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Josephine Baker: life of the week
00:47:17
From showbusiness to spying and civil rights, Hanna Diamond shares the extraordinary story of Josephine Baker
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Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. Celebrity spying, civil rights, the extraordinary life of Josephine Baker had it all. From difficult beginnings, Baker transformed herself into the world's first black superstar before turning her talents to espionage on behalf of the French Resistance. Ellie Cawthorn spoke to historian Hannah diamond, author of a new book on Baker, to find out more about everything from her showbiz lifestyle and tireless campaigning to her pet cheetah and troop of adopted children.
- [02:29]
Ellie Cawthorn
Hannah we're here today to talk about Josephine Baker. Before we get into the nitty Gritty, give us an idea of what's in store in her truly, I think it's fair to say, extraordinary life.
- [02:42]
Hannah Diamond
Well, she is indeed extraordinary and it's been a real honour, actually, to discover more about her in the course of my research, she was born In America, in St. Louis, in the most. Really the most deprived of circumstances. And she managed to get out of that environment and become a dance star and came to France between the wars and became the most extraordinarily huge star. Actually, I think of her as being one of the first celebrities. You know, images of her walking down the Champs Elysees with a pet cheetah. Initially, she made her name as a dancer. She went on to become a singer, a musical singer, a film star. And then when the war broke out, which is my area of expertise, she joined the war effort and became a spy, helping the Allies and the Free French Resistance Movement. Then after the war, when the situation for African Americans in particular in America did not resolve, she became very caught up in the civil rights movement. She adopted 12 children that she brought up in her chateau in the beautiful Dordogne. So there's really a lot to get through. So much to say about her.
- [04:05]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, absolutely. So we've got show business, we've got spying, we've got civil rights, as you say, a lot to get into here in just one life. But take us back to those very early years of Josephine's life. What do we know about her early life at St. Louis?
- [04:21]
Hannah Diamond
Well, we know that she was born in really very impoverished circumstances. Her mother, who also had had aspirations to become a music hall dancer, had given up such aspirations. And she took in washing. She really lived very much on the breadline. And she sent out Josephine at a very young age to go and work. She used to work. She did childcare for rich, ripe families. She cleaned for them and allegedly underwent quite difficult treatment there that she was not treated well. And, of course, the backdrop to Josephine's childhood is a very difficult time for African Americans in that part of America. There were race riots and, yeah, I think it was a very difficult childhood.
- [05:09]
Ellie Cawthorn
So how did she make it out of this difficult childhood into the world of show business?
- [05:15]
Hannah Diamond
Well, she was very lucky. She certainly had rhythm and she managed to draw the attention of a small group, Dixie Band, who took her on and they would do street performances. And she didn't really get her first proper break until about 1922, when she was able to appear on Broadway in her first show called Shuffle along at the very, very End of the Chorus Line. The not only did she dance brilliantly, but she would sort of pull faces and put on a bit of a comic show. And she was able to engage the audiences who picked her up, particularly for this very different style. She had so not only was she a gifted dancer, but she also had this kind of comic side to her that she would keep really all the way through her performing days. She loved to make people laugh as well.
- [06:09]
Ellie Cawthorn
So she had this kind of unique charisma then. Is it true that she was married twice by the age of 15?
- [06:16]
Hannah Diamond
Yes. Well, this was quite common at the time. I know it seems very exceptional to us now, but it was a way for much younger women to leave the home and have a form of independence. And it's true, her first marriage, she married at 13, someone called Willie Wells. But it didn't last. And it was really literally only, I think, a few months and they divorced. But she did then meet, at 15, another man who was called Baker, Willie Baker, another Willie in 1922. And he was, I think, a porter in a club. And she did stay married to him, although they didn't stay together, because in 1925 she came to France, but she kept his name. And that's where Josephine Baker comes from, because her actual born name was Frieda Josephine MacDonald.
- [07:11]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's not as catchy.
