May 8, 2023 • 53 mins
Margaret talks with journalist and writer Laurie Penny about Josephine Baker, the first black woman to star in a film, who also helped fight the Nazis.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff? Your
podcast about Stuff Today? Obviously we're going to be talking
about the nineteen ninety five film Hackers, starring Angeline and Jolie.
There might be other characters, but I don't see why
anyone would notice or care. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
Actually I'm not your host. I'm my host. I'm my
own host. I'm Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is
(00:21):
my guest Lori Penny Laurie, how are you?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hellom? All right, pretty late here in London, but it's
nice to be in the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah. So, Laurie, how would you describe yourself if I
was too lazy to have written a bio?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Well, I'm a writer and I'm a screenwriter, a journalist
and an essays and various other things that all mean
I'm a writer, who have it? Who has the Can
I do that again? Sorry? I'm sorry, Ian. So I'm
a writer, I'm a journalist, a screenwriter and author and
(00:58):
essayist and various other things that just mean I know
a lot of different words from writer, but it sounds
professional if you listen them that way. And I've been
writing on writing on TV shows most recently. But I've
also done a lot of column and journalist work in
the US and the UK, and I write a lot
(01:19):
about protest and about politics and philosophy and gender and
but my my fiction work tends to be that plus
a whole lot of spoopy, nerdy, intricate, haunty stuff general
(01:41):
goblin logic. There's a general goblin logic underlying most of
my professional work.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hell yeah, Now, since you've said that you write for television,
I am assuming that you are friends with George Clooney.
That's that's just my head canon, now, definitely, that's how
it works. Who I call cluone peg.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And I sort of know who is. He's the guy
from r oh great m hm, that's the place that
you go and give a fake name and social Security
number two.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
That's right, that's right, that's right. You also.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Cool? Well, you know who else had pet pigs?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
That's exactly why I brought it up, all right, Baker
might have gotten along. Ah, So Margaret, hi h. I
have I have carried out a vicious coup against Sophie Lichterman,
your normal producer. My my troops are inside the palace.
We have taken the major railway stations. Uh, and and
(02:41):
the broadcasting towers and so you know, I I wanted
to suggest a new name for your podcast. Uh huh
who did coup stuff? It's interesting get the joke.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, because you you did a coup. I actually just
thought you were Sophie the Cold.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
No. No, A lot of people say that, and it.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Makes much more sense when it's written down.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, that was my entire preparation for today, Laurie was
writing two people who did coop stuff, nodding and satisfaction
and then going to play video games.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's that is That is very cue.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
And that is actually all that anyone needs to do
to make it on this show is make one clever
joke like the guest today who No, they actually did
more than Okay, So I will continue as if nothing
had happened and Sophie was still our producer, because clearly
Sophie will return and free us from this tyrannical Okay,
(03:41):
So Ian is our audio engineer. I like saying hi, Ian,
even though Ian can't say back. So yeah, hi Ian.
Our theme music was written for usd by unwoman, So Laurie, Oh.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, yeah that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, No, I'm I quite like it, Laura. Have you
ever heard of World War Two?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yes, slightly. I think I saw a film about it once.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, in America we call it dub Dub dose. But
but similar.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying to translate things into
British question.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
It's kind of like we got the British Office in
the US Office. There's some differences, but you know, similar basis.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well it's more optimistic, but I don't
know not actually, you know what, I objected that comparison
because that's probably the one show where the American version
is better.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah. In the American version of World War Two, only
Tom Hanks dies, if I'm remembering correctly.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
So yeah, and the regular version a lot more people died,
that's true.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
The regular version was nasty.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So there's this war. It's called World War Two. It's
the lesser than sequel of the Great War. And one
thing that happened in this war is that France got
got by Germany and some sort of takeover, much like
what Robert has done to us here. This is a
good comparison, like problems, no problem.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I can see nothing that could possibly go wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Now tell me some people tried to stop that takeover
and then helped retake Europe. That's true. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, Robert,
I'm sorry to say this. Some people tried to retake
it successfully retook Europe from fascism. Some of those people
were spies. Have you ever heard of Josephine Baker.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yes, she was a dancer and she was in Paris
in the twenties and thirties, was it Yep? I feel
like I could know more about Josephine Baker. I've got
a friendly meant a daughter after Josephine Baker.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Oh that's awesome, which.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Is why I mugged up on it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, good for you. You're going to learn more about Josephine
Baker today.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I'm very excited.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And Robert will hear about Justphine Baker. Actually, yeah, we'll see,
we'll see. This week, we're going to talk about a
bisexual black woman from Missouri who got the fuck out
of the US, became one of the most famous people
in the world, then burned her entire fortune to become
one of the most effective spies the world has ever seen.
And that's Justphine Baker.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
So pretty good person to name your kid after But
I guess that's one of the conclusions we have today.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah, pretty cool kid.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah her one. The one weird spot is her kids,
but we'll get to that the way she chose to
raise her kids. M On June, I like to judge
people based on people who probably like it's possible that
if Josephine Baker didn't exist, like not, the Nazis would
have won the war. That's like not outside the realm
of possibility. I'm going to ask y'all's opinion about that
(06:55):
when we get to some of the crucial rights, correct,
because I feel like y'all's combination of knowledge, Robert knowing
an ungodly amount about World War Two and you Laurie
knowing about being from England, these all related.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Well. Actually, the thing about World War two and being
British is that I don't know how much World War
two history you all learn in school, but we I
think I look World War two history every single year
in my education, I think, And it's funny British history education.
(07:32):
There's quite a lot of it. Most of it is
just about British history, but for some reason, they teach
us World War two history every single year. But the
other history teaching mysteriously stops sometime in the mid sixteen
hundreds and just picks up again in World War One. Honestly, seriously,
ask any British person who has studied the history at
(07:55):
school if they learned a line of imperial history. And
I remember being taught like in the kind of post
war period that we somehow lost the empire, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It was you'll find it just like if it was like.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
You know, just down in the back of the sofa
or something. It was never quite it was never explained
how we came to have this empire, and losing it
was just from like, oh you know, oh terribly sorry,
oh Chap, was this yours? So here have it back,
if it was meant at all, But really it's very conspicuous,
(08:29):
like several century gap, then just World War two again
and again and again. The last time that we can
be reasonably sure and maybe the only time we could
be reasonably sure we were the good guys.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Kind of yeah, I mean the US, I think we're
a little less extreme than that, but like there's definitely
huge amount of history, everything up to the Revolution and
then more or less blow over everything until we get
to the Civil War, right.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Because we have two moments of good. The US can
be like, well, we defeat did the Confederacy and we
defeated the Nazis. Those are the only things that we
can say positively in US history.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, I mean, isn't defeating like my lot kind of
up there with those tourises not count Okay, So from
from the US, then I've seen Hamilton. It may be
very proud to be an American city. I'm not which
I'm not.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
My opinions about the American Revolutionary War is that it's
a lateral move from one imperial power to another. But
that's not a popular take. And yes, it's true that
the US educational system believes that it was positive.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
All right, off topic already, that.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Is that is not how mel Gibson described it in
the movie The Patriot Margaret.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
But oh interesting, interesting, Yeah, that's the one where he
paints himself blue and grabs a broadsword.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, that's that's what that's what women want, okay.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Oh yeah, no, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So speaking of anti Semitism, that'll come up later in
the thing. Not actually not our protagonist. Okay. So on
June third, nineteen oh six, FRIEDA Josephine McDonald was born
in a real poor part of Saint Louis, Missouri, like
a no running water part of town, where half the
businesses were crime businesses, brothels and other people doing various crime.
(10:21):
The other half were factories whose primary production seems to
be pollution. And her and her three siblings, they're all younger.
They all slept on one mattress on the floor in
her parents' bedroom. One of her sisters, one of her
younger sisters, was graced with the single best name that
anyone can have, which I'm sure you all already know
what is.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Here's we are you Harry?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
No Margaret?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Oh right right? Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
So it's just really important that everyone knows that just
fantas sister named Margaret and her mother, her mother used
to say things to her like I wish she'd never
been born.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Oh that's no good.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, she didn't have a good childhood, like an awful
lot of self made folks and folks for marginalized communities,
et cetera. She played real fast and loose with details
about her early life, and a lot is clouded in
mystery of her early life because she hated her early life,
and then a lot is clouded in history of her
war years because she was a spy. And she didn't
(11:24):
talk about this until like, she never talked about it.
Really she died in seventy five or something. She survives
the war spoiler and yeah, and this the details about
her her spying and stuff didn't come out until a
couple of years ago. One time, an interviewer was like,
every time you write a memoir, do an interview, you
change your story about your family background. So what is
your family background? And her defense of her actions, as
(11:47):
she said, I don't lie. I improve on life.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, love it. Yeah, that's exactly
what I say every time I get pulled over by
the police. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yes, that and it probably works for you, right, that's
where you don't have a driver's license.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Well, I don't need a driver's license because I'm a
sovereign citizen traveling on the land. Margaret.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, the Constitution is your driver's license.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
So we're going to do our best with putting together
her young history. And by our best, I mean I
will include the stories that I find the most interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Which is probably what she would have wanted. It's funny
isn't it trying to Like, you're trying to put together
a history of somebody who probably didn't want her history
put together. So it's a little pressure.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I know. Well, the worst is when they're alive. I yeah.
Her mother was a black woman who washed clothes for
a living, who was who had been adopted into a
black and indigenous family, or was indigenous herself. There's a
lot of uncertainty about that lineage. Her father was probably
a random white guy, but she has claimed to have
(13:01):
a ton of different fathers, like this fancy guy from
Spain or this other black man or you know, just
like lots of different people.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
She's claimed it.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Her childhood nickname was Humpty Dumpty, yeah, which got shortened
to tumpty I don't know how. And she worked since
she was young as hell in all kinds of different fields.
For example, when she was eight, she cleaned and babysat
for this rich fuck named missus Kaiser. There's no and
(13:31):
his naming here. One time she put too much soap
in her boss's laundry, so her white boss burned her hands.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, yeah, she's not very nice. She got mad at
one at Josephine at one point and started keeping Josephine
in the basement with the family dog, who Josephine loved
and called three legs for reasons that are probably self evident.
