Josephine Baker's Last Dance Read online

  Praise for internationally bestselling author

  SHERRY JONES

  THE SHARP HOOK OF LOVE

  “A fresh reimagining of a legendary romance . . . Readers will feel as though they are walking the streets of Paris and experiencing the joy that eventually leads to heartbreak.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “A sensual journey into twelfth-century Paris. With a sharp eye for historical detail, Jones weaves an unforgettable, compelling tale about enduring love.”

  —Lynn Cullen, national bestselling author of Mrs. Poe

  “Heloise is the sort of heroine you cannot help rooting for: brilliant and naïve, vulnerable and tough. The Sharp Hook of Love will have you up all night holding your breath as you turn each page.”

  —Rebecca Kanner, author of Sinners and the Sea

  FOUR SISTERS, ALL QUEENS

  “Jones’s impeccable eye for detail and beautifully layered plot . . . makes this not only a standout historical but an impressive novel in its own right, regardless of genre.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A feast for fans of historical fiction!”

  —Gillian Bagwell, author of The Darling Strumpet and The September Queen

  “Engrossing and vividly rendered. . . . A mesmerizing tableau of what it meant to be a queen.”

  —C. W. Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici

  THE SWORD OF MEDINA

  “Jones’s fictionalized history comes alive with delicate, determined prose.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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  To Kate Dresser, editor extraordinaire.

  Yes, I will dance all my life. I was born to dance, only for that. To live is to dance. I would love to die breathless, exhausted, at the end of a dance . . .

  —JOSEPHINE BAKER

  OVERTURE

  * * *

  Le Paradis du Music-Hall

  1975, Paris

  Sleep? How can she sleep when there’s so much living to do? She’s never needed much rest but it eludes her now and no wonder, her name in lights in Paris again, the first time in years, big stars filling the front rows night after glorious night, the critics raving like she’s pulling off some kind of miracle, like she rallied herself from the grave to sing and dance her life’s story across the stage. But she’s just sixty-eight, not dead yet! She only looks it right now, running on fumes and just a lick of sleep after what might be the greatest performance of her life. How will she top it tonight? Never mind: Josephine Baker always finds a way.

  “I heard you come in at five this morning.” Lélia, her maid, stands behind her in the bathroom and pins Josephine’s wig to the scant sprigs poking out from her scalp. Dear Lord, look at her in the mirror, the feed sacks under her eyes, she looks like a Saint Bernard. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “By dancing all night with Mick Jagger? I can think of worse ways to die.” She has never had a wilder premiere, nor one as star-studded: Sophia Loren, Alain Delon, Princess Grace, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Diana Ross, Carlo Ponti, and, of course, Mick. The standing ovation lasted fifteen minutes. She’d thought it would never end, her legs quivered like jelly as she’d staggered to her dressing room to collapse. Afterward, the reception in the Bristol Hotel with the cake like a tower to celebrate her fifty years on the Paris stage, the 50 on its top making her cringe, it would only remind Mick of her age. But the gleam in his eyes hadn’t faltered for an instant, he’d made her feel like sweet cream in her silk Nina Ricci dress, and he the tiger licking its chops.

  “The doctor said you need your rest,” Lélia says as the doorbell rings. Josephine covers her unmade face with enormous sunglasses.

  “There will be plenty of time for sleep when I’m dead,” she says.

  At the front door, the old doorman, Maurice, extends his arm. “Your car is waiting, madame.” He walks her to the elevator and pushes the button and lets the door close. When she emerges at the bottom he is waiting for her, having run down the stairs. He’s a little out of breath, which makes her grin: he’d never be able to endure the routine she’ll be doing tonight, he’d drop dead before intermission.

  Maurice hands her off with a bow to the chauffeur sent by the theater: French blue eyes and baby face, they get younger every year. He helps her into the back seat of a black limo, like a hearse, she’d told the director, Levasseur, making him laugh although she was dead serious. The chauffeur drapes a blanket over her legs, asking if she is comfortable. It’s April, but the day is as rainy and cold as February; she wonders what he’d do if she said she was cold. Warm her up? But no—those days are gone.