- [07:13]
Hannah Diamond
No, she kept the name Baker really all her life as a stage name, although the French picked me up for it, because when she was in France, she would be called Baker with a lovely French accent.
- [07:24]
Ellie Cawthorn
So as you just mentioned there, in 1925, she headed to France. How did she end up in Paris? Was France more welcoming to black performers at this time?
- [07:34]
Hannah Diamond
Well, yes. The performance she did in America before she left were all black performances, jazz performances. And the opportunities for African American performance were limited, of course, by segregation. But it was at one of these performances she was performing on the stage in an all black musical on Broadway. She was spotted by someone called Caroline Dudley, who was recruiting. She wanted to put on a new show in Paris. It has to be said that at this time in Paris, there was a huge amount of interest in jazz. And Caroline Dudley wanted to put on a new music hall show to show the kind of music and dancing that was going on in America at this time. And she spotted Josephine and she asked Josephine if she would come along to appear in this new show. It was called the Revue Negre in Paris. And of course, Josephine was delighted. It was a really exciting prospect. And she said, yes, I will. And it was almost as soon as Josephine got to Paris. And she talks about this very interestingly in her memoirs, she realized how different it was to be in a space where she was appreciated as a human being like any other. And she never really looked back because she felt so much freer away from the segregation of America.
- [09:01]
Ellie Cawthorn
And it's in France, isn't it, that her career really gets a rocket under it. How famous was she at her peak? And did she become rich?
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Hannah Diamond
She became very famous and very rich. This show that Caroline Dudley put on, the Revue Negre, they asked Josephine to do a number of scenes on her own and with other dancers. And the particular scene that really rocketed to stardom was the dance sauvage, where she was carried in on the back of another dancer wearing very little. And he put her down on the stage and she moves. I mean, there is still film that you can see the way in which she moves in a very frenetic way, really. The audience was completely shell shocked, amazed, some horrified and shocked. But almost overnight, she became really literally the talk of the town. And from that point, she really went strength to strength. She got this huge following. People came to see her, she was celebrated. Paintings and drawings were made of her. She was celebrated by the literati, the surrealists of Paris. She became, yes, hugely famous. But where she was very clever was she used this newfound stardom to kind of better herself, because it has to be said, she left school very early. She wasn't very educated, and she set about learning to read and write French. She loved being in France, she loved the freedom and the stardom it offered her. She loved to meet her fans and all these aspects, you know, celebrity was quite a new thing. Wherever she would go, she'd be followed by crowds. Reporters would try to talk to her. That all is quite familiar to us these days. But it was. It's quite a new phenomenon. And she had a companion. He was a bit of a pseudo Italian count called Pepito. They were together, they weren't really married, they pretended to be married. But where he is very interesting was he. He understood how to use and improve Baker's celebrity. And he got her to advertise hair oil. He got tutors in to help her learn to sing. And gradually, throughout the late 20s and 30s, she became a much more rounded kind of performer. She learned to sing, she appeared in films, firstly in a silent film, the Siren of the Tropics. And she really was the first African American to become a film star and be paid these extraordinary amounts of money to perform. In 1934, she was in a speaking film, Zuzu, and she did go on to do another two films. And in these films, which were very much vehicles for her celebrity, she often played forlorn heroines of the French colonies. So her kind of image became very tied up with what some academics have referred to as the colonial unconscious. She tapped into those understandings of the women of the French colonies, which were such an obsession for the French people at that time.
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Ellie Cawthorn
So she created this incredible celebrity public Persona. But what was she like offstage and off screen? You know, if you met her in a personal setting, what was she like?
- [12:35]
Hannah Diamond
Well, that's quite a tricky one, actually, when it comes to Josephine Baker, because she really was a consummate performer. She loved to sit down with the press and there are lots of interviews with her, and obviously she made wonderful copy and journalists loved to write about her. But do we know if that was the real Josephine Baker? What we do know about her was she had a very warm personality.
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Ellie Cawthorn
She.