Has to do with the number of legs that the
dog had.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Oh fascinating, Yeah, a.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Little bit more self evident than Humpty dumpty. She shared
her little bits of food with that dog. She grew
very close. She loved animals, This is a lifelong thing
for her. Missus Kaiser had a white rooster whom Josephine
named Tiny Tim, and once Tiny Tim was big enough,
missus Kaiser made Josephine kill it with scissors. Josephine's like eight,
(14:18):
Oh god, yeah, well, so Josephine the whole time, and
then ran away and never went back to missus Kaiser.
The first time she ever made money dancing, she was
about eight or so also, and this snake oil salesman
came through town selling fake medicine and he'd use theater
(14:38):
to attract a crowd on the street. This culminated in
a dance competition in which young Josephine won, and the
prize was a dollar, which is about twenty five dollars today.
So this was like a fairly big deal. She styled
her dancing based on the animals that she loved, like
she would like consciously mimic the dancing the movements of
different animals, which later led to really weird shit because
(15:03):
she's this black woman dancing for mostly a white audience
and people keep referring to her dances as like animalistic
in this like very fetishizing, shitty way. But it's like that, yeah,
but it's also awkward because she is also consciously styling
her dancing on animals.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Her favorite animals.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, And so she loves theaters since she's really small.
Theaters were around even in her neighborhood, including one that
would have different like ethnicity nights, like there was like
an Egypt thing, an Egypt themed night and stuff like that,
and Josephine wasn't going to those, but they influenced the
culture of the part of town she lived in. So
(15:41):
one of her friend's older brothers set up a basement
theater and charged a penny for attendance, and so she
danced in the chorus line and later set up a
similar club in her own basement. And then in nineteen seventeen,
when she was eleven, she saw some white people burning
a whole lot of black people's stuff in the East
Saint Lewis massacre, when white pieces of shit murdered between
(16:04):
thirty nine and one hundred and fifty black people and
burned a fuck ton of the houses and left six
thousand people homeless. And this is out of a fairly
small black population at the time. White cops in the
National Guard just let it happen. They got told not
to shoot the white rioters and so they just like
stepped back, and I suspect a lot of them were
joining in, and maybe a third of the black people
(16:27):
left Saint Louis after that. And one of the reasons
to bring it up is because it's a dark period
of labor history, because unions have never done anything wrong right.
Unions in the US were often white only, and so
owners used that to break the working class. They would
import black strike breakers who were desperate for work. So
the strikers just decided to attack all the black people
(16:48):
moving to the city. So it is actually a union
thing that caused all of this. And this is one
of Josephine's earliest memories. She said about it later, I
can still see myself standing on the west bank of
the Mississippi, looking over into East Saint Louis and watching
the glow of the burning Negro homes lighting the sky.
(17:09):
We children stood huddled together in bewilderment, rightened to death
with the screams of the Negro families running across this
bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs
as their worldly belongings. She worked other jobs in addition
to watching horrible things happen and dancing. The coolest job,
from my point of view, is that she was a
coal thief. I don't know if you've either of you
(17:30):
have ever had this job.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
But she ran so the job a person can have.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, Yeah, and certainly in Saint Louis at the time.
She ran with a gang of street kids in Saint Louis,
and so they'd steal from the coal trains. Josephine would
climb up on the trains while they were moving slow
and just like climb up to the top of the
cars and just start tossing hunks of coal down for
them to sell. Yeah, And she would do that until
the train started picking up too much speed and she'd
jump off. And there's all these like dramatic tellings of
(17:55):
this where yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Like what that is. That's like an orange story job.
That's like at the start of her Jones movie, Like
that's the first scene is her like hopping on a
train to Jack Cole, and then we like cut to
her in World War.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Some other sort of train which she's having a fight
in the root of the train with somebody with really
improbable parkourse skills who happens to be a Nazi, and
the music's kind of like yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's fistfighting a guy with the kind
of abs you only get when you're you're putting seven
thousand dollars a trend into your butt every month.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, And what's so great about that is that
that's actually literally what I said to someone who was
reading this is I was like, I was like, this
is the first scene if I filmed, if I filmed this,
this is the first scene.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, So this is the kinds of jobs that she has.
Right when she's thirteen, she was a waitress and a
street kid. She got I've heard different versions of this,
of course, she told different versions. She might have gotten
kicked out of her house by her parents for having
too many pets, like filling family's house with like all
of the strays and stuff. So she was living in
(19:05):
cardboard boxes and picking food from trash cans, and she
would make her money busking by dancing on street corners.
Soon she joined a busking crew called the Jones Family
Band that traveled around the US. And she got married
at the time. And I cannot find how old this
person was, so I'm just out of the goodness of
my heart guessing it's another thirteen year old. That is
(19:26):
what I wish to believe. Because when she's thirteen, she
gets married for the first time to someone named Willie Wells.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
But is that legal?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, I mean that's legal still in some states with
your parents' approval. Maybe it's Dane now, but yeah, like.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, And it's the new right wing thing as well.
They're busy calling us groomers. They're actually literally working.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
To get rid of let's sell off children.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, they're trying to lower the age of marriage or whatever.
So she marries Willy Wells. It's an unhappy marriage, as
probably any two thirteen years all time. Again, benefit of
the doubt here, assuming it was a thirteen year old.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
When you're like slightly young to really handle the moral
complexities of the original Pokemon games, you probably shouldn't be
navigating marriage.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
That is a controversial take to Christian nationalists. They might
not like you anymore, Robert.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Yeah, I'm gonna lose like thirty percent of our audience.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, well, don't worry, because when she's fifteen, she finds
another Willi.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
She divorces this guy right and doesn't last a year.
But when she's fifteen, she finds another Willy Willie Baker,
and she's like, look, I've got this thing where I
marry people named Willi. So she marries him. This marriage
doesn't last either, but she keeps his name, and it's
possible that she's never legally divorced. In everything she's doing
after this is like various forms of bigamy.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah yeah, but I don't care.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So, like double double divorce at fifteen is kind of
a flex in a weird way.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, that's true. This was a lot more common back
then too, the whole like people being technically big and
miskally married, because the way that like different states handled
the sharing of information meant that it was really a
lot of shit just out like lost in the male
effectively totally. I've been dealing with this talking reading about
like Vince McMahon's family, but this is like around the
(21:20):
same period of time, and his mom had another thing
where like she was, she had tried to get divorced,
but like it didn't go through for years. Not an
uncommon story.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And yeah, she doesn't want to.
She actually gets big fights, big fights with her mom,
her mom, who's again not the hero of this story,
because her mom is like, why don't you just go
be good to Willie Baker? Why do you keep running
around doing vaudeville and making something of yourself or whatever.
But if you want to make something for yourself, probably
(21:51):
the way to do it is to buy objects.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Uh huh, that's the only way.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yes, And so this podcast is proudly brought to you
by objects, the only thing that is real according to materialists.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
How do I obtain these objects? They sound great? I
must bring more of them to my house.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah, it's the it's the new trend that's sweeping the
world using wow presentations of time and effort, generally in
the form of paper or increasingly numbers on a computer
that you can then trade for physical objects.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
But I feel like that would like that decrease my
overall feeling of alienation in the world, and let's send
me up for objects.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Yeah, that's what That's what everyone says about currency. It's
the cure for alienation.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, wait, will this convict? Will this convict with the items?
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Oh? Interesting? Are you saying that it should be objects
and items?
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah? I'm doing Can I have objects and items? Is
what I'm asking.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
That really depends on the amount of currency you have, Okay, yeah,
and the.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Law and.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Mhm yeah, well if you what you really want to
do is you want to exploit other people's labor.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
That's where the real current is, right Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Or just buy this stuff objects, items and stuff. Here's
some uds and we're back. So the ages that Justphine
Baker does things don't line up because she's re rewriting
her life story. So I'm just going to go ahead
(23:37):
and use her numbers and things, even though they don't work.
When she was fifteen or so, she joined the Saint
Louis Chorus, maybe the Saint Louis Chorus to her, I'm
not entirely certain, joined a vaudevilsham and she was off.
Soon she makes her way up to Harlem and starts
working in musicals. She has aforementioned ditched her husband at
this point, and sometimes she's presented as being the Harlem Renaissance,
(24:01):
which is worth it's a black led revival of black
culture as compared to like just black culture being promoted
for a white audience, which is we'll get to that later.
And it was created by a ton of black folks
who are fleeing Jim Crow and the Red Summer in
nineteen nineteen, when race riots spread across the country. A
(24:23):
bunch of people come up and wind up in Harlem,
and they're pushing for civil rights and they're doing awesome
cultural stuff. There's a lot of it starts and centers
around theater and music. No more blackface and minstrel shows,
but shows that were earnest expressions done by black artists.
And there's a there's a poem that I'm not going
to read, but I will suggest to people to read
called if We Must Die by Claude McKay that was
(24:44):
part of inspiring all of this. And I'm really just
mad that this wasn't part of my public school education,
and that when people talk about Harlem Renaissance, they just
talk about it culturally, at least white public education or whatever, so.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You don't actually look at the culture know that it happened.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, exactly, it's like, oh, it's about plays without the
fact that the plays are about like, hey, we should
fucking fight for what's ours, you know, right, And this
poem is basically like, look, if we're going to die anyway,
we should fucking fight back.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I'm looking it up right now.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
And so, so this is the Harlem that Josephine Baker
shows up into, or she was never really part of
the Harlem Renaissance and went immediately to Broadway. I don't know.
Her goal is Broadway. The only way to break into
show business from her point of view is Broadway. And
since she's fourteen, I know, I just said she's fifteen,
But now she's fourteen. She's in New York and she's
(25:42):
too young to apply to be a chorus girl. You
have to be sixteen to be a chorus girl. But
she doesn't know that. She just knows she's probably too young.
And the show is called Shuffle Along, so she lies
and she says she's fifteen, and they're like, no, sorry,
you have to be sixteen, and they kick her out.
