Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening (ARTE Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) Hellenic Radio & Television [ERT], Kepler 22 Production Kinoport La Procirep-Angoa Novak Production, American Public Television, PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. the local PBS station, KPBS, ran a 2018 French documentary called Josephine Baker: The Story of an Awakening (though the original French title translates to Josephine Baker: The First Black Icon). It was an account of the great singer/dancer/entertainer/activist’s life that focused on her relationship to racism and her inability to escape the prejudices of the time. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906 and at the age of seven started working as a maid in the homes of well-to-do white St. Louisiana. Director Ilana Navaro acknowledged that there was a thriving Black middle class in St. Louis at the time, but Baker’s family weren’t part of it (as the next Black celebrity from St. Louis, Miles Davis, was). At age 13 she was preparing to do her latest employer’s dishes when she let the water boil too long and the dishes broke – whereupon the white woman she was working for plunged Baker’s hands into the boiling water as punishment. Baker decided to run away and seek work as a dancer. Her mom said, “If that’s the sort of life you want, go for it” –º essentially disowning her. Baker tried to get work in the chorus lines of New York nightclubs but was rejected as too gawky, too skinny and too dark – these were the days of the infamous “paper-bag rule” in which the Cotton Club’s owners held a brown grocery bag next to the face of each would-be chorus dancer, and if her skin was darker than the bag she didn’t get hired.

In 1925 she got an offer to come to Paris to dance in something called La Revue Negre – ironically, Sidhey Bechet was on the same ship (he was fleeing an assault charge in New York and decided to light out for the country he, as a mixed-race New Orleans Creole, considered his real homeland: not Africa, but France). When La Revue Negre opened it bombed – its producer had tried to do a relatively sophisticated Harlem-style show and he realized what the Parisian audience wanted from Black performers was a racist caricature of their supposed lives back in Africa. (The show includes footage of a carnival exhibit of Blacks supposedly re-enacting their original lives in the African countries the French were then colonizing.) Baker developed a unique style – like Fanny Brice, she seems to have figured out a way to turn her gawkiness to her advantage – and eventually she became an icon of cool in Paris, attracting white fans (and white lovers) and becoming a huge star in her adopted country. (The narration throughout claims that Baker was the first Black star to have a multi-racial audience; always on the lookout for examples of what I call “first-itis,” I immediately said, “What about Bert Williams?”)

Alas, when she returned to the U.S. to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 (Florenz Ziegfeld had been dead for four years by then but his widow, Billie Burke, licensed the name to Ziegfeld’s hated rivals, the Shuberts, as part of her determination to raise enough money to pay Ziegfeld’s debts), she got on the boat an acclaimed international superstar – and got off it as just another colored girl. When she showed up to occupy the hotel rooms that nad been booked for “Josephine Baker,” she got cold stares and assurances that there had been a “mistake.” Her act didn’t go over well either with white audiences or Blacks in the nascent civil rights movement, who criticized her for not doing more to help the struggle. According to this documentary, Baker found her social conscience during World War II, when France was occupied by the Nazis and Baker enlisted in the Resistance, carrying messages written in invisible ink over the scores of her songs and risking her life in the service of Liberation. (Unlike some French entertainers, like Édith Piaf, whose publicists gave them fictional Resistance exploits so they would be allowed to work after the war instead of being denounced as collabós, Baker’s were for real and were acknowledged in the 1950’s by the French government, when they awarded her the Legion of Honor.)

Baker tried another shot at a comeback in her native land in the late 1940’s, but her increasing civil-rights activism – including organizing a picket line outside the Stork Club when she was refused service (they didn’t bar her; they just didn’t send a waiter to her table, either), got her denounced as a Communist by J. Edgar Hoover and expelled from the U.S. The show ends in 1963, when Baker finally returned to the U.S. to speak at the 1963 March on Washington (she was the only woman who actually spoke there, though some women performers, including Joan Baez and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, sang), wearing her Free French uniform and presenting herself not as Josephine Baker, entertainer, but Josephine Baker, freedom fighter. She got to speak at the March because Martin Luther King, Jr. personally lobbied then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to lift the travel ban on Baker in the U.S. The final clip is from one of Baker’s last performances, in which she rather ironically commented on how she didn’t wear the banana skirts she had in the old days – a sort of rueful reflection on her age similar to what Marlene Dietrich in her later performances. It also mentioned that after World War II Baker adopted 12 children from various racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds and called them her “Rainbow Tribe” – though it doesn’t tell how the expense of raising them drove her into bankruptcy.

Director Navaro argued that this was the first use of the term “rainbow” to denote the ideal of a multi-racial society, and quoted Nelson Mandela as saying his goal was to create a “Rainbow Nation” in South Africa once apartheid ended – of course, there was also Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” in his 1984 and 1988 U.S. Presidential campaigns and the adoption of the rainbow flag as the symbol of Queer pride. Josephine Baker lived a fabulous life – when she died in 1975 she was living, where else, in Paris, where she had become accepted and achieved superstar status (and it’s one of the quirkier aspects of Baker’s career that, though it took her four years after the moved to France for her to feel comfortable enough with French to sing in it, her voice, with its fast vibrato, has long seemed to me better suited to singing in French than in English) – and while her triumph over racism isn’t the only way to look at her life, it’s certainly a real and quite appropriate one.