Kitty Kelley Book Club: ‘Fearless and Free: A Memoir’ by Josephine Baker
By • March 11, 2025 0 32
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) found fame in France in the 1920s as the American expat who danced in “a mere belt of bananas.” Ernest Hemingway described her as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Now, 50 years after her death, the dancer, singer, ingénue, scandal-maker, activist and spy is being celebrated in a memoir pieced together from various interviews she gave in French over more than 20 years.
While there have been a few biographies and one film about the “Bronze Venus” — also known as the “Black Pearl” and the “Creole Goddess” — this potpourri, translated into English after a half-century, purports to present “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images” of her life.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri (pop. 800,000 at the time), as Freda Josephine McDonald, she took her second husband’s name and kept it through two more marriages. She recalls her hometown as “the city of 100,000 Negroes,” where she grew up “cold and hungry … No father … I left school when I was eight years old to go and work.” Scavenging food from garbage cans, she spent many nights on the street. At 15, she was recruited for a vaudeville show, moved to Harlem, and then to France for a role in La Folie du Jour at the Folies Bergère theater.
In Paris, Le Joséphine’s landmark cabaret show, “Le Revue Nègre,” became a sensation as the flamboyant dancer played to the disturbing stereotype of Blacks as inherently primitive. Crossing her eyes, waving her arms, swaying her hips and swinging a G-string made of bananas, she clowned, rolled her eyes and made faces. Exuding sexuality and wearing only feathers (or fruit), “the American Negress” became an instant sensation with her tribal-inspired dances and comic commentary. “One day, all the papers, the dailies and the weeklies, were talking about me,” she recalled, citing the “presents, pretty presents, a mountain of them” bestowed upon her “danse sauvage.”
Seizing her instant fame, Baker posed nude for fashion photographers, sold Bakerskin — a skin-darkening lotion — and promoted Bakerfix, a hair pomade. Yet she paid a price for her celebrity.
On her European tour, the “Onyx Queen” recalled “the old Catholic groups hounding me with their Christian hate, from station to station, from town to town … in Vienna they rang all the city’s bells at full peal to warn the church-goers that Josephine Baker, the demon of immorality, the devil herself arrived … I came to represent the ‘moral decadence threatening the great country of Austria.’” In Hungary, her visit was debated in Parliament three times, and her performance was greeted by an ammonia bomb. “For one endless second,” she writes, “I had goosebumps under my ostrich feathers.”
By 1936, Le Joséphine was the toast of Paris, but when she returned to the U.S. to star in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, Time magazine denigrated her as “a St. Louis wash woman’s daughter” and “a Negro wench,” who stirred jaded Europeans of the jazz-loving type. “But to Manhattan theatre-goers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed young Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any night club show, whose dancing & singing could be topped anywhere outside France.”
Devastated, Baker returned to France, renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French citizen the following year. During World War II, she aided the French Resistance, performing for troops throughout the country, for which she received the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’honneur and the Rosette of the Resistance. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to enter France’s Panthéon.
Baker punctuates many anecdotes in this book with “oh, la la!” and presents her philosophy of life as “a matter of affection that one has or doesn’t have,” which may or may not explain why she adopted 12 children, “one of every race,” and kept a menagerie of pets, including six dogs, three cats, a monkey, a parrot, two budgies, three white mice, a goldfish, a snake and a cheetah; the latter, adorned with a diamond collar, was part of her stage act. The children, plus menagerie and maids, lived on her estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, outside of Paris, until 1968, when Baker went bankrupt and had to sell the property to satisfy her debts.
While Le Joséphine acknowledges four husbands, she does not mention her reputed relationships with women, such as the French writer Colette or the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In another publication, one of her sons described her as bisexual.
Sadly, the chanteuse ends her mishmash of a memoir on a dark note. “No Jews, no dogs, no [n—–s],” she writes in a diatribe against the U.S. “That’s what they boil down to, Americans, in their country, along with the atomic bomb, the portable refrigerator and chewing gum.” Baker repeats her racist rant several more times, then asks: “Can you blame me for being obsessed with this phrase, these ferocious words that I heard people say even in New York itself and by good people?”
In her introduction to “Fearless and Free,” the writer Ijeoma Oluo promises readers “a collection of defining moments, impressions and images.” On that weak point, there’s no debate.
Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times Best Seller biographies, including “Nancy Reagan,” “Jackie Oh!” and “Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star.” She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with the Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.