So she comes back and she lies again and she says,
I'm seven, and so they put her in. When she's fourteen,
(26:02):
probably she becomes a chorus girl. She gets the job
of being on the end of the line, which is
like the comedy dancer role who intentionally stumbles and such
for comedic effect. So it's kind of like the it's
a pretty good position in the chorus line, you know,
And she tours with it around the country, and she's
a chorus girl for years. She can't move up beyond
(26:25):
that because of racism, but it's still enough that she
starts sending money home to her family constantly, And this
is going to be a big part of Josephine Baker.
Does not remember, does not forget where she comes from.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Even though her family has been terrible to her, she
still sends all this money back.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, exactly, And like it's possible that her relationship with
her mother gets better at some point. I don't know,
you know. So France gets really excited about her La
Revue Negre, an all black club in Paris, was like, hell, yeah,
we want you. I don't think it's black owned to
be clear, but we want you. Everyone here in France
(27:03):
is obsessed with jazz and black culture, and we'll pay
you seriously good money. They pay her one thousand dollars
a month, which is about seventeen thousand dollars a month today,
which is wow, seriously good money.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Good money.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, so that's the like, it's like kind of messy,
right because she leaves segregated us to go to France
that claims to be anti racist, where they put her
in racist tropes constantly, right, but she is in Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It's also like they're putting her in racist tropes, but
everyone else doing those tropes is like having white people
do them in black face. So totally you have to
go her.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, yeah, an attempt, An attempt was made.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Yeah, it's they're not having a Humphrey Bogert do it.
So Cas is a win.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, and again it possibly saves the world. So when
she's nineteen, in nineteen twenty five, she moves to Paris
and being celebrated by a racist culture can be good money.
France was having a craze. White people were all about
jazz and dancing. The Charleston Modern Black author Morgan Jerkins
(28:18):
put it like this. When she swung on stage in
that fiercely swinging banana skirt in nineteen twenty six, Baker
brilliantly manipulated the white male imagination, crossing her eyes, waving
her arms, swaying her hips, poking out her backside. She
clowned and seduced and subverted stereotypes by reclaiming her image,
she advanced her career in ways unprecedented for a woman
(28:41):
of that time. Yeah, because her iconic outfit as soon
as she got there was a skirt made out of
bananas and a tiny brawl if any braw at all,
and a large pearl necklace. Hang on, not real banas, No,
they were fake bananas. Yeah if that sounds really hard
to do.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
But I don't know. Maybe she was just an amazing dancer.
I love the idea that she was. She was clowning still,
that she'd taken that being on the end of the
chorus line and made it part of the thing.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
That is absolutely Yeah, that is absolutely what's happening. And
her dance savage as I can't pronounce French is at
Le Revie Negra, was a huge hit. She's an overnight sensation.
This causes thousands of banana skirt dolls to be sold
around Europe. Magazines advised white ladies to rub walnut oil
(29:33):
onto their skin to darken it.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Oh boy, okay, there we go.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah. Baker herself cashed in on it, selling Baker's Skin. Okay,
a skin darkening lotion.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
When life gives you weird racists, sell wallet. What are
you going to do?
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, And it's like at a time when everyone else,
you know, Pe, we're trying to sell the opposite people
trying to sell skin lightning.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
She also sells Baker Fix, which is a hair palmade.
She had that signature twenty slick down hair, look like.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Betty Boop, the liddle wave at the front.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
She would do the little curl.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
You weren't hot back then unless your hair could ignite
your entire body like a candle with a single spark
got on it.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
If you coven in woolnut, yeah, how burnable, it'll go
in something very very deliciously smell.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
This is why this is why we don't really talk
about spontaneous human combustion when it was like a huge,
you know, conspiracy theory back then. It's because everyone was
drenched in oil and shade, smoking at all times.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, I wonder what it must be, Witch Crumb.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I'm gonna go pour gasoline on my head and fall
asleep with three cigars.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
It's part of the selling point is that everyone hated
their lives anyway. She also sold banana things like shoes
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Banana shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, I think so. I know she sold banana things
and shoes. It might be that she sold these might
be separate objects. I'm not entirely certain. And so she
becomes fuck off famous and rich and kind of an
inverse Coco Chanel. I'm just gonna say, who became fuck
off rich and picked the opposite side of the upcoming war.
(31:36):
She becomes fuck off famous, She buys a fucking mansion, sorry,
a chateau. This is friends. It has twenty four rooms,
and she does classic rich bit shit like she gets
a cheetah, which she names Chiquita.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Oh that's that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
That who has a diamond collar.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
I hear. They're the best big cats to have as
I mean, you shouldn't have any big cats as but
if you a pet, but if you are going to,
they're like the most anxious and the most receptive to
human affection.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Okay, okay, noted for future self.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I mean, hm, the most anxious, possibly illegal exubit pet
you can buy. I'm really glad that I know this now.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
She's she's she's she's filling her house with too many
animals and now nobody can stop it.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Oh, it's going to get just wait, No, it's good.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
There's more of them.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Oh, there's more animals. So I think she basically invents
the like rich motherfucker gets a cheetah trope. But I'm
not sure.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Mike Tyson like just just walking in her shadow exactly
like all of us.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, I want to hear the other animals.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
We'll get to them because I don't have their names
in front of me at this point in the script.
They're further in the script, so that's why we're going
to get to them. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
On into its time. I'm just envisioning a version of
Homeward Bound. Now, this is this is, this is the
movie I want to write where Jospey and Bakers off
being a spy or whatever, and then Tiki to the
Cheetah and various other of Jodophine Baker's amazing animals have
to go on some kind of homeward bound trip across
Nazi Germany. I think this could work.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
I'm pretty into this, Robert, do you think we can
get greenlit Netflix?
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yeah, I'll work on that. In the background, we'll hollered,
which I mean, I'm going to email my guy in
Central Africa and see if I can smuggle some cheetahs
in this fucking country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, no, I actually wasn't thinking live action, but but
this is a strong, strong pitch. I love it.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
DHL is delivering my cheetah tomorrow, and.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
We got you a couple too, louring mhm.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Oh yeah, you can't get them because the Brexit you.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Get a shipping break. You order at six pack. I'll
check one when I fly to the UK next. You
don't worry.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
So she gets Chakdah nineteen thirty from an exotic animal breeder,
and it's sort of on the advice of her pr folks.
I think this is her idea, but they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
do it because this puts her in the medium even more.
She goes to the opera and brings her cheetah and
he gets loose and he gets into the orchestra pit
and he causes havoc. He doesn't eat anybody, and this
(34:29):
causes international headlines as she disrupts the orchestra at the opera.
And this is good for her because it's international headlines.
It's just more fame. Soon she has her own club. Say, Josephine,
I really can't pronounce French. It's really bad house of Josephine's. Yeah, exactly,
(34:50):
thank you.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, sound like a giant asshole.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, okay, I'll just I'll just highlight the stuff I
need written read out in French in the script for you.
She is the store attraction at her own club. This
makes sense some of the other pets that were there
and included in the acts, And don't worry, this is
not all of her pets, but some of them are
the goat, Oh yes, great goat name. And Albert the pig,
(35:17):
or possibly Albert the pig, depending on how French the
pig is.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
I would say Albert's a good pig name, but Albert not.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
So let's go with Albert.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Yeah, Albert the bear would be Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Albert is a great name for a bear. Yeah, because
it reminds me of owl Bears, one of my favorite
D and D monsters.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, exactly. She actually has a pet, Albert.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Oh awesome.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, she stole it from a Nazi breeding program.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Wow. Yeah, brave to keep a CR three pet in
your in your in your house.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh she's she can handle up to see R twelve
at least at this point.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Wow. Oh wow. Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So she wasn't the most famous Black American woman in France,
she's the most famous American in France and one of
the most famous Americans in Europe at this point. She's
also like, she's at least called the most photographed woman
in the world, and she becomes the first black woman
(36:17):
to star in a movie. In nineteen twenty seven, she
stars in Siren of the Tropics, which.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Is that sounds super unproblematic.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
It's completely unproblematic. It's let me let me just put
this past you. This is actually I think this would
fly really well today. It's about a fictional colony that's
vaguely Polynesian. She's cast as an indigenous woman who falls
in love with a Frenchman moves to France, only to
be heartbroken by the fact that he's already engaged so
she goes out and is happier as a music hall performer.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Anyway, that's not as bad as a really expecting ID,
but the one where it's where the teacher and the
goat in the peg go on a journey across Europe
and like discover the treating the friendship.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
But no, no, I agree the positive reviews of it
will all include the racist things like wow, she moves
like a wild animal or whatever. This increases her fame.
She goes on to star in Zazao in nineteen thirty
four as an and then I think, once again she
isn't allowed to love the white guy she's in love
with as like the central part of it. Then she's
(37:23):
Princess Tam Tam, in which she's a Tunisian woman who
winds up in Paris. Basically there is a trope named
after her of primitive to Parisian. However, this last one,
Hollywood sensors refuse to show it in the US, so
it only plays in select black theaters in the US
that are ignoring the Hollywood Code or whatever the fuck
that thing is called. She's an astoundingly good performer. She
(37:48):
sings opera, she spends a ton of her time driving
a fancy car into slums with prepared packages for folks,
like food, blankets, closed, that kind of shit. She just
like piles high her car with all this stuff and
shows up and passes it out to everyone because she
never forgets where she's from. She's also a terrible driver,
just absolutely awful driver. The driving school passed her because
(38:11):
they wanted to be able to claim that they were
the school who taught her, not because they had actually
successfully taught her. And so at one point she crashes
her car into a light post and gets out dazed
and signs autographs and then walks away and takes a
cab home.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Where any of the animals in the car.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
I hope not none seemed to be harmed. They are
no animals harmed in the making of this script. She
was probably bisexual. She's like famously, she was bisexual. She
was sleeping like famously with other chorus girls and also
the other famous you know, performers and stuff. At her time.
