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Josephine Baker in Art and Life

University of Illinois Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.............................................ixForeword: A Luminous Humanism, by Simon Njami.....................xiiPreface...........................................................xvAcknowledgments...................................................xviiPrologue..........................................................1Part 1: creating the image1. Touring with Baker's Image.....................................132. Opening Nights.................................................473. Celluloid Projections..........................................72Part 2: Living the dream4. Dress Rehearsals...............................................1275. Baker's Scripts................................................1556. Hues of the Rainbow in a Global Village........................184Part 3: changing the World7. Legendary Legionnaire..........................................2138. Echoes and Influences..........................................2439. Eternal Comeback...............................................268Chronology........................................................287Notes.............................................................297Bibliography......................................................327Discography.......................................................341Index.............................................................345

Prologue

On a bright spring day in 1997, I first visited the Chteau des Milandes, Josephine Baker's medieval castle in southwestern France. While climbing the chteau's labyrinthine staircases, I was struck by the ways in which the narrative of Baker's life had been transformed into a tourist attraction. Baker's story, which began with her move from the United States to Paris in 1925, extended through her meteoric rise to fame in the Parisian music halls of the late 1920s and ended with the sobering moment of her eviction from the chteau in 1969. Yet, Baker's presence still permeates the chteau and, like an underground spring, provides it with a source of survival and renewal. Spectacular wax dioramas I saw at the chteau made her seem more real than ever and reinforced her status as a cult icon. When Baker lost the chteau in 1969, parts of the original Jorama-a wax museum that she had organized to represent her career-were lost or destroyed, but they were recreated for the new display. The chteau's owner and the Association Josphine Baker of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle joined forces to revive and maintain Baker's dream, but the carefully crafted touristic narrative left many research questions unanswered.

Constructed Images and Nested Narratives

Driven by curiosity about my new subject, I returned to Paris to explore archives containing copious records of Baker's life. Spread across three major archives, the Bibliothque Nationale, the Bibliothque de l'Arsenal, and the Bibliothque Richelieu, the voluminous records form the rich fabric of Baker's life. I waited for hours as the librarians delivered to me fragments of a life on crumbling yellowed paper and microfilm. As I pored over stacks of faded press clippings, theater programs, novels, and obscure biographies, I realized that the narrative was far more complex than the story outlined by panoramas in wax at Les Milandes. As early as 1927, when Baker was only twenty-one years old, she collaborated with Marcel Sauvage on her first biography, Les Mmoires de Josphine Baker. It was as though destiny had a plan for her that would be illustrated by an archetypal tale.

Born Freda Josephine McDonald to an impoverished family in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, Josephine Baker escaped to France in the fall of 1925 as a dancer with the black American vaudeville troupe called La Revue ngre. Its first show opened on October 2, 1925, for a three-month run at the Thtre des Champs-Elyses. Baker was an instant success with her danse sauvage, which she performed first in feathers and later in a banana belt. Within two years, she rose to fame in Paris and became the toast of the worlds of art and musical theater. She resided in France for the rest of her life, and, in her later years, she became a humanitarian with a unique vision of Paris and the world.

The heyday of Baker's early performance career lasted from 1925 to 1935. Under the guidance of her companion and manager Giuseppe (Pepito) Abatino, Baker achieved status as a music-hall, recording, and film star and a model for France's "new woman," a position that was consolidated during the 1930s. Afterwards, while continuing to perform, she became a militant, a political activist, and a philanthropist. Disparate forces from the worlds of avant-garde art, museum culture, politics, and commerce would coalesce to make her a household name in France and throughout the world. With Pepito, she was able to purchase a mansion, Beau-Chne, and to live her Cinderella dream. The fairy-tale narrative mapped a pathway to assimilation and social success. This master trope was crosscut by sensationalistic images of the primal Baker as a savage dancer and as the Black Venus. In most biographies of Baker, and in her own accounts, these images are treated as external constructions, which she nonetheless readily accepted and learned to manipulate. How much control did the young Baker have over the image- making process and what was her role, her agency, in making the dream come true? While music-hall impresarios, managers, fashion cartels, artists, photographers, and biographers all contributed to the construction of the primal Baker, and later the mature star ("La Bakaire"), Baker cleverly took advantage of and responded to these forces in creating her public persona and the narrative of her life.

Colonial discourse and anthropometric theories of race lay behind the primal image of Fatou, the character made famous in Baker's danse sauvage. These theories created a climate in which the sexualized figure of an exotic black woman released atavistic fantasies repressed by modernism's mechanical rationality. The character of Fatou was modeled on Fatou-gaye, the bewitching African mistress of the French explorer Jean Peyral, known as le spahi, in Pierre Loti's popular 1881 novel Le Roman d'un spahi, which was made into a film in 1936. Loti's novel had been serialized, and the image of Fatou was still well known to popular...