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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lamber and I'm Sarah Dowry and the first

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Speaker 1: time I ever heard of Josephine Baker are subject for today.

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Speaker 1: I was in middle school and I was reading an

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Speaker 1: old film book of my dad's that had lots of

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Speaker 1: film stills in it, and they're in the middle was

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Speaker 1: this almost completely naked woman who's only wearing pretty much

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Speaker 1: bananas around her waist. And being a Catholic schoolgirl, I

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Speaker 1: was completely scandalized and yet intrigued. And that's how a

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Speaker 1: lot of people felt about Josephine Baker, and that image

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Speaker 1: of her wearing the bananas around her waist is probably

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Speaker 1: the most famous. But there's a lot more to Josephine

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Speaker 1: Baker than just that, And besides being an extravagant, provocative

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Speaker 1: stage star, she's also a French spy, a civil rights agitator,

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Speaker 1: and the mother of twelve children, so obviously we've got

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Speaker 1: a lot to talk about here. As far as her

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Speaker 1: early life, she was born Frieda J. McDonald June third,

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Speaker 1: nineteen o six in St. Louis. Her family was very poor.

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Speaker 1: There wasn't a dad around, and she was working by

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Speaker 1: the time she was eight years old. She went on

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Speaker 1: tour as a dancer at sixteen, moved to New York

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Speaker 1: City in nineteen three, and while it was the Harlem

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Speaker 1: Renaissance there, it was still a really tough time to

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Speaker 1: be black in the United States, thought Josephine. So she

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Speaker 1: went to Paris in and she joins a black American

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Speaker 1: vaudeville troupe Lau Review Negra at the Teatra Deschans Liz

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Speaker 1: and does the dance avage in Feathers, which is another

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Speaker 1: thing that she's pretty well known for. And this is

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Speaker 1: where she found freedom in Paris. There was a marked

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Speaker 1: difference between being a black woman in New York City

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Speaker 1: and a black woman in Paris. Here she was, you know,

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Speaker 1: this ex pat and jazz age Paris Lisianna forle the

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Speaker 1: crazy years after World War One, where jazz was wonderful,

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Speaker 1: nudity was okay, brothels were okay, the dollar was strong,

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Speaker 1: there wasn't prohibition. It sounds like a lot of fun,

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Speaker 1: to be honest. So Josephine becomes a star at the

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Speaker 1: fully Beer Jaire. This is where the g string with

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Speaker 1: bananas comes into play, which is designed by no one

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Speaker 1: other than Jean Cocteau, and her dancing is passionate and

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Speaker 1: intense and gathers a lot of attention. Her act involved nudity,

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Speaker 1: cross dressing, a lot of overt sexuality, and you have

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Speaker 1: to ask the question of whether she was in control

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Speaker 1: by manipulating her own image or was it more subjugating

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Speaker 1: herself by buying into this idea of the sexual savage.

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Speaker 1: Either way, she made a lot of waves and a

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty two she performed in white face at the

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Speaker 1: Casino de Paris and a blonde wig and skin lightner

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Speaker 1: and sang a song called cieg blanche if I were white,

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Speaker 1: which was yeah, she's so over the top. Two she's

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Speaker 1: I mean off stage as well. She's got a cheetah Chiquita,

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Speaker 1: who does perform with her in a diamond collar. She

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Speaker 1: has a chimp named Ethel and a goat named to Toot,

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Speaker 1: among many other animals, and people worship her. Crowds follow

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Speaker 1: her around, people clamor for her autograph. She's offered flowers

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Speaker 1: and presents and dinners. So she's this huge celebrity in

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Speaker 1: in glamorous Paris at Picasso writes that she has tall,

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Speaker 1: coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to

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Speaker 1: end all smiles. Supposedly, Hemingway said she was the most

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Speaker 1: sensational woman anybody ever saw or ever will, So there's

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Speaker 1: no hope for the rest of us. According to Hemingway

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Speaker 1: and called Er made wire sculptures of her. So she

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Speaker 1: started getting into other things besides just being this stage dancer.

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Speaker 1: She collaborated on biographies of herself. She wrote a novella

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Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty one, and she began singing professionally in

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Speaker 1: nineteen thirty and appearing in silent films in nineteen thirty four.

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Speaker 1: You can find clips some of them on YouTube if

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Speaker 1: you look. And by nineteen thirty seven she makes an

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Speaker 1: important decision to become an official French citizen. This is

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Speaker 1: sort of renouncing her her American past and the the

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Speaker 1: trouble she faced when she lived in America. She thought

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Speaker 1: the US was very racist, and she made a lot

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Speaker 1: of comments about this throughout the rest of her life.