She also had a lover who was a gay man,
(38:54):
and it's very likely that she was doing high end
sex work, but not everywhere, and everyone loved her in Paris,
the reigning star now in her fifties was a white
woman named misting Get, whose name I can't pronounce, whose
real name was Gian bourgeoisie or bourgeois gian bourgeois. Uh yeah,
(39:20):
Josephine was starting to replace this lady. This lady was
also a racist. She'd say things like, how is I
forget her name? That colored girl my substitute. That was
like basically how she constantly referred to to Josephine. One time,
at a fancy movie premiere, misting Get called Josephine an
old timey racist word, a pickaninny. So Josephine walked over,
(39:45):
dug her nails into the woman's arm and spat in
her face. Huh yeah, that's good, legit. Yeah. And she
also like is like literally this this older lady now
is like just literally being replaced.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
It's like she'll be the star of something and they'll
be like never mind and just phenill come in, right,
And that's good because fuck that lady because she's old
and racist. But you know what is never racist? Capitalism?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Is its items? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Capitalism is not racist as long as you have enough
money to make not being racist worthwhile.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah right, Yeah, And so it makes total sense.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
We would like you, the listener, to peruse this fine
collection of what is it? Items, objects and stuff. Yeah,
so so what not tossed in there? Probably that's a
little bit far. I guess we would take we would
take what not Okay money, I think, I know, I
(40:49):
think we could take what not money?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
That's okay, stuff things, whatnot.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, here you go and we're back. So there's two more.
There's two places that she runs into trouble besides random
movie premieres with random racists. Didn't. I don't know if
y'all knew this, but there are a couple places in
time and geography where instead of individual racists, there's entirely
(41:17):
large systems of racism. One of those was Germany.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I think we learned this in school. Yeah, the thing
gets personally.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, so Germany the only racist country in history.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
In nineteen twenty six, she showed up and she was like, whoa,
it rules here because it is bymar Germany, and it rules.
And she plays a bunch of cabarets or whatever, has
a good time. Two years later, she's planning six months
in Berlin and doing shows the whole time, and first
she shows up in Austria, which is undergrowing Nazi influence,
and was met with angry mobs and had to be
(41:59):
escorted around by armed guards because she is the fucking
living embodiment of not Nazi. She is a slightly black,
she is unashamedly sexual and bisexual. So basically they're like
this is yeah, this I mean, and that's actually like
literally part of it. It's funny because it's like you
(42:20):
look at this, like, Okay, she's playing up to these
like kind of racist tropes, you know this, like dulcavage
or whatever. But literally the fact that the French were
okay with that was part of why Germany was like
we fucking hate the degenerate French because they're okay with
a black woman. So yeah, there's a.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Really funny story from kind of the early era of
the Third Reich when they held Gebels. I think is
going to put it together this big exhibition that was
the degenerate art Exhibition. I actually know the German but
I know I'll pronounce it wrong if I say it,
but it's like they did this big exhibition that was
(43:01):
supposed to be I think it was contrast with like,
you know, decent you know, Arian art.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Roper German arts proper Arean art which which all looks
like Tom of Finland.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
People kept hanging out listening to the jazz and looking
at like the degenerate art because it was good.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, yeah, actually, and gebels Uh definitely know Josephine Baker
by name, and multiple times was specifically like Josephine Baker
is the enemy. That's which is a yeah, it speaks
well of you.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
There's actually a part I didn't put it in a script.
At one point, Hitler goes to ah fuck, he goes
to some country and he goes to like the fanciest hotel,
and they put him in the fanciest room in the
fanciest hotel and there's a giant portrait of Josephine Baker
above the bed, and he's angry. He's so angry.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Was it there before her?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Oh my god? Yeah, And I hope whoever did that
to him survives. Yeah, So there's angry mobs. She has
to be escorted around. She goes to Berlin planning the
six month run of a show. She's stalked and harassed
and jeered people yell, go back to Africa and a
(44:17):
lot of other less nice things. Nazi papers are mad
that she was like ruining her co star this like
nice blonde lady. After three weeks she leaves, she flees,
She's like, I can't fucking do this, and she goes
back to Paris. But so the Nazis didn't like her.
Do you know where else struggled with racism only for
(44:39):
a brief moment, obviously, it's never had racism before after
this place?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Right?
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Canada?
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Similar the United States in the nineteen twenties thirties.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Really Mexico's Canada.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mexico's Canada.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
So I'm trying really hard to do this. U isn't here, Yeah, practicing, No,
I appreciate. How's it doing? Thank you?
Speaker 1 (45:03):
It's great because actually what you're doing is you're changing
the tone of your sarcasm to go from British sarcasm
which goes above the heads of all Americans and instead
trying to do amza.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
No, no, no, it's because you think that, because that's just
because I'm never doing it.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Ah, okay, okay, good to know.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, yeah it's not. I've let you were in a
little secret there, which is sometimes like it's British people
are not. We just sound like if it doesn't actually
mean we're clever. And you have to know British people
for a little bit before you realize this, and then
it's just slightly worse for us. And then we go
home and come back and try to find some new
Americans who haven't yet been nam on this trick that.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
Makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of
things so great. In nineteen thirty six, she goes back
to Broadway and she's hoping for this whole I mean,
she's like one of the most famous people in the
fucking world, right, She's a millionaire, she owns goddamn mansion, sorry,
a chateau, like most photographed woman in the world. Like,
clearly the US's racism will like make some exceptions for
(46:05):
Josephine Baker. She can't find a hotel to let her
stay in New York City. Whoa her Japanese friends, chauffeur
from the from the Japanese embassy. He's afraid of being
seen driving around a black woman. The New York Times
calls her a negro wench Oh boy, yeah, she opens up.
(46:30):
She opens up her own club, also called Josephine. Sorry,
I should have highlighted that for you, Robert, thank you,
But it wasn't really working the same way to a
US audience. It's just like, didn't the US audience was
segregated essentially, you know, And.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
This is really sad. It's just really sad, like you're
suddenly facing all this stuff like Germany, and then you
come home and it's even worse. I don't know, it's
something that sorry, I'm not being very clever. No, no,
I mean it's like the the having like I don't know,
you must she must have felt like, you know, having
been in France for that time, that she finally got
(47:10):
away from some stuff well, that things could be all right,
but then it was just this one place that was
just a little bit better, even though she had to
make those but it kind of sounds like in France
she got to she got to choose which compromises.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
To make, yeah, totally totally, and the US won't let
her make those decisions, and then Germany wants to just
murder her. Right, so she's like, all right, fuck you.
She leaves, she goes and she becomes a French citizen.
She goes back to France, she becomes a French citizen
maybe depending on the specifics of some bigamy stuff. But
(47:47):
she marries this Jewish sugar magnate whose name is Jean
Lyon or Jean Lyon or something.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh like from like, yeah, yeah, that's the brand of
sugar that like we have in the oh really yeah, yeah,
Lions Sugar.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Oh that's funny. Yeah, that's that's what family she marries into.
And she doesn't take the name Lion, even though everything
she does is animal themed, which is like kind of
good on her, you know. And apparently he proposed while
the two of them were flying in a plane, sorry,
he was flying a plane that she was in, because
(48:24):
he's a bored rich guy and so he wanted to
learn how to fly, so he went again. Yeah, but
he teaches her how to fly, and this is going
to come up in really cool ways in World War Two.
The marriage was always a bit rocky because they're both
uncompromising about their own careers, his business and politics, hers
(48:44):
his show business. But he teaches her how to fly,
and it's possible. She never technically divorced Willie Baker, but
it's a different country. Who fucking cares. Everyone is obsessed
with her. Hemingway spends hours chatting her up and right
her about her. Picasso paints her.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Oh my god. Yeah, yeah, that must have been so crazy.
I can just imagine it being naked constantly and it's
aving away. See.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
I like to imagine that it's while Picasso's painting her,
and they're both just like sort of taking turns trying
to hit on her.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
Wow, that's like the Battle of the Problematic Kings. Yeah,
the two most problematic men in our history both hitding
on you at once.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh Dolly, isn't there Oh yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
They are all retroactively canceled.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Yeah, so this is her life. She now lives in,
I think, still the same chateau with the Lion family,
all of the ship rules. She's amazing, she's doing cool stuff.
But that's not what we're here to talk about with her.
We're going to talk about how she was a badass,
fucking spy, crucial part of the machine that ripped apart
fascism limb by limb, but one messy part. In nineteen
(50:08):
thirty five, she vocally supported Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia because
that's because he said he was going in there to
end slavery, and she was like, sick, I hate slavery. Yeah,
well grandparents I think maybe great maybe great grandparents. I
don't remember which, but don't worry. Not only is she
more than make up for this mistake. Oddly it works
(50:30):
out against Mussolini that she did so that she like
supported him to begin with. And we'll talk about that
on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Oh wow, yeah, exciting man, old purbageous.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
All right, Laurie, do you have any plugs you want
to plug here at the end of the first episode.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Well, you could good buy any of my more recent books.
Got a bit doctrine. I've got Sexual Revolution, and they're
available from lots of different bookshops. And although I don't
mind if you steal one, that's that's fair, I think
for this podcast, and honestly I don't mind. It's you
don't write books to make money? Come on, we'll not No,
(51:17):
I shouldn't say that you should write books to make money,
but just in case, I think people should read them anyway.
And if you want to read my work entirely for
free above board and the distimately, just like search them
my articles and wired.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Or go to a library, and don't steal it from
the library.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, we don't really have those anymore in
the UK for thirteen years of conservative all over here.
So you forgetting.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I guess, yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
The nurses are on strike today.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
Oh yeah, it's also a bit dangerous, but you know
they should be on strike.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Yeah, Sophie, do you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 4 (52:02):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yeah, you know the get a pig. Get a pet, pig,
steal it from one of those horrible places where they
keep thousands of pigs pinned together above rivers of shit,
and then take it home and make it your friend.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
That's what just bad would I think that is what
it would do. Yeah, and I want to plug that.
People should plant trees. No, actually, the way that people
go out and randomly plant trees and large numbers doesn't
always actually work. Do good things instead of bad things.
That's my search. How to plant trees in a way
(52:39):
that helps and then do that? Yeah, do that and
we will talk to you all on Wednesday. Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia Dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts of
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff? Your
podcast about Stuff Today? Obviously we're going to be talking
about the nineteen ninety five film Hackers, starring Angeline and Jolie.
