"What is She Really Like... Josephine Baker?"

....This is a question which I have heard asked
perhaps a hundred times within the past two months.
Occasionally it has been asked of me because I have
seen and talked to Josephine Baker rather a lot and
*come* to understand her perhaps a little since the
night of October 16 when at four o'clock in the
morning our doorbell clanged like a fire alarm and
all of us sat in our night clothes in the dining
room listening to the story of what had happened at
the Stork Club!...

She told her story with enormous dignity but her
hands trembled and there were tears in her eyes--
like a little girl who had been hurt. "If there had
been a hole in the floor," she said, "I would have so
gladly gone down into it. Everybody was looking at
us and then looking away. Everybody could see how we
were being humiliated."

Since that time and particularly because of
Walter Winchell's *rather* curious involvement in the
case, Josephine Baker has been buffeted by tidal waves
of public opinion. Like tides of the sea they have
run first one way, then another. She has been deluged

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by thousands of letters of approbation and encourage-
ment. Despite the fact that most people are inclined
to write in order to damn rather than to praise, few
of the letters or telegrams have been derogatory but
there has been a good deal of vociferous blasting by
certain members of the press and considerable mutter-
ing among liberals, too, not only against Josephine
Baker and her stand at the Stork Club but also
against the NAACP who it is argued should not have
come to her defense because as many suggested, "Who
cares who eats at the Stork Club." The NAACP has
bigger things to worry about."

What really happened?...Didn't Josephine Baker
know about the attitude of Billingsley toward Negroes?
...Why did she go?...Was she really discriminated
against?...What was Walter Winchell's connection with
the incident?...What does Billingsley say to all this?...
Are former patrons avoiding the Stork Club?...Is it
true that their business is up 33 1/3%?...Has anybody
sued anybody? What will be the outcome of the Stork
Club squabble...and why does it matter...if it matters,
at all?

But over and beyond all these questions--what is
behind the legend of Josephine Baker? Is she a
scheming publicity seeking entertainer or a bronze

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Joan of Arc?

What you read in different newspapers and even in the same columns on consecutive days is confusing. One morning it is said that she has communist leanings... that leaders of the great Josephine Baker Day celebration in Harlem last spring were left-wingers...that she ranged herself with some of the radical supporters of the ill-fated Willie McGee. A few mornings later she becomes a fascist...a 1945 newspaper clipping is produced to prove, that she took a stand with Mussolini against Ethiopia!

It is charged on one hand that she is anti-Negro, that colored people were unwelcome in her own night club in Paris. But the same writer insists in the same column a day or two later that she is a rabid anti-segregationist and that she came to this country with the expressed purpose of fighting discrimination wherever and whenever she could pick a fight.

Walter Winchell quoted several paragraphs from a book called *Les Memoires de Josephine Baker* by Marcel Sauvage, Correa Press, Paris in which as he put it she "out-Goebbels Goebbels" in her denunciation of Jews. But in other passages of the same book (unquoted) she affirms her belief in the oneness and dignity of

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all human beings. She tells of her marriage to a
Jew and her continuing devotion to her Jewish
mother-in-law whom she loves and admires.

As to her abilities and her accomplishments there
is also disagreement--One critic seeing her for the
first time on the stage of the Roxy remarked, "She
doesn't actually have a show. She isn't a dancer or
an actress, a singer or even a great beauty. A
clothes horse maybe!...a great big ad for the Paris
couturiers who supply her free of charge with a new
two hundred thousand dollar wardrobe each season!"

Yet within the same month Park East magazine in
an article about the "Experts' Expert" i.e. the
painters' painter, the wits' wit, the sportswriters'
sportswriter names her "the performers' performer".

"Greatest of the greats", shouts big-timer Sophie
Tucker who has seen them all. Fellow entertainers
are Baker's most ardent fans!"

She has been criticized for giving up her American
citizenship and becoming French--Yet these same people
in the next breath will argue that being a French
woman she has no right to concern herself with the fate
of the American Negro. They say that she has self-
consciously developed "that ooh-la-la way of talking"
...that she has forgotten her St. Louis forbears...
and at the same time that she embarrasses hostesses by

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insisting that she wants to go into the kitchen...
and kissing the colored cook...that "she senti-
mentally drags her poor, penniless scrubwoman
mother into every speech..."

"Intellectual"..."lightweight"...
"wears too many clothes on stage"..."Wears
too few clothes"..."Spy"..."Ex-patriate"...
"Consummate patriot" (she is acknowledged as one of
the most ardent and effective members of the French
underground in Africa and credited with having made
possible almost single-handed the capture of the Ger-
man Marshall Roehm)...How does it all add up?

What makes Josephine Baker so baffling...and so
enchanting...is the fact that there appears to be
some measure of truth in all the charges and the counter-
charges. She has perhaps developed to the nth degree
the knack of doing the right thing at the wrong time...
or at least doing what she believes to be right when
no one else is doing it...just that way. An old
friend who, like a great many of Josephine Baker's old
friends, remains still one of her best friends, tells
about seeing her for the first time in the chorus line
of "Shuffle Along at the beginning of her career.