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Speaker 1: But during World War Two she was banned by the

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Speaker 1: Vichy government from performing and she started working with a

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Speaker 1: Red Cross and also the French Resistance which is so cool.

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Speaker 1: She was a spy and no one thought she would

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Speaker 1: be a spy. With someone like Julia Child, it's, you know,

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Speaker 1: she's the last perm likely back character, somebody who's so

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Speaker 1: you can't ever imagine them flipping away unnoticed. Their presence

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Speaker 1: is so so huge. But that's why it's right in

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Speaker 1: plain sight. She ended up getting the Quadi Guer and

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Speaker 1: the Legion of Honor with the rosette of the Raisy

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Speaker 1: Staunts after the war. But during the war she performed

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Speaker 1: for troops in Africa in the Middle East, passing messages.

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Speaker 1: So she went along too important people and very vocally

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Speaker 1: advocated integration in the army. So her post war life

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Speaker 1: is markedly different from the stuff that we've been talking

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Speaker 1: about leading out to this. She buys an estate in

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Speaker 1: the door don Chateau de Miland, and she starts adopting children.

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Speaker 1: She adopts twelve kids beginning in nineteen fifty, and she

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Speaker 1: calls them her Rainbow Tribe. They are boys and girls

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Speaker 1: from all over the world and I mean we mean everywhere,

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Speaker 1: and um. She goes from being a sex object to

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Speaker 1: a madonna surrounded by all of her children. It's a

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Speaker 1: really interesting transformation, which reminded us a lot of Angelina Jolie,

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Speaker 1: and it's something she did very consciously. First she cultivated

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Speaker 1: this image of herself as a sex object, and then

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Speaker 1: she cultivated just as hard as this image of herself

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Speaker 1: as a mother. She also dreamed of opening an international

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Speaker 1: education institute, which she planned to call the College of

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Speaker 1: Universal Brotherhood, and she basically quit the State age, but

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Speaker 1: with money troubles. She ended up performing throughout the rest

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Speaker 1: of her children well occasionally, both in the United States

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Speaker 1: and in Europe. But things were tough for her in

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Speaker 1: the US. Yeah, the nicer hotels wouldn't even receive her.

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Speaker 1: So she's on top of the world in Paris, this

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Speaker 1: huge star, but back in the United States, she's a

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Speaker 1: black girl in Jim Crow rules, So it's a it's

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Speaker 1: a tough shift for her that she is not going

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Speaker 1: to take it anymore, and she made United States theaters

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Speaker 1: desegregate her audiences. She regularly caused a ruckus with authorities

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Speaker 1: over treatment of blacks and the lack of opportunities, and

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Speaker 1: she also said that if a city's best hotel wouldn't

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Speaker 1: take her, then she simply would not perform in that city.

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Speaker 1: So there go your revenues. I like her here she's

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Speaker 1: this racial barrier breaker, but this diva performer too kind

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Speaker 1: of amazing. I love her. There was a famous incident

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Speaker 1: at the Stork Club in nineteen fifty one, which of

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Speaker 1: course was the plan used to be in New York,

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Speaker 1: but Sherman Billingsley didn't admit Blacks. Being Josephine Baker and

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Speaker 1: being wildly popular, he decided he would let her in,

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Speaker 1: but then none of the waiters would serve her. They

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Speaker 1: claimed they were out of every single item that she offered,

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Speaker 1: or at least this is according to Josephine's version of

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Speaker 1: the tale. She also said that Walter Winchell, who was

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Speaker 1: a very influential gossip columnist, was a witness to everything

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Speaker 1: that happened, and that he didn't do a darn thing

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Speaker 1: to help her, and he was incensed by this portrayal,

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Speaker 1: and she presses the matter, and Winchell says it's absolutely

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Speaker 1: not true, but she won't let go of her version

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Speaker 1: of the story, so he ends up calling her a

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Speaker 1: communist and also saying she's anti Semitic and anti African American,

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Speaker 1: and also talks to the FBI about her, which resulted

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Speaker 1: in a seventeen year FBI investigation. Sarah said he reminded

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Speaker 1: her of Press Hilton earlier today, kind of the scary

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Speaker 1: gossip her. But he had a big effect on her career.

