Living St. Louis Special: Josephine Baker

(crescendo in cymbal music) - Coming up on Living St. Louis Special, the incredible story of the girl from the streets of St. Louis, who became the toast of Paris.

She knew what she had, she knew how to use it, and she did it on her own terms.

Entertainer, war hero, activist, fighter, legend, Josephine Baker, next on Living St. Louis.

(upbeat jazz music) - [Jim] I'm Jim Kirchherr, and 100 years ago, 1921, a local Vaudeville performer by the name of Freda Josephine McDonald got married.

She was 15 and it was her second marriage.

She didn't keep this husband very long, either, but she did keep his name, and that year she headed to New York as Josephine Baker.

As part of the Missouri bicentennial we've been going through our local history archives and we bring you Ruth Ezell's 2006 special on the life of this remarkable woman.

(bright gentle music) - [Ruth] She was known as the Black Venus, Josephine Baker was the first African-American woman to achieve international stardom.

(bright gentle music) (singing in a foreign language) In virtually every aspect of her life and career, Baker was ahead of her time.

Whether she was breaking down racial barriers, reinventing her image with the changing times, using her celebrity status to promote humanitarian causes, or adopting children from foreign countries, Baker was a cultural trailblazer.

- [Bennetta] Everybody encounters a block in the road and we get, you know, depressed, or upset, and then I look at Baker as an example whenever I encounter a block in the road, because she just lept over these problems.

She kept going and she had many very difficult problems.

- [Ruth] Baker came a long way, from the humblest of circumstances in St. Louis, one century ago.

(gentle upbeat music) ♪ Beautiful, marvelous, them say adorable babe ♪ Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906.

The illegitimate daughter of former Vaudevillians, Carrie McDonald and Eddie Carson, Baker's early years in the Mill Creek neighborhood were marked by poverty and transience.

Her chubbiness as an infant prompted Baker's mother to nickname her after the nursery rhyme character, Humpty Dumpty, but it came out Tumpy.

- [Richard] My father said, "You're just like your aunt," that's what dad said.

Aunt Tumpy was crazy, she would put on all her shows and she would bring kids from the neighborhood.

- [Ruth] Richard Martin Jr. of St. Louis, keeps this photographic portrait of his aunt on display in his living room.

Baker was 16 when it was taken and was already on the road performing.

Growing up Martin says he was told stories about the way his Aunt Tumpy would dance in the streets for money to help the family survive.

- [Richard] She was the oldest child, and in those days the oldest child had a responsibility.

I'm the oldest child.

I had a responsibility to take care of my kids, and that's exactly what she did with her brothers and sisters, with dad and her two sisters, she took care of them.

- [Ruth] This is Eugenia Street, just a stones throw southwest of Union Station.

When Richard Martin was a boy, his family had a home here.

Eugenia was once part of the old Mill Creek Valley neighborhood, where Martin's Aunt Josephine also lived as a child.

Mill Creek was mostly a poor area, but when Baker lived here it was racially and culturally diverse.

It's that diversity that helped inspire Baker's future activism as an adult on behalf of racially harmony and civil rights.

- [Ruth] Baker was also influenced by the horrors of the 1917 Race Riots across the river in East St. Louis.

A rampage by white mobs who set fires and killed residents in a black neighborhood, left nearly 50 people dead.

- [Richard] When she saw that race riot, That's when she really knew that all human beings, all human beings are children of god.

But I'm serious, that's the way we were taught.

- [Ruth] Baker's formal education was brief and is reflected in her records from the St. Louis public schools, along with her other personal details.

Josephine took the last name of her step father, Arthur Martin.

Her mothers occupation, house work.

Josephine's birth date is listed as September 6th, not June 3rd.

Josephine attended two elementary schools, Dumas and L'Ouverture.

The records also show she dropped out of school in February of 1920, to get married.

Josephine was only 13, and she married after repeatedly trying to run away from home.

It was Josephine Bakers informal education that proved to be the biggest payoff.

