch me!’ ”
How many times we have heard that.
“Josephine was interested in everything,” Tor said. “At one press conference, she told foreign journalists that the biggest problem with black people in America was their lack of confidence. ‘They pity themselves,’ she said. ‘That will not help them.’ She was also concerned about South Africa (‘The white man there doesn’t understand he is sitting on a bomb’) and the Indians in South America.
“I was with her in Caracas when she adopted—or I should say, kidnapped—little Mara. We met a wonderful Indian woman who was in the government, and Josephine said she wanted to adopt an Indian child, and this woman took us to Maracaibo. It was a one-hour flight, and then we went with a jeep for three days visiting Indian camps, sleeping in tents. The Indians were poor, a lot of sick people and children.
“In one camp, we saw a little boy, maybe eighteen months old. They had made a hole in the sand, and he was lying in it. He looked like those pictures of concentration-camp children, big belly, skin and bones, he couldn’t walk.
“Josephine wanted to take him, and the parents were happy, they had nine or ten other children, so she gave them some money and we left. I carried the little boy on the plane, and suddenly Josephine said to me, ‘His name shall be Mara, for a big Indian chief.’
“When we got back to the airport in Caracas, a man in uniform came walking toward us, he looked like a general, and he seemed angry. I said to Josephine, ‘That man speaks a lot, but I do not understand Spanish.’
“ ‘He wants my autograph,’ she said.
“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I think he’s a policeman.’
“Suddenly a car came, and we were taken to jail. Josephine screamed for the French ambassador, but we were held for twenty-four hours. The French ambassador was there when we were released, and the ‘general’ came to apologize, and would you believe it, Josephine spat in his face. He didn’t move. He spoke bad English but he kept saying, ‘Excuse me, it was a mistake.’ They thought we had stolen an Indian baby.”
Arriving at the airport in Paris, Josephine was met by Paulette Coquatrix. Mara, the chosen descendant of Chief Maracaibo, was not happy, he was screeching. “Take care of him,” Josephine begged Paulette, “I can’t stop him.”
Paulette accepted the baby and, leaving Josephine behind to deal with the press, whisked him off to the Coquatrix apartment. “He still hadn’t stopped screaming, so I decided to change him. To my stupefaction, his skin came off with the diaper. Josephine had forgotten to change him, his poor bottom was absolutely raw. Josephine loved children, but did not know how to take care of them.”
Aside from Mara’s bottom, things were looking good. Preparations for Paris Mes Amours were already in the works (Josephine would make her Paris comeback at the Olympia, the same theater where she had made her farewell appearance), and Jo was home again. When he walked in, Josephine accosted him. “Do you know what Akio wants for Christmas?” “Yes,” he said, “a violin.” “No,” she said. “He told me he wanted for Daddy and Mommy to be more together.”
It was like the old days, an immense tree glittering next to the chimney in the salon, a mountain of toys in front of it. The whole family, Margaret, Elmo, Richard and Artie and their wives, shared a Christmas feast of oysters, turkey and chestnuts, bûche de Noël. Tor Hultin, his wife, and two young daughters joined them. “It was fantastic,” Tor says. “Josephine had invited all the children of the village and her employees and their families. There were presents for everyone. The children were playing with Gigolo, Margaret’s chimpanzee, tall as a four-year-old child and dressed in a sailor uniform, and I played Christmas songs on the beautiful grand piano that once belonged to Franz Liszt.”
Carrie did not leave her bed. There is a picture of her taken that day, lying against white pillows, her eyes far away. Is she homesick? Does she think of Arthur Martin? Tony Hudson? Willie Mae? Does she have a premonition that this will be her last Christmas?
After the holidays, Josephine took to the road again. On January 8, Charles de Gaulle became president of the Republic. On January 12, Carrie died. Josephine was in Istanbul, but did not come home. Dop had wired condolences, and she responded, “Your telegram did me good. . . . I’m completely upset.” Maybe she was, at that. Once she had told Jo, “You’re never sure about your father, but you know you came out of your mother’s belly.”
At first, Carrie’s body rested in a borrowed niche in the Malaury family’s vault, to the disapproval of Georges’s grandmother. “I do not want to spend eternity next to a négresse,” the old lady kept saying. “If you do not remove her from my vault, I will curse you from the beyond.”
In time, the removal was accomplished.
