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The year is 1939. As Nazi Germany advances on France, pushing ever nearer towards her borders, Captain Jacques Abtey of the Deuxième Bureau stalks the sidewalks of Paris with his briefcase at his side. His mission: find Josephine Baker, the woman he’s been told would make an exceptional undercover agent for the French resistance. Josephine Baker, he knows, everyone knows, is a performer, an exotic dancer, singer, actress, whose wild shows shock and delight audiences all over Europe. Feather clad with a live jaguar at her side, Josephine’s burlesque performances had taken Paris’ nightlife by storm. As he disembarks a train in the posh suburb of Le Vesinet, Abtey mentally prepares for the woman he’s about to meet, a woman draped in feathers and sequins sipping champagne with a wide grin and a loud, look-at-me voice. But when he approaches her mansion, the sight that greets him is nothing at all like he has imagined. There’s Josphine Baker, but instead of feathers and sequins she wears a felt hat and faded, oversized pants. What’s more, she’s on her hands and knees digging in the front garden. She stops and gazes up at Abtey as he comes up the front walk, dropping a rust colored snail into a bucket and dusting the rich black earth from her hands. “You must be Captain Abtey,” she says, squinting into the sun. “For my ducks,” she says, motioning towards the bucket of snails. “Come in,” she gets to her feet. “It’s time for champagne.” Josephine Baker, from St. Louis street rat to world famous performer, first Black female movie star to French spy, entrepreneur to US civil rights activist, mother of twelve… I think you will find, like Abtey, that Josephine Baker is nothing if not completely unexpected. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. It’s officially Black history month here in the US and I have some truly incredible stories for you this month. Starting off with a serious bang with the story of Josephine Baker. Josephine is someone I had heard about as a performer, singer, actress, right, a celebrity, but I truly did not know how absolutely bananas, literally, her story actually is. From her birth until the day she died, she truly took the world by storm, defying all the odds and blowing everyone’s expectations out of the water. And the impact that she had, the legacy she left behind is hard to quantify but I think it’s safe to say that she changed us, all of us in some way or another.
Josephine was born as Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis Missouri in 1906. Her ancestry is a complete question mark. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was a black woman but she had been adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald. The McDonalds were both formerly enslaved and of African American and Native American descent. But, once again, Carrie was adopted. We have no idea who Josephine’s father was. Her estate later identified her natural father as vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson but that was most likely not the case. In 1993, Josephine’s adopted son Jean-Claude Baker published a biography of her life called “Josephine: the Hungry Heart” in which he wrote quote “The records of the city of St. Louis tell an almost unbelievable story. They show that (Baker's mother) Carrie McDonald ... was admitted to the (exclusively white) Female Hospital on May 3, 1906, diagnosed as pregnant. She was discharged on June 17, her baby, Freda J. McDonald having been born two weeks earlier. Why six weeks in the hospital? Especially for a black woman (of that time) who would customarily have had her baby at home with the help of a midwife? ... The father was identified (on the birth certificate) simply as "Edw"... I think Josephine's father was white—so did Josephine, so did her family...people in St. Louis say that (Baker's mother) had worked for a German family (around the time she became pregnant)... I have unraveled many mysteries associated with Josephine Baker, but the most painful mystery of her life, the mystery of her father's identity, I could not solve. The secret died with Carrie, who refused to the end to talk about it. She let people think Eddie Carson was the father, and Carson played along, (but) Josephine knew better,” end quote. Josephine herself told varying tales throughout her life about who her father was - a famous Black lawyer, a Jewish tailor, a Spanish dancer, or a white German-American which is what Jean-Claude leaned towards. She’s reminding me a lot of Mary Richards here. I talked about Mary Richards in episode 50. She was an enslaved Black woman who acted as a Union spy, possibly from within the Confederate White House itself in Richmond Virginia during the Civil War. And Mary made up all sorts of stories about her life and about her parents. Her mother was Black and her father was a mix of Cuban-Spanish and Black. In another account her mother was white and her father was Black. Sometimes she said she knew nothing at all about her parents. Josephine is sort of doing the same thing here, almost creating her own identity as it suits her. Maybe that’s a spy thing because Josephine would also become involved in espionage during a totally different war, but, I’m getting ahead of myself.