She'd hangout in the entertainment district along Chestnut and Market streets.

She'd watch the dancers and musicians perform, then imitate them in her own impromptu street performances.

Here on the 2200 block of Market, she encountered a local vaudeville group called The Jones Family Band.

One night she was performing with the group outside the Booker T. Washington Vaudeville Theater, which was also on this block.

The theater manager spotted her and put her on stage with another group, The Dixie Steppers.

She never looked back.

(I Love Dancing by Josephine Baker plays) ♪ Dancing makes my blood tingle, makes me feel fun ♪ ♪ Dancing always cures my very ill ♪ - [Ruth] Josephine ditched St. Louis and divorced her husband, a foundry worker named Willy Wells, and joined The Dixie Steppers.

They toured the South in conditions as bad or worse than those she left behind.

But Baker quickly honed her song and dance skills along with a distinctive comic style.

- [Olivia] As glamorous as Josephine could be, she was also a ham.

- [Ruth] A few of Bakers comic portraits were included in the Centennial Exhibit, Josephine Baker Image and Icon, at The Sheldon Art Galleries, in the spring and summer of 2006.

- [Olivia] That's actually how she got noticed, when she was still in the United States, as she would essentially be the little, the girl on the end of the chorus line, who was, pretending she pretended to make mistakes, and she would kind of flub up, and roll her eyes, and all the attention would be diverted to her, much to the chagrin of some of the other chorus girls.

And, she got several write ups from some different critics because they noticed her for that, and they actually loved what she was doing.

(I Love Dancing by Josephine Baker) ♪ Jazz Scatting ♪ - [Ruth] Josephine and The Dixie Steppers eventually made their way to Philadelphia, that's where she met and married a railway porter named Billy Baker.

That marriage didn't last long either, but she used his surname for the rest of her life.

(Cheery piano music) Another door opened for Josephine Baker in 1922, courtesy of two other ground breaking African Americans, Composers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake.

The men were among a handful of black artist performing on the white vaudeville circuit, but their goal was to get all black musicals back on Broadway following World War I.

The Sissle and Blake show, Shuffle Along, became a box office hit, and immortalized the tune "I'm Just Wild About Harry".

Baker went to New York and joined the chorus of Shuffle Along, after that show closed she was hired for a starring role in another Sissle and Blake musical, Chocolate Dandies.

♪ Everybody's got somebody, a lot to brag about ♪ In Harlem, during this time, Baker often sang at the Cotton Club.

But, it was a performance at another local night spot which would lead to her biggest opportunity yet.

- [Bennetta] The wife of the French Cultural Attaché, Caroline Dudley Reagan, came and discovered Baker who was then singing at a club called The Plantation Club in New York and she joined The Revue Negre.

- [Ruth] La Revue Nègre, was a new touring production set to open in Paris.

(Ship engine rumbling) Baker packed her bags and set sail across the Atlantic to a country that would make her a star across Europe and become her new home.

(Júai Deux Amours by Josephine Baker plays) (light horn music) By they time Baker arrived in France in the Autumn of 1925, the French were caught up in the American music form called Jazz.

They were dancing The Charleston and fascinated by all things Afro American.

- [Bennetta] There many, by the way, other African American groups touring Europe at the time, including one, The Black Birds, which had Florence Mills, and then Adelaide Hall who was another performer and contemporary of Bakers, also was traveling through Europe.

- [Ruth] La Revue Nègre was a string of musical tableau's featuring female dancers in scant costumes.

But none were as minimal as the banana skirt and beads worn by a topless Josephine Baker.

Her performance in The Danse Sauvage was a sensation in part because it was inspired by a popular french novel from the late 19th Century.

(upbeat drum music) Baker portrayed the character Fa Tu Gue, a native girl, and love interest of a french explorer.

- [Bennetta] Now when we see that, quote, banana dance, separated from the story, we don't quite understand the context.