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Speaker 1: He started calling her ms Josephony Baker in his column

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Speaker 1: and a lot of her bookings were canceled because of

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Speaker 1: this rift. And she also comes to the US for

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Speaker 1: a lot of civil rights demonstration, So I mean her

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Speaker 1: her experiences performing give you a pretty good idea of

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Speaker 1: why she would be invested in this. She speaks at

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Speaker 1: the March in Washington in nineteen sixty three. But she

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Speaker 1: does have money trouble. She likes to spend. She has

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Speaker 1: all these children, and um she loses the chateau. But

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Speaker 1: who comes to the rescue Princess of Great Monico. I

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Speaker 1: wish would come to my rescue on a regular basis.

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Speaker 1: So we're nearing the end of her life. And in

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, there is a Josephine retrospective in Paris.

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Speaker 1: It's marking her debut there fifty years earlier, and it

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Speaker 1: was hugely popular. All the celebrities are there. But during

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Speaker 1: its run, she dies of a stroke and the story

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Speaker 1: is that she has this hemorrhage when she's in bed,

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Speaker 1: surrounded by the newspapers with blowing reviews exactly telling the

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Speaker 1: story of just how wonderful she is, which I think

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Speaker 1: she probably liked a lot. And she's buried in Monte

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Speaker 1: Carlo and twenty thousand people came to her funeral, So um,

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Speaker 1: this is not not your typical story of a famous

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Speaker 1: stage presence who weighs away an obscurity. She's famous to

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Speaker 1: the end. But Sarah and I were talking earlier about

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Speaker 1: this switch from being this sexual object to being the madonna,

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Speaker 1: and people often wonder which image was more her, because

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Speaker 1: of course we have the urge to categorize and stick

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Speaker 1: her in one or the other. But we have an

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Speaker 1: interesting biography to talk about, which is by Jean Claude

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Speaker 1: baker Um, who she considered her adopted son even though

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Speaker 1: he was never legally adopted, and he wrote a biography

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Speaker 1: called Josephine the Hungry Heart. In it, he said that

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Speaker 1: she was sexually abused, and also that she had had

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Speaker 1: an affair with a middle aged man when she was thirteen.

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Speaker 1: She also had several marriages that weren't entirely legal because

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Speaker 1: she never ended the ones before them, and she got

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Speaker 1: married when you was thirteen, and that she had affairs

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Speaker 1: with both men and women, white and black. He also

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Speaker 1: claims that she got into vaudeville through a sexual relationship

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Speaker 1: with a woman, a blue singer. And we have a

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Speaker 1: quote from a woman named maud Russell who met Josephine

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Speaker 1: when they were working in Philadelphia, and she said, often

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Speaker 1: we girls would share a boarding house room because of

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Speaker 1: the cost. Well, many of us have been kind of

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Speaker 1: abused by producers, directors, leading men if they liked girls

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Speaker 1: and the girls needed tenderness. So we had girl friendships,

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Speaker 1: the famous lady lovers. But lesbians weren't well accepted in

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Speaker 1: show business. They were called bull dykers. I guess we

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Speaker 1: were bisexual and what you would call us today. So

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Speaker 1: going back to that earlier argument, which is more her

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Speaker 1: this Madonna image or the um crazy sexualized dancer. And

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Speaker 1: it's easy enough to see how the Madonna image is

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Speaker 1: partly created, you know, it's partly an image that she

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Speaker 1: creates and assumes later in life. But I think by

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Speaker 1: saying that doesn't necessarily mean the earlier sexualized image is

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Speaker 1: Josephine Baker's true self. It could be something that has

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Speaker 1: been created in part two, and then something um that

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Speaker 1: she's forced to assume. This uh, you know, affair with

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Speaker 1: the middle aged man when she's thirteen, these marriages when

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Speaker 1: she's a teenager. It seems like some of this um

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Speaker 1: she just it was forced upon her almost. So let

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Speaker 1: us know what you think. Email us at History Podcast

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Speaker 1: at house to aff Works dot com, and we'd like

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Speaker 1: to end with a quote from Jean claus book trying

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Speaker 1: to explain why people love her so much. He said

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Speaker 1: she was burning in hell from all the pain and abuse,

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Speaker 1: but she was able to shut up her feelings within

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Speaker 1: herself and give it back to people in a majestic

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Speaker 1: and generous way. She was one of those exceptional people

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Speaker 1: who know how to break down barriers to reach and

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Speaker 1: touch the body the soul of anyone. So if you

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Speaker 1: want to learn more about jazz and the jazz age,

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Speaker 1: you should go to our home page ww of you

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Speaker 1: dot how stuff Works dot com and search for how

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Speaker 1: Jazz Worked. You should also try following us on Twitter

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Speaker 1: because we write about all kinds of interesting Josephine Baker

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Speaker 1: facts and everybody we're researching. We're at missed in history

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