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Josephine Baker: New York
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Born in St. Louis, Josephine Baker was a star in Paris for most of her adult life. She left her home in Missouri and began performing in her early teens. She appeared in the chorus lines of all-black revues on New York vaudeville stages, then travelled to Paris in 1925 as part of La Revue Negre. Her lithe body and frank sensuality, combined with her jovial clowning on stage, caused a sensation. She was so successful in Paris that she stayed and opened her own nightclub there, Chez Josephine. Baker was famous for her exotic outfits, her trademarks being a leopard on a leash, a skirt made of feathers, and a dance in which she wore a string of bananas and not much else.
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Born into poverty in St. Louis, dancer and singer Josephine Baker progressed from vaudeville to New York theater to the Parisian cabaret scene and became the toast of Europe before the age of 21. Though her later career wasn't quite able to handle such an early peak, Baker spent much of her life working tirelessly against prejudice, during World War II in Europe and the civil-rights era in America. She's still one of the most famous expatriates in American history, perfectly epitomizing the hedonistic abandon of the Jazz Age in Paris.
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In August 1922 Baker joined the chorus line of the touring show Shuffle Along in Boston, Massachusetts. Afterwards Baker was in New York City for the Chocolate Dandies (at the Cotton Club) and the floorshow at the Plantation Club in Harlem with Ethel Waters (c. 1900–1977). She drew the attention of the audience by clowning, mugging, and improvising. With her long legs, slim figure, and comic presence, her special style as an entertainer began to take shape.
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In 1973, Baker was 66 years old. She returned to Carnegie Hall, where she was greeted with a standing ovation before she even began her performance-a dramatic contrast to one of her previous New York experiences. In 1975, she premiered a show at the Bobino Theater in Paris, where she performed a medley of selections from her more than fifty-year-long career. A few days later, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while taking a nap, and died at the age of 69.
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[O]n October 16 of that year, after finishing a performance at the Roxy in New York, Baker crossed the threshold of the Stork Club and her rose-colored bubble burst. Depending on whom one believes, Winchell either stood by as she was denied service because of her race, knew nothing of the affront, or left the club before it happened. By all accounts... he was at the Stork Club that night, seated at his personal table, number 50. For more than hour, she and her party received nothing to eat, being told that the restaurant had run out of whatever they ordered—steak, fish, chicken. Fuming, she left her seat, marched to the nearest telephone, and called Walter White, then NAACP president, to complain about the incident and Winchell’s nonchalance. During the next weeks, she denounced the journalist to anyone who would listen, while he proclaimed his innocence.
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Born Freda Carson on June 3, 1906, Baker spent a hardscrabble childhood in the slums of St. Louis. After a successful audition at a local vaudeville theater, she left home at the age of 13, waitressing most of the time and working on the stage whenever she could get there. By 1920, she was married and divorced and married again -- the second time to Willie Baker, from whom she took the name she used on stage. Baker finally caught her big break one year later while dancing in the chorus for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's all-black revue Shuffle Along. A frenetic dancer and relentless onstage clown, she quickly attracted notice and was tapped for a bigger part in another Sissle/Blake production, 1924's Chocolate Dandies. The show made her a star in New York and she became big in Harlem as well with performances at the Cotton Club and the Plantation Club, among others.
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