On her arrival in Paris in 1925, Josephine Baker was ‘just a featured dancer with a knack for comedy’, the Observer explained in an evocative photo essay on the singer, dancer and superstar in 1986. It was the 19-year-old’s first experience of unsegregated society and, casting off her childhood in the St Louis slums, (where she witnessed ‘the worst race riots and massacres the United States had known’) she fell in love with the city.
Paris returned the favour: by 1926, Baker was performing at the Folies Bergère ‘in a girdle of gilded bananas’; she made her fortune and acquired her own nightclub; Picasso and Matisse portrayed her, and Hemingway and Kurt Weil wrote about her.
Baker annoyed the Nazis (they protested about her ‘degenerate’ performance outside the Berlin theatre where she was starring) and more. The article does not delve into her double life as a secret Resistance agent – then still just rumoured – but notes her Légion d’honneur and Resistance medal were the sort of honours ‘not usually bestowed on ex-nude dancers from the music hall’.
Even aside from that secret life, Baker was a complex character: ‘a complicated friend, lover, mother and colleague’. She and her fourth husband, band leader Jo Bouillon, could not have children, and adopted 12 of various nationalities; in 1956, she retired to the Dordogne to look after them. No one believed it was her final adieu and, sure enough, in 1969, the money ran out and Baker returned, triumphantly, to the stage, ‘even more attractive than in 1956.’
In 1975, she celebrated her 50th anniversary in Paris with a run of performances (she also had opera glasses removed from the auditoriums to preserve her mystique). Baker astonished audiences with her ‘youthfulness and vivacity’, dancing a ‘vigorous Charleston’; the first-night audience applauded for a full 15 minutes. The music finally stopped after the 14th show: ‘After dining with friends, Josephine went home and, amid the flowers and the press cuttings of her last triumph, died quietly in her sleep.’
