Josephine Baker Was the Star France Wanted—and the Spy It Needed
When the night-club sensation became a Resistance agent, the Nazis never realized what she was hiding in the spotlight.
By Lauren Michele Jackson NY Times
A chameleonic gift for moving among identities aided Baker’s turn at espionage.
The Negro, historically, has always been in the espionage business. Subalterns survive by being watchful, warily gathering intelligence about those for whom they labor. The flight from servitude, even from an identity, involves spy craft, too. Harriet Tubman was called Moses for a liberator who slipped the confines of caste when his mother placed him undercover among the reeds in that pitch-daubed basket. Brown skin could be cloaked in soot and stereotypes or in learned airs. George Harris, one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s high-yellow fugitives, attained an inscrutable foreignness with the assistance of walnut bark: “A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared; and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural to him, he found no difficulty in playing the bold part he had adopted.”
In this respect, Josephine Baker, who clowned her way into the heart of les Anees folles—France’s Roaring Twenties—and played the civilized primitive when she got there, might have been the smoothest operator of the twentieth century. A dancer, a singer, and the most celebrated night-club entertainer of her era, she was at once inescapable and elusive. She first captivated Parisians in 1925 when she appeared on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, nude save for her feathers. The next year, at the Folies Bergère, audiences saw stretches of brown skin intersected by pearls and a skirt strung with tumescent bananas. As her star rose, Baker was known to stroll the streets of Paris with her fellow-performer Chiquita, a cheetah collared by a rope of diamonds. Without actually laying eyes on the woman, a visitor to Paris would see her everywhere: in photographs and on those Paul Colin posters, as a doll in a shop window, in the style of Parisiennes palming their heads with Bakerfix pomade.
Who was she, really? Baker homages are usually unsubtle and beatifying, embodied by contemporary Black denizens of the arts who managed to do what Baker couldn’t: carve out stardom on American soil. Diana Ross, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have played in her silhouette; Lynn Whitfield received an Emmy when she starred in HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story” (1991). In “Frida” (2002), Baker has an affair with the title character, a nod to the free sexuality of each; she rumbas through “Midnight in Paris” (2011). Cush Jumbo staged an acclaimed tribute show, “Josephine and I,” in 2015, and Carra Patterson recently played her, with strange showgirl malaise, in an episode of the horror series “Lovecraft Country.” Ruth Negga and Janelle Monáe are now slated to take their turn, in a pair of TV series about her. Last November, Baker was inducted into the French Panthéon, the first woman of color to grace the hallowed monument, among such figures as Victor Hugo and Marie Curie. “Stereotypes, Joséphine Baker takes them on,” President Macron said. “But she shakes them up, digs at them, turns them into sublime burlesque. A spirit of the Enlightenment ridiculing colonialist prejudices to music by Sidney Bechet.”
Even if Baker’s career had been restricted to her role as an entertainer, it would have had the allure of a thriller. The racecraft of the day was bound to give rise to spycraft: all identities are impostures, and Baker had a chameleonic gift for moving among them. But during the war years she was also—as a new book, “Agent Josephine” (PublicAffairs), by the British journalist Damien Lewis, chronicles with much fresh detail—a spy in the most literal sense. There was, after all, little that La Bakaire didn’t understand about resistance.
“This is not a book telling Josephine Baker’s life story,” Lewis cautions. His saga, though it stretches across five hundred pages, is mainly concerned with Baker’s service as a secret agent, and mainly confined to the years shadowed by the Second World War. There’s another sense, too, in which it isn’t her life story: the account is largely told by an assemblage of third parties. Lewis’s bibliography and notes make clear how deeply he has drawn on interviews with veterans, memoirs by agents, the private family archives of a British spymaster, and the wartime files of intelligence bureaus, some of which were not made available to the public until 2020. But Baker maintained a code of silence about the seven years she spent fighting the Nazis and, Lewis writes, “went to her grave in 1975 taking many of those secrets with her.”
