Josephine Baker

An African-American by birth who felt more at home in France than in the US, a person of virtually no formal education whose ambition and innate abilities allowed her to rise from obscurity and poverty to wealth and fame, a lesbian famous for her exploits with men: this, ladies and gentlemen, was Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906. She was the daughter of Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson. Carson abandoned Baker and her mother when Josephine was still a child.

Her early life held no clues as to the international megastar she would become. Her formative years were marked by abuse and poverty and by the time young Freda was a teenager, she was living on the streets and surviving on food scraps from garbage cans.

Yet it was the streets that gave life to Baker’s talents, transporting her from a cardboard box in St Louis to the heart of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. But the Big Apple wasn’t her final destination. At the age of 19, Baker was spotted by a talent recruiter who was looking for entertainers to perform in a groundbreaking all-black revue in Paris. With a promise of $1,000 a month, Baker headed to France and never looked back.

Baker’s presence on the Parisian entertainment scene was unlike anything that had ever been seen before. On 2 October 1925, she debuted in Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Dressed in little more than pearls and feathers, Baker performed her Danse Sauvage to a rapturous audience. The pulsating, gyrating, bare-breasted act sold out night after night, marking the start of France’s love affair with the ‘Bronze Venus’.

In 1926 came her first recording contract. The first song she cut was Dinah:

From the same session came Sleepy Time Gal:

Baker immersed herself in her new life, learning not only French but Italian and Russian.  She never shied away from the controversial… or strange. How many people do you know with a pet cheetah? On top of that, she also had a pet goat and a pet pig.

Baker went on to star in four movies: Siren of the Tropics (1927), ZouZou (1934), Princesse Tam Tam (1935) and Fausse Alerte (1940), breaking yet more barriers as a woman of colour.

“She never made a Hollywood film,” says Bennetta Jules-Rosette, director of the African and African-American Studies Research Center at the University of California – San Diego and author of Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image. “But at the time she was recording in France, you had the likes of Hattie McDaniel playing maids in Gone With the Wind”.

In 1927, she recorded a very good version of Irving Berlin's classic Blue Skies:

Bye Bye Blackbird was also recorded in 1927:

Also from 1927, this short film depicting her famous banana dance, an act which she performed at the Folies Bergère in Paris, wearing nothing more than bananas. To appease the film censors, she's dressed slightly more modestly in the filmed version:

It was inevitable that she would start singing in French, as a way of saying thanks to the French people, who embraced her so warmly and made her a superstar. Her most famous French song, from 1930, is J'ai Deux Amours (I Have Two Loves). It's become a classic since.

Also a famous performance from 1930, here's La Petite Tonkinoise:

This is Madiana from 1932:

Baker had a stormy love life. By age thirteen she was “playing house” with a fifty-year-old steel foundry worker known as “Mr. Dad” who ran an ice cream and candy parlor on the side. The arrangement was a neighborhood scandal, and Josephine’s mother soon ended it. Then a few months after the Mr. Dad episode, she married. The fact that she was underage—at thirteen years old so far underage that not even parental consent was sufficient to make it legal in Missouri—seems to have occurred to no one. On December 22, 1919, she became Mrs. Willie Wells, with the blessings of her family, family friends, and the minister who performed the ceremony.

It was not a marriage made in heaven and was soon at an end (though there was no divorce). But if playing the role of housewife was not to Josephine’s liking, she had already discovered one that was: performing onstage. In November 1920 she was hired as a chorus girl by Bob Russell to tour the black vaudeville circuit with one of his companies. Josephine had secured the job through the influence of Clara Smith, one of Russell’s star blues singers. She became Clara Smith’s protégée—Smith’s “lady lover” in the contemporary lingo of black vaudeville. The implications were as sexual as they sound, according to Jean-Claude Baker, Josephine's adopted son, so people connected with the show knew exactly what was going on.

On September 17, 1921, at fifteen, she married a young man named Billy Baker, the son of a prominent black Philadelphia restauranteur. By the time she left for Europe in September 1925, she had shed the marriage to Billy (without divorcing him) but not the surname. For the next fifty years, she would be known as Josephine Baker.

Just how many lesbian affairs Josephine engaged in, and with whom, will probably never be known with any certainty. Jean-Claude’s biography mentions six of her women lovers by name: Clara Smith, Evelyn Sheppard, Bessie Allison, and Mildred Smallwood, all of whom she met on the black performing circuit during her early years onstage in the United States; along with fellow American black expatriate Bricktop and the French novelist Colette after she relocated to Paris. Bricktop in particular served as an early mentor who showed her the ropes around Paris for the first few months after her move to Europe.

