Forty-five minutes later, we were in his office, and it was Nelle Nugent’s turn to gape. (Only recently, she told me that when I came back to the Palace with her boss, she thought, “How could this guy find Jimmy Nederlander so fast? I can’t find him myself!”)
Mr. Nederlander had me call Josephine. “I’m not talking to you,” she said. “You’re a traitor.” I said Mr. Nederlander was booking her into the Palace, wasn’t it wonderful? and he took the phone. “Miss Baker, your son is the fastest talker I ever met. I want you here tomorrow.”
Impossible. She couldn’t leave the children, she was booked for the ball at Versailles, but her Jean-Claude knew everything, he could get the press releases started. Mr. Nederlander agreed, yet I was worried. Why was I a traitor? Back at Peter Brown’s, I called Marie Spiers and asked what was going on.
After San Francisco, Josephine had gone to spend a few days with Marie in Paris, and Marie had confronted her with a copy of France-Dimanche. “You’re hiding something from me.” The newspaper featured pictures of Josephine and Bob Brady (“twenty years younger, and an American millionaire”), along with a story about the “shadow” over their happiness. I was quoted as saying, “Maman is not divorced from Jo Bouillon,” something I did not even know.
Josephine swore to Marie that there was nothing to the story. Again, it was “I don’t know that man.” She was going to appear at the Versailles ball after all (I had convinced Jean-Louis Barrault to approach her directly—he told her, “France needs you”), and since I had been invited too, I decided to fly to Paris for a couple of days. I could attend the party and, while in town, clear up the France-Dimanche mystery.
Upon my arrival, the first thing I did was get a copy of the “interview” I was supposed to have given. It was nothing but a blown-up version of the item from Suzy’s column that had already appeared in London’s Daily Mail and France-Soir. Although the editor of France-Dimanche was willing to clear me, Josephine refused to speak to him. She went to Versailles without me—she’d got my invitation canceled (“I don’t know that person”)—and stole the show from Liza Minnelli and Nureyev, and I went back to America.
By mid-November, the Palace contract was in Joseph Bessone’s office. Josephine was to be paid thirty thousand dollars for her week’s work, she was to open on New Year’s Eve, and to be in New York five days earlier “for publicity purposes.”
Now to my surprise, her nephew, Richard, Jr., took my place as whipping boy. “Aunt Tumpy used to tell me her children are bastards and giving her trouble, they don’t have her blood, whereas I do, so she trusts me.”
In December, Josephine wrote to Bob Brady about their “marriage,” now three months old. “I too regret not having took [sic] the communion that beautiful and special day. . . .” She also told him that since I had talked to a “scandal newspaper,” the family had written me off. “Not one of us wishes to see him again, he is a very bad boy. . . .”
I soon learned that was not the way the children felt at all. “I was surprised,” Jean-Claude said. “She’d had you on a pedestal, and I said to myself, ‘It cannot be, she used him and now she is discarding him.’ Anyway, I felt a lot of affection for you, and you know, at the time, we were so fed up with her we had almost lost interest in her welfare.”
Jari offered reassurance too. “For me,” he said, “you were the brother who had logic, and who helped us a lot.”
Josephine opened at the Palace on New Year’s Eve. That morning, it rained. The journalist Dotson Rader, working for Esquire, covered the final rehearsal. Briefly, he spoke with Richard, who confided that “Madame Aunt” had never had a face-lift. When he saw her, Rader believed it. Her cheeks, he said, “like errant sand dunes invading an oasis, encroached sadly on her mouth when she was not smiling.”
He sketched for his magazine a painful picture of a woman in the twilight of her days, wandering, distracted, working from some deep recess of will; when the body said no, the mind said no, and only the spirit insisted.
She ran out of breath. She forgot the name of her new dresser, and could not remember her lyrics, Rader reported. “Richard, sensing her confusion, brought her a cardboard schedule listing her songs and conversation. She had trouble reading it. She went on, leaning back, her sunglasses catching the stage lights . . . into another medley, and again she forgot the words . . . ‘Smile when you’re blah blah blah . . . and then I came back to New York and Billy Brice . . .’
“She had forgotten Fanny Brice.”