So she was born in St. Louis, Missouri at the turn of the century and we know very little about her ancestry or ethnicity other than her mother was Black. Josephine grew up extremely poor. This is why Jean-Claude was so shocked to uncover that her mother had spent 6 weeks in a hospital for white women around the time of Josephine’s birth. Who paid for that? This German family? The prominent Black lawyer? The Jewish guy? Someone paid for that and it wasn’t Carrie cause Carrie was dirt poor. Josephine spent her childhood in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Louis which was a racially mixed low income neighborhood made up of mostly rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing. Her mother married a man named Arthur Martin and they had a few more children together. Arthur was kind to them but he couldn’t hold down a job. Carrie did people’s laundry to try to scrape by but it wasn’t enough. At the age of 8, yes 8, Josephine was hired out to work as a domestic servant for white families in St. Louis. And she was not treated well. According to Wikipedia, “one woman abused her, burning Josephine’s hands when the young girl put too much soap in the laundry,” end quote.
In 1917, at the age of 11, she witnessed racial violence that stuck with her for the rest of her life. She later recalled this traumatic incident in a speech saying quote “I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings,” end quote. By the age of 12, Josephine had dropped out of school and was living on the streets, sleeping in cardboard boxes and eating out of trashcans. She also danced on street corners for money in order to buy food. At 13 she got a job as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur's Club which was a popular hang out for jazz musicians. This is where she met a 26 year old steel worker named Willie Wells whom she married at the age of 13. The marriage lasted less than a year, thank God. After that she got involved in a vaudeville troupe called the Jones Family Band. Vaudeville shows were popular, especially in the late 1800s. They were a type of entertainment involving singing, dancing, comedic skits, acrobatics, cross-dressing. They were almost circus-like. And these would be put on in vaudeville halls throughout the US so it was a traveling thing. They followed the vaudeville circuit. So Josephine joined a vaudeville troupe which displeased her mother. Her mother did not want her to be an entertainer. She also scolded Josephine for neglecting her second husband, William Howard Baker, whom she had married at age 15. So this is where the last name Baker comes into play. This marriage would only last a few years but Josephine kept the name Baker for the rest of her life. And the main reason the marriage failed was because Josephine’s vaudeville act took her to New York City and she left her husband behind in St. Louis in order to pursue this opportunity. In New York, she performed in several broadway musicals as part of the chorus line. This included “Shuffle Along” in 1921 and “The Chocolate Dandies” in 1924. And this put Jospehine right in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance taking place at the time, a period of African American cultural and artistic expression centered around Harlem in New York City - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday - and though you aren’t likely to see her name on any of those lists - Hazel Scott. Episode 26. Because Josphine reminds me a whole lot of Hazel too. I’ll try to point out the parallels as we come to them. But I mean, already, they were both Black female performers during New York’s Harlem Renaissance.
So Josephine was performing on Broadway but she was always relegated to the chorus line and she really wanted more than that. She wanted to be the star. But to achieve that, she was going to have to cross an ocean. Black American entertainers faced many many more obstacles than Black European entertainers. Slavery was too fresh. There was so much discrimination and racism in the US in the 1920s but not as much in France. Hmm who else relocated to France? Could it be Hazel Scott? So Josephine goes to Paris in 1925 at the age of 19 and she is an instant success. She said in a 1974 interview with the Guardian quote “No, I didn't get my first break on Broadway. I was only in the chorus in 'Shuffle Along' and 'Chocolate Dandies.' I became famous first in France in the twenties. I just couldn't stand America and I was one of the first coloured Americans to move to Paris,” end quote. Her first show upon arrival was called “la Revue Negre” (you guys know I can’t do the French accent, sorry). It was at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees. According to Tim Murari in that Guardian article quote “she danced the Charleston on top of a drum dressed in ostrich feathers, and became a huge star. The French press went wild and said she was “Nefertiti and the Queen of Sheba and Cleopatra… her eyelids twinkling with sequins, her fingers, wrists, throat and ears aglow with diamonds… She is the most radiant of all temptresses ever to grace the Paris stage… A sinuous idol who enslaves and incites all mankind,” end quote. So she’s scantily clad, wearing nothing but feathers, and this is 1925. I mean this is mega scandalous. I don’t think this would have flown in the US. But in Paris. They’re here for it. They love how exotic she is. She’s able to incorporate her African heritage in a way that Parisians appreciate where Americans maybe would have viewed it as too savage and uncivilized.
