Posted on 10/27/2006 12:49:21 AM PDT by Mrs Ivan
Someone contact Candidate Webb! We've got a hot setup for one of his bodice-ripping novels.
Europe
Baker, Josephine (b. June 3, 1906, St. Louis, Mo; d. April 12, 1975, Paris, France), African American expatriate dancer, singer, and entertainer.
For many people, Josephine Baker's name will always evoke a familiar, controversial image: the "black Venus" naked onstage, except for a string of bananas around her waist, dancing to African drums before her white Parisian audiences. It was this image that first made Baker a star, one whose international fame lasted for five decades. But the picture of the exotic dancer does not fully capture the complexity of the woman who was one of the first black performers to transcend race and appeal to audiences of all colors from around the world.
Baker was born Freda Josephine MacDonald (the name Baker came from her second husband). Her parents were not married; her father was a drummer in a local band, and her mother, a washerwoman, rarely had enough money to support Baker and her three younger half-siblings. At age 8, Baker began working as a maid in white homes, and by age 14 she had left home, married and separated from her first of five husbands, and begun working with a traveling vaudeville troupe. Her first break came when she was featured in Shuffle Along, Broadway's first black musical, in 1921.
Originally rejected from the show for being too young, too thin, and too dark, she eventually won the role of the comic "end girl" in the chorus line - the one too confused to keep up with the moves - and wound up stealing the show. Four years later she was offered the opportunity to go to Paris and perform in La Revue Nègre. By then her teenaged body had fully matured, and her show-stopping finale, "Danse sauvage" - in which she danced the Charleston wearing nothing but a girdle of feathers - made her an overnight sensation. Baker became the living embodiment of everything European audiences found exotic and provocative about black women's sexuality.
Similar stage and film roles across Europe soon followed. Baker's act was most notorious for its nudity, but its innovative techniques also introduced many popular African American dance styles to European audiences. The unique blend of comedy, sensuality, passion, and exuberance present in her jazz-inspired performances also spilled over into her personal life. Baker and her leopard, Chiquita, were a common sight on Paris streets. Her stable of animals also included dogs, monkeys, birds, rabbits, snakes, a turkey, and a pig named Albert. Christian Dior designed her clothing; her admirers included Ernest Hemingway (who called her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen) and Pablo Picasso; and she was known for her many lovers, both male and female.
In the midst of all this adulation, however, American audiences were still cool. Baker returned to the United States to appear with the Ziegfeld Follies in 1936 and received terrible reviews. Her stage show had evolved by then into a more glamorous, refined act, and white America did not seem ready to see a sophisticated black star on stage. In 1937, after returning to Paris, Baker legally became a French citizen. During World War II she served as an intelligence liaison and an ambulance driver for the French Resistance and was awarded the Medal of the Resistance and the Legion of Honor.
Soon after the war Baker toured the United States again, and this time she won respect and praise from African Americans for her support of the Civil Rights Movement. She refused to play to segregated audiences or stay in segregated hotels during a 1951 American tour, and as a result the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) named her its Most Outstanding Woman of the Year. She also participated in the 1963 March on Washington, and later that year gave a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall for the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality.
By then, she had taken on another of her most important roles, that of mother. Baker was forced to undergo an emergency hysterectomy that almost took her life after the 1942 birth of a stillborn child, and she never had biological children. But between 1954 and 1965 she adopted ten sons and two daughters of various races and nationalities - the family she called her Rainbow Tribe. Baker planned to retire from show business to raise her children at Les Milandes, her French chateau, but her savings were not enough to support the entire family in the style to which she was accustomed. The expenses eventually sent her into deep debt, and when her beloved chateau was seized in 1969, the family was forced to move into a much smaller villa given to them by Princess Grace of Monaco.
The last five years of her life were marked by an ironic mix of public adoration and personal poverty. At home in France, she was sometimes reduced to begging on the streets for her children - unrecognizable without her makeup, wig, and costumes. Her health also began to decline, and she suffered two heart attacks and a stroke. But she continued to perform, and onstage she was as glamorous as ever. A 1973 tour of the United States brought widespread acclaim, although some African American audiences were upset by Baker's condemnation of the Black Power Movement (which she saw as too separatist). In 1974 she starred in a Monaco production of Josephine, a show based on her life, and the performances were so successful that the show came to Paris in April 1975.
That year marked the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Paris, and on April 8 there was a huge gala in a Paris hotel to celebrate both that anniversary and Josephine's opening night. Four days later, however, Baker suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage during a nap. Twenty thousand people attended her Paris funeral in a massive show of devotion to an African American performer whose boldness and unconventional style had taken France and the world by storm.
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