Picasso called her “the Nefertiti of modern times”. Liberal with her affections, she apparently cast her spell over, among others, architect Le Corbusier, Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret, novelist Colette and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Though Ms Baker still struggled to make an impact in the segregationist USA, her allure mesmerised pretty much everywhere, and everyone, else. Swiftly, she went up through the showbusiness gears – leading revues, dancing fully-clothed (glamorous gowns and stage costumes abound in the château), appearing in movies and making records.
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It’s not absolutely certain that this was in the forefront of the minds of those who flocked to the Folies Bergères.īut Ms Baker certainly knew how to make it work for her. Academics have subsequently said that the dancer’s performance was playing to black and colonial stereotypes in order to deride them. The château displays relevant photos (including of Ms Baker with her cheetah) and, crucially, one of her several micro skirts.
Nude except for a few feathers and the banana micro-skirt, she danced in a savannah setting - a jazz age sensation. Ms Baker’s mix of sensualism and eye-rolling clowning made her a star, and shortly she was starring in other revues. He brought her across to Paris to appear in the 1925 Revue Nègre, a show devised to satisfy the local taste for barely-dressed exotica. By the age of 19, she was dancing on stage in New York, friskily enough to catch the eye of a French impresario. (And no, I haven’t forgotten the Loire valley.)īorn in 1906 into a poor Missouri family – her mum black, her disappearing dad possibly Spanish – Ms Baker was married at 13, divorced at 14, re-married at 15 to one Willie Baker (whose surname she kept) and re-divorced at 16. Thus we have one of the most fascinating château visits in France. These days, the late 15th-century rooms and chambers trace the star’s life and startling career – from France’s top-earning female entertainer to bag lady, and back. Overlooking the Dordogne river, this magnificent Renaissance castle was first rented then bought by Ms Baker as, in the inter- and post-war years, her celebrity, wealth and family increased. It is more interesting to focus on the extraordinary Ms Baker herself, and the best place to do this is at the Château des Milandes, south-east of Sarlat in the Dordogne. Sceptics have said that this is a useful Macronite message as the presidential elections loom, but sceptics are always saying things like that. He reckoned that her life and example illustrated French universalism, that everyone may overcome differences and stand together within the French republic. It is for these reasons – rather than for the banana skirt – that President Macron ok’ed the campaign to have her “pantheonised” (as the French almost say).
What we should also mention is that, showbiz aside, Ms Baker was a considerable figure in the wartime French Resistance and, later, in the anti-racist campaigns for civil rights in both France and her native US. Ms Baker will be the Pantheon’s sixth woman (but its first black woman), the first stage entertainer and the first to have found fame wearing a micro-skirt decorated with artificial bananas. There, Josephine Baker – for it is she – will lie among some 80 other celebrated figures, from Voltaire and Rousseau through Victor Hugo to Emile Zola.
The Pantheon, a monumental neo-classical pile in Paris’s Latin Quarter, is mausoleum to the France’s most revered figures, the ones to whom the nation considers it owes particular gratitude. As was announced last weekend, a woman who had been divorced twice by the age of 16, who began her career as an exotic topless dancer, and later took to the stage with a live cheetah is to be honoured by admission to France’s Pantheon.
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