Tommy Tune, the dancer/choreographer/actor, was at that opening. “I’d never seen Josephine, and it was not only New Year’s Eve, but my night off from a show called Seesaw, so I went. There were many old European people in the audience, and this black guy dressed in a turban ran down the aisles passing out roses, and he said, ‘Throw these to Josephine when she comes on, she will love it.’
“And Josephine started on and stopped and said, ‘I can’t step on all these beautiful roses,’ and I thought, ‘My God, how sensitive, how wonderful. And then somebody came out and sort of cleared her a path.
“My favorite moment in the show was when she sat down on the stage and started to recall this dance that George Balanchine had done for her. He’d said, ‘Josephine, I see you with four men,’ and she’d said, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe that’s too many men for me . . .’ And she just drifted off into this reverie. The piano player was playing soft music, and she went away from us, into some memory we were not a part of. She was so at home on the stage she just went off. And then you could see her thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m here at the Palace, what am I doing, talking about Balanchine and those four men, I must go on with the show.’
“You could see her return to reality, it was one of the great magic moments I ever experienced in a theater.”
At the Palace, Dany Revel was her pianist, one of the fixed points in her changing world. He had known her since 1959, played for her in Paris Mes Amours. It was Dany who had come with her to the Regal in Chicago. “With her, many times I got tears in my eyes, and that’s why I forgave her everything.
“In her own way, she was looking for perfection. She once stopped in the middle of the street and said, ‘You understand, Dany, in life one can always do better.’ To survive a long time, a hardness is needed. She dared to cut people out of her life, she tired everyone.”
The New York Times’s Howard Thompson raved about the show at the Palace, saying Josephine still had “luscious, honeyed tones in the middle register and hearty top ones belted out when she chooses. . . .”
Now Jack Jordan and Howard Sanders filed a $1.5-million damage suit against her, charging breach of contract in San Francisco. But in the teeth of lawsuits, she was unregenerate. After the last show at the Palace, she stole the costumes again. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Richard, Jr., says. “She heard someone’s coming with a warrant to take her costumes, and she calls up my brother Artie, and he brings his truck from Long Island. A sheriff came backstage later, but the costumes were gone. I said to Aunt Tumpy later, ‘You are the biggest crook in the world!’ ”
As with Thelma Carpenter’s “biggest gyp on the Nile,” there is a certain amount of admiration in the description.
“From the Palace,” Dany Revel says, “we went to the Raffles Club. I thought that was a step down, it was a private club, not ideal.”
In the three weeks between her closing at the Palace and her opening at Raffles, she flew to Cuernavaca, and Bob Brady. But something went wrong between them. My own theory is that she discovered he was not so rich as she had believed. In any case, during the afternoon of January 15, she wrote a farewell note on paper with his letterhead, Casa de la Torre, and begged a favor. “One night, I was very ill, and you stayed near me, please do this again tonight. I only have pure thoughts, I probably will not come here again, so I would like to be near you one more night.”
She calls him “my husband,” tells him to throw himself into his painting and not drink too much, and announces her intention to sneak away “like a thief in the early morning . . . I won’t be able to say goodbye.”
Josephine is being so dishonest. She had started the game with him before our trip to Mexico—“He is gay,” she had told me, “but a great host.” Meaning, there would be free food, free beds, good company, nice parties. And when she’s had enough, she’s gone.
His letters to her were destroyed—after a fight with Richard, Jr., fearing blackmail, she burned them—and since he died before I could talk to him, we don’t have his side of the story. But it seems to me he wasn’t treated much better than I, though he did get a fond notice of dismissal.
People who didn’t love her, who treated her as a business proposition, got a better deal. With Jimmy Nederlander, she showed up on time, she talked to the press, she signed autographs.
At Raffles, there was no Jimmy Nederlander to temper Josephine’s whims, and little structure of any kind, so the show was pretty much a mess. The club, in the basement of the Sherry Netherland Hotel, was doing no business.
“And everybody was serving her with subpoenas,” Richard, Jr., marvels. “I said, ‘Aunt Tumpy, stop signing those autographs, you gonna sign one, we gonna go to jail.’