The story was obviously a colonialist narrative.

It was a bout Jean who wore a pith helmet and had a a kind of some kind of glass like he was searching for insects and butterflies and then he would all of a sudden the girl would pop out and he would hold the glass up and you know it was all humorous routine.

And, the french loved it at that time, and it fulfilled a lot of fantasies, fantasies about exoticism, and exploring, and colonialism, and it was also in a way a spoof on colonialism.

- [Ruth] Overnight, Baker became the darling of Cafe Society.

Photographers, painters, and writers were all inspired by the black dancer and her banana skirt.

But Baker had grander plans for herself, and seized control of her public persona and her life in general.

- [Simon] Only one year after she came to Paris she was owning her own bar in Montmartre.

Which means that she was not just that young girl that people might imagine that she had some agendas, and that she had a goal.

(Dis-Moi Josephine by Josephine Baker plays) - [Ruth] Baker had many goals including being accepted as a glamorous star.

After her musical performances she'd shed her skimpy costume, slip into a beautiful gown, and continue to entertain at her night club, Chez Josephine.

By this time, Baker was headlining at the Folies Bergere, but like La Revue Nègre, she was limited by what she could do on stage.

Not so at Chez Josephine, where her song and dance routines were more sophisticated and emotionally intimate.

As Baker built her image, she challenged widespread perceptions of race and gender.

She wore men's formal clothing with the same ease and panache as women's wear.

This transition in Baker's career came about with the help of her business and personal partner Giuseppe Pepito Abatino.

- [Bennetta] Pepito Abatino was a person who was thoroughly dedicated to opening doors for her in France, those doors that he could open, and he did a very good job of it I think.

- [Ruth] Abatino arranged a tutorial for Baker which included lessons in ballet and french.

He negotiated lucrative contracts for Baker to perform in theaters around the world.

And, there were product endorsements, the most profitable was the hair grooming product that bore her name Bakerfix.

The prosperity Baker enjoyed was shared with her family in St. Louis.

- [Richard] She did everything an Aunt usually does and she sent her mother money maybe five or 600 dollars a month.

- [Ruth] That was a lot - Lot of money, that's when I realized that she was famous.

- [Ruth] Toward the end of the silent film era, Baker branched out into movies.

Her feature film debut was the 1927 silent picture, Siren of the Tropics.

It established a model for Bakers future films, Rags to Riches Tales, Patterned after Pygmalion, and Cinderella.

This at a time when African Americans Actors in Hollywood were mostly limited to portraying maids and butlers.

Bakers next two features, both Talkies, were written by Pepito Abatino.

(upbeat horn music) - Her first talkie was Zouzou, made in 1934.

(foreign language spoken) - Bakers title character is adopted as a child into a circus family and when she grows up, Zouzou falls in love with her adoptive brother, played by french star Jean Gabin.

(foreign language singing) - With art imitating life, Zouzou becomes an overnight success after being cast in a review.

But her love in unrequited and Jean falls for another.

Even in relatively tolerant France, movie producers were not ready to put an interracial romance on screen.

(energetic horn music) - The following year Baker starred in Princess Tom Tom.

Here, Baker played a shepherdess who's discovered by a french aristocrat.

He teaches her the ways of European society, then takes her to paris, and passes her off as exotic royalty.

- [Bennetta] In Princess Tom Tom, you see Baker's own influence with the screen play and the creative control, and I think that that makes her one of the first African American women to have creative control over her own films.

- [Ruth] One of Baker's greatest artistic achievements is considered to be a revival of an 1875 opera, Jacques Offenbach's La Créole.

But, that triumph was followed by an experience so unpleasant, Baker refused to talk about it.

It was 1935, and Baker had signed with the Ziegfeld Follies.

She returned to the United States for the first time since heading of to France 10 years earlier.

She received equal billing with Follies star Fanny Brice, and equal pay 1500 dollars a week, but her reviews were mixed, some in fact were scathing, and laced with racist overtones.