She could be sly about other facts, too. Like many colored women intent on arranging their destiny, Baker subjected her origin story to copious revisions. “I don’t lie,” she said. “I improve on life.” Her autobiographies can generously be called loose collaborations: “Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker,” published in 1927, when she was twenty-one, and updated in later years, was in drafts before she and her co-author, Marcel Sauvage, shared a language. And once they did? “It would then be thoroughly funny—and at times, very difficult,” Sauvage wrote in the book’s preface. “Miss Baker does not like to remember.” Her third autobiography, “Josephine,” was published in 1977, two years after her death, produced from folders of notes, press clippings, documents, and the rough draft of a memoir that her last husband, Jo Bouillon, pulled together with the assistance of a co-author. The resulting Baker is another assemblage, an “I” laid alongside the testimony of others who were enlisted, as Bouillon writes, “whenever there was information lacking.” More candid was the biography “Josephine: The Hungry Heart,” published in 1993 and written by her adopted son Jean-Claude Baker with the journalist Chris Chase; the effort to sort through his mother’s various fictions is notated in its pages. “Josephine was a fabulist,” he writes. “You couldn’t hold her to strict account as you could a tailor who measured slipcovers.”
She had her reasons. “A black childhood is always a little sad,” Baker told Sauvage. Hers began on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, when a dance-hall girl of local renown, Carrie McDonald, delivered a baby whom she named Freda Josephine. The baby was plump, and came to be called Tumpy (for Humpty Dumpty), a moniker that persisted well after poverty had thinned her into a ragamuffin. The identity of her father remains disputed, and became an opportunity for Baker to improvise. Lewis notes, “She had variously claimed that her father was a famous black lawyer, a Jewish tailor, a Spanish dancer, or a white German then resident in America.” The shifting myth was mirrored in the ethnic promiscuity of her on-screen roles: the tropical daughter of a colonial official, possibly Spanish, in “La Sirène des Tropiques” (1927), a Tunisian Eliza Doolittle, in “Princesse Tam-Tam” (1935).
Little Tumpy wanted to dance, but opportunities were scarce. By 1921, Baker had fled her St. Louis life and her second husband—she was all of fifteen when she married the man, William Howard Baker—and was performing as a comic chorine among the Dixie Steppers, a travelling vaudeville troupe. Aiming higher, she booked a one-way passage to New York, where she ended up working as a backstage dresser for the all-Black revue “Shuffle Along.” When a member of the touring cast fell ill—it was just a matter of time—Baker stepped in with fizzing style. After the show’s successful run, she landed a role in the 1924 Broadway musical “The Chocolate Dandies,” playing a blackface version of Topsy. She was nineteen when she was recruited by a society woman and impresario named Caroline Dudley Reagan for a new production across the Atlantic. “La Revue Nègre” opened at the Champs on October 2nd that year. That evening, a vedette was born.
You surely had to be there. Reviewers tripped over gerunds in their efforts to commit the wriggling thing to print. In the jungle dreamscape “Danse Sauvage,” Baker, wearing little more than a feathered loincloth, entered on the shoulders of her male dance partner, upside down and in a full split. André Levinson, perhaps the foremost ballet critic of the day, wrote:
It was as though the jazz, catching on the wing the vibrations of this body, was interpreting word by word its fantastic monologue.?.?.?. The gyrations of this cynical yet merry mountebank, the good-natured grin on her large mouth, suddenly give way to visions from which good humor is entirely absent. In the short pas de deux of the savages, which came as the finale of the Revue Nègre, there was a wild splendor and magnificent animality.
He was sure he had glimpsed “the black Venus that haunted Baudelaire.”
At a certain point, her efflorescence seems to depart from linear narrative, demanding a form suited to the artistic flights of the era: collage. The appeal of La Joséphine—in Europe, at least; America never ran quite as hot for her—exhausted hyperbole. “The most sensational woman anyone ever saw,” Ernest Hemingway pronounced. “Beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic” was E. E. Cummings’s estimation. Le Corbusier, a lover of hers, dressed himself in Baker drag, blackening his skin and wearing a feathered waistband. George Balanchine gave her dance lessons; Alexander Calder sculpted her out of wire. Adolf Loos, after a chance meeting, started sketching an architectural wonder to be called Baker House, with viewing windows cut into an indoor swimming pool. But Baker’s power wasn’t a matter of being hoisted upon the shoulders of great men; she regarded most of them with equable indifference. In a 1933 interview, she flubbed the name of a notable Spanish painter: “You know, Pinazaro, or what is his name, the one everyone talks about?” As Margo Jefferson has observed of Baker, “She was her own devoted muse.”
