JAZZ CLEOPATRA: Josephine Baker in Her Time

by Phyllis Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 1989

Vivid life of the fabulous entertainer who rose from povery in East St. Louis to international celebrity in the Folies-Berg≤re as the banana-bikinied ""black Venus"" and later returned to poverty; by the author of the shrewd Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983) and a well-received biography of Virginia Woolf (1978). Josephine Baker died before finishing her autobiography Josephine (1977), which was completed by bandleader Jo Bouillon, her second husband, but was something of a mess. Here, Rose focuses largely on 19-year-old Baker's first great year in Paris (1925-26), details finely Baker's various stage routines (often bare-breasted, she loved to cross her eyes, spread her knees in the widest rubber, legged Charleston ever seen, and bounce her rear end like a machine--""The rear end exists. I see no reason to be ashamed of it,"" she said), and explores the racial mythologies that produced Black Broadway and Black Paris. Baker's opening night in the Revue Negre compared well with the first-nighters' riot at Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring. After only one year, Bakermania swept France: white-skinned Frenchwomen stained themselves with walnut oil and slicked their hair with a product called Bakerfix. Rose is especially clearminded about Baker's love life and sex life, which were not the same--Baker had no bourgeois morality (one of her lovers was Georges Simenon). Between the wars she became a European star, though the Nazi Aryans tried to wipe jazz out of Germany, and on a trip home she discovered that race-conscious America did not welcome her as Paris had. During WW II she did undercover work, later adopted children of all races while on her world tours, collecting a personal family of man but exasperating husband Bouillon. For 25 years she gave so many farewell performances that ""a goodbye performance by Josephine was just an elegant way of announcing she was back again."" At 69, at the height of another Paris comeback, she had a fatal stroke in her sleep. Her state funeral: tremendous, with 20,000 mourners crowding the church door. Rose is a sympathetic, idea-filled biographer who tells a rich story briskly.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989

Categories: NONFICTION