Josephine Baker, The Toast of Paris

With a career spanning five decades, Josephine Baker was a star of stage and screen. However, she was also a spy for the French resistance during World War II. Tune in and learn more about Josephine Baker in this podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lamber and I'm Sarah Dowry and the first
time I ever heard of Josephine Baker are subject for today.

(00:20):
I was in middle school and I was reading an
old film book of my dad's that had lots of
film stills in it, and they're in the middle was
this almost completely naked woman who's only wearing pretty much
bananas around her waist. And being a Catholic schoolgirl, I
was completely scandalized and yet intrigued. And that's how a
lot of people felt about Josephine Baker, and that image

(00:42):
of her wearing the bananas around her waist is probably
the most famous. But there's a lot more to Josephine
Baker than just that, And besides being an extravagant, provocative
stage star, she's also a French spy, a civil rights agitator,
and the mother of twelve children, so obviously we've got
a lot to talk about here. As far as her

(01:04):
early life, she was born Frieda J. McDonald June third,
nineteen o six in St. Louis. Her family was very poor.
There wasn't a dad around, and she was working by
the time she was eight years old. She went on
tour as a dancer at sixteen, moved to New York
City in nineteen three, and while it was the Harlem
Renaissance there, it was still a really tough time to

(01:25):
be black in the United States, thought Josephine. So she
went to Paris in and she joins a black American
vaudeville troupe Lau Review Negra at the Teatra Deschans Liz
and does the dance avage in Feathers, which is another
thing that she's pretty well known for. And this is
where she found freedom in Paris. There was a marked

(01:47):
difference between being a black woman in New York City
and a black woman in Paris. Here she was, you know,
this ex pat and jazz age Paris Lisianna forle the
crazy years after World War One, where jazz was wonderful,
nudity was okay, brothels were okay, the dollar was strong,
there wasn't prohibition. It sounds like a lot of fun,
to be honest. So Josephine becomes a star at the

(02:08):
fully Beer Jaire. This is where the g string with
bananas comes into play, which is designed by no one
other than Jean Cocteau, and her dancing is passionate and
intense and gathers a lot of attention. Her act involved nudity,
cross dressing, a lot of overt sexuality, and you have
to ask the question of whether she was in control

(02:31):
by manipulating her own image or was it more subjugating
herself by buying into this idea of the sexual savage.
Either way, she made a lot of waves and a
nineteen thirty two she performed in white face at the
Casino de Paris and a blonde wig and skin lightner
and sang a song called cieg blanche if I were white,
which was yeah, she's so over the top. Two she's

(02:57):
I mean off stage as well. She's got a cheetah Chiquita,
who does perform with her in a diamond collar. She
has a chimp named Ethel and a goat named to Toot,
among many other animals, and people worship her. Crowds follow
her around, people clamor for her autograph. She's offered flowers
and presents and dinners. So she's this huge celebrity in

(03:21):
in glamorous Paris at Picasso writes that she has tall,
coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to
end all smiles. Supposedly, Hemingway said she was the most
sensational woman anybody ever saw or ever will, So there's
no hope for the rest of us. According to Hemingway
and called Er made wire sculptures of her. So she

(03:44):
started getting into other things besides just being this stage dancer.
She collaborated on biographies of herself. She wrote a novella
in nineteen thirty one, and she began singing professionally in
nineteen thirty and appearing in silent films in nineteen thirty four.
You can find clips some of them on YouTube if
you look. And by nineteen thirty seven she makes an

(04:04):
important decision to become an official French citizen. This is
sort of renouncing her her American past and the the
trouble she faced when she lived in America. She thought
the US was very racist, and she made a lot
of comments about this throughout the rest of her life.
But during World War Two she was banned by the

(04:24):
Vichy government from performing and she started working with a
Red Cross and also the French Resistance which is so cool.
She was a spy and no one thought she would
be a spy. With someone like Julia Child, it's, you know,
she's the last perm likely back character, somebody who's so
you can't ever imagine them flipping away unnoticed. Their presence

(04:46):
is so so huge. But that's why it's right in
plain sight. She ended up getting the Quadi Guer and
the Legion of Honor with the rosette of the Raisy
Staunts after the war. But during the war she performed
for troops in Africa in the Middle East, passing messages.
So she went along too important people and very vocally
advocated integration in the army. So her post war life

(05:08):
is markedly different from the stuff that we've been talking
about leading out to this. She buys an estate in
the door don Chateau de Miland, and she starts adopting children.
She adopts twelve kids beginning in nineteen fifty, and she
calls them her Rainbow Tribe. They are boys and girls
from all over the world and I mean we mean everywhere,

(05:28):
and um. She goes from being a sex object to
a madonna surrounded by all of her children. It's a
really interesting transformation, which reminded us a lot of Angelina Jolie,
and it's something she did very consciously. First she cultivated
this image of herself as a sex object, and then
she cultivated just as hard as this image of herself

(05:50):
as a mother. She also dreamed of opening an international
education institute, which she planned to call the College of
Universal Brotherhood, and she basically quit the State age, but
with money troubles. She ended up performing throughout the rest
of her children well occasionally, both in the United States
and in Europe. But things were tough for her in
the US. Yeah, the nicer hotels wouldn't even receive her.