By the thirties, Baker had refined her visual signature. The show “Paris Qui Remue,” at the illustrious Casino de Paris, made this plain. The feathers were gone. Writing for this magazine, in 1930, Janet Flanner reported, “Her caramel-colored body which overnight became a legend in Europe is still magnificent, but it has become thinned, trained, almost civilized.” A Paris critic announced, with greater enthusiasm, “She left us a négresse, droll and primitive; she comes back a great artist.”
Not everyone was entertained. Austrian headlines denounced the “Black Devil” touring the country’s cities; at the Theater des Westens, in Berlin, Baker was hounded out of town three weeks into a scheduled six-month engagement. In the late nineteen-thirties, her face appeared on a leaflet issued by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, as a potent representative of degenerate, untermenschlich art. Shortly thereafter, Benito Mussolini banned Baker from Italy. Such enmity was intense, and intensely reciprocated.
How could a named target of the Fascists serve as a secret agent? Her very celebrity would provide camouflage, or so the theatre manager Daniel Marouani argued when he brought up her name with the French counter-intelligence agency, the Deuxième Bureau. For certain Bureau officers, the prospect called to mind the case of Mata Hari, the Dutch dancer who was recruited by the French during the First World War and then executed by them when she was revealed to have been a double agent for the Germans. Fame coupled with inexperience could prove costly.
Still, the Deuxième Bureau was in dire straits: cash-strapped, understaffed, and, worse, ignored by political officials. “It was far easier to gather intelligence than it was to get those in power to act upon it,” Lewis writes. Counter-espionage would require the deployment of amateur, loyal, and—vitally—unpaid sources, who were designated Honorary Correspondents.
If Baker has a co-star in Lewis’s book, it’s Captain Jacques Abtey, an agent at the Deuxième Bureau. He was thirty when, in September of 1939, he went to meet La Joséphine. His mission was to determine whether she was willing and able to be entrusted with undercover service. Arriving at her mansion in the posh Paris suburb of Le Vésinet, he found her wearing not the expected finery but a felt hat and faded trousers that were suited to her current task—scrounging for snails in the garden to feed to her ducks. Soon enough, though, champagne was served, and Baker made a toast: “To France.” Abtey was taken by her fierce French nationalism and, Lewis writes, by “her almost childlike quality, at turns playful and pensive, and her schoolgirlish habit of wrinkling her forehead when lost in thought.” He was also “struck by the dichotomy of this superstar: her split life.” The agent did not seem to consider an alternative geometry, in which she wore many more than two faces.
After he anointed her “one of us,” she was asked to exploit her Italian and Japanese contacts for any useful information they might let slip. Four years earlier, Baker had expressed support for Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, believing that it would emancipate the country’s enslaved people. That otherwise unfortunate show of faith gained her the devotion of a loose-lipped attaché at the Italian Embassy. “She’d realised the best way to pump him for information was to provoke and contradict him, in response to which he had fallen into the habit of whispering reassurances into her ear,” Lewis writes. Whatever she learned, she passed along to Abtey.
It was the start of a partnership, professional and romantic. Both Baker and Abtey were married; both were at least nominally separated. Abtey had sent his wife and child to the French countryside as the war heated up. Baker’s situation was more honorable. In 1937, as the bride of the French industrialist Jean Lion, she cast off her U.S. citizenship and renounced her flashy life style. “I have finished with the exotic,” she told the press. She was prepared to be “just plain Madame Lion.” But domesticity on patriarchal terms didn’t suit her. After learning that Lion was catting around, and spending her money, she filed for divorce in 1939.