- [13:01]
Hannah Diamond
She was very clever. She knew how to make the best of herself. I think she genuinely adopted France. I think she was very disappointed not to have been able to get the kind of recognition she had in France in the us. She sort of longed to be a success at home, and she did go back and do a show in New York in the mid-30s, but the Americans just didn't get it. It was partly to do with segregation, and they just didn't get Josephine Baker. They didn't identify with the kind of way she sang and danced. So she came back after that, really not terribly successful to her. And she then married a third marriage. She married a Frenchman, Jean Leon. There's some lovely pictures of the ceremony in a small village in a remote part of France. And as part of the ceremony in. She was asked whether she wanted to become French. And she did take French nationality. And I think this step to sort of embrace France really marks the rest of her life and was a big part of her identity. She spoke very good French and she adopted the French cause very deeply, I think, from that point.
- [14:19]
Ellie Cawthorn
And, of course, she was in France when the Second World War broke out. Baker at this point, is kind of riding high in her career when suddenly everything comes to a standstill. How did she respond to the outbreak of war?
- [14:32]
Hannah Diamond
Because Baker had this French nationality, unlike. And there were a lot of African Americans who'd come to Paris to make their fortunes in the interwar period. But most of these African Americans did return to America as war threatened, and Baker was very different. She stayed. She stayed because she wanted to stay. She saw herself as a. She felt she had a duty to stay and face the consequences. And she believed that her French nationality would protect her. And Josephine Baker understood the threat of Nazism. She'd done tours in the Late twenties in Germany and Austria, she had been vilified by Nazi propagandists, and she knew that they represented a personal threat for her. She also understood antisemitism. She was married, Jean Leon, her husband was Jewish, and she became very attached to his family. And actually, her son mentioned to me that she had tried to convert to Judaism and she carried a prayer book. So she had this strong understanding of what the threat of Nazism meant to Europe. So she wanted to engage herself and be a patriot. When the war broke out, I think she also felt very deeply the debt that she felt she owed the French people, the French, and particularly the Parisians, who had been responsible for this hugely unexpected rise to fame that she could never have hoped for in the United States. So when war broke out, she adopted lots and lots of the soldiers who were on the Maginot Line. She sent them parcels. She did benefit concerts. She went to the Maginot Line with Maurice Chevalier, and they toured the. They did troop performances. She did a show in Paris called Paris London, which was designed to celebrate the relationship between the French and British. But it was also during this period, and this is the exciting bit, that she had an approach from the French secret services. She was approached by a man called Jacques Abdet, who was the head of the Paris branch of the French secret services, because he had been advised that Josephine Baker could be useful because she had many contacts and that she could help his counterintelligence service to gain information about the activities of people who were of interest. There were secret agents in Paris at this time who were trying to find out all they could about what was going on in France. And this, let's remember, was the period of the phoney war, which went on for several months. You know, the war broke out in September 1939, but actually the German attacks didn't happen until May 1940. And during all this period, everyone was really, particularly the secret service, were trying to find out what was going on. And Josephine was delighted by this approach. She really felt that she had something to offer. And although Jacques Capt. At the beginning was a little bit unsure about what Josephine could offer, here was this huge star who didn't actually fit the traditional picture of a spy who passes unnoticed. She proved to be really a remarkable asset. She was well liked by the Italians. She was invited to the Italian embassy, and she was able to talk to diplomats, and they were so starstruck that they would perhaps reveal more than they should have. And she either remembered what they told her, or the story is that she would write down everything they'd said and keep it in the sleeve of her clothes. And then she would tell Jacques Apte what she'd found out and she was able to inform him, for example, what the Italian ambitions were and the event of war. And similarly, she was able to get in during this period into the Japanese embassy and find out similar kinds of information.
- [18:41]
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Ellie Cawthorn
Quite extraordinary because as you say, on the face of it, she seems the opposite of what you'd want in an aspire. She wasn't exactly inconspicuous, was she? But I guess what you're saying is it was this ability to kind of access all areas and catch people off guard that really helped her get information.