During another Paris show, she appeared in not much more than strings of pearls and a skirt made of sparkly artificial bananas. Later, she incorporated her pet cheetah into her shows. The cheetah’s name was Chiquita and she wore a diamond collar and often escaped into the orchestra pit, terrorizing the musicians while Josephine performed. Before long, Josephine was the most successful American performer in France, Black or white or whatever. She swept them off their feet. Ernest Hemingway called her quote “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Pablo Picasso frequently sketched her and French avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau befriended her and helped launch her to international stardom with his entertainment connections. In 1927 she became the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, a French silent film called Siren of the Tropics. In 1929 she became the first African American celebrity to visit Yugoslavia, like the whole country of Yugoslavia. Welsh singer Dame Shirley Bassey, who is, according to Wikipedia one of the most popular vocalists in Britain cites Josephine as her biggest influence and said quote “she went from a petite danseuse sauvage with a decent voice to la grande diva magnifique... I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer,” end quote.
But despite this, despite being catapulted to super stardom in Europe, Josephine remains somewhat humble and authentic, in a felt hat, digging for snails to feed her ducks. Lauren Michele Jackson says in an article for the New Yorker quote “Baker’s power wasn’t a matter of being hoisted upon the shoulders of great men; she regarded most of them with equable indifference. In a 1933 interview, she flubbed the name of a notable Spanish painter [saying] ‘You know, Pinazaro, or what is his name, the one everyone talks about?” end quote. That’s Picasso she’s referring to there. But, really, she never attained the same level of fame in the US. She tried. She attempted to return to Broadway in the mid 30s but was not successful. Time magazine referred to her as a quote “Negro wench… whose dancing and singing might be topped anywhere outside of Paris,” end quote. And so Josephine returned to France, sort of heart broken that her country hadn’t wanted her. And it’s then, in 1937 that she relinquished her American citizenship for French citizenship when she married a guy named Jean Lion.
There was another place that wasn’t really feeling Jospehine though, Germany. While her career was taking off in France and much of Europe, she was facing hostility in Germany and Eastern Europe. According to Wikipedia quote “she was targeted by storm troopers with ammonia bombs and told to quote "Go back to Africa,” end quote. Austrian headlines called her the “Black Devil” and she was basically run out of Berlin 3 weeks into a scheduled 6 month show run there. In the late 30s, her face was printed on a leaflet by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as an example of degenerate untermenschlich art. So, yeah, if there’s anywhere more racist than America in 1939, it’s Germany. 1939 is when Josephine was recruited by France’s Deuxième (doze-ee-em) Bureau. This was a French military intelligence agency, like the CIA or Britain’s MI6, Russia’s KGB, that operated from 1870 until 1940 when Germany officially invaded France. So this is right before Nazi’s took over Paris, basically. They are closing in on France in 1939 and in September, France officially declares war on Germany. Josephine remained tight-lipped about this part of her life. She seemed to downplay it. In that Guardian interview she said quote “During the war I worked with the French Resistance and I drove an ambulance. It was exciting. The French Government gave me the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honour… I told them why give it to me. I didn’t do much. Others deserve it more,” end quote.
But Jackson’s New Yorker article sheds some more light on Josephine’s involvement in fighting Nazis during World War II. She interviews British journalist Damien Lewis about his new book “Agent Josephine.” In this book, Lewis seeks to uncover what actually happened during the 7 years Josephine spent working for the French Resistance. Jackson says quote “Lewis’s bibliography and notes make clear how deeply he has drawn on interviews with veterans, memoirs by agents, the private family archives of a British spymaster, and the wartime files of intelligence bureaus, some of which were not made available to the public until 2020. But Baker maintained a code of silence about the seven years she spent fighting the Nazis and, Lewis writes, “went to her grave in 1975 taking many of those secrets with her.” So based on what Damien Lewis was able to dig up for his book, here’s what we think Josephine’s actual involvement was. And, it’s a lot more than just driving ambulances. According to these accounts, theatre manager Daniel Morouani was the one who mentioned Josephine’s name to the Deuxième (doze-ee-em) Bureau. They were hesitant, fearing her notoriety and lack of experience would spell disaster. I mean her face had been printed on a fascist propaganda poster already. But Morouani convinced them that her celebrity would act as the perfect cover. She could travel without raising suspicion. She could gain access to just about anywhere. Her level of celebrity across Europe meant that her clearance was at an all time high. I’m not sure if they were convinced by that argument or they were just super desperate. The agency was understaffed and strapped for cash, basically on their last leg, and so they decided to check Josephine out. That’s when Captain Jacques Abtey visited her at her mansion in Les Vesinet near Paris, our opener for this episode. And she really was digging up snails in her garden when he arrived. “Soon enough, though,” Jackson writes quote “champagne was served, and Baker made a toast: “To France.” Abtey was taken by her fierce French nationalism and, Lewis writes, by quote ‘her almost childlike quality, at turns playful and pensive, and her schoolgirlish habit of wrinkling her forehead when lost in thought.’ He was also quote ‘struck by the dichotomy of this superstar: her split life,’” end quote.