André Rivollet said Carrie had quit her home in America “for truffle country; now she rests forever next to an Italian count she never knew.” (Or, rather, next to his heart. According to Maryse Bouillon, it was Jo who had suggested that Pepito’s body, after having lain in the basement of a church for twelve years, should be moved to Les Milandes for a proper burial. But this was not dramatic enough for Josephine; she decided that she would bring back only his heart. Which she had put into a heart-shaped coffin and consigned to a grave, while the servants crossed themselves and remarked on how kind she was.)
Carrie left her son Richard her Bible. In its pages, he found a small picture of Tony Hudson.
“Josephine’s mother was lonely,” says Leon Burg. “She is buried here in the little cemetery of Les Milandes, with Jo Bouillon’s father, Pepito’s heart, and the little girl of Arthur and Janie Martin. My wife and I go sometimes to put some flowers on the right side of the cemetery where they lie. We put white flowers for the baby. The wood crosses fell long ago, you have to look under the leaves to find them.”
The children missed Carrie. “I know she adored us,” Jari says. “When Mother got angry and sent us upstairs without dinner, Granny would sneak us food.”
As a member of the family, Jo’s niece, Maryse Bouillon, had seen some of the darker side of life in the château. She was on the scene when Carrie, Margaret, and Elmo arrived from St. Louis, and describes Carrie as “imposing, a grande dame. She and my grandparents used to take long walks together, and they talked, she in American, they in French, and they understood each other perfectly.”
Maryse says she never saw any affection between Josephine and Carrie—“Carrie was a kind of prisoner there”—and she wasn’t surprised that Josephine was away when Carrie died. “She was always away when people died, she was away for my grandfather, for my grandmother, for her own mother, for the little girl, Artie’s little girl. Josephine was never there, never.”
Margaret was the person most crushed by the loss of Carrie—“I had lived with Mama all my life”—and the next time Josephine came home, she brought her sister a child, her own answer to any life crisis. Born in Belgium, the little girl’s name was Anna Balla Rama Castelluccio. Margaret called her Rama.
Paris Mes Amours, Jo Bouillon said, was going to be billed “as a rescue operation.” In fact, Bruno Coquatrix was spending a fortune on new costumes, and Paulette had brought in André Levasseur, a talented young designer, to work with Josephine. “She would stand for three hours having fittings, and not complain,” Paulette says. “Once, I stood in for her, and the clothes were so heavy they made me giddy. I had not realized you could walk in anything that heavy.
“For us, and for Josephine, this show was a very big risk.” (George Reich, who choreographed Paris Mes Amours, puts it more bluntly. “In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been, Coquatrix took a big chance.”)
For the run of the show, Josephine had rented a little studio at 4 rue Saint-Roch. Harold Nicholas was in Paris, and she asked Bruno to hire him. “I did a Caribbean number with her,” Nicholas says. “We had fun, I will always cherish the memory.”
George Reich’s memories of Josephine were less sweet. Reich not only choreographed Paris Mes Amours, he used dancers from his own company—Ballets Ho!—to support, as he put it, “the old star in a new sauce.”
A handsome blond American, he was just back from Hollywood, where he had worked on Daddy Long Legs with Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire. “I was thrilled to meet Josephine, but she asked me to partner her in a piece—‘Antinea’s Snack’—and I couldn’t find the time. I was already dancing in four numbers, besides choreographing the show, and working in TV. I explained the situation, and Coquatrix understood, but Josephine took my explanation as an insult, and used it for publicity. She dragged out the old story—Reich is white, he refused to dance with a black lady.
“She finally did the number with one of my dancers, he was a beautiful boy, it was a very sexy scene. After the reviews came in, and it was a triumph for everyone, she apologized.
“She was so tired by then with all her problems. She would arrive ten minutes before the show, and everything would be ready. False lashes, wigs, makeup, the wardrobe mistress waiting with the costume in her hands. Josephine would take three steps to the right, and the costume had to be there, three steps to the left, and Ginette would slap the wig on her head. She was like a doll, you wound her up and she went. If there was any change, she was screwed up. She would make her entrance with not a second to spare.
“Each day was a miracle. Between numbers, she would put her head on her makeup table and fall asleep for a minute or two, and they would wake her up for the next number, and she would crawl backstage, still asleep, but when the music started, she would go on and be incredible.