  As they roll down the Avenue Paul Doumer, the Eiffel Tower stands elegant sentry over her right shoulder, the embodiment of Paris that, unlike the Statue of Liberty, makes no promises and, therefore, tells no lies. Throughout the years, she has situated herself in hotel rooms and apartments where she could look out and see it. Now, on the ride from her tiny borrowed apartment with no views of anything, it keeps her company on the way to the Bobino theater. She has fallen, yes, but not too far—she still has Paris.

  The car pulls up before the theater, her name dominating the marquee in bold capital letters over the words Un Grand Spectacle, two and one-half hours of spangle and sparkle and froth—her life not as she lived it but as the audience wishes it to be, all sweet frosting and no cake. Her audiences don’t want the truth. She’s learned that lesson so many times she doesn’t quite know anymore what’s real and what isn’t.

  “Like hell, you don’t,” she mutters. “Don’t start lying to yourself, Josephine.”

  The car door opens and she accepts the hand of her chubby chauffeur, his mustache like a paintbrush, a far cry from the elegant André who drove her for so many years, watching her life unfold in his rearview mirror. He once took her right here in the back seat, no, not this one, but a seat covered in snakeskin, the heels of her shoes punching holes in the ceiling, try explaining that to the upholsterer! But that was a long time ago. Everything, it seems to her now, happened so long ago.

  She emerges into a crowd of fans holding out records and programs and autograph books for her to sign, the driver trying to shoo them away until Josephine tells him to stop. These people have been waiting for who knows how long, and she isn’t going to disappoint them. But as she is signing her name and petting the little dog in someone’s purse and posing for pictures, M. Levasseur, the director, comes striding out the theater doors—pointed nose, cleft chin, he used to be handsome, but now, like her, he is getting old—and steers her through the throng and into the theater. She will take the stage in two hours, barely enough time to apply her frosting.

  “You must enter through the stage door tomorrow, in the back, and avoid the crowds,” he says, knowing that she won’t, that she wants to see and be seen for this, “My last show,” she has pledged to everyone, her friends, her children, her doctor, none of whom believe her. She does not believe herself.

  They walk as fast as she will let herself be led through the red-and-gold lobby, into the red velvet auditorium where stagehands are arranging the staircase for her grand entrance, to her dressing room draped in blue silk, where two makeup artists whisk away her wrap, hat, and su
nglasses, help her sit before the mirror, and begin smearing and dabbing and brushing and stippling layer upon layer.

  She drowses in her chair and dreams of the night before: Mick twirling her and twitching his skinny hips, Grace’s speech praising the show but saying it doesn’t do Josephine justice—You need a film, darling, or a novel but who would dare? She awakens when they pin her hair tight under a wig, pulling back her skin to smooth the lines and erase the years. A pin pierces her scalp and brings tears to her eyes, which someone quickly dabs away, mustn’t smear the makeup!—before the costumers rush in and stretch the white gown like a second skin over the body that she has starved for weeks. Magnifique, the costumer says as she turns this way and that to admire her slender arms and neck, her nearly flat belly. Sixty-eight years old, and she still looks groovy.

  As they attach the giant feathered cartwheel hat, the stage manager comes in to fetch her, bowing like a supplicant and exclaiming over her beauty. Josephine checks her reflection one last time in the full-length mirror, marveling anew at the transformation. No longer is she a tired old bag but a vibrant and youthful woman, propped up by feathers, pearls, four-inch heels, and force of will to capture once more the heart of Paris—her true love for fifty years, but just as fickle as every other lover in her life. She lifts her arms, ruffling the feathers on her sleeves.

  “It’s showtime,” she says.

  The stage manager takes her hand almost reverently, as though leading her to the altar. Behind the curtain, two beautiful boys in white tuxedos step up to escort her to the top of the staircase. There she waits for the first notes of the overture, poised in a gown the likes of which she never wore, one from the belle epoque, before Josephine’s time, but so what? It’s all the same to folks now.