According to Lewis, one of the first things Josephine did in her role as an undercover French intelligence agent was to exploit her connections in both Japan and Italy which were part of the axis powers, right they were on Germany’s side during World War II. According to Jackson quote “Four years earlier, Baker had expressed support for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, believing that it would emancipate the country’s enslaved people. That otherwise unfortunate show of faith gained her the devotion of a loose-lipped attaché at the Italian Embassy. “She’d realised the best way to pump him for information was to provoke and contradict him, in response to which he had fallen into the habit of whispering reassurances into her ear,” Lewis writes. Whatever she learned, she passed along to Abtey,” end quote.
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Josephine had divorced her husband Jean Lion in 1939, fed up with him spending her money and having affairs. But one good thing came of that relationship - he taught her how to fly airplanes. And she used her pilot skills to fly food and supplies to refugees. She served in the Free French Air Forces during the war. But at this point, up until 1940, she’s still mostly hanging out in Paris, operating out of Paris. In early June of 1940, Abtey finally convinced her to leave Paris just days before the Nazis marched into the city and took it over. According to Jackson quote “Her car carried petrol-filled champagne bottles, along with an elderly Belgian Jewish couple, fugitives she had taken in,” end quote. Her destination was a 15th century castle she had been renting for a few years already in the French countryside called Chateau de Milandes (Me-lond). It’s literally a castle you guys, a medieval castle, and it became sort of a gathering place for French resistance fighters and Jewish refugees whom Josephine provided with money, food, clothing, and forged documents that she funded herself. Now, the Deuxième (doze-ee-em) Bureau was officially dunzo after Germany invaded France but the resistance was only getting started. Intelligence agents just went underground with it. Soon Josephine and Abtey were recruited by a former commander at the Bureau named Paul Paillole. He had compiled a dossier of information about Nazi airbases across France, known secret agents roaming Britain and Ireland, and the axis power’s plans to take the Straight of Gibraltar. But he had no way of getting this information to Great Britain. He needed someone who could move freely and that person was Josephine. So Josephine pretends to go on tour again. She and Abtey, who is pretending to be her tour manager, hop on a train through Spain, which was neutral during the war. She brings trunks with her full of makeup and costumes for her shows plus books of sheet music. And inside these books, hidden between the pages of sheet music are the pages of Paillole’s dossier written in invisible ink with all of this stolen information about Nazi plans and movements throughout France that he needs to get to Great Britain. And the plan works beautifully. No one checks her luggage. No one bothers her. Lewis writes that French, Spanish, and German officials quote “crowded around Josephine, desperate to see, to feel, to touch; to bask in the radiance of that famous smile,” end quote. They are starstruck by her. Completely starstruck. Lewis says quote “her stardom was her cloak.” They are able to pass the dossier on through the British Embassy in Spain to Wilfred Dunderdale, a spymaster in London’s Secret Intelligence Service. Wilfred Dunderdale sounds like such a made up name but I promise he was real.
In 1941 Josephine and Abtey were in Morocco connecting with American diplomats when Josephine became super sick. She had had a late term miscarriage that led to an infection requiring a hysterectomy and after that surgery she developed peritonitis which is an inflammation of the lining of the abdomen caused by an infection as well septicemia which is blood poisoning, a blood infection. So, like, not good. This kept her bedridden for more than a year. Jackson writes quote “According to Lewis, her sickbed, in Casablanca’s Comte Clinic, became a rendezvous point, as contacts arrived as “visitors” to give their best to an ailing performer. “Josephine Baker’s celebrity was global, which meant that practically anyone might want to pay a visit,” Lewis tells us. It made for an ideal intelligence hub. The toll her illness had taken was apparent, though. Baker grew “bone thin,” her nurse recalled, and had fits of weeping when she wasn’t putting on a show for visitors,” end quote. When she recovered, she continued performing for the troops and passing information until the war ended in 1945.