“We were living at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South, and Aunt Tumpy was cooking rice all the time. And we had sweet rolls so stale we had to put water on them to soften them. She had been making thousands of dollars a night at the Palace—she would go to Armani and buy clothes, she bought that teacup puppy, Fifi, that cost five hundred dollars—and we were living in poverty.”
Florence Dixon recalls those winter afternoons through a rosy haze. “We would sit on the floor of her apartment at the Navarro, and Josephine would put out pictures of the kids, and pictures of the Christmas dinner, with Sister there. I was spellbound.
“She didn’t want anybody to know about her medical condition. We used to go to a lab and have her blood tested. She was supposed to send reports back to her doctor in France, but I don’t think she ever did.”
“Aunt Tumpy was very suspicious,” Richard, Jr., says. “At the Navarro, she suddenly got the idea that terrorists were going to attack us, and suddenly I was moving trunks from one hotel room to another. She was suspicious of you, too, Jean-Claude. She said, ‘He is scandalous, he is using my name, after all I have done for him, like he was a son of mine. Do you know, he tried to sing in my show?’ ”
I had finally made the acquaintance of Richard, Jr., outside of Raffles. Loving his father, I was happy to meet him, and we had a brief, friendly conversation. He told me of his troubles. “All the time at the Palace, and now at Raffles, she’s complaining, ‘Jean-Claude wouldn’t do things that way,’ and I’ve been saying, ‘Why don’t you get him back if he’s so great?’ ”
He thought I should make peace with his aunt. I said no. “She’d have to ask my pardon on her knees.”
I thought I was out of her life, but I wasn’t. The manager at Raffles had made me welcome—I found out later that Josephine had told him to take care of me—and I went there almost every night, and stood at the bar. It was an exercise in masochism. She wasn’t happy with the way the maître d’ introduced her, and one night she reprimanded him in front of the audience. “That’s it!” he said to me. “From now on, she can introduce herself!”
She never approached me and I didn’t go to her, but a mutual friend, Jocelyne Jocya, was determined to effect a reconciliation, and prevailed on both of us to show up at the Village Gate where she—Jocelyne—was singing. “I have arranged everything for Sunday, Josephine’s day off,” she told me. “I have reserved a front table, you will arrive first, then she will come with Bessie Buchanan and Florence Dixon. The champagne is on ice.”
Still, I fought with myself. If I gave in, Josephine would once again be getting away with murder. “She wanted to dominate, and make you afraid at the same time,” Jacqueline Abtey had said. “When I discovered that, I knew it was time to leave her.” Not being as smart as Jacqueline Abtey, I came to the Village Gate, sat at the table down in front, and waited. At midnight, I got up and went home.
Jocelyne says Josephine arrived a few minutes afterward, and was sad that I’d left. But she never called:
In April, with Richard, Jr., she went west to appear at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for a weekend. “I thought, my aunt, the big star,” Richard, Jr., says, “and then we went into that ballroom and it was empty. Only a few people came, Nina Simone, Lou Rawls’s mother, Eartha Kitt, Diana Ross.
“Diana Ross is sitting there with her friends, and Aunt Tumpy goes up to her and cups Diana Ross’s face in her hands, and kisses her on both cheeks.”
Diana Ross has told me a less tender version of the face-cupping story. “Josephine came, stood in front of me, put her fingers into my hair, and pulled hard,” she says. “I guess she wanted to see if I was wearing a wig.”
“I was getting sick of the whole mess,” Richard, Jr., says. “I finally just left California and never saw Aunt Tumpy again.”
Back home on the Riviera, Josephine went to Joseph Bessone and said she wanted to buy a large property in Monaco. “I told her,” he says, “the princess has been very generous with you, and I know she doesn’t expect you to pay off the mortgage on the Villa Maryvonne, but if I were you, to show my gratitude, I would take care of that.
“Josephine paid off the mortgage. The princess was once again generous, she refused to take any interest.”
In June, Sammy Davis, Jr., who was to headline the opening show at Monaco’s new Sporting Club, withdrew in a fit of pique. He was replaced by Burt Bacharach, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Bill Cosby, and Josephine. The princess could always count on Josephine.
Her nephew, Richard, Jr., could not. At that time, she thought of him as an enemy who was planning to write a scurrilous book about her. “He told me he had frightful things to say about me and my sister,” she confided to Florence Dixon. “He threatened to unveil the true Josephine Baker. The lack of family feeling among some of the young is deplorable . . . that boy is only thirsty for money and glory.”