  People don’t come to the theater for truth. Her fans want the dream, the candy coating: a face with no lines, a heart never broken, a life free of cares.

  The first notes sound. The curtain lifts. The full house cheers. The spotlights and footlights dazzle. Josephine, blinking back tears, begins the slow descent to live her life once more.

  ACT I

  * * *

  La Louisiane

  While the woman looks on, younger versions of Josephine cross the stage with a parade of musicians and dancers, confetti splashing the air, a NEW ORLEANS sign flashing. These girls look well fed and well clothed, nothing like her as a child. For one thing, they’re wearing shoes.

  These girls with happy childhoods are figments of her own fancy, characters she invented in the made-up stories she has told over the years—her real childhood being too miserable for anyone to stomach. Josephine’s public life has always been illusion and spectacle, the shine on the star with none of the tarnish.

  So instead of Saint Louis, Missouri, she gives them New Orleans, Louisiana.

  A jazz band plays bright notes on its horns while dancers in green and gold strut in a Mardi Gras parade and toss strings of bright beads into the audience. Josephine sings an upbeat “Sonny Boy,” not because it has anything to do with her childhood but because it shows off her voice, which has ripened with age to a rich contralto.

  A succession of children walks on- and offstage: a swaddled “infant” cuddled by a Negro woman; a little girl in a nicer dress than she ever owned and pickaninny pigtails, which she never had; an adolescent playing the slide trombone—here, a kernel of truth—and at sixteen, leaving New Orleans for New York, as if her year in Philadelphia and marriage to Billy Baker never happened. That part of her story is best left untold.

  But here it all comes like a cyclone, the bad parts and the good, picking her up and spinning her around, and there’s nothing she can do to stop it.

  CHAPTER 1

  1913, Saint Louis

  Her mama had kept saying what a nice lady Mrs. Kaiser was, but Josephine knew meanness. She’d seen it in the woman’s clenched teeth, in the hard little black eyes giving her the up-and-down as though Josephine were her own great-grandmama on the auction block in Charleston, South Carolina. The way the woman talked, high and desperate-sounding, reminded Josephine of a yellow jacket buzzing around, frenetic and angry, looking for somebody to sting.

  “Carrie, you didn’t tell me she was so pretty.” Now there was a lie, right there: Josephine had buck teeth. “What’s your favorite subject in school, child?”

  She had to think about that one. School meant sitting still and keeping quiet. “Lunch,” she finally said, and Mrs. Kaiser’s narrow face sharpened like a razor honing itself on disapproval. Too mean to laugh at a joke did not bode well for Josephine, who rolled her eyes and turned her lips inside out.

  Standing next to her mama, his ill-fitting Sunday shirt popping its seams on his big frame, Daddy Arthur stifled a snort. He loved Josephine’s silly faces and acts, but he knew better than to egg her on in front of this white lady who thought herself fancy in the flowered dress that Mama had washed and ironed at the laundry where she worked. Some thought Josephine’s faces funny and some did not, but everybody agreed that she looked like she had no sense, which she knew Mrs. Kaiser was thinking. With her eyes crossed, she couldn’t see that face too ugly for even a mother to love—except for Josephine’s mother, blinded by the glint of the twenty-five cents she was about to make.

  “She’s clever, too,” Mrs. Kaiser said, pulling her lips across teeth even bigger than Josephine’s. “Why, I can hardly believe she’s only seven years old! She’s mature for her age, just as you said. But I don’t know. The child is a bit small. I need a strong one. I told you that.”

  “She’s as strong as I am, ma’am. She hauls water from the pumps down the street every morning and evening. Show the mistress your muscles, Tumpy.”

  Josephine lifted a limp arm. No way she was going home with this stingy-looking witch, not if she could help it. But then her mama was dragging her out the door and down the steps and pushing her into the mistress’s Model T, Josephine’s first time in a car. She watched as if in a spell as Daddy Arthur cranked the engine and the vehicle sputtered and popped to life, and then they were moving and it was too late for her to get away. She pulled on her goggles and accepted her fate.