In 1926, a gigolo named Giuseppe Abatino, nicknamed Pepito, entered her life as both mentor and lover. With Pepito’s help, and her own flair for the grandiose, Josephine began to transform herself from a popular entertainer into an international legend. Even the Great Depression had little effect on her fortunes: the 1930’s were mostly spent performing in Paris and on international tours, buying homes, making movies, running her Paris nightclub Chez Josephine, and making—and spending—a great deal of money.

In 1935 she ended her relationship with Pepito. On her own once more, she set out in earnest to find herself a French husband, which she succeeded in doing so that on November 30, 1937, she wed the (white) French businessman Jean Lion (without, it should be noted again, having divorced either Willie Wells or Billy Baker). This marriage, like its predecessors, didn’t last long, but it accomplished one all-important goal: as the wife of a Frenchman, she could now claim French citizenship under French law, and within four days of the wedding she had obtained her French passport.

One of the the songs that she recorded in 1935 was Dis-moi Joséphine (Tell Me Josephine):

Josephine and Lion were formally divorced in April 1941. In the meantime, World War II intervened. Such circumstances test the mettle of every citizen, and by all accounts Josephine acquitted herself well. Stepping away from her acting work, she served as a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the French air force. As if that wasn’t enough, Baker turned her talents to espionage as a spy for the French Resistance, smuggling military intelligence using invisible ink on her sheet music.

When she returned to Paris in October 1944, after its liberation, she was greeted by throngs of people on the Champs-Élysées welcoming her home. She was also awarded the Medal of Resistance and eventually the Légion d’Honneur by France in recognition of her wartime work. She also met and became involved with Jo Bouillon, a (white) French jazz bandleader, whom she married on June 3, 1947, her fourty-first birthday. This marriage was no more legal than those that preceded it, and no less troubled, but it lasted a great deal longer—to the end of Josephine’s life nearly thirty years later.

The durability of this marriage was due in part to a crusade against racial discrimination that Josephine had undertaken after “rediscovering her race” (in Jean-Claude’s words) during World War II. Over the years she gave talks on the subject, challenged segregation laws when in the American South, and marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the historic March on Washington in 1963. She was so vociferous in her denunciations of American racism at various international forums that she ended up on the FBI watch list and lost her US citizenship rights for over a decade. With the help of attorney general Robert F Kennedy, Baker finally returned to US soil in 1963 to speak at the March on Washington. Gone were the flamboyant feathers, bold make-up and risqué stage outfits. Instead, Baker took to the stage in her French air force uniform, thick glasses and a loose-curled hairstyle.

From that era, she developed a liking to the music of Bob Dylan. Here she is in a live performance in Carnegie Hall (1973), of The Times They Are A-changin:

But arguably her most public activity was an experiment in racial harmony that she undertook at Les Milandes, a château in southern France that she bought after the War. There she assembled what she called her “Rainbow Tribe” of twelve children that she and Jo Bouillon adopted from different parts of the world. (Because of a congenital malformation of the uterus, Josephine was unable to have children herself.) All the children were given Bouillon’s last name, and they were the glue that kept the marriage contract itself in force long after the couple’s spousal relationship had come to an end.

Bouillon never hid his homosexuality from Josephine. At times he even seemed to flaunt it as a way of asserting his independence from a wife whose imperious personality and demands continually overwhelmed him. Josephine, for her part, flaunted her affairs with women.

In 1960, Jo Bouillon decamped (without divorcing Josephine) to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he established a new life as a restauranteur. In 1968, creditors foreclosed on Les Milandes. Josephine was still performing onstage, but the money no longer flowed as freely as before. She was perpetually in debt, and she and her children were increasingly dependent on the generosity of benefactors like Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco.

She never stopped singing, though. Here she is in 1968 in a recording of Edith Piaf's breakout hit, La Vie En Rose:

In bad health for years, Josephine finally collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on April 10, 1975, the day following a triumphant stage comeback, and died two days later without regaining consciousness. Three funerals were held in her honor, one in Paris and two in Monte Carlo. At the behest of Princess Grace, she was buried in Monaco—a great distance both in miles and in circumstances from her humble origins in St. Louis nearly 69 years before.