It was a thirst with which she was familiar. By mid-July, she and Dany Revel were back from a tour of Japan, and she was planning for the 1974 Red Cross gala. Again, in that act of cannibalism practiced by aging stars who feed on their own legends, the spectacular was to be a retelling of Josephine’s life story.
Jean-Claude Brialy had agreed to act as master of ceremonies on opening night, and Josephine wove dreams. If the show were a hit, why not move it to Paris?
Marie Spiers came to spend her vacation in Roquebrune. “As soon as I arrived, Josephine said, ‘Give me all your money, I need it,’ and she took me and Christina Scotto (who was also staying with her) to Italy to buy beauty products. She claimed they were less expensive than in France.
“The Red Cross show was an absolute triumph. Afterward, again with my money, she went to Israel to cry at the Wailing Wall, and to comfort Golda Meir, who was no longer prime minister. She took Stellina.”
Of all the children, Stellina, being the baby, was now closest to Josephine. “I was lucky,” she says, “I think I had a wonderful mother, I never tried to judge her. I had ten years with her, and after she died, ten years with my father in Argentina, but for me he was a stranger.
“Once I said to him, ‘You know something? You never wanted me, but be careful, because life is going to fool you. You love Marianne and all your other children, you think I’m the bad one, but the day you’re alone, the one who will stay with you will be me.’
“When he was dying, he was hallucinating one time, he wanted to kill me, and afterward, he said, ‘Stellina, it’s not you, it’s your mother.’ And he cried. And he said all those things he never told my mother, things he thought and felt and never said. He had lived twenty years with all that inside. He died loving her.”
Excited by the success of the latest Monte Carlo gala, Josephine got in touch with Gerard Oestreicher, an American producer. She said she would like to bring the production over “as soon as you arrange it with James Nederlander.”
It didn’t happen. Still, she didn’t sit on her hands waiting. She was appearing at the Berns Theatre in Stockholm when she ran into Jack Jordan, who was convinced they were being led by forces they didn’t understand. “I had to leave America because I lost everything, and I came to Stockholm to start again. We met. . . . There must be a reason.”
“How strange life is,” said Josephine. “Think! I was crossing the street . . . and you came down another road.”
Then she accused him of lying, stealing, and leaving her stranded in San Francisco. As for the lawsuit, not only did she not owe him money, he owed her money!
She was on her way to South Africa, where she would tour for a month; after that, she would be appearing at the Palladium in London.
She had asked Dany Revel to accompany her on the South African tour, but Mrs. Revel said no. “My wife is a respected medium in France, and she said, ‘I don’t want you to go, c’est tout noir.’ She didn’t see death, just darkness. I felt like an idiot, but I didn’t go.”
Josephine shouldn’t have gone either. The tour was a flop, houses a quarter full. The star criticized the apartheid laws but, said Variety, “she was willing to accept South African money.”
She must have been glad to get back to London, where Dany was playing piano for her, the queen mother was in the audience—it was a command performance to help needy actors—and Josephine was a hit. She wore a new jumpsuit, and told old stories. “I started in 1924, and we were all beginners together—Pablo, Matisse, Hemingway. I used to look after them, picking up their clothes, getting them organized.” As for the bananas, “I wasn’t really naked, I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”
Two weeks before Christmas, Moïse got married. Josephine did not attend.
“He was the first of us to get married,” Jean-Claude says, “and he wanted his mother at the wedding. It was touching. I remember she was in the kitchen doing the dishes, like a poor old woman with that plastic cap on her head, and Moïse said, ‘Mother, why don’t you want to come?’ and she told him some kind of story—she had not been introduced to the girl, rules of etiquette had not been respected, whatever. She used any excuses she could think of.
“Moïse was very tense, hyper, and he said, ‘For the last time, will you come to the wedding?’ and she answered calmly, ‘No, Moïse.’ So he said, ‘From this day forward, I will never set foot in your house.’
“It was so hard, but she preferred that, she preferred putting up a wall to talking, and there was no going over that wall.”
