Ask anyone today what they know about the great Josephine Baker and they will inevitably trot out the fact that she scandalized tout Paris in the 1920’s by dancing wearing nothing more than a bunch of bananas. In this (far too short) film on her life we learn there was so much more to this multi-faceted woman than her glittering show business career and that in later life she was a Decorated French Resistance Hero in WW2, and then in the 60’s was the only female speaker alongside Martin Luther King at the famous civil rights ‘March on Washington’.
Born in 1908 to a black mother and an absent white father in St Louis, she dropped out of school at 12 years old and lived on the streets before eventually landing a job as a dancer in the chorus locally which led to a move and a new gig in New York. By the age of 19 she had become the scandalous and sensational star of the Follies Bergere in Paris with the help of those bananas and other props like her pet cheetah with his diamond encrusted collar.
In the 1950’s when she returned to the US as a star and a hero she was feted with a ticker tape parade in Harlem but she still suffered the indignities of segregation like all black performers at the time who were considered good enough to entertain (white) polite society as long they stuck to using the ‘coloureds only’ toilet and entered the Clubs through the kitchen door. Baker confused the audiences of that period even further by appearing not in the traditional attire of black performers but by dressing head to toe as the chic Parisian that she now was.
In later life she was so much in the forefront of the US civil rights movement, that Coretta King even asked her to become its Leader after her husband was killed. At the same time back in France Ms Baker also adopted countless orphans and established this enormous family of her own.
She didn’t always make the right choices with people in her life, and when she was in her 60’s and discovered that her hubby had blown all her money, she had to go back to work again. I remember that part well, cos as an impressionable young man in my very early 20’s I got to see her perform at the London Palladium, still every inch a star but thankfully sans bananas.
She may not have had the most perfect life, albeit that it was packed with some very heady moments, but she did have the most perfect ending. At the age of 75 after a sensation reception given to her by the audience at her ‘retrospective’ concert at Paris’s L’Olympia, she went back to her hotel to rest, and then died peacefully in her sleep that night.
This brief look at her life included a wealth of glorious archival footage but it does beg for a full length documentary and one soon whilst there are people still around who were touched by this incredible woman who against so many odds, achieved so much.
★★★★★★★★
Labels: biography, documentary, music
