Josephine Baker
Freda Josephine Baker, naturalized as Joséphine Baker, was an American and French dancer, singer, and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in France. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 French silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.
During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in its 1927 revue Un vent de folie caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting only of a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the "Black Venus", the "Black Pearl", the "Bronze Venus", and the "Creole Goddess". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She adopted 12 children, whom she referred to as the Rainbow Tribe, and raised them in France.
Baker aided the French Resistance during World War II, and also worked with the British Secret Intelligence Service and the United States Office of Strategic Services, the extent of which was not publicized until 2020, when French documents were declassified. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de guerre 1939–1945 by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker sang: "I have two loves: my country and Paris." She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States, and is also noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement. In 1968, she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement following the assassination of Martin Luther King, but declined due to concerns for the welfare of her children. On November 30, 2021, Baker was inducted into the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France. As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthéon.
Early life
Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri. Baker's mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom were former slaves of African descent. Carrie McDonald was a person of African American and Native American heritage. Baker's official website identifies vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her natural father; both Carson and Carrie McDonald were vaudeville performers. However, in his 1993 biography entitled Josephine: The Hungry Heart, Baker's foster son, Jean-Claude Baker, stated otherwise. Following decades of exhaustive research into Baker's life and career, Jean-Claude Baker's book described the circumstances of Baker's birth as follows:Jean-Claude Baker went on to state that he had failed to unearth the identity of Baker's biological father, but that he, Baker, and others believed her father to have been a white man. He added that Eddie Carson "played along" with the assertion that he was Baker's father. Khalid Elhassan, the author of "40 Fascinating Facts About the Fabulous Josephine Baker", noted that it was "almost unheard of" for a person of color to be treated in a white hospital during segregation; he opined that "the likeliest explanation is that Josephine’s mother, who worked for a wealthy German family, had been impregnated by her employer, who then pulled strings to get admitted into the city’s best hospital".
Josephine McDonald spent her early life on 212 Targee Street in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, a racially mixed low-income area near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing. She was poorly dressed and hungry, and she developed street smarts playing in the railroad yards of Union Station.
Her mother married Arthur Martin, "a kind but perpetually unemployed man", with whom she had a son and two more daughters. She worked in a laundry; her mother placed her there due to her family being impoverished; she worked there in order to increase the income of her family and, at eight years old, Josephine began working as a live-in domestic for white families in St. Louis. One woman abused her, burning Josephine's hands when the young girl put too much soap in the laundry.
In 1917, when she was 11, a terrified Josephine McDonald witnessed racial violence in East St. Louis. In a speech years later, she recalled what she had seen:
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... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran...
By age 12, she had dropped out of school. At 13, she worked as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur's Club at 3133 Pine Street. She also lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis, sleeping in cardboard shelters, scavenging for food in garbage cans, making a living with street-corner dancing. It was at the Old Chauffeur's Club that Josephine met Willie Wells, whom she married at age 13, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Following her divorce from Wells, she found work with a street performance group called the Jones Family Band.
In her teens, she struggled to have a healthy relationship with her mother, who opposed her becoming an entertainer and scolded her for not tending to her second husband, William Howard Baker, whom she had married in 1921, at age 15. She soon left him when her vaudeville troupe was booked into a New York City venue. They divorced in 1925, during a period when her career success was beginning. Still, she continued to use his last name professionally for the rest of her life. Though Baker was often on the road, returning with gifts and money for her mother and younger half-sister, larger career opportunities drew her farther afield, to France.
Career
Early career
Baker's unrelenting badgering of a local show manager led to her recruitment for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville act. At the age of 13, she headed to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance and performed at the Plantation Club, Florence Mills's old stomping ground. After several auditions, she secured a role in the chorus line of a touring production of the groundbreaking and hugely successful Broadway revue "Shuffle Along" that helped bring public attention to Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, and Adelaide Hall.In "Shuffle Along", Baker was a dancer at the end of a chorus line. Fearing she might be overshadowed by the others, she used her position to ad-lib, introducing a hint of comedy into her routine, making her stand out from her fellow dancers, thus going off-script, yet engaging audiences. She began in "Shuffle Along" with one of the U.S. touring companies, but, once she came of age, she was transferred to the Broadway production, where she remained for several months, until the show closed, in 1923. Next, Baker was cast in "The Chocolate Dandies", a revue that opened on September 1, 1924. Again, she was relegated to the chorus line. The show ran for 96 performances, finally closing on November 22, 1924.
Pre-war Paris and rise to fame
A 1936 interview with Baker in The New York Times reported that,After the Plantation Club there was a Mrs. Caroline Dudley. "She was interested in art and she got up a Negro revue and took us to Europe." The "Revue Nègre" that was, bound for a tour of European capitals.