In 1947 Josephine married for a fourth time, a French composer named Jo Bouillon and she bought her castle, the Chateau de Milandes (Me-lond) which she had previously only been renting. For her work during the war, was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Croix de Guerre, and the Legion de’Honneur which was delivered to her in person by General Charles de Gaulle who had led the Free French Forces during the war. So these are super high honors. And you’d think maybe she’d just chill out now with her medals and her castle. But, no. Josephine has more battles to fight. She turns her attention now back to the US. As she had moved about during the war, she had encountered Black American soldiers and she had promised them that a war on segregation would follow the war on fascism. So she returns to America now to fight that war on segregation. She once said quote “I ran away from home. I ran away from St. Louis. And then I ran away from the United States of America, because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one’s very soul and body,” end quote.
In 1951 she returned to the US to perform at a nightclub in Miami. But she demanded that the club first desegregate their audience. That turned into a national tour which led her to desegregate audiences in Las Vegas as well. For this she received threatening phone calls from people claiming to be in the Ku Klux Klan but she said publicly that she was not afraid of them. Soon Josephine was named “woman of the year” by the NAACP complete with a parade in Harlem to honor her. She flat out refused to perform at segregated venues where white patrons and Black patrons were not allowed to sit together to watch a show. She was adamantly against this. She famously walked out of the Stork Club in New York City in 1951 when she was refused service there because she was Black. Actress Grace Kelly also happened to be at the club on this night. Now, Grace Kelly was white but when she saw this unfolding, when she saw them refusing to serve Josephine, she rushed over to her, took her by the arm, and stormed out of the club with her in a show of solidarity, taking her whole entourage with her and vowing never to return. Side note: Grace Kelly would actually return to the Stork Club a few years later with her soon to be husband Prince Rainier of Monaco. Eh, can’t very well tell a prince no when you’re trying to marry him. But Josephine and Grace remained good friends after that night in 1951. So much so that later, when Josephine fell on hard times financially, Grace Kelly, then the princess consort of Monaco, offered her financial assistance and gave her an entire villa.
There was another person of note at the Stork Club that night - a prominent newspaper columnist named Walter Winchell. And when Walter saw the drama unfold, the club refusing to serve Josephine because she was Black he did absolutely nothing. And Josephine called him out for this. She said that by not stepping up, by not writing, publishing anything about it or speaking out about it, he was condoning discrimination. He should have said something. He should have done something, exposed the injustice. Well, Walter Winchell didn’t take kindly to her calling him out. He did take to his newspaper column but not to speak out against the discrimination she faced. Instead, he super randomly accused her of harboring quote "communist sympathies.” Good ol’ Walter was a huge fan of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, if you listened to my Hazel Scott episode you may remember, is most known for starting a communist witch hunt within the US government that then extended into the entertainment celebrity realm. Hazel Scott herself was falsely accused of being a communist sympathizer and it absolutely destroyed her career, blacklisted her, erased her. It’s the reason her name isn’t as famous as Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday. This was actually when Hazel moved to France herself. So many parallels, it’s really kind of wild. Both black female entertainers, both part of the Harlem Renaissance, both falsely accused of being communist sympathizers, both moved to France because America was too messed up at the time. Kind of crazy. So anyway Walter Winchell publishes false claims that Josephine is a communist sympathizer which is, I mean that’s a serious accusation at the time. It led to Josephine having her visa withdrawn, because remember she's a French citizen now, and she’s forced to go back to France. And the FBI actually opened a dossier on her, on Josephine and started keeping tabs on her. Which is quite ironic since they once benefited from dossiers she smuggled past Nazis at her own personal risk.
But Josephine wasn’t done with the US entirely. There was work to be done yet. In 1963 she spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr. She was one of only two women to speak at this major Civil Rights event. She said quote “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you that I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens, and into the houses of presidents and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, 'cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world,” end quote. After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, his widow Coretta Scott King sought out Josephine in Europe and asked her if she would take his place to lead the Civil Rights movement. She thought it over. She gave it considerable thought. But ultimately, she declined, saying that her children were quote “too young to lose their mother,” end quote. And that’s, that says a lot. This lady spied on Nazis you guys. and yet she saw the US Civil Rights movement as too dangerous. But there is something about becoming a mother that changes how you view danger and risk.
