Performer, patriot, spy

“Ma France, c’est Joséphine”, Emmanuel Macron declared at a grand, theatrical ceremony in Paris on November 30, 2021, at which a symbolic coffin with soil from the places that had meant most to Josephine Baker was buried in the Panthéon. A petition with 38,000 signatories had convinced the French president that Baker, the music-hall star who had delighted Parisians in the 1920s and 1930s, was worthy of becoming the first Black woman, and the first performer, to take her place among France’s most honoured citizens. Lying alongside her are Marie Curie, Simone Weil, Émile Zola and Voltaire.

The story of what took a poor, sparky, talented half-Black, half-white girl, born in 1906 in St Louis, Missouri, to France’s grandest resting place is indeed extraordinary, and has been much chronicled since her death in 1975. One of two new books to throw fresh light on Baker’s life is her own memoir, Fearless and Free, as told to the French journalist Marcel Sauvage over a period of twenty years, and now translated into English for the first time. The result is more a collection of memorable moments and images than an autobiography, but the voice that comes across is lively and humorous, at once candid and reticent. We learn almost nothing about Baker’s four marriages – the first at the age of thirteen – but her portrait of growing up in segregated America and falling in love with France is vivid.

Baker began to dance, she says, because she always felt cold in St Louis, and because her childhood was “the type where you have no stockings”. At the age of sixteen, observing that “you can’t do anything … with your family on your back”, she cropped her hair short and went to New York, where she moved quickly from the second chorus line to the first. Then came her lucky break. Paris was in the throes of the Jazz Age, and the enterprising wife of the US commercial attaché to Paris recruited Baker to perform in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She took to Paris “spirit and heart”. In return, the Parisians delighted in her signature song, “J’ai deux amours”, and in her risqué dances, for which she famously wore little more than a string of bananas. She loved stunts and strolled the streets with her pet cheetah on a lead. “She is an empress”, wrote one theatre critic, “a princess of the pose, with the elegance of a hummingbird.”

Between 1928 and 1930, Baker danced and sang her way across twenty-five countries, performing in theatres, nightclubs, cinemas, casinos and private houses, moving from city to city, revelling in the strange food and new sights, making friends wherever she went. She appeared in films, but hated radio because (she said) it made her sound like a goat in labour. What she liked was an audience. In Leipzig, she shared a variety show with tap-dancing crocodiles. She wore her hair slicked close to her scalp and exchanged one flamboyant and feathery costume for another. Everywhere she went, she took with her two small dogs, one of them “as fat as a water bottle”. A brief marriage gave her French citizenship.

Audiences loved her. She was chatty, funny, full of verve, and she spoke to them directly and intimately. She was showered with presents: opals as big as eggs, pearls the size of teeth and a car upholstered in snakeskin. Occasionally, church leaders protested: in Vienna, the city bells were rung to warn people as she passed. Protected from racism by her vast success in Europe, she was appalled, when she returned to tour America, to find herself turned away from white hotels. Racial equality became her lifelong cause.

It is from the second of the books under review that we learn about Baker’s wartime activities and one of the reasons for her presence in the Panthéon. Hanna Diamond has mined the military archives to produce a detailed study of the other Josephine Baker, the woman who, to repay the country that took her in with such warmth, joined the French secret services at the start of the Second World War. Using her world tours as cover, she spent the war years performing for the troops, mainly across North Africa, while gathering information to pass on to Allied intelligence. Morocco, full of spies, informers and Germans trying to foster resentment against the French, was of strategic importance to both the Allies and the Axis powers. Baker was clearly an excellent spy. Often in the company of her lover, Jacques Abtey of the Deuxième Bureau, she crisscrossed the desert in a caravan of cars piled high with her costumes. Her backdrop was a Croix de Lorraine stitched by nuns. Having enrolled in the French air force, she often performed in uniform, her jacket proudly covered in medals. To cross borders, she pinned her notes on her underclothes. She survived a crash in a small plane.

For all her considerable energy, Baker’s health was precarious. Abdominal problems and septicaemia led to prolonged stays into clinics in Marrakesh and Casablanca, where she used her room for clandestine exchanges. A trip back to America convinced her that little had changed and she swore to give no more concerts there unless her audiences included Blacks. Ferocious about racism in the US, she was curiously blind to its manifestations in French colonies. In January 1945, she performed for Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and de Gaulle in Berlin. Baker ends her own tale with sketches of the celebrities she most admired, among them the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello (“a headstrong nanny goat”), King Farouk of Egypt, Colette and a “flushed and bubbly” Noël Coward. But she reserves her greatest praise for de Gaulle, whose cause she championed untiringly.

Fearless and Free does not dwell on the darker moments of the dancer’s life, but Josephine Baker’s Secret War carries on her story. Determined to register her disgust at racism, she adopted what she called her “rainbow tribe” of twelve children from different races and religions, installing them in a chateau in the Dordogne along with a menagerie made up of six monkeys, a kangaroo and a lion. This ambitious project grew to include a hotel and a restaurant, but eventually foundered, as did her marriage to her fourth husband, the violinist and conductor Jo Bouillon. Rescued from bankruptcy by Princess Grace, who installed Baker and her brood in a house in Monaco, she continued to perform at a frenetic pace. On April 12, 1975, at the age of sixty-eight, after giving two galas in Paris, she was found in a coma after her siesta. She never regained consciousness. Her funeral was lavish, with military honours and a twenty-one-gun salute.

The first jaunty and charming, the second precise and factual, these two books between them paint an engaging picture of the early world of light entertainment and of the movements against racism that swept the world in the 1950s and 1960s. In her French air force uniform, Baker joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963. She wrote in her memoir: “I’d like never to get old … [to] dance, sing, be free”. For all the obstacles in her path, this is precisely what she did.

Caroline Moorehead’s most recent book is Edda Mussolini: The most dangerous woman in Europe, 2022

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