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Hannah Diamond
Yes, it was. I think it was linked to her networks and also people confided her because this was work that she started during the Phony war. But after the defeat of France, of course, things became much more difficult when the Germans occupied France and when the Germans Invaded. She left Paris and she went to stay in her chateau that she was renting at that time in Milan, in Dordogne. And Jacob Tay came to join her there, actually, and he talked to her about General de Gaulle, who, of course, had left France at the time that Marshal Petain decided that he would ask for an armistice with the Germans. And General de Gaulle made this appeal from London on 18 June, 1940, calling on the French to carry on the fight for the flame of resistance to carry. And Josephine Baker was immediately caught up and excited by the idea. Yes, she said, we must go to London and join de Gaulle and fight the fascists. Carry on the battle. And from there, Josephine Baker's commitment becomes a much more dangerous and serious one, because now she is fighting a war for the Allies. And, you know, if she'd been uncovered, it would have been very dangerous for her over and above the fact that she was an African American with Jewish links. And she and Abtey did make a journey to Lisbon because they thought if they could get to Lisbon and make contact with British intelligence, it would be a way for them to reach the goal in London. But what is so remarkable about this trip to Lisbon is that we see how Baker's celebrity became a huge advantage because Abtey was traveling with her undercover. He had a false identity as her secretary. And when they arrived at the border, we have this scene of Baker in all her furs. All the border guards, all the railway operators were absolutely amazed to see this huge star walking down the platform towards border controls. They ran off, fetched their wives, asked for autographs, and meanwhile, Abte, her secretary, who was traveling with her, passed unnoticed, carrying documents in his briefcase. You know, nobody gave him a second thought because the great Josephine Baker was there. And I think this story is very telling because it shows how she was able to use her stardom to move around at a time when it was very difficult, really. You know, there were serious constraints. She would get visas, she would create reasons why she had to travel. And on the pretense, under cover of these events, she could travel around Europe, pick up information and pass it on. I should just add that they did get to Lisbon as a result of this trip, and they did manage to make contact with the British intelligence base there. But the British actually said, you'd be much more used to us if you went back to France because we don't have much information. And they sent Josephine Baker and Jacques Abtet back to France initially, where they were working by now, beginning to rebuild contacts with Jacobte's old hierarchy, the Dezien Bureau, it was called the Counterintelligence Services. And they spent a little while back in France, but soon then moved to North Africa, to Morocco, where Josephine Baker and Jacques Captay were based for most of the rest of the war, on and off. But she was able to use her stardom and to advance the cause of the Allies and to uncover material that they really needed for the war effort.
- [24:28]
Ellie Cawthorn
Just before we talk about North Africa, quickly, why do you think that Baker wasn't targeted more by the Nazis when they occupied France? As you say, she was African American, she had strong Jewish links. Do you think her celebrity protected her in any sense there?
- [24:43]
Hannah Diamond
Yes, I think it was her celebrity. I think it was the image she projected as a star. I think she really wasn't suspected. They underestimated her. It just never occurred to anyone that she could be doing this kind of thing. And, I mean, this isn't uncommon. I've done a lot of work in the past on women in the French Resistance, and women were able to become involved in Resistance work by carrying on their everyday lives, by using their lives as a cover. Josephine Baker was even less likely to be here was this huge star. Why would she get involved in such activities? I think she was a woman, she was an African American. It just never occurred to anyone that she could be doing something like this.
- [25:33]
Ellie Cawthorn
So what did she get up to when she'd gone to North Africa then?