There might be other characters, but I don't see why
anyone would notice or care. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
Actually I'm not your host. I'm my host. I'm my
own host. I'm Margaret Kiljoy and with me today is
(00:21):
my guest Lori Penny Laurie, how are you?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hellom? All right, pretty late here in London, but it's
nice to be in the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah. So, Laurie, how would you describe yourself if I
was too lazy to have written a bio?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Well, I'm a writer and I'm a screenwriter, a journalist
and an essays and various other things that all mean
I'm a writer, who have it? Who has the Can
I do that again? Sorry? I'm sorry, Ian. So I'm
a writer, I'm a journalist, a screenwriter and author and
(00:58):
essayist and various other things that just mean I know
a lot of different words from writer, but it sounds
professional if you listen them that way. And I've been
writing on writing on TV shows most recently. But I've
also done a lot of column and journalist work in
the US and the UK, and I write a lot
(01:19):
about protest and about politics and philosophy and gender and
but my my fiction work tends to be that plus
a whole lot of spoopy, nerdy, intricate, haunty stuff general
(01:41):
goblin logic. There's a general goblin logic underlying most of
my professional work.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Hell yeah, Now, since you've said that you write for television,
I am assuming that you are friends with George Clooney.
That's that's just my head canon, now, definitely, that's how
it works. Who I call cluone peg.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And I sort of know who is. He's the guy
from r oh great m hm, that's the place that
you go and give a fake name and social Security
number two.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
That's right, that's right, that's right. You also.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Cool? Well, you know who else had pet pigs?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
That's exactly why I brought it up, all right, Baker
might have gotten along. Ah, So Margaret, hi h. I
have I have carried out a vicious coup against Sophie Lichterman,
your normal producer. My my troops are inside the palace.
We have taken the major railway stations. Uh, and and
(02:41):
the broadcasting towers and so you know, I I wanted
to suggest a new name for your podcast. Uh huh
who did coup stuff? It's interesting get the joke.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, because you you did a coup. I actually just
thought you were Sophie the Cold.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
No. No, A lot of people say that, and it.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Makes much more sense when it's written down.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, that was my entire preparation for today, Laurie was
writing two people who did coop stuff, nodding and satisfaction
and then going to play video games.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
That's that is That is very cue.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
And that is actually all that anyone needs to do
to make it on this show is make one clever
joke like the guest today who No, they actually did
more than Okay, So I will continue as if nothing
had happened and Sophie was still our producer, because clearly
Sophie will return and free us from this tyrannical Okay,
(03:41):
So Ian is our audio engineer. I like saying hi, Ian,
even though Ian can't say back. So yeah, hi Ian.
Our theme music was written for usd by unwoman, So Laurie, Oh.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, yeah that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Yeah, No, I'm I quite like it, Laura. Have you
ever heard of World War Two?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yes, slightly. I think I saw a film about it once.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, in America we call it dub Dub dose. But
but similar.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, I'm trying to I'm trying to translate things into
British question.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
It's kind of like we got the British Office in
the US Office. There's some differences, but you know, similar basis.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well it's more optimistic, but I don't
know not actually, you know what, I objected that comparison
because that's probably the one show where the American version
is better.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Yeah. In the American version of World War Two, only
Tom Hanks dies, if I'm remembering correctly.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
So yeah, and the regular version a lot more people died,
that's true.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
The regular version was nasty.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
So there's this war. It's called World War Two. It's
the lesser than sequel of the Great War. And one
thing that happened in this war is that France got
got by Germany and some sort of takeover, much like
what Robert has done to us here. This is a
good comparison, like problems, no problem.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I can see nothing that could possibly go wrong.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Now tell me some people tried to stop that takeover
and then helped retake Europe. That's true. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, Robert,
I'm sorry to say this. Some people tried to retake
it successfully retook Europe from fascism. Some of those people
were spies. Have you ever heard of Josephine Baker.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yes, she was a dancer and she was in Paris
in the twenties and thirties, was it Yep? I feel
like I could know more about Josephine Baker. I've got
a friendly meant a daughter after Josephine Baker.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Oh that's awesome, which.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Is why I mugged up on it a little bit.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Well, good for you. You're going to learn more about Josephine
Baker today.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I'm very excited.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
And Robert will hear about Justphine Baker. Actually, yeah, we'll see,
we'll see. This week, we're going to talk about a
bisexual black woman from Missouri who got the fuck out
of the US, became one of the most famous people
in the world, then burned her entire fortune to become
one of the most effective spies the world has ever seen.
And that's Justphine Baker.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
So pretty good person to name your kid after But
I guess that's one of the conclusions we have today.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah, pretty cool kid.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Yeah her one. The one weird spot is her kids,
but we'll get to that the way she chose to
raise her kids. M On June, I like to judge
people based on people who probably like it's possible that
if Josephine Baker didn't exist, like not, the Nazis would
have won the war. That's like not outside the realm
of possibility. I'm going to ask y'all's opinion about that
(06:55):
when we get to some of the crucial rights, correct,
because I feel like y'all's combination of knowledge, Robert knowing
an ungodly amount about World War Two and you Laurie
knowing about being from England, these all related.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Well. Actually, the thing about World War two and being
British is that I don't know how much World War
two history you all learn in school, but we I
think I look World War two history every single year
in my education, I think, And it's funny British history education.
(07:32):
There's quite a lot of it. Most of it is
just about British history, but for some reason, they teach
us World War two history every single year. But the
other history teaching mysteriously stops sometime in the mid sixteen
hundreds and just picks up again in World War One. Honestly, seriously,
ask any British person who has studied the history at
(07:55):
school if they learned a line of imperial history. And
I remember being taught like in the kind of post
war period that we somehow lost the empire, you know, and.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
It was you'll find it just like if it was like.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
You know, just down in the back of the sofa
or something. It was never quite it was never explained
how we came to have this empire, and losing it
was just from like, oh you know, oh terribly sorry,
oh Chap, was this yours? So here have it back,
if it was meant at all, But really it's very conspicuous,
(08:29):
like several century gap, then just World War two again
and again and again. The last time that we can
be reasonably sure and maybe the only time we could
be reasonably sure we were the good guys.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Kind of yeah, I mean the US, I think we're
a little less extreme than that, but like there's definitely
huge amount of history, everything up to the Revolution and
then more or less blow over everything until we get
to the Civil War, right.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Because we have two moments of good. The US can
be like, well, we defeat did the Confederacy and we
defeated the Nazis. Those are the only things that we
can say positively in US history.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, I mean, isn't defeating like my lot kind of
up there with those tourises not count Okay, So from
from the US, then I've seen Hamilton. It may be
very proud to be an American city. I'm not which
I'm not.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
My opinions about the American Revolutionary War is that it's
a lateral move from one imperial power to another. But
that's not a popular take. And yes, it's true that
the US educational system believes that it was positive.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
All right, off topic already, that.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Is that is not how mel Gibson described it in
the movie The Patriot Margaret.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
But oh interesting, interesting, Yeah, that's the one where he
paints himself blue and grabs a broadsword.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Yeah, that's that's what that's what women want, okay.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Oh yeah, no, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
So speaking of anti Semitism, that'll come up later in
the thing. Not actually not our protagonist. Okay. So on
June third, nineteen oh six, FRIEDA Josephine McDonald was born
in a real poor part of Saint Louis, Missouri, like
a no running water part of town, where half the
businesses were crime businesses, brothels and other people doing various crime.
(10:21):
The other half were factories whose primary production seems to
be pollution. And her and her three siblings, they're all younger.
They all slept on one mattress on the floor in
her parents' bedroom. One of her sisters, one of her
younger sisters, was graced with the single best name that
anyone can have, which I'm sure you all already know
what is.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Here's we are you Harry?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
No Margaret?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Oh right right? Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
So it's just really important that everyone knows that just
fantas sister named Margaret and her mother, her mother used
to say things to her like I wish she'd never
been born.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Oh that's no good.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, she didn't have a good childhood, like an awful
lot of self made folks and folks for marginalized communities,
et cetera. She played real fast and loose with details
about her early life, and a lot is clouded in
mystery of her early life because she hated her early life,
and then a lot is clouded in history of her
war years because she was a spy. And she didn't
(11:24):
talk about this until like, she never talked about it.
Really she died in seventy five or something. She survives
the war spoiler and yeah, and this the details about
her her spying and stuff didn't come out until a
couple of years ago. One time, an interviewer was like,
every time you write a memoir, do an interview, you
change your story about your family background. So what is
your family background? And her defense of her actions, as
(11:47):
she said, I don't lie. I improve on life.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, love it. Yeah, that's exactly
what I say every time I get pulled over by
the police. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Yes, that and it probably works for you, right, that's
where you don't have a driver's license.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Well, I don't need a driver's license because I'm a
sovereign citizen traveling on the land. Margaret.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yeah, the Constitution is your driver's license.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
So we're going to do our best with putting together
her young history. And by our best, I mean I
will include the stories that I find the most interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Which is probably what she would have wanted. It's funny
isn't it trying to Like, you're trying to put together
a history of somebody who probably didn't want her history
put together. So it's a little pressure.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
I know. Well, the worst is when they're alive. I yeah.
Her mother was a black woman who washed clothes for
a living, who was who had been adopted into a
black and indigenous family, or was indigenous herself. There's a
lot of uncertainty about that lineage. Her father was probably
a random white guy, but she has claimed to have
(13:01):
a ton of different fathers, like this fancy guy from
Spain or this other black man or you know, just
like lots of different people.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
She's claimed it.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Her childhood nickname was Humpty Dumpty, yeah, which got shortened
to tumpty I don't know how. And she worked since
she was young as hell in all kinds of different fields.
For example, when she was eight, she cleaned and babysat
for this rich fuck named missus Kaiser. There's no and
(13:31):
his naming here. One time she put too much soap
in her boss's laundry, so her white boss burned her hands.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, yeah, she's not very nice. She got mad at
one at Josephine at one point and started keeping Josephine
in the basement with the family dog, who Josephine loved
and called three legs for reasons that are probably self evident.