So let’s talk about those children. Josephine didn’t have any biological children. She tried. She had multiple miscarriages, the final one, remember, leading to a hysterectomy and a major infection that almost cost her her life. But she still wanted children. She wanted to be a mother. And she also wanted to prove a point. Josephine adopted 12 children, 10 boys and 2 girls of all different races that she referred to as the “rainbow tribe.” She once explained that they were quote “all adopted to come down here to prove that human beings could live together. They might have different pigmentations and come from different continents, but that has nothing to do with the human being,” end quote. This was happening after the war, when Josephine was married to her fourth husband, that French composer Jo Bouillon, and in her 40s. She started adopting all these kids from all over the world and based on the pictures, they are all very similar ages. She basically like brought them back with her from her travels, like collected them like souvenirs when she toured other countries. Akio and Janot came back from Japan with her in 1954. Then she brought back Jarry from Finland and Luis from Colombia. Next they adopted two French children, Jean-Claude, who I mentioned earlier and Moise. In 1956 they adopted two children from Algeria, Brahim and Marianne, the first girl. In 1957, she brought a boy named Koffi back from a tour of the Ivory Coast. In 1959 they adopted Mara from Venezuela followed by Noel who was named that because he was found in a crib in a Parisian street at Christmas time. And then a few years later, Stellina, the second girl and 12th and final child who had been abandoned in France at birth by a Moroccan friend of Josephine’s. Yeah, wow. And meanwhile, she’s traveling all over the world, touring and performing all over the world and the kids are at this literal medieval castle, the Chateau de Milandes (Me-lond) in the French countryside. She must have had a lot of help. But also, it must have been mostly chaos at all times. Actually Jean-Claude Baker, one of the 12 refers to it as chaos, remember he wrote that biography about Josephine that I quoted earlier in the episode. But she’s really trying to do something powerful here. This is a social experiment, in a way. She’s trying to prove to the world that race does not matter. She wrote in a Christmas card once of quote “twelve tiny tots who were blown together by a soft wind as a symbol of universal brotherhood,” end quote.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for Josephine and her rainbow tribe though. There was some weirdness to the whole thing for sure. It was tinged in weirdness. For one, she charged admission for visitors to come see the rainbow tribe. Rebecca Onion writes in a Slate article quote “They sang songs for paying visitors, appeared in print advertisements, gave interviews to curious press, and played in a courtyard in full view of what Guterl describes as “a wall of faces, watching and taking pictures,” end quote. Guterl is Matthew Pratt Guterl, professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, who wrote a book called Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe that shed a lot of light on this whole situation. Onion writes quote “we see early incarnations of celebrity eccentricities from our own time. In the big adoptive family, we see Angelina or Madonna; in the celebrity theme park, we see Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch,” end quote. Because rememeber they are at the Chateau de Milandes (Me-lond) which wasn’t just a castle, according to Onion it also had a motel, bakery, cafes, a jazz club, a miniature golf course, and a wax museum, and a child zoo apparently. As the children grew up, they clashed with their mother quite a bit. I mean Josephine was, she did a lot of great things, noble, honorable things, but she was a big person. She was used to getting her way and doing things her way and I imagine that she was probably a difficult mother to have.
By the 1960s Josephine was experiencing health problems that made it difficult to tour and her finances started to crumble. She couldn’t make enough money to sustain this gigantic family she had put together in this literal castle theme park. This is when her old pal Grace Kelly swoops in and gives her a villa in Monaco so she moves the family there. But a lot of the kids were actually sent away as teenagers. They went to boarding school. Some went to live with their father Jo Bouillon in Argentina who by then was no longer with Josephine. A handful were actually sent to live with a fan in the UK??? Ok. Guterl interviewed three of Josephine’s children in his book and they all remembered their childhood at Chateau de Milandes (Me-lond) fondly. They were, however, all hesitant to comment about their relationship with their mother. In a 2009 interview with Spiegel International, Jarry, who was adopted from Finland said quote “She was too possessive. We weren’t allowed to develop the way we wanted to.” but Akio who was adopted from Japan was a bit more understanding saying quote “She was a great artist, and she was our mother. Mothers make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect,” end quote.