- [25:36]
Hannah Diamond
Well, once she settled in North Africa, she and Abtey, their role was to be at the center of a network of intelligence collection that they sent to London via these networks, which were linked back to France through the counterintelligence network that had re established itself. It has to be said that the French Secret service scene is massively complicated, as was the whole underground, clandestine world of spying. I'm sure that many of your listeners know the film Casablanca and how the whole of that city in North Africa, as well as Algiers and Marrakech, which was Josephine Baker's preferred city, was teeming with spies of all different nationalities. German agents, Italian agents, British agents, somewhat. They had more difficulty getting in. Special operations executives, agents, and also the Americans would arrive in the course of the early 40s, as Roosevelt started to make plans to think about the invasion of North Africa, the Allied invasion of North Africa. So Josephine Baker found herself right in the thick of this world of espionage. There was a real fear, I think, that the Allies really worried that Hitler might be able to do a deal with Franco and invade the French Empire. The North African territories that were actually under the aegis of the Vichy government. And then if North Africa went over to the Germans, that would have been an absolute disaster to the war effort. So having someone like Josephine Baker who could travel around, who could collect information about the people she saw, what was going on, and also very importantly, the local Moroccan, North African populations, where did they sit? Because the Germans were trying very hard to get the Arab populations over to their side. And Josephine Baker was able to talk to them. She was invited to banquets and they were all delighted to entertain her. And she was able to pick up information about the military. Were there any dealings with the German army, what was going on? And on these kinds of missions, Jacobte wasn't able to travel with her because he couldn't get the permissions. So she was operating alone, which really is very remarkable for this woman who was used to having a huge entourage.
- [28:17]
Ellie Cawthorn
Around her when the war was over. Was any of this work by Baker acknowledged straight away or was it kept secret?
- [28:26]
Hannah Diamond
There was an acknowledgement she was given in 1946. She was given a Medal of the Resistance. It has to be said that in the later part of the war, from May 1944, she'd done a lot of troop entertaining. She'd traveled around across North Africa and into the Middle East. She'd raised huge sums of money for the interior French Resistance. And she joined the Auxiliary French air Force in May 1944. So she was then wearing a French uniform. So that was a kind of recognition of the work she had done. And from that point she continued mainly entertainment work. She did do some work, but she was working by this point directly for the goalists for the Free French Forces, because of course the Allies were now very present in North Africa at this point. And this kind of more formal recognition of what she was recognized, you know, and she was wearing here was this African American born woman who was representing France in uniform. So after the war, she had a good war, Josephine Baker, and she came out of it very much as a heroine. It has to be said that other entertainers like Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf, didn't have such an easy time at the end of the war because they'd carried on performing and it wasn't really seen to have been the right choice to have been made. Their war records were examined and Marie Chevalier did feel that his reputation had taken a hit and actually Josephine Baker denounced him. She was very angry about him not being more involved in pro Allied work. But she had very clearly operated on the side of the Allies and of the French Resistance. So she got the resistance medal in October 1946. She was seen very much to have been a war heroine, but the details of what she did were less clear. And she didn't talk about it, people didn't talk about it. And we have to remember also she was dealing with secret intelligence. So, you know, she may not always have known exactly the nature of the information she was carrying and its importance later in the post war period. She did get a Legion d' Honneur in 1958, it was granted to her. And there was a big ceremony in her Chateau in 1961, which is actually quite late, and there was a delay. The first efforts to put her forward were not successful. And I suspect that one of the reasons that it was a bit late for her to get this medal was because Jacques Apted, he was a bit of an operator and his allegiances in the complexities of the French intelligence scenario were a bit confused. He did manage to establish himself as having been on the side of resistance. But I think this might have clouded Josephine Baker's reputation for a while and explains that delay.
- [31:26]
Ellie Cawthorn
After the war, she spent a lot of time on her estate in southwest France and she adopted 12 children. That's quite an extraordinary thing to do. Can you tell us more about it?