Has to do with the number of legs that the
dog had.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Oh fascinating, Yeah, a.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Little bit more self evident than Humpty dumpty. She shared
her little bits of food with that dog. She grew
very close. She loved animals, This is a lifelong thing
for her. Missus Kaiser had a white rooster whom Josephine
named Tiny Tim, and once Tiny Tim was big enough,
missus Kaiser made Josephine kill it with scissors. Josephine's like eight,
(14:18):
Oh god, yeah, well, so Josephine the whole time, and
then ran away and never went back to missus Kaiser.
The first time she ever made money dancing, she was
about eight or so also, and this snake oil salesman
came through town selling fake medicine and he'd use theater
(14:38):
to attract a crowd on the street. This culminated in
a dance competition in which young Josephine won, and the
prize was a dollar, which is about twenty five dollars today.
So this was like a fairly big deal. She styled
her dancing based on the animals that she loved, like
she would like consciously mimic the dancing the movements of
different animals, which later led to really weird shit because
(15:03):
she's this black woman dancing for mostly a white audience
and people keep referring to her dances as like animalistic
in this like very fetishizing, shitty way. But it's like that, yeah,
but it's also awkward because she is also consciously styling
her dancing on animals.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Her favorite animals.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, And so she loves theaters since she's really small.
Theaters were around even in her neighborhood, including one that
would have different like ethnicity nights, like there was like
an Egypt thing, an Egypt themed night and stuff like that,
and Josephine wasn't going to those, but they influenced the
culture of the part of town she lived in. So
(15:41):
one of her friend's older brothers set up a basement
theater and charged a penny for attendance, and so she
danced in the chorus line and later set up a
similar club in her own basement. And then in nineteen seventeen,
when she was eleven, she saw some white people burning
a whole lot of black people's stuff in the East
Saint Lewis massacre, when white pieces of shit murdered between
(16:04):
thirty nine and one hundred and fifty black people and
burned a fuck ton of the houses and left six
thousand people homeless. And this is out of a fairly
small black population at the time. White cops in the
National Guard just let it happen. They got told not
to shoot the white rioters and so they just like
stepped back, and I suspect a lot of them were
joining in, and maybe a third of the black people
(16:27):
left Saint Louis after that. And one of the reasons
to bring it up is because it's a dark period
of labor history, because unions have never done anything wrong right.
Unions in the US were often white only, and so
owners used that to break the working class. They would
import black strike breakers who were desperate for work. So
the strikers just decided to attack all the black people
(16:48):
moving to the city. So it is actually a union
thing that caused all of this. And this is one
of Josephine's earliest memories. She said about it later, I
can still see myself standing on the west bank of
the Mississippi, looking over into East Saint Louis and watching
the glow of the burning Negro homes lighting the sky.
(17:09):
We children stood huddled together in bewilderment, rightened to death
with the screams of the Negro families running across this
bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs
as their worldly belongings. She worked other jobs in addition
to watching horrible things happen and dancing. The coolest job,
from my point of view, is that she was a
coal thief. I don't know if you've either of you
(17:30):
have ever had this job.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
But she ran so the job a person can have.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, Yeah, and certainly in Saint Louis at the time.
She ran with a gang of street kids in Saint Louis,
and so they'd steal from the coal trains. Josephine would
climb up on the trains while they were moving slow
and just like climb up to the top of the
cars and just start tossing hunks of coal down for
them to sell. Yeah, And she would do that until
the train started picking up too much speed and she'd
jump off. And there's all these like dramatic tellings of
(17:55):
this where yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Like what that is. That's like an orange story job.
That's like at the start of her Jones movie, Like
that's the first scene is her like hopping on a
train to Jack Cole, and then we like cut to
her in World War.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Some other sort of train which she's having a fight
in the root of the train with somebody with really
improbable parkourse skills who happens to be a Nazi, and
the music's kind of like yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's fistfighting a guy with the kind
of abs you only get when you're you're putting seven
thousand dollars a trend into your butt every month.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, And what's so great about that is that
that's actually literally what I said to someone who was
reading this is I was like, I was like, this
is the first scene if I filmed, if I filmed this,
this is the first scene.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah, So this is the kinds of jobs that she has.
Right when she's thirteen, she was a waitress and a
street kid. She got I've heard different versions of this,
of course, she told different versions. She might have gotten
kicked out of her house by her parents for having
too many pets, like filling family's house with like all
of the strays and stuff. So she was living in
(19:05):
cardboard boxes and picking food from trash cans, and she
would make her money busking by dancing on street corners.
Soon she joined a busking crew called the Jones Family
Band that traveled around the US. And she got married
at the time. And I cannot find how old this
person was, so I'm just out of the goodness of
my heart guessing it's another thirteen year old. That is
(19:26):
what I wish to believe. Because when she's thirteen, she
gets married for the first time to someone named Willie Wells.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
But is that legal?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, I mean that's legal still in some states with
your parents' approval. Maybe it's Dane now, but yeah, like.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, And it's the new right wing thing as well.
They're busy calling us groomers. They're actually literally working.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
To get rid of let's sell off children.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Yeah, they're trying to lower the age of marriage or whatever.
So she marries Willy Wells. It's an unhappy marriage, as
probably any two thirteen years all time. Again, benefit of
the doubt here, assuming it was a thirteen year old.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
When you're like slightly young to really handle the moral
complexities of the original Pokemon games, you probably shouldn't be
navigating marriage.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
That is a controversial take to Christian nationalists. They might
not like you anymore, Robert.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Yeah, I'm gonna lose like thirty percent of our audience.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Yeah, well, don't worry, because when she's fifteen, she finds
another Willi.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
She divorces this guy right and doesn't last a year.
But when she's fifteen, she finds another Willy Willie Baker,
and she's like, look, I've got this thing where I
marry people named Willi. So she marries him. This marriage
doesn't last either, but she keeps his name, and it's
possible that she's never legally divorced. In everything she's doing
after this is like various forms of bigamy.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Yeah yeah, but I don't care.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
So, like double double divorce at fifteen is kind of
a flex in a weird way.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Yeah, that's true. This was a lot more common back
then too, the whole like people being technically big and
miskally married, because the way that like different states handled
the sharing of information meant that it was really a
lot of shit just out like lost in the male
effectively totally. I've been dealing with this talking reading about
like Vince McMahon's family, but this is like around the
(21:20):
same period of time, and his mom had another thing
where like she was, she had tried to get divorced,
but like it didn't go through for years. Not an
uncommon story.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And yeah, she doesn't want to.
She actually gets big fights, big fights with her mom,
her mom, who's again not the hero of this story,
because her mom is like, why don't you just go
be good to Willie Baker? Why do you keep running
around doing vaudeville and making something of yourself or whatever.
But if you want to make something for yourself, probably
(21:51):
the way to do it is to buy objects.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Uh huh, that's the only way.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yes, And so this podcast is proudly brought to you
by objects, the only thing that is real according to materialists.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
How do I obtain these objects? They sound great? I
must bring more of them to my house.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Yeah, it's the it's the new trend that's sweeping the
world using wow presentations of time and effort, generally in
the form of paper or increasingly numbers on a computer
that you can then trade for physical objects.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
But I feel like that would like that decrease my
overall feeling of alienation in the world, and let's send
me up for objects.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
Yeah, that's what That's what everyone says about currency. It's
the cure for alienation.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, wait, will this convict? Will this convict with the items?
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Oh? Interesting? Are you saying that it should be objects
and items?
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah? I'm doing Can I have objects and items? Is
what I'm asking.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
That really depends on the amount of currency you have, Okay, yeah,
and the.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Law and.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Mhm yeah, well if you what you really want to
do is you want to exploit other people's labor.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
That's where the real current is, right Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
Or just buy this stuff objects, items and stuff. Here's
some uds and we're back. So the ages that Justphine
Baker does things don't line up because she's re rewriting
her life story. So I'm just going to go ahead
(23:37):
and use her numbers and things, even though they don't work.
When she was fifteen or so, she joined the Saint
Louis Chorus, maybe the Saint Louis Chorus to her, I'm
not entirely certain, joined a vaudevilsham and she was off.
Soon she makes her way up to Harlem and starts
working in musicals. She has aforementioned ditched her husband at
this point, and sometimes she's presented as being the Harlem Renaissance,
(24:01):
which is worth it's a black led revival of black
culture as compared to like just black culture being promoted
for a white audience, which is we'll get to that later.
And it was created by a ton of black folks
who are fleeing Jim Crow and the Red Summer in
nineteen nineteen, when race riots spread across the country. A
(24:23):
bunch of people come up and wind up in Harlem,
and they're pushing for civil rights and they're doing awesome
cultural stuff. There's a lot of it starts and centers
around theater and music. No more blackface and minstrel shows,
but shows that were earnest expressions done by black artists.
And there's a there's a poem that I'm not going
to read, but I will suggest to people to read
called if We Must Die by Claude McKay that was
(24:44):
part of inspiring all of this. And I'm really just
mad that this wasn't part of my public school education,
and that when people talk about Harlem Renaissance, they just
talk about it culturally, at least white public education or whatever, so.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
You don't actually look at the culture know that it happened.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, exactly, it's like, oh, it's about plays without the
fact that the plays are about like, hey, we should
fucking fight for what's ours, you know, right, And this
poem is basically like, look, if we're going to die anyway,
we should fucking fight back.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
I'm looking it up right now.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
And so, so this is the Harlem that Josephine Baker
shows up into, or she was never really part of
the Harlem Renaissance and went immediately to Broadway. I don't know.
Her goal is Broadway. The only way to break into
show business from her point of view is Broadway. And
since she's fourteen, I know, I just said she's fifteen,
But now she's fourteen. She's in New York and she's
(25:42):
too young to apply to be a chorus girl. You
have to be sixteen to be a chorus girl. But
she doesn't know that. She just knows she's probably too young.
And the show is called Shuffle Along, so she lies
and she says she's fifteen, and they're like, no, sorry,
you have to be sixteen, and they kick her out.
So she comes back and she lies again and she says,
I'm seven, and so they put her in. When she's fourteen,
(26:02):
probably she becomes a chorus girl. She gets the job
of being on the end of the line, which is
like the comedy dancer role who intentionally stumbles and such
for comedic effect. So it's kind of like the it's
a pretty good position in the chorus line, you know,
And she tours with it around the country, and she's
a chorus girl for years. She can't move up beyond
(26:25):
that because of racism, but it's still enough that she
starts sending money home to her family constantly, And this
is going to be a big part of Josephine Baker.