(06:13):
So she's on top of the world in Paris, this
huge star, but back in the United States, she's a
black girl in Jim Crow rules, So it's a it's
a tough shift for her that she is not going
to take it anymore, and she made United States theaters
desegregate her audiences. She regularly caused a ruckus with authorities

(06:35):
over treatment of blacks and the lack of opportunities, and
she also said that if a city's best hotel wouldn't
take her, then she simply would not perform in that city.
So there go your revenues. I like her here she's
this racial barrier breaker, but this diva performer too kind
of amazing. I love her. There was a famous incident

(06:56):
at the Stork Club in nineteen fifty one, which of
course was the plan used to be in New York,
but Sherman Billingsley didn't admit Blacks. Being Josephine Baker and
being wildly popular, he decided he would let her in,
but then none of the waiters would serve her. They
claimed they were out of every single item that she offered,
or at least this is according to Josephine's version of
the tale. She also said that Walter Winchell, who was

(07:18):
a very influential gossip columnist, was a witness to everything
that happened, and that he didn't do a darn thing
to help her, and he was incensed by this portrayal,
and she presses the matter, and Winchell says it's absolutely
not true, but she won't let go of her version
of the story, so he ends up calling her a
communist and also saying she's anti Semitic and anti African American,

(07:42):
and also talks to the FBI about her, which resulted
in a seventeen year FBI investigation. Sarah said he reminded
her of Press Hilton earlier today, kind of the scary
gossip her. But he had a big effect on her career.
He started calling her ms Josephony Baker in his column
and a lot of her bookings were canceled because of

(08:02):
this rift. And she also comes to the US for
a lot of civil rights demonstration, So I mean her
her experiences performing give you a pretty good idea of
why she would be invested in this. She speaks at
the March in Washington in nineteen sixty three. But she
does have money trouble. She likes to spend. She has

(08:23):
all these children, and um she loses the chateau. But
who comes to the rescue Princess of Great Monico. I
wish would come to my rescue on a regular basis.
So we're nearing the end of her life. And in
nineteen seventy five, there is a Josephine retrospective in Paris.
It's marking her debut there fifty years earlier, and it

(08:44):
was hugely popular. All the celebrities are there. But during
its run, she dies of a stroke and the story
is that she has this hemorrhage when she's in bed,
surrounded by the newspapers with blowing reviews exactly telling the
story of just how wonderful she is, which I think
she probably liked a lot. And she's buried in Monte

(09:06):
Carlo and twenty thousand people came to her funeral, So um,
this is not not your typical story of a famous
stage presence who weighs away an obscurity. She's famous to
the end. But Sarah and I were talking earlier about
this switch from being this sexual object to being the madonna,

(09:27):
and people often wonder which image was more her, because
of course we have the urge to categorize and stick
her in one or the other. But we have an
interesting biography to talk about, which is by Jean Claude
baker Um, who she considered her adopted son even though
he was never legally adopted, and he wrote a biography
called Josephine the Hungry Heart. In it, he said that

(09:48):
she was sexually abused, and also that she had had
an affair with a middle aged man when she was thirteen.
She also had several marriages that weren't entirely legal because
she never ended the ones before them, and she got
married when you was thirteen, and that she had affairs
with both men and women, white and black. He also
claims that she got into vaudeville through a sexual relationship

(10:09):
with a woman, a blue singer. And we have a
quote from a woman named maud Russell who met Josephine
when they were working in Philadelphia, and she said, often
we girls would share a boarding house room because of
the cost. Well, many of us have been kind of
abused by producers, directors, leading men if they liked girls
and the girls needed tenderness. So we had girl friendships,

(10:30):
the famous lady lovers. But lesbians weren't well accepted in
show business. They were called bull dykers. I guess we
were bisexual and what you would call us today. So
going back to that earlier argument, which is more her
this Madonna image or the um crazy sexualized dancer. And
it's easy enough to see how the Madonna image is

(10:53):
partly created, you know, it's partly an image that she
creates and assumes later in life. But I think by
saying that doesn't necessarily mean the earlier sexualized image is
Josephine Baker's true self. It could be something that has
been created in part two, and then something um that
she's forced to assume. This uh, you know, affair with

(11:15):
the middle aged man when she's thirteen, these marriages when
she's a teenager. It seems like some of this um
she just it was forced upon her almost. So let
us know what you think. Email us at History Podcast
at house to aff Works dot com, and we'd like
to end with a quote from Jean claus book trying
to explain why people love her so much. He said

(11:38):
she was burning in hell from all the pain and abuse,
but she was able to shut up her feelings within
herself and give it back to people in a majestic
and generous way. She was one of those exceptional people
who know how to break down barriers to reach and
touch the body the soul of anyone. So if you
want to learn more about jazz and the jazz age,
you should go to our home page ww of you

(12:00):
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(12:21):
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