Free Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase Page B

mama, big bottom, big breasts, kerchief on my head, wearing big, big shoes and blackface, I was a killer with that number”), and he said Clara had spotted Josephine waiting tables at the Chauffeur’s Club.
    â€œBob told me how he got stuck with Josephine in St. Louis. She had become Clara’s protégée, you know, her lady lover as we called it in those days. Bob did not like that kind of hanky-panky, but Clara was a big draw, and anyhow, better a steady date than a fight in every city. Josephine had no real experience, you know, but Bob saw she had potential, and Clara did the rest.”
    Clara, who disliked publicity and all the fuss that went with it—this was not a dislike Josephine would ever share—was only twenty-six years old in 1920, with a voice Carl Van Vechten described as so powerful and melancholy “it tears the blood from one’s heart.” Josephine could not have found a better singing coach.
    Besides Clara, billed as the South’s “favorite coon shouter,” the troupe, forty-five strong, featured Henry “Gang” Jones (a comedian), some bathing beauties, and a female baritone named Anna Belle Cook. No Russell company had played St. Louis in two years, but now the entertainers would be there for two months. The first show would open on Monday night, the twenty-ninth of November. Mr. Russell wanted it clearly understood “that he permits no smutty or suggestive words or action in any of his plays.”
    That her new boss wasn’t thrilled with the relationship between his star and a chorus girl had not been lost on Josephine. “I thought I understood what was bothering Mr. Russell,” she tells us, ingenuously. “He felt that his leading lady was monopolizing my time. He wasn’tpaying me to spend hours in Mama Smith’s dressing room improving my penmanship.”
    Or massaging Mama Smith’s feet, either.
    St. Louis went wild over Clara, but Josephine didn’t get to go onstage until the week of January 17, in
Twenty Minutes in Hell
, a melodrama “with a good moral.” It told the story of a man who dreamed he had sold his soul to the devil. A scene in hell was replete with fairy costumes and electrical effects, Clara Smith sang “Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone,” and Josephine flew.
    Literally. “I remember the first role they gave me. I was to be an angel. I wore pink tights and had big wings to flap. They expected me to swing around on a wire. But my wings kept getting tangled in the sets and my feet were dangling in every direction. After a while, I got so badly tangled up they fired me.”
    Nobody fired her, and another time, in another mood, she told what really happened. “I returned to the wings, to find Mr. Russell weeping with laughter. ‘You’re a real clown, Birdy. A born comic.’ ”
    The Booker’s stage manager remembered that Willie Mae showed up backstage every day after school. “That one-eyed girl had a whole lotta mouth, she wanted everybody to know she was Josephine’s sister.”
    For the Russell company’s final show,
Toby’s Breeches
, Josephine danced in the chorus, which got several encores, and the
Argus
raved, “Nine weeks without a taint of smut or suggestiveness . . . The fastidious Mr. Russell has raised the standard of the stage here.”
    Even so, Mr. Russell’s fastidiousness did not entice Carrie Martin to come out and see her daughter perform. In those days, show business gave a girl a worse reputation than going with men for money, or drinking homemade gin.
    Sunday, January 30, the last show. A frenzy. Everyone packing, Josephine feeling—what? Sadness? Regret? Fear? She was detaching herself from Tumpy, like a butterfly breaking painfully from the cocoon, slowly unfolding its wings.
    Now they are hurrying to Union Station to catch the last train to Memphis. It is just past midnight. The