  “She’s a burden to us,” she’d heard Mama murmur to Daddy Arthur last night, while her brother and sisters slept and Josephine stared into the dark, listening to the rattle of a tin can dislodged by a rat and then the creature’s gnawing.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” her mother had said. “She’s driving me out of my ever-loving mind.”

  Josephine’s face burned as though she’d been slapped. “It was an accident!” she wanted to cry out, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody thought she’d sent the old man’s casket crashing to the floor on purpose. She remembers the scene: the garden snake she’d found outside clutched in her hand, a gift to old Tom, who loved snakes; the scream of the woman who knocked it from Josephine’s hand; lunging under the casket perched on six dining room chairs to retrieve the poor little guy; the topple of the coffin and Mr. Tom’s body rolling out. At home, as she’d whispered the tale to Richard, Margaret, and Willie Mae, they’d about split their sides from holding in the laughter, worried Josephine might get a whipping. Now, she wished she had. Maybe then, Mama might be satisfied, instead of sending her away to live with this pinch-faced white woman who, when it came down to facts, just wanted a slave. “She doesn’t fit in here,” Mama had said to Daddy Arthur. Or anywhere else, it seemed to Josephine.

  “Stop sucking your thumb, you little heathen,” Mrs. Kaiser snapped, knocking Josephine so hard she saw white dots. “I’ll keep your hands so busy they’ll forget where your mouth is.” She kept her word, too, didn’t she? Josephine almost forgot how to use a fork, so little did she get to eat.

  A piece of leftover cornbread for breakfast with some molasses, another piece for lunch. After school, the rest of the cornbread, cold and dry as sawdust, with no molasses. She’d come home to a house smelling of food, her mouth watering, and get nothing but a boiled potato for supper
while the mistress would sit with a full plate and eat it right in front of her: ham, collard greens, black-eyed peas, red-eye gravy, sugared tomatoes. The bone would go to the dog, Three Legs, who would take it to the box in the basement that he and Josephine slept in and smear its grease all over the straw, making her hair smell like ham for a week. When a breeze would stir up that smell and bring it to her nose, her stomach would clench and her mouth would fill with water, and all she had to swallow was ham-scented air.

  Was it any wonder she fell asleep in school? Prodded by the toe of the mistress’s shoe, she dragged herself before daybreak out of the box, stuffed coal from the basement bin into a burlap sack, and slung it over her shoulder to haul upstairs, the dog limping along behind. She’d open the door to let the dog out to pee and light the stove in the kitchen, then haul more coal upstairs and start that stove—quietly, so she didn’t awaken the again-sleeping mistress and get a beating.

  She and the dead mister’s belt became close friends, kissing cousins, blood sisters. It came to know every part of her, almost: legs, back, bottom, and—when she’d turn to protect herself, begging the mistress to stop—arms and hands and stomach and chest. She felt its sting all over except on her face, because then she’d have to go to school with her bruises and welts in plain sight and her teacher, Mrs. Smith, might ask more questions than she already had: “What time do you go to bed, child? When do you get up? Do you have nightmares? Answer me, Tumpy, please, I’m trying to understand why you can’t stay awake in class. Are you ill? If this keeps up, I’m going to have a talk with your aunt.” Mrs. Kaiser had told the school that Josephine was her brother’s illegitimate child, which, for all Josephine knew, might be the truth.

  Not long before Thanksgiving, the mistress put the turkey, Tiny Tim, Josephine’s only friend besides Three Legs, in a cage inside the kitchen to “fatten up for the feast.” Unable to run around the yard with her now, he gained weight so fast that she hardly recognized him except for the way he cocked his head when she talked to him, his bright eye looking right at her as though he understood every word. “Don’t eat this,” she’d whisper while scooping dried corn into his bowl, but he devoured every kernel and gobbled for more.