“She never missed a performance, she never missed an entrance, she was a workaholic. Josephine, Marlene, Edith—I have known them all. They were beasts, beasts of the stage, that’s all. It doesn’t exist anymore. They were the last of the last, they knew how to walk onstage and give you shivers.
“Paris Mes Amours was supposed to run three months, but Josephine was such a success we stayed for eight, and then left the Olympia to go on tour.”
The theater program carried ads for Les Milandes, (“Capital of World Brotherhood”) and ads showing the Rainbow Tribe drinking Pschitt, an orangeade (“now my nine children have adopted Pschitt, making it a world drink”), and ads showing them wearing “soft, non-shrinkable, color-fast” terry-cloth robes by Boussac, a company that promised SATISFACTION OR YOUR MONEY BACK. There were also pictures of a glittering Josephine bending to the rhinestone-covered mike in her right hand. She changed with the times. Borrowing from the art of Clara Smith, she had worked with a handkerchief, and she had worked with an electric guitar before electric guitars were common. Now she had mastered the microphone, using it as a weapon of seduction, voice and machine fusing into a single instrument.
Bill Taub was impressed all over again. Throughout the summer, Josephine held meetings with the producer who had once tried to put her in jail. It was a recurring pattern, she would sue you or you would sue her, but all would be forgiven the minute there was some mutual advantage in a new deal.
No other American producer was willing to touch her, but Taub believed a smart man could still make money presenting Josephine Baker back home. Although, visiting Les Milandes in September, he may have had second thoughts, because she had also invited Premier Khrushchev to be a houseguest. Fortunately, the premier couldn’t make it. Despite her apparent tolerance for godless communists, Taub signed her to two “exclusive” contracts.
Oddly enough, I got to meet Khrushchev that same year. But more important, I got to see Josephine onstage for the first time. I had been in Paris for twenty months when the headlines announced that she was coming back to the Olympia in Paris Mes Amours. It was thrilling. I had loved her voice on the radio, I had poured out my soul to her while she sat with a towel around her head in the Hôtel Scribe, and ever after, I was sure that when she sang, it was for me, to give me courage and bring me luck at work, so I could get big tips and be able to send money to my mother.
Now I bought a ticket to go and see my very first stage show at the Olympia, one block from the Scribe.
I didn’t know you were supposed to tip the usher, and when I sat down, she said, very loud, “Still a farmer, that one!” which embarrassed me. But once the lights went down and the music started, I was lost. I remember nothing but the number where Josephine, dressed like a gypsy, sang “Give Me Your Hand.” I thought of my village, and the gypsies coming, women brightly dressed, barefooted children, dark-haired men; they would park their caravans at the edge of the fields, and make fires in the grass, and cook, and we would smell the strange odors. At night, I dreamed they would take me away with them.
Wearing her fortune-teller’s costume, Josephine took me—and the rest of the audience—away with her. Coming down into the first row, capturing a man’s hand, she teasingly told his future: “Monsieur, I see you have lost your hair, but Madame is happy because I also see love in your heart, and big success will come to you.”
In my trance, it was my hand she was holding. She was my heroine; I had seen the headlines about her fight for human dignity, her fight for her children, she represented everything I wished my real mother was. I wanted my mother to be assertive, not quiet or embarrassed, I wanted her to fight my father, curse, rather than stand there with her pain written on her face.
Josephine was different. And when she sang, I knew I would follow wherever she led. I wanted to go backstage; after all, less than two years ago, this woman had promised to be my second mother, but there were so many people around that I grew shy, and left.
Now about Khrushchev. The day he came to Paris, I was working as a parking boy at a chic restaurant, Pavillon Dauphine, where the Soviet leader was to lunch with four hundred businessmen. We all had to go through metal detectors and get badges, there were cops with guns in the trees on the Bois de Boulogne, it was exciting.
Suddenly, a motorcade arrived, and I, in my dark trousers and white jacket, opened a car door and bowed, tipping my cap. Khrushchev stepped out, smiling. He kissed me, and turned me toward the reporters. “Oh, my little one, what a shame you are a servant in this capitalist country, if you were in my country you would be at school.” A translator dutifully repeated this for the press; the premier had turned me into a prop.
His arm around me, he led me into the dining room, sat me down, asked me what I wanted to eat. When he’d had enough of me and turned to talk to the businessmen, I ran back outside. I was a star. Reporters weren’t allowed inside, and one of them offered me a hundred new francs to go back, listen, “and come out and tell me what he says.”