To make matters worse, a Manhattan hotel turned away Baker and Pepito Abatino, because hotel guests from the South complained.

Baker's relationship with Abatino disintegrated under the strain.

She took advantage of a clause in her contract to leave the show.

Baker visited her family in St. Louis then returned to her adopted home town.

Upon Baker's arrival in Paris, she was greeted by enthusiastic photographers.

An accordionist played Baker's signature tune "J'ai Deux Amours" or "I Have Two Loves".

- [Bennetta] As she sings I have two loves, my country and Paris, she retained those two loves and was very politically active in a number of things in France during her later life.

- [Ruth] Empresarial Paul Derval, signed Baker for the 1936-37 season at the Folies Bergère.

By now, every trace of the Banana Dance, that made Baker famous, was gone from her performances.

She found love again with Jean Lion, a millionaire business man, who was Jewish.

When they married in 1937, Baker became a french citizen and converted to Judaism.

The couple divorced three years later.

- The 1930's saw the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.

Baker witnessed it first hand in her travels.

When World War II broke out she was determined to do her part for France and the Allied forces.

(dramatic orchestral music) (foreign language speech) When Adolf Hitler and Nazi forces began their occupation of France in 1940, French men and women fought back through a variety of anti German resistance groups.

- [Announcer] Familiar streets suddenly as hot wood bullets as a border town.

Guns dug out of a back yard.

Plums dished up by the corner druggist.

- [Ruth] Josephine Baker became Sub Lieutenant Baker of the Free French Forces.

She drove an ambulance for the Red Cross.

As a touring entertainer, Baker took advantage of her mobility, and became a courier.

She carried messages about positions of German troupes to help the resistance.

- [Olivia] They would do invisible writing on her sheet music and she traveled under the guise of going off to perform somewhere and she was able to get through the lines that way.

She traveled with her partner Jacques Abtey, who was also in the French Resistance.

He traveled as her ballet master.

And, they were able to smuggle secrets that way, she would have notes and photographs pinned underneath her clothing when she traveled.

She was quite charming of course and was able to charm all kinds of information out of people as well, so that was very helpful.

(triumphant horn music) - [Ruth] August 25th, 1944, Paris is liberated from the Nazis, and light is restored to The City of Light.

18 months later, Lieutenant Josephine Baker received the French Medal of Resistance for her contributions to the war effort.

(Peg De Mon Coeur by Josephine Baker plays) - The post war years brought a marriage boom, and Josephine Baker was part of it.

In May of 1947, she married band leader Jo Bouillon, with whom she toured to raise money for war victims.

It was her fourth marriage and her second interracial marriage.

They tied the knot at the estate that was their home, Château des Milandes, or Les Milandes.

Baker began renting the 15th Century castle the year before the war started.

When the German occupation began, Les Milandes was used as a rendezvous point for the resistance.

Now Baker was buying the château, both newlyweds brought relatives to live with them.

- [Richard] She came here, she wanted her whole family out of the United States.

She wanted us to live with her in Europe, but mom said no, my mother.

(Dans Mon Village by Josephine Baker plays) - [Ruth] Baker also started a baby boom unlike anything anyone had seen before.

Between 1953 and '64, she adopted a dozen children from Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.

She called them her rainbow tribe.

- [Bennetta] Her idea was, lets start where we live, so if we want this multicultural world, we start at home, and the easiest, or perhaps not the easiest, but one of the most obvious ways to do that is through family and marriage.

So she believed that interracial marriage is the first step and then of course she tried the adoption.

- [Ruth] Les Milandes, situated 345 miles south of Paris, would become Bakers village of the world, and symbolized her quest for racial harmony.

She and her new husband, playing crucial and costly restorations to the estate.

Baker maintained a farm on the grounds.

Here she is growing tobacco as a way of staying connected to her American roots.

Future visits to the U.S. to raise money for Les Milandes and other causes, would reveal more of Baker the activist, the humanitarian, and the center of controversy.