"Look at that girl at the end of the line. I don't
know what I'm going to do about her," the producer
wailed..."when the others zig she zags; when they zag,
she zigs...and everybody watches *her*."

This is a book called *Les Memoires de Josephine Baker gathered and adapted* (and this means entirely written) by Marcel Sauvage, 1949, Correa Press, Paris

She starts the section out with a line: Neither Jews nor dogs nor niggers ... "I love dogs," she says, "I love animals. I am on the side of (quotes her's) 'niggers.' I have from them neither glory nor humiliation. I haven't chosen."

"As to the Jews ... Ah, here comes the painful point -- the most painful -- of which I must speak. One must have the courage to denounce certain things in the hope that people to whom one wishes from the bottom of one's heart that they may never again be victims -- are going to open their eyes, open them first on themselves and understand, to improve, to finally change things. We must change those things. We must."

"Never would I have believed that Hebrews who are the target throughout the world of sectarians, of misery, of reprobation, could be capable of conducting themselves as poorly as they do in America toward the colored people."

"I am not subject to caution, is that right? I don't think that anyone wants to accuse me of falsehood. I would have too much pain for the future. I have been married to a Hebrew. I have nothing to reproach him for. His mother still holds a great part of my affection. I have lived in his family and also in other Jewish families where I met people that I love, that I admire, that I would defend if anyone were to attack them."

"But the frightening exploitations of the Negro by the Jews in America, no, truly, one can't let it go by in silence. One

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can't keep quiet. It's not possible.

"When one thinks of the martyrdom of the Jews in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, and that there are Jewish refugees from all over the world in New York, that there have always been some there, of whom many don't speak English, don't want to be and will never speak English. When one hears that in the entire world, these are the Jews who cry the loudest to ask for pity -- and they have good reason for that -- to demand justice, equality among men, and yet you see in what way they behave toward the Negroes in America, to say the truth, how can you avoid persuading yourself that they are committing a fraud on sentiment, that they are seeking an equality only for themselves and rights only to permit themselves to be just as hard, as bad as their adversaries.

as I not right,

"Those for whom, / we have been to war because the Germans condemned the Jews and the colored people, how can they explain their conduct, worse than that of white Americans toward the miserable people of Harlem and elsewhere.

"I have sung in Africa in the camps of Jewish soldiers, colored soldiers, and Greeks, Poles and Belgians ...

"And now ...

"Ah, in the sorry of those things how I have regretted the war. There was a purity among all soldiers, a bit of fraternity. When there was breed one shared it, when there was nothing to eat, they consoled each other without caring about the colors of the skin and the confessions in the head.

"In Harlem, the Jews reduce the colored people to slavery. In Harlem all the proprietors are Jewish. They overwhelm all the

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colored people (she uses the French for blacks). All the movies,
all the five-and-tens in Harlem belong to Jews, the salesmen are
colored and they are robbed as nowhere else. The colored people
can't work without the Jews. They can't go to work on Broadway
without the Jews as intermediaries. They depend completely on
the Jews. They are in their hands submitted to their wants.

"And not a colored man raises his voice, not one would dare,
against the Jews. The colored people know, at their own expense,
that they would starve to death if they protested against the treat-
ment the Jews impose on them.

"I am giving you the chance of your life, say the Jews, to the colored people of Harlem, whatever trade the colored people chose. And the colored people are obliged to accept the opportunity the Jews offer them because otherwise they would have no chance to be able to live whatever they do. The opportunity offered by the Jews is the enslavement of the colored people. When a colored artist, for example, earns a good salary, the maximum is $3,000 a week, and the Jew who has assured himself the control of these salaries, levies on each, everywhere and always, an unbelievable percentage."

"All the managers of colored boxers are Jews. Many are the colored boxers who don't receive the tenth of what they earn with their broken noses. Among the gangsters there are many Jews. They are less dangerous than the other Jews for the colored people of Harlem and elsewhere."

(Then several paragraphs on how the Jews "overflow more and more
the boundaries of Harlem," how they push the blue-bloods off Park
Avenue and Riverside Drive, how they have apartments in the best
quarters of New York with Negro servants, "whom they pay just as they
wish.")

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cont. P. 321:

"Don't the Jews know what they're doing? Why do they do it? And they come from the four corners of the earth to do that? How can one believe in their sincerity when they complain about other men and accuse them? Don't they see that they are calling down more unhappiness on their heads, and on the heads of their children and that then they will be more to blame than to pity."

(She talks about the Hebrews she admires in Jerusalem, around the Grand Synagogue and the Wailing Wall, and in Tel Aviv "which inspires confidence in those who built it, when one walks through.")

Concluding: "Ah, why must the unfortunate colored people of Harlem, by a mockery of the destiny of one and of the other, be the victim of the Jews who have forgotten the history of their fathers?"

Translation by Al Davis (of N.Y. Post)