Josephine Baker Read Online Free PDF Page A

hour of the final curtain on opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the grapevine up to the cafés on the Champs-Élysées, where the witnesses of her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what they had just seen. . . .”
    News tearing through the streets, my God, it’s like Napoléon, when he was fighting. And yet, Josephine’s triumph was real. And she had made it look easy, effortless, so spontaneous that some observers were fooled into thinking the performance they had just seen was an expression of her nature, not a product of her art. They were mistaken. Josephine was not a natural child, she was a complicated, driven nineteen-year-old. She herself had created that “magnificent dark body,” out of will and her need to be noticed. And the day leading up to her conquest of Paris had been one of the worst she had ever lived.

Chapter 2

TERROR BEFORE THE OPENING
“Josephine, don’t you jump out that window!”
    There is a truth behind every legend that is different from what you might imagine. The legend, for instance, of the night a dancer with a body “possessed by the devil” seduced a jaded public.
    In the twenty-four hours before the opening of
La Revue Nègre
, it was Josephine who was feeling seduced and abandoned.
    But let us step back a moment. Most of the cast had been drinking since they got off the SS
Berengaria
in Cherbourg. It had been ten days of nonstop party, though it began quietly. In a manuscript she never published, Caroline Dudley Reagan wrote of “our modest arrival in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare. . . . There was no fanfare, nor anybody to notice . . . the performers were a little bewildered, lost. . . . It was Mr. Daven who told me he had reserved rooms, two here, three there . . . and we were on our way to the hotels—in Montmartre, in the section of artists of all colors and all races, no prejudice, no racism—at the right time, without a fuss.”
    Even during the rehearsal period, there were celebrations every night, one at a cabaret where Maurice Chevalier bought caviar for the cast. “I liked it on those little pieces of toast,” says Evelyn Anderson. “I was eighteen years old, and it was great to be onstage and in France.”
    Josephine wasn’t so sure. Claude Hopkins had been her lover all the way across the ocean (even with his wife, Mabel, right there, only a step behind them), but almost as soon as the
Berengaria
docked, he discovered the brothel of Madame Blanche. Now, every evening after rehearsal, he would lie to Mabel (and to Josephine) about where he was going, and show up at Madame Blanche’s door.
    The first time he went, there were five or six other patrons. After a few days, he decided he didn’t want to be part of a crowd, asked, “How much for the house?” and a deal was made. A sultan with a harem, Claude spent blissful hours sitting naked at a gold piano, one girl perched on top of the gaudy upright, her legs around his neck, another girl on his knee.
    If Mabel guessed what was going on, she kept her own counsel. Josephine was different. For a week, she had been raging to Lydia Jones about Claude’s disappearances. She was also beginning to worry about the reception she might receive at the hands of the opening-night crowd. The company had already given a preview for an invited audience, and the responses had not been uniformly enthusiastic. (One journalist wrote of “dancers, singers and musicians who perform their sketches terribly”; another complained about the “infernal racket” made by the band.)
    The day before the opening, dress rehearsal seemed to go well enough, but the theater was swarming with photographers and, as soon as the final curtain fell, Josephine made her escape. Claude was nowhere to be seen, but maybe he would show up at her