- [31:39]
Hannah Diamond
Yes, well, one of the things that my research has really interestingly shown up is that when she was in North Africa, Josephine Baker, who was there when the Americans arrived, had been terribly ill for a long spell. And we didn't mention that. Josephine Baker struggled terribly with her health. And she was laid up for several months from July 1941 right through until the Allied landings in November 1942. But once she had recovered, round about the middle of 1943, she was very excited by the American presence and she did a lot of entertaining camp tours. And one of the things she noticed when she was doing these tours was the treatment of the African American soldiers who under segregation, which operated very strictly in the American military, they had to carry out the more menial jobs, bury the dead, run the canteens. So she started to speak out about, you know, how proud she was of the African American servicemen. And she talks really at this early stage about how they should be recognized. And this is, I think, the very beginnings of her civil rights activism. Now, when after the war, as many African Americans had expected that segregation would be brought to an end as a result of the post war changes, when this didn't happen, Josephine Baker took it upon herself to become very involved in anti racist activities. First in France, and she would intervene also in America. And a part of this drive she had was the adoption of this Rainbow Tribe, this family of children who she brought together and raised in her chateau in Milan in an effort to show the world that human beings, whatever their origins, whatever their religious affiliations, can live together successfully. And so it was that she brought the media into the chateau and people saw her with these various children that she'd brought in from around the world. It really is an extraordinary story.
- [34:00]
Ellie Cawthorn
So, as you say, this Rainbow Tribe, as she called it, that she established in France, of these 12 children, was just a part of her activism in the post war period. She also became involved, as you alluded to, in the American civil rights movement. What did that involvement look like?
- [34:15]
Hannah Diamond
She would do concerts in America and she absolutely refused to accept the color bar she required when she did these concerts that she should have African American performers. And she was able, I think, to really make an impact in the American context. I mean, there was a little bit of, I think, talk back about some of the work she was doing, because it had to be said that she never spoke about what was going on, for example, in the French colonies at this time. And this post war period was a time where the geopolitical globe was being heavily impacted by decolonisation and the French. The loss of the French colonies and, of course, the Algerian war were a very big part of what was happening. And Josephine Baker never spoke out about what was happening in the French context. We talked about how she was very involved with the Free French movement and Josephine Baker had a very strong affiliation for de Gaulle. And I found her correspondence, her post war correspondence with de Gaulle, which shows us she had a huge devotion to him as a leader. And of course, in the post war period, he does become president. And I think that this commitment to France and to de Gaulle meant that she kept quiet about what was going on in the French decolonisation context, which didn't always sit well with some of those who were observing her activities in the American context, where she was very outspoken about the treatment of African Americans. And you can see that there was a bit of a tension there. And again, I would date that back to her wartime experience, where we see the beginnings of this really quite passionate devotion that she had for General de Gaulle, which cuts across some of her activism in terms of where she directed it.
- [36:23]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah. So she was at the March on Washington in 1963. She was seen alongside Martin Luther King. What can you tell us about her? And her final swan song, if you will, before her death.
- [36:37]
Hannah Diamond
Well, she was indeed at the March of Washington. She was one of, I think, two women who spoke there and proudly stood in that Free French uniform, that Air Force uniform that I alluded to, that she had started to wear in mid-1944. And according to the children, it was the same uniform that was pressed and washed and all her medals that she had by this point now, because she had her Medal of Resistance and her Legend d' Honneur, she must have cut quite an extraordinary figure. But all the while, she was still very supportive of de Gaulle, and she would go and in France she would do benefits. One of the reasons, I think, that she continued performing during this period was that her project in Dordogne, the Chateau, not only was she raising her children in this extraordinary. It really is an extraordinary place, but she made it into a tourist resort. She wanted to build a real business there. And she actually did use the children as a pool for tourists to come and visit the area. My goodness. There was a nightclub, there were restaurants, there was a wonderful pool in the shape of a jewel. And initially, she had married again. She divorced Jean Leon during the war, and in 1947, she married Jo Bouillon, who was a band leader who she had met doing a benefit tour. And from then on, she worked really quite intensively. She went to Italy, I think she did some shows with Edith Piaf, and she worked with Jo Bouillon, his orchestra that accompanied her. And they then