Josephine Baker Read Online Free

jewels.” And after a pause, almost with regret, “Not even my public.” We stood there holding each other, tears running together. Today, eighteen years after my search for Josephine began, I think I have discovered something. I think we were crying not for Stellina, but for the child in each of us who was forever gone with the Sandman.
    I met the choreographer George Balanchine, who had known Josephine in the thirties, and although he refused to be interviewed on tape—he was ashamed of his accent—he told me how she had invited him, on a Sunday, to Le Vésinet, the suburb of Paris where she had a house called Le Beau Chêne. Balanchine, who was poor then, put on his best suit, took the train, and arrived at the mansion with two big iron gates. Josephine’s name was spelled out in flowers on either side of the entrance, and everywhere there were life-size naked statues. Mostly of Josephine.
    Balanchine went up the stairs, knocked on the door, and nobody answered, so he started yelling, “Josephine, Josephine—” Suddenly, in one of the tall ground-floor windows, Josephine appeared, naked except for three flowers glued on in strategic places. “Yes, yes, yes,
chéri
, I’m coming.” She said she had given the servants the day off, and she had been baking bread.
    A half century later, recounting the story, Balanchine turned a little pink. “Yes,
maître
,” I said. “And then what happened?” He smiled. “Well,” he said, “I think we had lunch.”
    I told him how I was discovering Josephine, and he said yes, “she is like Salome. She has seven veils. If you lift one, there is a second, and what you discover is even more mysterious, and you go to the third, and you still don’t know where you are. Only at the end, if you keep looking faithfully, will you find the true Josephine.”

JOSEPHINE

Chapter 1

PARIS, OCTOBER 1925: ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE
“She had no shame in front of those crackers”
    Quel cul elle a!”
What an ass! Excuse the expression, but that is the cry that greeted Josephine as she exploded onstage in “La Danse de Sauvage.” (Sixty years later, her friend and sometime lover, Maurice Bataille, would say to me, “Ah!
ce cul
 . . . it gave all of Paris a hard-on.”)
    It is October 2, 1925, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, opening night of
La Revue Nègre
. Everyone is here, painters, writers, music hall stars—Léger, Gertrude Stein, Chevalier—diplomats, princes, expatriate Americans (of whom there are forty-three thousand in Paris). At home, there is Prohibition; in France, drink and sex seem free. For one American dollar, you get twenty-five francs.
    The theater is sold out, all two thousand mauve-colored velvet seats. Earlier, a voice has roared a message—“Full! Only folding chairs left”—into the avenue Montaigne. So many flowers arrive that they are put on the street, there is no more place for them inside. Ticket holders walk to the entrance across a red carpet flanked by white rose trees, the menin full dress, the women with bobbed hair, lips and nails lacquered scarlet, arms flashing those narrow diamond bracelets the cynical of the age call “service stripes.”
    Backstage, producer Caroline Dudley Reagan paces. She has given herself the role of narrator. “Side by side with my artists.” Years later, she will say of
La Revue Nègre’s
success, “It wasn’t me, but the phoenix inside Josephine, that bird of paradise. It wasn’t me, but Bechet’s saxophone, and his soul. It wasn’t me, but Louis Douglas, my choreographer. . . . He had already danced in Russia, even for the czarina. . . . Decidedly, God was with me.”
    In the first row are students from L’École des Beaux-Arts. They have rented twenty seats for the entire two weeks
La Revue