Josephine Baker Read Online Free PDF

place later.
    Josephine, being the star, was booked into a different hotel than the chorus; she had a living room, a bedroom with a mirrored ceiling, and a bathroom with a bidet. In the bidet, she had installed a few goldfish; she always had some kind of livestock around.
    Even though she had invited Lydia Jones to be her roommate (as always, she disliked spending nights alone), the two were not particularly compatible, and one of the things they disagreed about was the mirrored ceiling. Lydia was somewhat moralistic—“Claude used to come sleep in the bed with Josephine, and I would be in the next bed, that made mesick, you know”—and did not like to see endless reflections of herself. Josephine, on the other hand, admired her body day and night, loving it from every angle.
    Waiting for Claude, who did not arrive, she put a hair straightener, Mary’s Congolene, on her hair, and fell asleep. When she woke—was it noon? 2 P.M .?—she was not thinking of the opening of
La Revue Nègre
, only hours away; she was thinking of running. Anyplace.
    For one thing, the Congolene had left her almost bald, her scalp badly burned. It was meant to be combed through and rinsed out, not slept in. And Lydia, her small pretty face so set in disapproval, was not the person to comfort a wild woman, so Josephine fled, making for Evelyn Anderson’s hotel, on rue Pigalle.
    Evelyn lived with Joe Hayman, Claude’s saxophone player, and they were in bed on the fifth floor when the banging on the door woke them up.
Bam! bam! bam!
like a machine gun. Half asleep, Evelyn opened the door, and there like a fury came Josephine, eyes puffy, screaming a torrent of words.
    â€œShe was talkin’ about Claude, she was so upset because she couldn’t have him, and she’d had some champagne, I guess, and she went to the window, and I said, ‘What are you gonna do, Josephine?’ I said, ‘Don’t you act like no fool and jump out that window, you come on back here.’ She was on the verge. Ain’t no doubt about it, she really was.”
    Roused from sleep, Joe Hayman’s reaction was fury. When Josephine opened the shutters and leaned over the balcony railing, he leaped naked from the bed, grabbed her, and nearly went off the balcony with her. He managed to yank the bellowing Josephine back inside—Evelyn remembers his yelling, “Stupid cow, you almost got me killed!”—and he hurled her onto the bed, where she continued to sob.
    â€œShe’s having a nervous breakdown,” said Evelyn.
    â€œGet the cognac,” said Joe.
    Evelyn brought the bottle, then telephoned Caroline Reagan, who came rushing over and put in a call to her friend Antoine, the most famous hairdresser in Paris. She said she was bringing Miss Baker to see him. But after one look at Josephine, Antoine shook his head. Alas, Madame must forgive him, he could do nothing for that poor burned skin. He was desolate, he regretted—and then, all at once, an inspiration.
    He fetched some paper, took up his scissors. He cut out a cap,complete with the spit curls that would become famous, lacquered it black, and gently glued it to Josephine’s temples. A little black helmet so cleverly fashioned that from far away it would look like hair.
    Crisis averted. Josephine had one more cognac, courtesy of Antoine, and went home. Caroline wanted her to get some rest before she came to the theater. Came, as it turned out, to be greeted by flowers and crowds and bravos and controversy and adulation.
    She did not yet know that her life would never again be simple. Half an hour after the last curtain came down, she was slipping through the crowds, laughing, flirting, no more the naked savage, but a queen in a gold lamé dress by Poiret.
    André Daven and Rolf de Maré, the theater’s owner, had turned the place into a giant club (supper on the balcony, dancing on the stage) for three hundred invited