Well Done, Josephine Baker!

The popular image of Josephine Baker is of a daring entertainer, one who often shocked audiences by defying all the conventions of the day. But behind the tabloid fodder of  her dramatic stage performances and glamorous lifestyle — including a pet cheetah — there was a complex woman who many of her fans never saw.

Baker was a French Resistance spy, a civil rights activist, and an adoptive mother to a “Rainbow Tribe” of a dozen diverse children that she hoped could model racial unity. “She never thought that anything was impossible,” observes Bennetta Jules-Rosette, author of Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image.  “She could do things we would consider ahead of their time, because she never thought she would fail.”

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri on June 3, 1906, and her show business career started early: her mother had a song-and-dance act and would carry her baby daughter onto the stage starting when she was about a year old.

However, the family struggled financially, and Baker began working as a live-in domestic for white families at age 8 and, by age 12, she dropped out of school. By thirteen, she had run away and was working as a waitress and living on the streets. At fourteen, Baker married for the first time, and divorced her first husband the following year. She found work with a street performance group, the Jones Family Band and married again in 1921 at age 15. That marriage was also short-lived, but by the time it ended, she had developed a reputation under the last name Baker, so she kept it for the rest of her life.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Baker went to New York City and began to build her career; within a few years, she was “the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville.”

She then had an opportunity to tour in Paris, where audiences were thrilled by her risqué performances and compelling stage presence. She joined the Folies Bergère and became famous for her “Danse sauvage” wearing a banana skirt. But she wanted to be known as more than an “exotic” or “primitive” act, so she took vocal coaching and transformed her personas, both on stage and off it.

Shirley Bassey, who lists Baker as one of her great influences, once said “she went from a ‘petite danseuse sauvage’ with a decent voice to ‘la grande diva magnifique’…. I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer.”

Baker’s success in Paris, however, didn’t translate into success at home. After poor reviews of her performances in the U.S. in the late 1930s, she returned to France, marrying Jewish Frenchman Jean Lion and becoming a French citizen in 1937. After France declared war on Germany in 1939 in response to the invasion of Poland, Baker was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, France’s military intelligence agency, as an “honorable correspondent”. 

Throughout much of the war, she maintained a busy performance schedule which provided an excellent cover for her covert activities as a sub-lieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the Free French Air Force.

She helped support General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement by gathering information for the Resistance at high society events held at embassies.  Her fame gave her the unusual ability to visit neutral nations during the war as she worked as a spy for the French Resistance, smuggling information about German installations and troop movements in invisible ink on her sheet music or pinned on notes inside her underwear, trusting that her fame would prevent extensive searches.  For her service to France during the war, Baker was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the French Resistance with Rosette,  and de Gaulle named her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest decoration.

Following the war, Baker was eager to return to her performing career, but she also had a newfound desire to champion civil rights causes. In 1963, she became the only official female speaker at the famous March on Washington, telling the vast crowd, while wearing her ‘Free France’ uniform, “You know I have always taken the rocky path. I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you.”

During her work with the Civil Rights Movement, Baker formed an adoptive family she called the Rainbow Tribe; she hoped that her two daughters and ten sons would show that “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.” 

After Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Coretta Scott King even asked Baker to consider taking King’s place as leader of the Civil Rights Movement; however, Baker declined, saying that her children were “too young to lose their mother.”

Baker performed until the end of her life in many of the most prominent venues in the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the London Palladium, and the Gala du Cirque in Paris.

On April 8, 1975, she held a retrospective revue at the Bobino in Paris, which was financed by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and opened to rave reviews. There was so much demand for seating that fold-out chairs were added to allow more ticket sales. Four days later, she was found in her bed, surrounded by newspaper reviews praising her show, in a coma from a cerebral hemorrhage; she died the same day.

After her death, Baker’s adoptive country honored her for her wartime service once again when she became the first American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral. And, in the end, her death likely would have satisfied her; “I shall dance all my life,” she once said. “I would like to die, breathless and spent, at the end of a dance.”

Posted by Katherine for A Mighty Girl.

What a lady!