“Moïse is marrying a chambermaid at the hotel where he’s a waiter,” Josephine complained to Jean-Claude Brialy. “It is a mistake to get married at nineteen with no experience in life.” (The estrangement from Moïse had its bright side, she wouldn’t have to part with any of the jewels she had been keeping “for my future daughters-in-law.”)
“I wonder,” Brahim says, “if she was not jealous of the women my brothers chose. Moïse’s wife, Monique, was good-looking, a lovely girl, but Mother was furious.”
Margaret had been planning to fix Christmas dinner, but Josephine protested. “No, Sister, you have worked enough, I’m going to take all of you to a restaurant.” She also bought new clothes for all the children, spending one and a half million francs in a fancy store in Nice. “It was as though she had a presentiment that it would be her last Christmas,” says Joseph Bessone. “Since she came back from America, she had gone nonstop. I told her she had to take more care of herself.”
She didn’t, she couldn’t. Since America had not responded with a new offer, she turned her sights back home. No nibbles. Paris managers did not have faith in yet another Josephine Baker comeback.
And then, with her good fairy in attendance, her baraka working, whatever it was that always supplied her with a fresh chance, she met Jean Bodson, a patron of the arts. He took her to lunch and confessed that as a young man, he had been madly in love with her. “I own a little theater, not worthy of your talent, but it would be an honor to give it to you.”
They went to check out his theater, Bobino, in Montparnasse, on rue de la Gaîté, and she was satisfied. “Oh! It will be perfect for my farewell. We could maybe move that column, build a staircase . . .”
Monsieur Bodson said he would redo the theater. By the time it was done, it had cost him a million dollars.
Now, every day, in Marie Spiers’s apartment, Josephine rehearsed with Dany Revel at the grand piano. He had to go to play at the Hôtel Méridien at 6 P.M., but he gave Josephine his afternoons. He had written an opening number for her, a song with lyrics that began, “Here I am, back again, Paris, tell me, how do you find me?”
“For three months they were rehearsing,” Marie says, “and while Josephine sang, she rearranged all my shelves. Pierre would come at night to see what she had learned.” (Once again, Pierre was going to be her conductor.)
“She was beginning,” Marie says, “to behave like someone reborn. She even found time to try writing her own life story [no Sauvage or Rivollet to help her this time], dictating a little bit every day to a secretary at Bobino. And she wanted to receive a lot of people again. She told me, ‘It’s too small here.’ I found her an apartment two doors from mine, and she liked it, except for the bedroom. ‘It smells of death,’ she said. I signed the lease, and my son was upset. ‘You are crazy,’ he said.”
Despite her bravado, Dany Revel knew that Josephine was worried. “It was her last chance to reconquer Paris. Then one day, we were rehearsing the opening, she was sitting on a chair, and she started to sing, and it was like a phonograph winding down, ‘Heeere IIIII aaammm . . .’ I looked over at her, and she had fallen asleep.
“I let her sleep, but wondered about her strength.”
Still nervous that she wasn’t quite ready to face the public, Josephine had asked to have the opening pushed back a week. Mr. Bodson was willing, but André Levasseur, who had designed the sets and costumes, said no, Dany Revel recalls. “She needed a few more days, even forty-eight hours would have given her some time to rest.”
On March 24, the first preview took place. Her doctor had tried to prevent all extracurricular activities, but Josephine could never say no to the press. She permitted a TV news crew to come backstage. She was dressed for the finale of the first act in her army uniform with all her medals and ribbons. “The decorations you are wearing—” the interviewer began. Josephine never let him finish the question. “Won on the battlefields,” she said.
She was asked about her family, and she laughed. “They are growing up. One of my sons, Luis, is getting married.”
Had they been to the show?
No, they were studying. “At this moment, it is good they are not here, because when I’m with them, I forget everything, tout, tout, tout. Only my children count. And right now it is necessary that I have peace and tranquillity so I can give myself entirely to the public of Paris.”
How did it feel to be back on a Paris stage?
“Good. Agreeable to find again my family. For me, family is everybody, but mostly the public who made me.”
Heavily made up, without her big glasses, the bags under her eyes no longer hidden behind spangles, Josephine looked straight into the camera. “It is agreeable, because at least I can see what they think of me while I’m still alive.”