FEARLESS AND FREE

A freewheeling account of the boundary-smashing entertainer’s first four decades.

First published in 1949, this is less a memoir than a transcription by French journalist Marcel Sauvage (whose original introduction is included) of conversations he had over the course of 15 years with expatriate American sensation Josephine Baker (1906-75). Born in St. Louis, Baker left her impoverished family at 16 and was on Broadway at 17 in the chorus of the landmark Black musical Shuffle Along. Still a teenager, she hit Paris in 1925 and rocketed to fame for her uninhibited dancing; surviving film documents her charisma and acrobatic gyrations. All factual details about her life and career, including multiple marriages and affairs, must be gleaned in passing from Baker’s decidedly impressionistic recollections, which ramble unabashedly to give a vivid impression of her ebullient personality, extravagant love for animals, and overflowing generosity for the world’s unfortunates. Extensive touring in Europe, North Africa, and South America prompted endless protests about her “immorality,” usually fostered by the Catholic Church, but proved a useful cover for her intelligence work for the Free French during World War II. Despite conservative criticisms, Baker felt freer and more accepted in France than she had as a girl in the United States, and she is forthright about her indignation over the racism she encountered on a postwar American visit; she served in the fight against Germany “because of their race policy,” she comments, but “I found it again, more insidious, more hideous, perhaps, among the people who claimed to fight against it,” in the North as well as the South. (Her comments about exploitive Jewish landlords and shop owners in Harlem, though balanced by condemnation of American antisemitism, prompt a nervous disclaimer in this volume’s foreword.) The book closes with verbal snapshots of her many famous friends.

Baker’s charmingly scattershot reminiscences flag the need for a full-scale biography of this remarkable woman.