Baker, Josephine

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Baker, Josephine

June 6, 1906
April 14, 1975

Entertainer Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Carrie McDonald, an unmarried domestic worker, and Eddie Carson, a jazz drummer. At age eight she was working as a domestic. At age eleven she survived the East St. Louis race riots in which thirty-nine blacks were killed. Before she was fourteen, Baker had run away from a sadistic employer, and married and discarded a husband, Willie Wells. "I was cold, and I danced to keep warm, that's my childhood," she said. After entertaining locally, she joined a traveling show called the Dixie Steppers, where she developed as a dancer and mime.

In 1920 Baker married a jockey named Willie Baker, but she quickly left him to try out for the new black musical, Noble Sissle and composer Eubie Blake's pathbreaking Shuffle Along. She was turned down as too young, too thin, and too dark. At sixteen she was hired as end girl in a Shuffle Along road show chorus line, where she captivated audiences with her mugging. Sissle and Blake wrote her into their next show, Chocolate Dandies (1924), and the next year, Caroline Dudley invited her to join a troupe of "authentic" Negro performers she was taking to Paris in La Revue Nègre.

Baker was an overnight sensation and became the rage of Paris. As a black exotic jungle Venus, she became a phenomenon whose style and presence outweighed her talents. Everyone danced her version of the Charleston and black bottom. Women copied her hairdo. Couturiers saw a new ideal in her body. She took a series of lovers, including Paul Colin, who immortalized her on posters, and Georges Simenon, who worked as her secretary. In 1927 "La Bakair" opened at the Folies Bergère in her famous costume of a few rhinestoned bananas.

That same year Baker met the café-society habitué "Count" Pepito de Abatino (actually a Sicilian stonemason). He became her lover and manager, taught her how to dress and act, trained her voice and body, and sculpted a highly sophisticated and marketable star. They toured Europe and South America. In Vienna, Baker was preached against for being the "impure incarnation of sex." She provoked hostility fueled by economic frustration, moral indignation, xenophobia, and racism.

When Baker returned to France, Abatino had done what he had promised: turned the diamond-in-the-rough of 1925 into the polished gem of 1930. There followed a ten-year reign of Baker in the music halls of Paris. Henri Varna of the Casino de Paris added to her image a baby leopard in a $20,000 diamond necklace and the song that would become her signature "J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris." Her name was linked with several Frenchmen, including singer Jacques Pills, and in 1934 she made her best motion picture, Zouzou, costarring Jean Gabin, followed by Princess Tam Tam in 1935.

Baker returned to New York to play in the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies, but the show was a fiasco. She learned that America would neither welcome her nor look on her with color-blind eyes as France did. Abatino died of cancer before she returned to Paris. Baker married Jean Lion, a

wealthy sugar broker, in 1937, and divorced him fourteen months later. By 1939 Baker had become a French citizen. When the Nazis occupied France during World War II, Baker joined the Resistance, recruited by the head of French intelligence. For her activities in counterintelligence, Baker received the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur. After operating between Marseilles and Lisbon under cover of a revival of her operetta La Creole, she was sent to Casablanca in January of 1940 to continue intelligence activities.

In 1941 Baker delivered a stillborn child, the father unknown. Complications from this birth endangered her life for more than nineteen months, and at one point her obituary was published. She recovered and spent the last years of the war driving an ambulance and entertaining Allied troops in North Africa. After the war she married orchestra leader Jo Bouillon and adopted four children of different races whom she called her "Rainbow Tribe." She turned her château, Les Milandes, into her idea of a multiracial community. In 1951 she attracted wide attention in the United States and was honored by the NAACP, which organized a Josephine Baker Day in Harlem.

Baker continued to be an outspoken civil rights advocate, refusing to perform before segregated audiences in Las Vegas and Miami and instigating a notorious cause célèbre by accusing the Stork Club of New York of discrimination. Her controversial image hurt her career, and the U.S. State Department hinted that it might cancel her visa. Baker continued to tour outside America as her Rainbow Tribe grew to twelve. From 1953 to 1963 she spent more than $1.5 million on Les Milandes, her financial affairs degenerated into chaos, her fees diminished, and she and Bouillon separated.

In 1963 Baker appeared at the March on Washington, and after performing in Denmark had her first heart attack. In the spring of 1969 she declared bankruptcy and Les Milandes was seized. Baker accepted a villa in Monaco from Princess Grace, began a long series of farewell performances, and begged in the streets when she couldn't work. In 1975 she summoned all her resources and professionalism for a last farewell performance at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. Baker died two days into her performance run on April 14. Her televised state funeral at the Madeleine Church drew thousands of people and included a twentyone-gun salute.

See also Blake, Eubie; Musical Theater