Black

By John Elson

JAZZ CLEOPATRA: JOSEPHINE BAKER IN HER TIME

by Phyllis Rose

Doubleday; 321 pages; $22.50

Some performers live in memory as icons of their eras -- Marilyn Monroe with her air-blown skirt at thigh level, or Louise Brooks of the silents, purring beneath a helmet of slinky black hair. Particularly to the French, there is more than one archetypical image of Josephine Baker, who danced her way out of the hovels of East St. Louis to become the world's first black international star. From the Roaring Twenties came a Baker persona at once erotic and comic: prancing topless on a Paris music-hall stage, with eyes crossed as if to spoof her naked sensuality. Later came the vision of La Baker, a glamorous chanteuse gowned by Dior or Balenciaga and seemingly the essence of Gallic sophistication.

Baker, as author Phyllis Rose observes in this elegant, judicious biography, actually "had little subtlety and less angst." Still, as the evolution from cabaret "jungle bunny" to boulevard nobility suggests, she was a woman of Cleopatra-like variety and contradiction. Baker was cheerfully promiscuous, yet loyal in a way to a few paternalistic men who meant more to her than a year of one-night stands. Childless herself, she eventually adopted twelve infants of different races, accumulating a rambunctious family she called the "Rainbow Tribe." Baker built her career in Europe, partly to escape the humiliations of a racist America; yet her proudest moment was sharing a podium with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.

France, her home from 1925 until her death in 1975 at age 69, may have been color-blind, but Baker never escaped the reality of race. Indeed, it was the exoticism of her black beauty and the apparent spontaneity of her jazz- inflected dancing that captivated French audiences. With negritude the cultural rage, Baker was nominated as queen of Paris' great Colonial Exposition of 1931 -- until critics pointed out the obvious, that she was neither French nor African. Baker was memorably reminded of that during a 1935 dinner party in New York City given by Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. She insisted on speaking French at table until Hart's black maid burst out, "Honey, you is full of s - - - -. Talk the way yo' mouth was born."

Baker, sadly enough, never learned how or when to quit. She spent francs as fast as she earned them, and her last years were marked by humiliations: mortgage foreclosure on the rambling country home she built for the Tribe, increasingly inept and desperate "farewell" performances to pay overdue bills. But when the end came, Paris remembered what it, and the world, had lost. In 1940-42 Baker had been a spy of sorts for De Gaulle's Free French, and later in the war, she made endless appearances as a troop entertainer. At the historic Madeleine church, her flag-bedecked coffin was carried past an honor guard, as would have befitted an army veteran. The Minister of Culture and the city's mayor were among those who delivered tributes.

There was truth as well as justice in the theme of her famous signature ballad, J'ai Deux Amours ("I have two loves,/ My country and Paris . . ."). The French music hall made her a star; the spirit of American jazz made her a great one.