I’ve been reading Folly Du Jour by Barbara Cleverly. It is set in Paris in the 1920s. The opening scene features a character going to see Josephine Baker in La Revue Nègre. I didn’t know much about her except that she was a famous dancer and an African American expat.
I didn’t know that her specialty was comic performances. As a Broadway chorus girl, she played the part of the “pony”, a term for a comic bit in which the last girl in line appears to be messing up the steps all the way through the dance, but then surprises the audience at the end by performing with great skill and precision.
She incorporated comic bits into her revue in Paris as you can see in the video below of a famous act in which she descends onto the stage in a giant egg and then does the charleston while making funny faces.
I also didn’t know about her work with the Free French during World War II.
In the mid 1930s, Baker had returned to the US to star in a revival of Ziegfeld Follies. Bad revues, racist comments, and segregation soured her on America. She returned to France in 1937, surrendered her US citizenship and became a French citizen.
She fled to the south of France after the German invasion in 1939 and offered her assistance to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement saying
France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything… I am ready, captain, to give them my life. You can use me as you wish.
She stored weapons, housed resistance fighters, and helped them obtain visas. As an entertainer, she was able to cross borders and gather information about airfields, harbors, and German troop concentrations, writing it all down on her sheet music in invisible ink, and delivering it to neutral countries where it could be forwarded on to the UK.
At the end of World War II, General Charles de Gaulle awarded Baker the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, and named her a Chevalier de Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit for military and civil action.
I did not know about her close relationships with the icons of the American civil rights movement — that she spoke beside the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March on Washington saying
I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, 'cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world
I did not know that she once turned down a $10,000 fee to perform at a Miami night club because it was segregated.
Sadly her personal life was not so happy. She was married and divorced four times. She ended up estranged from her 12 adopted children.
Princess Grace of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis financed a comeback show for her in 1975. A few days into the run of the show, Baker died of a stroke.
Josephine Baker is buried at the Cimitière de Monaco. She is the only American-born woman to receive a funeral with full French military honors.