Josephine Baker Read Online Free Page B

starts to come alive, the muscular body begins to move, the music begins to pound. (“The jazz gets stronger and stronger, the blood pressure goes up six points,” a doctor in the audience said later.)
    She slides down Joe’s body. Shameless, she seems to be making love to him in front of everyone. Joe has been chasing Josephine since rehearsals began, but he is not real to her. The one she wants to make jealous, Claude, is upstage of them, playing the piano, as their frenzy builds.
    For Pierre de Regnier, the “Danse de Sauvage” is “barbaric . . . naughty . . . a return to the customs of the dark ages,” and he tells his readers how Josephine achieves a “silent declaration of love by a simple forward movement of her belly, with her arms raised above her head, and the quiver of her entire rear.”
    This is the way Josephine herself will recall the occasion: “The first time I had to appear in front of the Paris audience . . . I had to execute a dance rather . . . savage. I came onstage and . . . a frenzy took possession of me . . . seeing nothing, not even hearing the orchestra, I danced!”
    Some people in the audience scream for more, others rise, wrapping themselves in indignation and little furs, and stalk from the theater, muttering that jazz and blacks are going to destroy white civilization. Josephine doesn’t care. First, she doesn’t understand a word of French, so she can’t tell what they’re saying, and second, she and Joe take the noise as a kind of participation in their ritual, it gives an extra energy to their wild mating dance.
    In the wings, André Daven, the director of the theater, knows he has seen theatrical history being made. “It was like the revelation of a new world,” Daven says. “Eroticism finding a style. Josephine was laughing, she was crying, and the audience stood and gave her such an ovation that she trembled, and could not leave the stage. We had to bring the curtain down.”
    Backstage, the chorus girls are amazed. Most feel sorry for Claude Hopkins’s wife, Mabel, because Claude has been cheating on her with this crazy Josephine. Besides being amazed, the girls are embarrassed. Lydia Jones remembers the feeling. “We were horrified at how disgusting Josie was behaving in front of this French audience, doing her nigger routine. She had no self-respect, no shame in front of these crackers, and would you believe it, they loved her.”
    They did love her. Berenice Abbott, the American photographer, called the night electric. “Josephine came out with these feathers on her tail and this beautiful little body, and people went wild. The French were kind of tired and a little bit decadent, it’s hard to get them excited, but everybody just wanted to leap over the balcony; a great spontaneous combustion took place.”
    In
Le Crapouillot
, Louis Cheronnet wrote that he had never seen anything more sensual than the dance where Josephine “mimics love, the gift of herself, while a black man wraps her in his passionate movements, his frantic desire. . . .”
    In
L’Art Vivant
, André Levinson spoke of Josephine’s having “the splendor of an ancient animal, until the movements of her behind and her grin of a benevolent cannibal make admiring spectators laugh.”
    Reviewing for
The New Yorker
, Janet Flanner found the music “tuneless” and the finale “dull,” but later reversed herself. In 1972, forty-seven years after the fact, she described the moment when Joe Alex set Josephine down on the stage. “She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater.”
    It’s all in the perspective. One man’s scream of salutation is another man’s “What an ass!”
    The belated Flanner homage continued: “Within a half