Does not remember, does not forget where she comes from.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Even though her family has been terrible to her, she
still sends all this money back.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Yeah, exactly, And like it's possible that her relationship with
her mother gets better at some point. I don't know,
you know. So France gets really excited about her La
Revue Negre, an all black club in Paris, was like, hell, yeah,
we want you. I don't think it's black owned to
be clear, but we want you. Everyone here in France
(27:03):
is obsessed with jazz and black culture, and we'll pay
you seriously good money. They pay her one thousand dollars
a month, which is about seventeen thousand dollars a month today,
which is wow, seriously good money.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
Good money.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, so that's the like, it's like kind of messy,
right because she leaves segregated us to go to France
that claims to be anti racist, where they put her
in racist tropes constantly, right, but she is in Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
It's also like they're putting her in racist tropes, but
everyone else doing those tropes is like having white people
do them in black face. So totally you have to
go her.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, yeah, an attempt, An attempt was made.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
Yeah, it's they're not having a Humphrey Bogert do it.
So Cas is a win.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, and again it possibly saves the world. So when
she's nineteen, in nineteen twenty five, she moves to Paris
and being celebrated by a racist culture can be good money.
France was having a craze. White people were all about
jazz and dancing. The Charleston Modern Black author Morgan Jerkins
(28:18):
put it like this. When she swung on stage in
that fiercely swinging banana skirt in nineteen twenty six, Baker
brilliantly manipulated the white male imagination, crossing her eyes, waving
her arms, swaying her hips, poking out her backside. She
clowned and seduced and subverted stereotypes by reclaiming her image,
she advanced her career in ways unprecedented for a woman
(28:41):
of that time. Yeah, because her iconic outfit as soon
as she got there was a skirt made out of
bananas and a tiny brawl if any braw at all,
and a large pearl necklace. Hang on, not real banas, No,
they were fake bananas. Yeah if that sounds really hard
to do.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
But I don't know. Maybe she was just an amazing dancer.
I love the idea that she was. She was clowning still,
that she'd taken that being on the end of the
chorus line and made it part of the thing.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
That is absolutely Yeah, that is absolutely what's happening. And
her dance savage as I can't pronounce French is at
Le Revie Negra, was a huge hit. She's an overnight sensation.
This causes thousands of banana skirt dolls to be sold
around Europe. Magazines advised white ladies to rub walnut oil
(29:33):
onto their skin to darken it.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Oh boy, okay, there we go.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah. Baker herself cashed in on it, selling Baker's Skin. Okay,
a skin darkening lotion.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
When life gives you weird racists, sell wallet. What are
you going to do?
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, And it's like at a time when everyone else,
you know, Pe, we're trying to sell the opposite people
trying to sell skin lightning.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
She also sells Baker Fix, which is a hair palmade.
She had that signature twenty slick down hair, look like.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Betty Boop, the liddle wave at the front.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
She would do the little curl.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
You weren't hot back then unless your hair could ignite
your entire body like a candle with a single spark
got on it.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:23):
If you coven in woolnut, yeah, how burnable, it'll go
in something very very deliciously smell.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
This is why this is why we don't really talk
about spontaneous human combustion when it was like a huge,
you know, conspiracy theory back then. It's because everyone was
drenched in oil and shade, smoking at all times.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, I wonder what it must be, Witch Crumb.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
I'm gonna go pour gasoline on my head and fall
asleep with three cigars.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
It's part of the selling point is that everyone hated
their lives anyway. She also sold banana things like shoes
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Banana shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, I think so. I know she sold banana things
and shoes. It might be that she sold these might
be separate objects. I'm not entirely certain. And so she
becomes fuck off famous and rich and kind of an
inverse Coco Chanel. I'm just gonna say, who became fuck
off rich and picked the opposite side of the upcoming war.
(31:36):
She becomes fuck off famous, She buys a fucking mansion, sorry,
a chateau. This is friends. It has twenty four rooms,
and she does classic rich bit shit like she gets
a cheetah, which she names Chiquita.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Oh that's that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
That who has a diamond collar.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
I hear. They're the best big cats to have as
I mean, you shouldn't have any big cats as but
if you a pet, but if you are going to,
they're like the most anxious and the most receptive to
human affection.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Okay, okay, noted for future self.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
I mean, hm, the most anxious, possibly illegal exubit pet
you can buy. I'm really glad that I know this now.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
She's she's she's she's filling her house with too many
animals and now nobody can stop it.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Oh, it's going to get just wait, No, it's good.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
There's more of them.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Oh, there's more animals. So I think she basically invents
the like rich motherfucker gets a cheetah trope. But I'm
not sure.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Mike Tyson like just just walking in her shadow exactly
like all of us.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, I want to hear the other animals.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
We'll get to them because I don't have their names
in front of me at this point in the script.
They're further in the script, so that's why we're going
to get to them. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
On into its time. I'm just envisioning a version of
Homeward Bound. Now, this is this is, this is the
movie I want to write where Jospey and Bakers off
being a spy or whatever, and then Tiki to the
Cheetah and various other of Jodophine Baker's amazing animals have
to go on some kind of homeward bound trip across
Nazi Germany. I think this could work.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
I'm pretty into this, Robert, do you think we can
get greenlit Netflix?
Speaker 3 (33:27):
Yeah, I'll work on that. In the background, we'll hollered,
which I mean, I'm going to email my guy in
Central Africa and see if I can smuggle some cheetahs
in this fucking country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, no, I actually wasn't thinking live action, but but
this is a strong, strong pitch. I love it.
Speaker 3 (33:48):
DHL is delivering my cheetah tomorrow, and.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
We got you a couple too, louring mhm.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
Oh yeah, you can't get them because the Brexit you.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Get a shipping break. You order at six pack. I'll
check one when I fly to the UK next. You
don't worry.
Speaker 4 (34:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
So she gets Chakdah nineteen thirty from an exotic animal breeder,
and it's sort of on the advice of her pr folks.
I think this is her idea, but they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
do it because this puts her in the medium even more.
She goes to the opera and brings her cheetah and
he gets loose and he gets into the orchestra pit
and he causes havoc. He doesn't eat anybody, and this
(34:29):
causes international headlines as she disrupts the orchestra at the opera.
And this is good for her because it's international headlines.
It's just more fame. Soon she has her own club. Say, Josephine,
I really can't pronounce French. It's really bad house of Josephine's. Yeah, exactly,
(34:50):
thank you.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, sound like a giant asshole.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, okay, I'll just I'll just highlight the stuff I
need written read out in French in the script for you.
She is the store attraction at her own club. This
makes sense some of the other pets that were there
and included in the acts, And don't worry, this is
not all of her pets, but some of them are
the goat, Oh yes, great goat name. And Albert the pig,
(35:17):
or possibly Albert the pig, depending on how French the
pig is.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
I would say Albert's a good pig name, but Albert not.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
So let's go with Albert.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Yeah, Albert the bear would be Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Albert is a great name for a bear. Yeah, because
it reminds me of owl Bears, one of my favorite
D and D monsters.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, exactly. She actually has a pet, Albert.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Oh awesome.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, she stole it from a Nazi breeding program.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
Wow. Yeah, brave to keep a CR three pet in
your in your in your house.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh she's she can handle up to see R twelve
at least at this point.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Wow. Oh wow. Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So she wasn't the most famous Black American woman in France,
she's the most famous American in France and one of
the most famous Americans in Europe at this point. She's
also like, she's at least called the most photographed woman
in the world, and she becomes the first black woman
(36:17):
to star in a movie. In nineteen twenty seven, she
stars in Siren of the Tropics, which.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Is that sounds super unproblematic.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
It's completely unproblematic. It's let me let me just put
this past you. This is actually I think this would
fly really well today. It's about a fictional colony that's
vaguely Polynesian. She's cast as an indigenous woman who falls
in love with a Frenchman moves to France, only to
be heartbroken by the fact that he's already engaged so
she goes out and is happier as a music hall performer.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Anyway, that's not as bad as a really expecting ID,
but the one where it's where the teacher and the
goat in the peg go on a journey across Europe
and like discover the treating the friendship.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
But no, no, I agree the positive reviews of it
will all include the racist things like wow, she moves
like a wild animal or whatever. This increases her fame.
She goes on to star in Zazao in nineteen thirty
four as an and then I think, once again she
isn't allowed to love the white guy she's in love
with as like the central part of it. Then she's
(37:23):
Princess Tam Tam, in which she's a Tunisian woman who
winds up in Paris. Basically there is a trope named
after her of primitive to Parisian. However, this last one,
Hollywood sensors refuse to show it in the US, so
it only plays in select black theaters in the US
that are ignoring the Hollywood Code or whatever the fuck
that thing is called. She's an astoundingly good performer. She
(37:48):
sings opera, she spends a ton of her time driving
a fancy car into slums with prepared packages for folks,
like food, blankets, closed, that kind of shit. She just
like piles high her car with all this stuff and
shows up and passes it out to everyone because she
never forgets where she's from. She's also a terrible driver,
just absolutely awful driver. The driving school passed her because
(38:11):
they wanted to be able to claim that they were
the school who taught her, not because they had actually
successfully taught her. And so at one point she crashes
her car into a light post and gets out dazed
and signs autographs and then walks away and takes a
cab home.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Where any of the animals in the car.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
I hope not none seemed to be harmed. They are
no animals harmed in the making of this script. She
was probably bisexual. She's like famously, she was bisexual. She
was sleeping like famously with other chorus girls and also
the other famous you know, performers and stuff. At her time.
