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5.0 out of 5 stars
More Than Just a Hot Performer, July 3, 2007
Everyone in the 1920s knew who Josephine Baker was, and the image of her from that time has stuck with us; if you have a mental picture of her, it is probably of her lovely svelte black body dressed in little more than a skirt made of bananas, performing in a Paris dance hall. The image is so strong that it unfairly eclipses the other roles she played, and not just roles as a performer (and those roles in many media), but as spy, humanitarian, utopian reformer, and civil rights activist. It was in this latter role that Bennetta Jules-Rosette saw her when Baker took part as a speaker in the March on Washington in 1963. Jules-Rosette is a fan, but since she is also a professor of sociology and an expert in semiotics, her tribute comes with lots of footnotes. _Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image_ (University of Illinois Press) is not strictly a biography. The life history is here, of course, but not necessarily chronologically. Instead, the themes of Baker's life and the art she used in making her many stage and real-life personas are examined, showing how she deliberately manipulated sex and race roles to form the themes of her life and performance.
Baker was born in 1903 and grew up in St. Louis, performing on the streets and moving to vaudeville. She became a cast member of reviews such as _Shuffle Along_ and _Chocolate Dandies_, playing to enthusiastic reviews in New York when she did her comic routines. Among the many pictures included in this volume are those of Baker in clown outfit, including enormous shoes, but also, strangely, in blackface. It was just the first of her manipulations of racial roles. In her first movie in 1927, she played a stowaway who "is chased by crew members and shocks society matrons by falling into a coal bin, turning black, and then into a flour bin, turning white." She headed to Paris in 1925, and was a sensation, admired by Picasso and Hemingway. Alexander Calder did wire sculptures of her. She was used to performing in front of primitive or surrealistic sets, and it was Jean Cocteau himself who designed the banana skirt. Her performances wowed Paris, but sometimes did not go well when Baker traveled. In Vienna in 1928, priests and politicians tried to ban her threat to public morality, and rang bells as a warning to clear the streets when she entered the city. Baker did stage performances all her life, but had more important things on her mind. During World War II, she helped the Red Cross and the French Resistance. After the war, she started adopting children, twelve of them of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds. This was her "Rainbow Tribe", installed in her chateau at Les Milandes. Because of overoptimistic finances, she lost the chateau (and she and the tribe were rescued by, among others, Princess Grace of Monaco). When Baker toured the US, she forced theater owners to desegregate when she performed. There was a famous incident in 1951 at the Stork Club which did not admit blacks, but Baker arranged an admission, only to be ignored by the waiters. Columnist Walter Winchell was present, and Baker called upon him to witness the incident, but instead he attacked her on his radio program and wrote to J. Edgar Hoover requesting an FBI investigation of Baker's political activities, and of course Hoover obliged.
Baker died in 1975, having just opened to glowing reviews of a retrospective show in Paris. Thousands watched the procession and Paris came to a standstill. Jules-Rosette analyzes her continuing influence on chameleons like Madonna, Grace Jones, and Michael Jackson. Baker was a real original, though, formed by her times but deliberately forming herself and taking roles to transform herself artistically, with the larger goal of transforming the world. It was a lifetime of brilliant performances on and off stage, and fully worthy of the intellectual dissections Jules-Rosette has brought together in a readable and entertaining volume.
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