Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Extraordinary Life of Josephine Baker

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

The woman the world would know as Josephine Baker was born into abject poverty in 1906 in Saint Louis, Missouri.  Despite her humble background and numerous obstacles in her way, she became one of the most significant entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. However, the way she found success was unlike any of her contemporaries.  She later used her fame and celebrity as a highly effective spy during the Second World War.  Learn more about the incredible life of Josephine Baker on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The woman the world would know as Josephine Baker was born into abject poverty in 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. Despite her humble background and numerous obstacles in her way, she became one of the most significant entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. However, the way she found success was unlike any of her contemporaries. And she later used her fame and celebrity as a highly effective spy during the Second World War. Learn more about the incredible life of Josephine Baker on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. if your perceptions about the past were wrong. ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story

that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The woman the world would know as Josephine Baker was born Frida Josephine McDonald on June 3rd, 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie MacDonald, was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas by adoptive parents of African and Native American descent who had been born into slavery. Her mother had dreams of becoming a music hall dancer, but she made her living doing laundry.

Josephine grew up without knowing her father. Many people believe that her father was a vaudeville drummer by the name of Eddie Carson. However, there are many conflicting and contradictory stories from this period in her life, and the identity of her father isn't known for a fact. She grew up in a predominantly black section of town known as Chestnut Valley, an area that was subsequently demolished under the guise of urban renewal. The buildings in her neighborhood didn't have indoor plumbing at the time, and the neighborhood was known for its many brothels and bars. She did not have what most people would consider an ideal childhood. Despite being quite intelligent, she received little formal schooling. She began working at the age of eight as a maid for a white family who abused her. At the age of 11, she witnessed an event that would shape the rest of her life.

The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre. The East St. Louis Massacre is worthy of its own episode in the future. But in July 1917, mobs attacked African Americans living in East St. Louis, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Over 100 people were killed, and hundreds of homes were burned to the ground. As Baker herself later recounted, quote, I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi River, looking into East St. Louis, and watching the glow of the burning Negro homes lighting the sky.

We children stood together huddled in bewilderment, frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across the bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings. So with this vision, I ran and ran and ran. End quote. She dropped out of school at the age of 12 and began living on the streets. She literally slept on cardboard, scrounge for food, and danced on the street corners for money.

At the age of 13, she was married to a man named Willie Wells, and the marriage didn't even last a year. She was married a second time in 1912 at the age of 15 to William Howard Baker, whose name she used as her stage name for the rest of her life. She spent very little time with Baker as she soon got a part in the chorus line in the traveling show, Shuffle Along. When she turned 16, she was added to the cast of the Broadway version of the the show in New York City, which at the time was in the middle of the period known as the Harlem

Renaissance. She soon found work doing dancing at some of the biggest clubs in Harlem at the time, the Cotton Club and the Plantation Club. She was also in the chorus line of the Broadway musical The Chocolate Dandies. At this point, the story of Josephine Baker was not too dissimilar to that of hundreds of women who sought careers as dancers and entertainers in New York. However, in 1925, at the age of 19, she made the decision that would change the direction of the rest of her life. She left the United States for Paris. This was a highly unusual move at the time, but in hindsight, it made perfect sense. In Jim Crow America, the options available for a young black woman were extremely limited. In an interview she conducted in 1974, she noted,

no, I didn't get my first break on Broadway. I was only in the chorus in shuffle along and chocolate dandies. I became famous first in France in the 20s. I just couldn't stand America, and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris. Oh yes, Bricktop was there as well. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvelous time. Of course, everyone who was anyone knew Brickie, and they got to know Miss Baker as well. End quote. Bricktop was the stage name for a woman name Ada Smith, a jazz singer and club owner in Paris. In Paris, she got her start as a dancer in a show called La Ravou Negg and doubled what she was making in New York, now the equivalent of $250 a week.

The Parisians went crazy for her. Her act at this time was known as the Dant Sauvage, and it was quite scandalous. It was basically a burlesque performance appearing on stage with little but a skirt made out of artificial bananas, and she later added a pet cheetah named Chequita to the act. She was the intersection of everything Parisians were fascinated with at the time. jazz music, American culture, and risque exotic dancing. Her success wasn't just in the risque nature of her performance. Anybody can do that.

She was a performer and knew how to work a crowd, adding elements of physicality and comedy to her performances. Her act garnered rave reviews in Parisian newspapers, and she very quickly became the most popular American entertainer in France. She became friends with many of the celebrities who came through Paris in the 1920s. She became very good friends and spent many hours with Ernest Hemingway, who called her, quote, the most sensational woman anyone ever saw. Pablo Picasso did multiple sketches of her.

She became good friends with the French novelist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and the poet E. Cummings. And she also did multiple endorsement deals for hair gels, cosmetics, and shoes. She eventually began touring throughout Europe, where she sold out shows everywhere she went. In 1927, she starred in the silent movie, Siren of the Tropics. becoming the first black woman ever to be the star of a film. She went on to perform in several other silent films and two talking films. The films were popular in Europe, but not so much outside of Europe. In the early 1930s, after extensive training, she began a singing career.

In 1931, she released her biggest hit, Je du's Amor, or I Have Two Loves. The song was about having two loves, her home country and Paris. Some of the lyrics in English are, quote, Manhattan is beautiful, but why deny it? What puts a spell on me is Paris. Paris in its whole, seeing it in one day is my pretty dream. I have two loves, my country, and Paris.