I moved back through the guards, Khrushchev spoke, I listened to as much as I thought I could remember, then ran outside and told the guy. Other reporters cornered me and I did the same for them. I made five hundred dollars that day, and was on the evening news, but I had to work, and I didn’t see myself.
With the success of Paris Mes Amours came new business for Les Milandes. Not only tourists but performers and politicians showed up, and everyone who appeared on the premises was invited to join Les Amis des Milandes and pay yearly dues for the privilege of helping World Brotherhood. “Josephine,” Leon Burg told me, “was now attracting more visitors than the stone cave at Lascaux with its drawings by Cro-Magnon man.”
And she was once again happy with a lady lover. “Josephine and a famous and flamboyant Mexican actress were inseparable during the run of Paris Mes Amours,” says Maryse Bouillon.
Sunday nights, after her last show, Josephine left for the country. “Maurice, her chauffeur, would be waiting,” says Paulette Coquatrix, “and sometimes I would go with her. At the château, the first thing she would do is clean. Poor Jo would be trying to sleep, but she would check behind everything! Me, I was always wondering what would happen to all those children. It made me sick. Josephine thought she was a good mother, she would go away and work for them, so they had all the comforts, but they needed something else.
“My feeling is, if she had adopted two or three, she could have made them happy, but she had so many. One you can take into your arms, or two, but you cannot take twelve.
“Josephine was a superb bird, and she had plenty of heart, but she went wrong all her life because she wanted to compensate for what she had missed, give it to others. And nobody could explain to her that it was not possible.
“All day long at Les Milandes, she ran everywhere giving orders. She insisted that the electric lines be buried underground, so as not to destroy the look of the countryside with ugly poles, she worked out themes for each of the rooms at the Chartreuse (one was the Revolution Room, all in red, white, and blue), I never saw her go to bed.
“It is not attacking her to say she used people. Most artists do that. Maybe it’s not only the law of show business but the law of all people with talent.”
One night during the run of Paris Mes Amours—it was in November, and cold—a tramp on the street found a live baby boy in a garbage can and took him to the police.
“As soon as we saw that story in the newspapers,” Paulette says, “we decided not to say a word to Josephine. But after the show, she was in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower, and a journalist ran up and said, ‘Josephine, what do you think about that poor little boy?’
“Well, she couldn’t be stopped. She insisted on going to the hospital, she fell in love with the little boy, and he became her eleventh child. Since it was so close to Christmas, she called him Noël, though the nurses had given him the name of André.”
In January, Noël was christened by Abbé Tournebise; Josephine looked happy, Jo did not. He felt hopeless. “My attempts to salvage Les Milandes and our marriage had clearly failed.”
He decided to return to Paris. “Since we can’t seem to agree,” he said, “I think it’s best I leave, Josephine. I wish you luck . . . but I refuse to divorce until all the children are of age.”
Despite her renascence at the Olympia, Josephine was losing ground. One by one, the people she depended on—except for Margaret—had left her. Carrie was gone, Jo was gone (again), Richard was gone, and Artie had taken his family home to America.
“Les Milandes could have been a big success,” Artie says. “Jo Bouillon was good for the place. But my aunt would reproach him if he bought a magazine for two francs, while she was buying feathered costumes for millions. She was brutal with the help, not paying them for two or three months, screaming at them, so how could you expect them to love her? And that’s what she wanted, to be loved.
“She wanted me to call her ‘Mother’; I said no, ‘You are my aunt, not my mother.’ If she arrived home at 5 A.M., she still expected people to line up along the streets to greet her. It didn’t matter that they were sleeping, they had to show thankfulness for all she was providing. She should have stuck to show business, everything she did was theater.
“She had lured my father from St. Louis promising him everything. ‘You will have a gas station, a house, you will be happy.’ By the time I went home, he had already left.”
Josephine’s estrangement from Richard was her own doing. His marriage to the postmistress had been unhappy, and he’d fallen in love with a young woman of Sarlat named Marie-Louise Yvonne Marchive. The first Marie-Louise refused to give him a divorce, the second Marie-Louise was pregnant with his child. Josephine disapproved. She who had never cared what anybody said, who had lived exactly as she liked, lectured him about the immorality of his situation. She drove him away, her handsome, merry brother. Her only brother.