fell in love. And they were married in 1947. And he was very much behind her activism, this Frenchman, and he stayed on board for a good while. He took on. She would go off and sing and bring in money, and he would stay in the Chateau Les Milandes and operate it as a business. She brought her mother over from America to help manage the children. She really didn't know what she was taking on with all these kids. It was a massive undertaking. And I think by the time she brought home about the sixth child, Jo Bouillon said, that's enough. I'm not doing this anymore. Because she didn't really have her feet on the ground. People took advantage of her. The business really didn't run. And once Jo Bouillon was no longer there, she ran into trouble very quickly. So she lost in the end. So cut a long story short, she tried to raise funds. She was helped. She even actually, apparently, the King and Queen of England, she wrote to them and asked for help. She wrote to everyone. Brigitte Bardot did an appeal on her behalf, but they couldn't make it Work. Princess Grace of Monaco was very impressed with Josephine Baker. And when she got into so much trouble, she offered her a home. And Josephine Baker, with all her children, who were teenagers by this point, moved to mental near Monaco and set up in a villa there. And quite late in her life, around 1973, Josephine Baker became involved with Princess Grace's backing in a new concert tour. And she'd become actually something of an icon, particularly, I think she'd gone to America and done a number of performances and been very successful, particularly with the gay community. She was seen as this extraordinary figure and she loved it. She loved being back in performing. And it was decided that this comeback performance that she did in Monaco should move to the Theatre Bobigny in Paris. And so it was that in 1975, she put together an extraordinary performance that had chapters in it from all across all aspects of her life. Right from the beginning, Dans Sauvage, right through the war, when she traveled around in jeeps. There's a scene of her doing a performance on a jeep, and it was hugely successful. There was really a huge response to this comeback performance by Josephine Baker, and she was thrilled. And she danced all night and celebrated after the performance. And then on the second night, again, it was hugely successful. But some point after that second performance, I think she went to have a rest and she had a stroke. She never woke up. And she was found surrounded by the rave reviews of her performance in bed. I mean, it's quite a way to go, isn't it, to have done this huge comeback and she had a huge funeral. I mean, she had drawn so much attention to herself through this comeback tour. She was given military honors for her work during the Second World War. And there was a huge parade that went in front of the Theatre Bobineau where she had performed. And it was a huge media event. Princess Grace, who didn't go for this huge theatrical spectacular event that had been her televised funeral, arranged for a much smaller, personalized ceremony near where she lived, where the children were intended. In fact, Jo Bouillon came over also. He'd moved to South America by this point. Children, close friend Jacques Abte was there. And so it was. She was buried and has a lovely stone showing the importance of really of the military role that she played during the Second World War.
- [42:21]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, that leads us on nicely to our last question. Hannah, obviously your book on Josephine looks primarily at her military work and her work during the war and espionage. But if we take her life as a whole, how do you think we should remember her today?
- [42:35]
Hannah Diamond
Well, I think what I find most impressive about Josephine Baker is the way in which she was able to to make the best of her situation from someone who really had nothing. She took advantage of her circumstances, she took the opportunities that were presented her. She became this huge star. Then she mobilized her stardom, her celebrity, to do something for the causes she believed in. Not just during the Second World War when she became a spy and helped the Allies and then performed and supported De Gaulle and the French Resistance. Then we've talked about the post war, she used her celebrity again as a platform to speak out for what she believed in to promote the African American cause. Then she had this project which was her Rainbow Tribe. And she did everything she could to try and provoke this message of inter human comprehension and building a better world. So the lesson I take from her is that of course this coincides a bit with the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. That it's a time to think about what we can do, how we can make the best of our own situations to promote those causes that we believe in, like those people who were so bravely fought on our behalfs during the Second World War. So yes, that's the lesson I take from Josephine Baker and that people are not always what they seem. She was not this great diva star. She's often referred to as a diva, which I don't like. She was very multifaceted and had many layers to her that we would not have known if we did not dig quite deep to find out about her.
- [44:27]
Lowes Advertiser
That was Hannah diamond speaking to Ellie Cawthorn. Hannah is professor of French History at Cardiff University and the author of Josephine Baker's Secret War. And you can find out more about Josephine's life in an article by Anna Maria Barry, which is available now on our website historyextra.com you can find a link in the episode description.