As Hitler’s troops advanced, Baker maintained her life in and around Paris for as long as she could, making use of her piloting skills—flying lessons had been a gift from Lion—to transport aid to refugees in the Low Countries, and performing for troops along the Maginot Line. Early in June of 1940, Baker, prompted by Abtey, left her beloved city, days before German troops stalked its avenues. Her car carried petrol-filled champagne bottles, along with an elderly Belgian Jewish couple, fugitives she had taken in.
Her destination, the Château des Milandes, overlooking the Dordogne, was a place she had leased three years earlier as a country idyll. The fifteenth-century castle now became a fortress once again, harboring a ragtag Resistance group. Amid mobilizations for de Gaulle’s Free French forces, Baker and Abtey found time to take lazy canoe trips along the river. He also taught her how to use a pistol, and equipped her with a cyanide pill in the event of capture.
Although Milandes was situated in the “free zone” of Vichy, the terms of armistice required that all French security forces report to the newly throttled government. Officially, there was no longer a Deuxième Bureau; unofficially, its agents had simply gone to ground, including the crew at Milandes. One fall day, as Baker met with two former Bureau agents, a group of Nazi officials arrived at the château. Baker, after shooing her résistantes into hiding, struck her pose as the lady of the house, hotly impatient with the German intrusion, especially once a search warrant appeared. In Lewis’s account, drawn from the writings of a Resistance veteran named Gilbert Renault (nom de guerre: Colonel Rémy), her sheer effrontery assuaged suspicion. She acted as if she had nothing to hide.
Baker and Abtey could not lie in wait forever, though, and a former commander at the Bureau, Paul Paillole, had a job for them. He had already set up a shadow network in the city of Marseille, under the cover of an agricultural service. But he urgently needed to reëstablish lines of communication with Great Britain. Otherwise, whatever intelligence he gathered couldn’t be put to use, and Britain would be left ignorant of the enemy’s movements on the Continent and in North Africa. He compiled a dossier, which included details about Nazi airbases across France, known Abwehr agents roaming Britain and Ireland, and Axis plans for taking Gibraltar. The information was to be transported by someone who could move freely, and who knew how to use her incandescence to cast shadows.
Shadows had long been a Baker specialty. In the 1934 film “Zouzou,” Baker, in the title role, discovers her immense, dancing shadow against the back wall of a stage. She is entranced, and then so are we, as the camera strays from the human in favor of a thrown silhouette that remains unmistakably Baker’s. What we’re watching “is neither pure illusion nor authentic embodiment,” the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng writes in a book-length study of Baker’s art. Cheng nicely describes Baker’s idiosyncratic method—enlisting shadows, gold lamé, animal hides, and her own golden skin—as “disappearance into appearance.”
Now, in November of 1940, Baker and Abtey made their way by train through Franco’s Spain, with Baker wrapped in furs and Abtey, as Lewis writes, “lurking in her shadow.” The cover story was that Baker was touring again, assisted by “Jacques Hébert,” her nondescript tour manager. Alongside costumes and makeup, her trunks held Paillole’s dossier, written in invisible ink among the notes on Baker’s sheet music. As Baker disembarked, nobody concerned himself with her luggage or with the man attending to it. Instead, Lewis recounts, French, Spanish, and German officials “crowded around Josephine, desperate to see, to feel, to touch; to bask in the radiance of that famous smile.” In Lisbon, as Baker drew attention—“I come to dance, to sing,” she told reporters—Abtey saw to it that the files passed from the British Embassy there into the hands of Wilfred Dunderdale, a spymaster in London’s Secret Intelligence Service. “Her stardom was her cloak,” Lewis writes.
In the summer of 1941, Baker and Abtey were in Morocco, having gained, Lewis says, another vital link to Britain, this time through a group of wily American diplomats. Then Baker fell ill. She was diagnosed with peritonitis and was essentially bedridden for more than a year. According to Lewis, her sickbed, in Casablanca’s Comte Clinic, became a rendezvous point, as contacts arrived as “visitors” to give their best to an ailing performer. “Josephine Baker’s celebrity was global, which meant that practically anyone might want to pay a visit,” Lewis tells us. It made for an ideal intelligence hub.