She also had a lover who was a gay man,
(38:54):
and it's very likely that she was doing high end
sex work, but not everywhere, and everyone loved her in Paris,
the reigning star now in her fifties was a white
woman named misting Get, whose name I can't pronounce, whose
real name was Gian bourgeoisie or bourgeois gian bourgeois. Uh yeah,
(39:20):
Josephine was starting to replace this lady. This lady was
also a racist. She'd say things like, how is I
forget her name? That colored girl my substitute. That was
like basically how she constantly referred to to Josephine. One time,
at a fancy movie premiere, misting Get called Josephine an
old timey racist word, a pickaninny. So Josephine walked over,
(39:45):
dug her nails into the woman's arm and spat in
her face. Huh yeah, that's good, legit. Yeah. And she
also like is like literally this this older lady now
is like just literally being replaced.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You know.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
It's like she'll be the star of something and they'll
be like never mind and just phenill come in, right,
And that's good because fuck that lady because she's old
and racist. But you know what is never racist? Capitalism?
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Right?
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Is its items? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (40:18):
Capitalism is not racist as long as you have enough
money to make not being racist worthwhile.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
Yeah right, Yeah, And so it makes total sense.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
We would like you, the listener, to peruse this fine
collection of what is it? Items, objects and stuff. Yeah,
so so what not tossed in there? Probably that's a
little bit far. I guess we would take we would
take what not Okay money, I think, I know, I
(40:49):
think we could take what not money?
Speaker 3 (40:50):
That's okay, stuff things, whatnot.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Yeah, here you go and we're back. So there's two more.
There's two places that she runs into trouble besides random
movie premieres with random racists. Didn't. I don't know if
y'all knew this, but there are a couple places in
time and geography where instead of individual racists, there's entirely
(41:17):
large systems of racism. One of those was Germany.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
I think we learned this in school. Yeah, the thing
gets personally.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yeah, so Germany the only racist country in history.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
In nineteen twenty six, she showed up and she was like, whoa,
it rules here because it is bymar Germany, and it rules.
And she plays a bunch of cabarets or whatever, has
a good time. Two years later, she's planning six months
in Berlin and doing shows the whole time, and first
she shows up in Austria, which is undergrowing Nazi influence,
and was met with angry mobs and had to be
(41:59):
escorted around by armed guards because she is the fucking
living embodiment of not Nazi. She is a slightly black,
she is unashamedly sexual and bisexual. So basically they're like
this is yeah, this I mean, and that's actually like
literally part of it. It's funny because it's like you
(42:20):
look at this, like, Okay, she's playing up to these
like kind of racist tropes, you know this, like dulcavage
or whatever. But literally the fact that the French were
okay with that was part of why Germany was like
we fucking hate the degenerate French because they're okay with
a black woman. So yeah, there's a.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Really funny story from kind of the early era of
the Third Reich when they held Gebels. I think is
going to put it together this big exhibition that was
the degenerate art Exhibition. I actually know the German but
I know I'll pronounce it wrong if I say it,
but it's like they did this big exhibition that was
(43:01):
supposed to be I think it was contrast with like,
you know, decent you know, Arian art.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Roper German arts proper Arean art which which all looks
like Tom of Finland.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
People kept hanging out listening to the jazz and looking
at like the degenerate art because it was good.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Yeah, yeah, actually, and gebels Uh definitely know Josephine Baker
by name, and multiple times was specifically like Josephine Baker
is the enemy. That's which is a yeah, it speaks
well of you.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
There's actually a part I didn't put it in a script.
At one point, Hitler goes to ah fuck, he goes
to some country and he goes to like the fanciest hotel,
and they put him in the fanciest room in the
fanciest hotel and there's a giant portrait of Josephine Baker
above the bed, and he's angry. He's so angry.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Was it there before her?
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Oh my god? Yeah, And I hope whoever did that
to him survives. Yeah, So there's angry mobs. She has
to be escorted around. She goes to Berlin planning the
six month run of a show. She's stalked and harassed
and jeered people yell, go back to Africa and a
(44:17):
lot of other less nice things. Nazi papers are mad
that she was like ruining her co star this like
nice blonde lady. After three weeks she leaves, she flees,
She's like, I can't fucking do this, and she goes
back to Paris. But so the Nazis didn't like her.
Do you know where else struggled with racism only for
(44:39):
a brief moment, obviously, it's never had racism before after
this place?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Right?
Speaker 3 (44:44):
Canada?
Speaker 1 (44:45):
Similar the United States in the nineteen twenties thirties.
Speaker 3 (44:51):
Really Mexico's Canada.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Mexico's Canada.
Speaker 2 (44:57):
So I'm trying really hard to do this. U isn't here, Yeah, practicing, No,
I appreciate. How's it doing? Thank you?
Speaker 1 (45:03):
It's great because actually what you're doing is you're changing
the tone of your sarcasm to go from British sarcasm
which goes above the heads of all Americans and instead
trying to do amza.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
No, no, no, it's because you think that, because that's just
because I'm never doing it.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Ah, okay, okay, good to know.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, yeah it's not. I've let you were in a
little secret there, which is sometimes like it's British people
are not. We just sound like if it doesn't actually
mean we're clever. And you have to know British people
for a little bit before you realize this, and then
it's just slightly worse for us. And then we go
home and come back and try to find some new
Americans who haven't yet been nam on this trick that.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
Makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of
things so great. In nineteen thirty six, she goes back
to Broadway and she's hoping for this whole I mean,
she's like one of the most famous people in the
fucking world, right, She's a millionaire, she owns goddamn mansion, sorry,
a chateau, like most photographed woman in the world. Like,
clearly the US's racism will like make some exceptions for
(46:05):
Josephine Baker. She can't find a hotel to let her
stay in New York City. Whoa her Japanese friends, chauffeur
from the from the Japanese embassy. He's afraid of being
seen driving around a black woman. The New York Times
calls her a negro wench Oh boy, yeah, she opens up.
(46:30):
She opens up her own club, also called Josephine. Sorry,
I should have highlighted that for you, Robert, thank you,
But it wasn't really working the same way to a
US audience. It's just like, didn't the US audience was
segregated essentially, you know, And.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
This is really sad. It's just really sad, like you're
suddenly facing all this stuff like Germany, and then you
come home and it's even worse. I don't know, it's
something that sorry, I'm not being very clever. No, no,
I mean it's like the the having like I don't know,
you must she must have felt like, you know, having
been in France for that time, that she finally got
(47:10):
away from some stuff well, that things could be all right,
but then it was just this one place that was
just a little bit better, even though she had to
make those but it kind of sounds like in France
she got to she got to choose which compromises.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
To make, yeah, totally totally, and the US won't let
her make those decisions, and then Germany wants to just
murder her. Right, so she's like, all right, fuck you.
She leaves, she goes and she becomes a French citizen.
She goes back to France, she becomes a French citizen
maybe depending on the specifics of some bigamy stuff. But
(47:47):
she marries this Jewish sugar magnate whose name is Jean
Lyon or Jean Lyon or something.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Oh like from like, yeah, yeah, that's the brand of
sugar that like we have in the oh really yeah, yeah,
Lions Sugar.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Oh that's funny. Yeah, that's that's what family she marries into.
And she doesn't take the name Lion, even though everything
she does is animal themed, which is like kind of
good on her, you know. And apparently he proposed while
the two of them were flying in a plane, sorry,
he was flying a plane that she was in, because
(48:24):
he's a bored rich guy and so he wanted to
learn how to fly, so he went again. Yeah, but
he teaches her how to fly, and this is going
to come up in really cool ways in World War Two.
The marriage was always a bit rocky because they're both
uncompromising about their own careers, his business and politics, hers
(48:44):
his show business. But he teaches her how to fly,
and it's possible. She never technically divorced Willie Baker, but
it's a different country. Who fucking cares. Everyone is obsessed
with her. Hemingway spends hours chatting her up and right
her about her. Picasso paints her.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Oh my god. Yeah, yeah, that must have been so crazy.
I can just imagine it being naked constantly and it's
aving away. See.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
I like to imagine that it's while Picasso's painting her,
and they're both just like sort of taking turns trying
to hit on her.
Speaker 3 (49:23):
Wow, that's like the Battle of the Problematic Kings. Yeah,
the two most problematic men in our history both hitding
on you at once.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
Oh Dolly, isn't there Oh yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
They are all retroactively canceled.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
Yeah, so this is her life. She now lives in,
I think, still the same chateau with the Lion family,
all of the ship rules. She's amazing, she's doing cool stuff.
But that's not what we're here to talk about with her.
We're going to talk about how she was a badass,
fucking spy, crucial part of the machine that ripped apart
fascism limb by limb, but one messy part. In nineteen
(50:08):
thirty five, she vocally supported Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia because
that's because he said he was going in there to
end slavery, and she was like, sick, I hate slavery. Yeah,
well grandparents I think maybe great maybe great grandparents. I
don't remember which, but don't worry. Not only is she
more than make up for this mistake. Oddly it works
(50:30):
out against Mussolini that she did so that she like
supported him to begin with. And we'll talk about that
on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
Oh wow, yeah, exciting man, old purbageous.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
All right, Laurie, do you have any plugs you want
to plug here at the end of the first episode.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Well, you could good buy any of my more recent books.
Got a bit doctrine. I've got Sexual Revolution, and they're
available from lots of different bookshops. And although I don't
mind if you steal one, that's that's fair, I think
for this podcast, and honestly I don't mind. It's you
don't write books to make money? Come on, we'll not No,
(51:17):
I shouldn't say that you should write books to make money,
but just in case, I think people should read them anyway.
And if you want to read my work entirely for
free above board and the distimately, just like search them
my articles and wired.
Speaker 1 (51:32):
Or go to a library, and don't steal it from
the library.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, we don't really have those anymore in
the UK for thirteen years of conservative all over here.
So you forgetting.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I guess, yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
The nurses are on strike today.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
That's good.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
Oh yeah, it's also a bit dangerous, but you know
they should be on strike.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Yeah, Sophie, do you have anything you want to plug?
Speaker 4 (52:02):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yeah, you know the get a pig. Get a pet, pig,
steal it from one of those horrible places where they
keep thousands of pigs pinned together above rivers of shit,
and then take it home and make it your friend.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
That's what just bad would I think that is what
it would do. Yeah, and I want to plug that.
People should plant trees. No, actually, the way that people
go out and randomly plant trees and large numbers doesn't
always actually work. Do good things instead of bad things.
That's my search. How to plant trees in a way
(52:39):
that helps and then do that? Yeah, do that and
we will talk to you all on Wednesday. Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia Dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts of
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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