The song and its subsequent popularity solidified Baker's status with France and with Paris. In 1934, she performed in the lead of the opera Les Creole, which was a major transformation for her, going all the way from a dancer to an operatic diva. After a decade of success in France, in 1936, Josephine Baker decided the time was right to make her triumphal return to America. She was booked a star in a revival of Ziegfield's Follies on Broadway. Her return did not go as she had hoped.

The show lost money, had bad reviews, and she found herself the subject of the same racism that she had dealt with before she left for France. She returned to France in 1937, married the French industrialist Jean Leone, and became a French citizen, renouncing her American citizenship in the process. Here is where the story of Josephine Baker takes a very interesting turn. Arguably one of the most famous entertainers in Europe at this point, when France declared war in Germany in 1939, she was recruited by the Douzium Bureau, or the French military intelligence, to function as what they called an honorable correspondent. Normally, spies try to remain hidden and covert. Josephine Baker was the exact opposite of that.

She used her celebrity to hobnob with Germans who frequented nightclubs in Paris, and she was able to gain access to officials at the Italian and Japanese embassies. All the while, she was gathering information and funneling it back to French counterintelligence officials. After the invasion of France by Germany in 1940, because of her celebrity, she was publicly able to continue to perform throughout Europe, including visiting neutral countries like Portugal. In 1941, she made a tour of French colonies in Africa, but again, it was just a cover to gain intelligence for the French resistance.

The information she gathered would be written on Invisible Ink on her sheet music or hidden in her underwear. She was counting on the fact that her celebrity would prevent her from getting strip-searched. During the war, she also left Paris and moved to the Chateau-Miland in southwest France. There she aided members of the French resistance during the war. After the war in 1961, she was awarded France's highest honors, the Legion of Honor, and the Quad du Guerre by Charles de Gaulle himself. After the war, Josephine Baker gained new prominence with the public acknowledgement of her activities during the war.

In 1951, she was invited to perform at a club in Miami. However, the club was racially segregated, and she refused to perform until the club changed its policy, which it eventually did. After her successful engagement in Miami and several sold-out shows, she won on a national tour and was named the NAACP's first woman of the year. However, all was not well on her return to the U.S. While in New York, she was refused service at the store club due to her race. The actress Grace Kelly was there that night, and she walked out with Josephine Baker in support of her and refused to return. The incident resulted in the suspension of her work visa, which prevented her.

her from returning to the United States for another decade. It was then that she began to adopt children to live on her estate at the Chateau de Milan. She adopted a lot of children, 12 in total. Foreshadowing the later adoptions by celebrities like Madonna or Angelina Jolie, she adopted children from different cultures and religions from all around the world. During the 1950s, she adopted children from Morocco, Algeria, Colombia, Japan, the Ivory Coast, Finland, Venezuela, and of course, France. She dubbed her family the Rainbow Tribe. It was her attempt to show that people from different backgrounds and religions

could all live together in harmony. While in France, she continued to support the civil rights movement in the United States. When she was finally allowed to return to the United States, she was invited to be a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous, I Have a Dream speech. She was the only woman asked to speak at the event. and while speaking she wore her uniform from the free French army, complete with her Legion of Honor Medal. She had difficulties in the 1960s. She was getting older and wasn't performing as much.

Having 12 children in a large chateau wasn't cheap, and she eventually lost the chateau over mounting debts. And her friend, now the Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, offered her an apartment. By the early 1970s, she assumed that the public had forgotten about her. but that was far from the case. In 1973, she performed at sold-out shows in New York's Carnegie Hall. In 1974, she again performed to a packed audience in the London's Palladium Theater and in Paris's Gala du Cirque. Her last performance took place on April 8, 1975,

in a retrospective show celebrating her 50 years in French show business. The show was so crowded that night that folding chairs had to be brought in. And in attendance on opening night were Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassie, Diana Ross, and Liza Minnelli. Just four days later, Josephine Baker was found in her bed, having died in her sleep. She was surrounded by newspapers with positive reviews of her last show. Josephine Baker has been remembered for many things. Despite being in France, she became kind of the poster girl for the entire decade of the roaring 20s.

Her look, hairstyle, and dress were the epitome of the flapper trend of the period. In fact, if you go to the Wikipedia page for Roaring 20s, the first thing you will see is a pitcher of Josephine Baker. As a performer, she was an inspiration to many black women who came after her. Shirley Bassie credited her as her inspiration for getting into show business. Diana Ross and Beyonce have both done homages to her banana skirt that she originally made famous in the 1920s. However, her greatest legacy was in France. This African-American woman embraced France as her. adopted homeland, and they embraced her in return. There is a street in Paris named after

Josephine Baker, and her former home, the Chateau de Milan, is now a museum dedicated to her memory. However, perhaps the greatest honor she has been bestowed occurred in 2021. She was given a place of honor in the French Pantheon, the resting place of many of the greatest citizens of the French Republic, including the likes of Marie Curie, Victor Hugo, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. No one would have ever expected a poor girl from St. Louis, Missouri, to become one of France's most celebrated citizens. Yet, she did. As she told the audience in attendance when she received the Legion of Honor, quote, I am proud to be French because this is the only place in the world where I can realize my dream. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel.

The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiever. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in everything everywhere daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified to future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server.

Links to everything are in the show notes.