File:Baker Banana.jpg|thumb|Baker in her banana costume, wearing little more than "strings of pearls, wrist cuffs, and a skirt with 16 rubber bananas", Folies Bergère revue Un vent de folie, 1927, photo by Lucien Waléry
Baker sailed to Paris in 1925 and opened on October 2 in La Revue nègre at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, performing Danse Sauvage with :fr:Joe Alex, barely wearing a feather skirt. She was 19 at the time. In a 1974 interview with The Guardian, she explained that her first big break came in this bustling European city:
In Paris, she became an instant success for her erotic dancing and for appearing practically nude onstage. After a successful tour of Europe, she broke her contract and returned to France in 1926 to star at the Folies Bergère, setting the standard for her future acts. "In a 1926 performance at the popular concert hall Folies Bergére, Baker wore a banana skirt during La Folie du Jour."
Baker performed the Danse Sauvage Her success coincided with the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which gave birth to the term "Art Deco", as well as a renewed interest in non-Western art forms, including those of African origin, which Baker would represent. In later shows in Paris, she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, "Chiquita", donning a diamond collar. Chiquita frequently escaped into the orchestra pit, terrorizing the musicians and adding another element of excitement to the show.
After a while, Baker became the most successful American entertainer in France. Ernest Hemingway called her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw." The author spent hours talking with her in Parisian bars, Picasso depicted her alluring beauty, and Jean Cocteau became friendly with her. Baker endorsed a "Bakerfix" hair gel, as well as bananas, shoes, and cosmetics, among other products.
In 1929, Baker became the first African-American star to visit Yugoslavia, which she included on a tour through Central Europe via the Orient Express. In Belgrade, she performed at Luxor Balkanska, then the city's most luxurious venue. In a nod to local culture, she included a Pirot kilim in her routine and donated some of the show's proceeds to poor children of Serbia. In Zagreb, adoring crowds greeted her at the train station, but opposition from local clergy and morality police led to the cancellation of some of her shows.
During her travels in Yugoslavia, Baker was accompanied by "Count" Giuseppe "Pepito" Abatino. At the start of her career in France, Abatino, a Sicilian former stonemason who passed himself off as a count, persuaded her to let him manage her. He became not only Baker's manager, but her lover as well. The two could not marry because she was not yet divorced from her second husband, Willie Baker.
In 1930, Baker sang professionally for the first time. During this period, she released her most successful song, "J'ai deux amours". The song expresses the sentiment that "I have two loves, my country and Paris." In a 2007 book, Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street claimed that "by the 1930's, Baker's assimilation into French popular culture had been completed by her association with the song." She starred in four films, which found success only in Europe: the silent film Siren of the Tropics, and the sound films Zouzou, Princesse Tam Tam, and Fausse alerte. Bergfelder, Harris, and Street wrote that Siren of the Tropics "rehearses the 'primitive-to-Parisienne' narrative that would become the staple of Baker's cinema career, and exploited in particular her comic stage persona based on loose-limbed athleticism and artful clumsiness." Zouzou and Princesse Tam Tam were both star vehicles for Baker.
Under the management of Abatino, Baker's stage and public persona, as well as her singing voice, were transformed. In 1934, she took the lead in a revival of Jacques Offenbach's opera La créole, which premiered in December of that year for a six-month run at the Théâtre Marigny on the Champs-Élysées of Paris. In preparation for her performances, she went through months of training with a vocal coach. In the words of Shirley Bassey, who has cited Baker as her primary influence, "... 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."
Despite her popularity in France, Baker never attained the equivalent reputation in America. Her star turn in a 1936 revival of "Ziegfeld Follies" on Broadway was not commercially successful, and later in the run she was replaced by Gypsy Rose Lee. Time magazine referred to her as a "Negro wench... whose dancing and singing might be topped anywhere outside of Paris", while other critics said her voice was "too thin" and "dwarf-like" to fill the Winter Garden Theatre. She returned to Europe heartbroken. This contributed to Baker's becoming a legal citizen of France and giving up her American citizenship.
In 1936, brought Baker from New York City to Paris to lead the revue En Super Folies, opening in October 1936. The show starred Baker in 1936, and continued in 1937. A film of En Super Folies was released.
On December 14, 1926, Giuseppe "Pepito" Abatino, established the first Chez Josephine cabaret at 40 Rue Fontaine, in Montmartre, Paris, as a gift to Baker, Baker invested her own money. In 1936, she established a second "Chez Josephine" cabaret in New York City. "Josephine Baker, the famous colored star who faintly shocked Paris with her daring stage appearances, is the owner of a supper-club in New York. It is called 'Chez Josephine Baker,' and on the opening night, complete with paper snowballs, serpentine, and all the other weapons of all-night-club warfare, Josephine was handed a beribboned parcel that revealed a tiny snorting piglet in a crate". On December 17, 1948, a Chez Josephine cabaret opened in Paris. In 1986, Jean-Claude Baker opened Chez Josephine in New York City.
In 1937, Baker married the French industrialist Jean Lion, thus becoming a French citizen. They were married in the French town of Crèvecœur-le-Grand, in a wedding presided over by the mayor, Jammy Schmidt.
Between 1933 and 1937, Baker was a guest at the start of the Tour de France on four occasions. After enduring severe hostility in Germany and Eastern Europe during the late 1920s—where she was targeted by storm troopers with ammonia bombs and told to "Go back to Africa"—she was spurred to actively participate in the French Resistance against the Nazis.