(La Conga Blicoti by Josephine Baker plays) In 1951, several years before the Cuban Revolution, Josephine Baker performed in Havana, where this photo was made.

During a previous visit she mobilized a group of non white Cubans to protest when a hotel turned her away.

Baker employed similar tactics in the next stop on her world tour, the United States.

- [Kathy] She did a citizens arrest because someone hurled a racial slur against her and it made the news.

So, that's the kind of person she was and I admire her ability to stand up, and really speak out, and create situations that would call attention to problems that would be very risky for other people to do.

- [Ruth] Film makers Kathy Corley and Paul Guzzardo, collaborated on a documentary titled "Secret the Josephine Baker FBI Files".

The agency began tracking Baker's movements around the globe on the orders of FBI Director Jay Edgar Hoover.

It started after an incident on October 16th, 1951, at New York City's Stork Club.

Baker was invited by friends who were white and regulars at the club to a late supper.

As everyone at the table was served, she waited for her crab salad, steak, and a bottle of French wine.

One hour later, and after excuses by the waiter, a small steak finally arrived.

Baker was fuming, before she left she telephoned an official of the NAACP.

The next day NAACP members picketed the club, and New York papers carried reports of Baker's complaint, but the fallout was just beginning.

- [Kathy] The point was made that this was a point of discrimination, and she's going to rally against that in the media, and then do it by attacking Walter Winchell, where she says, "and he was there and didn't come to my defense."

You know?

And then, that just all starts a whole ball rolling.

- [Ruth] Walter Winchell was a powerful radio commentator and a perfect target in the eyes of Baker.

She filed a $400,000 Lawsuit against him, and while nothing came of it, the feud enraged Winchell's good friend at the FBI.

- [Paul] Hoover's focus on Baker was not simply because of her alleged politics, but because she as an entertainer had a real effect on Hoover's best friend Walter Winchell, and that was personal.

- [Ruth] Winchell implied on the air that Baker was a communist and Hoover surveillance set out to prove it.

But, after compiling a file on her 400 pages thick, the FBI concluded she was not a communist.

(La Petite Tonkinoise by Josephine Baker plays) On February 3rd, 1952, Josephine Baker performed here at Kiel Auditorium.

Here is a copy of the rental agreement, the amount of rent for the evening $850.

Baker donated her services to raise money for the fight against segregation in the St. Louis public schools and overcrowding in the districts African American schools.

- [Kathy] When she came back to the United States in the 50's to perform, she would not perform in any theater that did not integrate his their audiences.

- [Ruth] In 1963, Baker took part in the march on Washington.

She was among the speakers who preceded her close friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The year King was assassinated, 1968, Baker went through another divorce.

She and her children were evicted from Les Milandes to pay off creditors.

To get back on her feet, Baker went on tour once again.

Before the Josephine Baker Centennial, this was probably just another name on a street sign for many young people.

But, when I was a youngster, my parents took me to see Josephine Baker perform.

It was in Detroit, Michigan, where I grew up.

They told me she was a living legend.

When I saw her, Baker was in her 60's, and could still keep an audience transfixed.

But, she had been plagued by illness, and had suffered several heart attacks over the years.

In April of 1975, Baker opened a new review the critical acclaim at the Bobino theater in Paris.

A few days into the run, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell into a coma.

Baker died April 12th, 1975, she was 68.

(slow sad music) Baker was given a state funeral and thousands of Parisians filled the streets to watch the procession.

She is remembered not just as an entertainer, but as a decorated war heroine, a fearless civil rights activist, and a woman who never abandoned her commitment to make the world a better place.

- [Bennetta] My whole journey and experience with her has been enormously uplifting and encouraging to me.

- [Simon] I think that the more we know about her the more we will discover how much we don't know.

(J'ai Deux Amours by Josephine Baker plays) (Upbeat guitar music) - [Ruth] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of The Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation, The Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan charitable trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.