Josephine certainly wasn’t perfect. She had four failed marriages. She had strained relationships with her children. She did some questionable things, a bit of a wild card. She wasn’t an easy person to become close to because you were forever sort of forced to be in her shadow. Take Captain Jaques Abtey from the Deuxième (doze-ee-em) Bureau who was with her throughout the war. They were both married at the time but separated from their spouses and most likely had a romantic relationship of some kind. Josephine even wrote at one point that Abtey was someone she could have settled down with. But according to Jackson in that New Yorker article, Abtey confided to a friend that quote “he could not countenance being ‘Monsieur Baker’; in other words, living in her shadow,” end quote.
On April 8, 1975, Josephine starred in one last show in Paris. It was a retrospective revue which is like a light hearted series of sketches, songs, and dances usually a satire. It was called “Josephine a Bobino 1975” because it was at the Bobino Theater in Paris. And it was to be a celebration of her 50 years in showbusiness. This show was financed by Prince Rainier of Monaco, Grace Kelly, his wife, and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of JFK. This final show opened to rave reviews and tickets were in such high demand that they actually busted out folding chairs to add more seats to the audience. Many celebrities attended that opening night including Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Diana Ross, and Liza Minelli. So even at 68 years old and in poor health, people could not get enough of Josephine. But it would be her last. Four days after this show, she was found, according to Wikipedia, quote “lying peacefully in her bed surrounded by newspapers with glowing reviews of her performance. She was in a coma after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage,” end quote. Which is a type of stroke. She was taken to the hospital where she died on April 12, 1975 leaving behind, no doubt, many grief stricken fans.
I keep coming back to Josephine in the garden with the felt hat and baggy pants digging for snails for her ducks even when she knew she had company coming. To me that says a lot. She did not care what people thought about her. She was her authentic self no matter what. And that takes an incredible amount of confidence and self assurance. Even in her performances she was able to remain true to herself, her African roots. She took it to Paris this dans savage, Paris, one of the fanciest most high end cities and she was able to make this really primitive savagery, make it couture. You know, a lot of people like Josephine, celebrities with that kind of lowly background, they’d have to change who they were entirely. They’d have to become someone else in order for the world to accept them. But not Josephine. She showed them who she was, dancing the Charleston topless in ostrich feathers. And she delivered it in such a way that they couldn’t help but like it and accept it. And I think it’s this same special sauce, this X factor, that helped her during the war when she was working in intelligence as a spy for the French resistance. This was seriously dangerous work. I cannot stress that enough to you. If you listened to episode 54 about the women of the SOE, this is what they were doing and not many of them survived it. Quite a few of them met horrific, torturous fates. Josephine didn’t even seem scared. She just went about her business with invisible ink dossiers stuffed into her sheet music. She just showed up, with unshakeable confidence and nobody questioned her. And I feel like we can see this in the interview she did with the Guardian, she called her work with the French resistance exciting. She also maintained that she didn’t do much. It just wasn’t a big deal to her, sneaking around Nazi occupied Europe and I think that just speaks volumes about the type of person she was.
In her 1934 film ZouZou, there is a scene where Josephine is dancing on a stage, the curtain is closed, she’s not supposed to be on the stage but she’s drawn to it and she starts dancing. And she notices that, as she’s dancing, there’s this huge shadow cast on the wall behind her, a silhouette of her dancing. And she’s enthralled by it and so she keeps dancing and it’s like the shadow dances with her, this larger than life shadow that is unmistakably Josephine. And the curtain opens at one point and she just keeps dancing and the orchestra keeps playing and this scene is so powerful because it’s a metaphor for what Josephine did in real life. She didn’t hide. She didn’t hide who she was or what she believed in. She cast shadows, silhouettes that were even larger than life. And in a bizarre, unexpected way, this strange dichotomy, she somehow managed to hide in those shadows in what biographer Anne Anlin Cheng calls quote “disappearance into appearance.” I think Lauren Michele Jackson sums it up nicely at the end of her New Yorker article so I’m going to end with her words. She says quote “What most beguiles us today is the sense that a proud revolutionary lurked beneath the winsome savage, the snowy smile. Spycraft wasn’t so much what Baker did as who she was. The most public of figures in her heyday, she pulled off the trick of vanishing into visibility, of disappearing into the limelight. She still does. Now as then, however, the silhouette remains.”
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from the New Yorker, The Guardian, Spiegel International, Slate, CBS News, The Conversation, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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