The toll her illness had taken was apparent, though. Baker grew “bone thin,” her nurse recalled, and had fits of weeping when she wasn’t putting on a show for visitors. One day, Maurice Chevalier, a quondam co-star of hers who happily performed in Occupied Paris, showed up at the Comte Clinic but was turned away. Afterward, Lewis recounts, he spun the story of Baker “dying in a small room of a Casablanca hospital.” As word spread, Baker received memorial tributes, including from her friend Langston Hughes. On December 6, 1942, a month after the Allied invasion of North Africa, the Times ran the headline “josephine baker is safe.”
After her recovery, Baker resumed performing for Allied troops, in a fund-raising and morale-boosting tour alongside the likes of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. She and Abtey also assembled a final docket of intelligence for Free France. As she performed in Alexandria and Cairo and Damascus and Beirut, hobnobbing with the beau monde, the energy of the region was clear. Europeans were not the only ones seeking freedom.
Baker and Abtey’s romance scarcely outlasted the war. She later wrote that he was someone she could have settled down with. But, Lewis tells us, Abtey confided to a friend that “he could not countenance being ‘Monsieur Baker’; in other words, living in her shadow.” In 1947, Baker bought the Château des Milandes outright and married the French composer Jo Bouillon. Still, she and Abtey continued to support each other throughout the next decades, testifying to the heroism of each other’s exploits, with Abtey even returning to reside at Milandes. Did his stories about those exploits improve on life? It’s impossible not to wonder: deception, manipulation, and pretense were, in various ways, part of his and her professional repertoire. But French officials made their own assessment. In 1957, Baker was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for military service.
For her, there were battles still to be waged. She had promised the Black American G.I.s. she encountered on the African front that a war on segregation would follow the war on Fascism. Throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Baker reasserted her racial egalitarianism, refusing to perform in segregated clubs, and shaming establishments that declined to serve Black patrons. Manhattan’s Stork Club was one such establishment, and, on a fateful night in 1951, Baker made a show of walking out of the place. (So did Grace Kelly, in solidarity.) The newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, who was present at the club, did nothing, and Baker reproached him for condoning discrimination. Winchell, a staunch supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, responded in print, accusing Baker of harboring “Communist sympathies.” Her visa was revoked, returning her to France. The F.B.I., once the recipient of intelligence facilitated by Baker’s wartime activity for the Resistance, opened a dossier on her.
Baker sometimes described herself as a fugitive from injustice: “I ran away from home. I ran away from St. Louis. And then I ran away from the United States of America, because of that terror of discrimination, that horrible beast which paralyzes one’s very soul and body.” Yet she thrived on the tension between shadow and act. As a cabaret performer, she played to the colonial imagination even as she declared her own independence. Both artist and fetish, she was a chorine who evaded Jim Crow’s reach for the embrace of la négrophilie—then placed that fetishized body in the service of liberation. She was fifty-seven when she spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, one of two women (the other was Daisy Bates) who were permitted a speech that day. She came dressed in the stately, decorated uniform of the Free French Air Force.
“I am not a young woman now, friends,” she told the quarter-million people gathered on the Mall. “My life is behind me.” She pledged to use her ebbing flame to light a fire in them. But although her performance schedule had slowed to a crawl, and her finances had grown tight, she embarked on the creation of a new race, adopting a dozen children from various continents and countries. She called them the Rainbow Tribe, summoning them either to another dreamscape or to another form of resistance. In a Christmas card, she wrote of “twelve tiny tots who were blown together by a soft wind as a symbol of universal brotherhood.” (Unsurprisingly, Jean-Claude Baker describes a distinctly chaotic mode of child-rearing.) In 1975, she managed to perform at a Paris tribute revue, celebrating a half century in entertainment. When she died, a few days later, of a cerebral hemorrhage, she became the only woman from America whose funeral saw full French military honors.
What most beguiles us today is the sense that a proud revolutionary lurked beneath the winsome savage, the snowy smile. Spycraft wasn’t so much what Baker did as who she was. The most public of figures in her heyday, she pulled off the trick of vanishing into visibility, of disappearing into the limelight. She still does. Now as then, however, the silhouette remains.
