‘She just wiggled her fanny and all the French fell in love with her,’ said Maria Jolas to Josephine Baker’s biographer, Phyllis Rose. Maria Jolas, evidently still bewildered after all these years by the insouciant ease with which the washerwoman’s daughter from St Louis, Missouri, conquered Paris in 1925.
But by all accounts that wiggle was an unprecedented event even in the uninhibited world of Parisian spectacle. Her posterior agitated as if it had a life of its own. Phyllis Rose theorises about it: ‘With Baker’s triumph, the erotic gaze of a nation moved downward: she had uncovered a new region for desire.’ Surely Ms Rose is being a little unfair; the French reputation for sexual sophistication may be exaggerated but the habitués of Montmartre cabaret must have seen a bare bum before.
And, of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. Baker herself put her finger on the source of her attraction: ‘The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks,’ she said. When Baker sailed the Atlantic in 1925 with a group of African-American artists, including Sidney Bechet, to take a little taste of show-stopping Harlem nightlife to Europe, she left behind nascent Broadway stardom as a comic dancer, an elastic-limbed, rubber-faced clown, grimacing, grinning, crossing her eyes, to find herself freshly incarnated as a sex-goddess without, it would seem, changing her act very much at all.
She even, although glammed up to the nines, continued crossing her eyes at odd moments: she must have felt it necessary to make her own ironic comment on herself to her audiences, so rapt and breathless was the Parisian reaction to the Revue Négre. ‘Their lips must have the taste of pickled watermelon, coconut, poisonous flowers, jungles and turquoise waters,’ enthused one scribe.
Yes, of course there is an implicit racism behind that purple prose, but it is a better thing to be adored for one’s difference than shunned for it and Phyllis Rose describes eloquently the extraordinary sense of liberation these black artists felt when they arrived in Europe. Life acquired a grand simplicity; any bar would serve them, and waiters said: ‘sir’, and ‘madame’. They could check into any hotel they wanted. To use a public convenience did not provoke a race riot. Later on, in the US in the Fifties, Baker would battle valiantly in the Civil Rights Movement; in Paris in the Twenties, she allowed herself to enjoy being a girl. She was Cinderella, the papers said; all she need do now was try on the slipper and marry the prince.
As toothy, exuberant, not-precisely-pretty Josephine Baker grew into her new role of jungle queen, savage seductress and round Baudelairean Black Venus, she left off making faces. At night, she hit the town in Poiret frocks. She never married a prince but Georges Simenon always said he would have married her had he not been married already; then, staggering thought, she would have been, in a sense, Madame Maigret. She had plenty of other offers, too; Phyllis Rose does not drop many names, although she gives a teasing vignette of the architect Le Corbusier, whom Baker met on an ocean liner. ‘He and Josephine became great pals and he went to the ship’s costume ball dressed as Josephine Baker, with darkened skin and a waistband of feathers.’
She acquired a pet, a leopard named Chiquita, ‘a male despite his name’, who sported a diamond collar. (She had a Bardot-like passion for animals.) Chiquita went everywhere with her, her exquisite objective correlative; the French wanted her to be herself a jewelled panther and good humouredly she gave them what they wanted. Baring her breasts, she danced in the Folies Bergéres wearing a girdle of bananas and sealed her fame. From henceforth, this garment, which is, I think, unknown in any form of dress in any part of the world, which is purely the invention of a mildly prurient exoticism, would be associated with her.
In 1928, she danced in Berlin. Louise Brooks, there to film Pandora’s Box for Pabst, and something of an expert in the methodology of exploited sexuality, saw her. 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 menagerie when the meat appears at the cage”.’ Phyllis Rose doesn’t record Brooks’s observation, suggesting as it does that there was, perhaps, rather more raw eroticism about Baker’s early performances than Rose lets on.
La Baker came back to the Casino de Paris and sang: ‘J’ai deux amours. Mon pays et Paris.’ That became her song. In return for her youth, her sex, her exoticism, the French gave her love, cash, and respect. She briefly returned to Broadway in 1935 and arrived at a party for Gershwin in full drop-’em-dead French glamour-queen glad rags: ‘Who dat?’ said Bea Lillie. In France once again, now and then she’d change the words of her song: ‘Mon pays, c’est Paris.’ After a war in which she proved her loyalty to her adopted country, smuggling secret information in invisible ink on her sheet music, would you believe, the French gave her the Légion d’Honneur.
She died in her seventieth year, in 1975, in the white heat and ostrich plumes of her umpteenth come-back, an institution, a heroine, mourned by the dozen children – her multi-ethnic ‘Rainbow Tribe’ – she adopted in her forties, something glorious if faintly touched by the ludicrous, at last, a geriatric sex-queen cherished in old age by the French loyalty to the familiar as she had been feted when young by the French passion for the new.
(1990)