But with her kind of stage magic, she didn’t need God’s help. Refusing “to be eclipsed,” she mugged, hammed, black-bottomed, and high-strutted like a “rooster flipping his tail.” She won a part in the first Broadway all-black musical
Shuffle Along,
and went on to the Cotton Club, where Caroline Dudley nabbed her for the Revue Nègre in Paris.
At nineteen Josephine realized her most florid fairy-tale fantasies. The French, primed by the primitivist movement and Baudelaire’s poems, adored her and saw her for what she was: a resurrection of the repressed sex goddess. The artist Paul Colin, also her lover, made her the poster girl of the twenties; Calder sculpted her; Picasso painted her; and Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw.” Women bobbed their hair à la Josephine, tanned their skin, and flexed their erotic muscle. She joined the Folies Bergère and danced her trademark fertility dance topless in a skirt of yellow phallic bananas to tumultuous acclaim.
With her name in lights, Josephine made the most of the aphrodisiacal charge of her celebrity and booty-shaking voodoo. She was a Masters and Johnson lab experiment fifty years before her time, living in tune with her V-8 anatomy. She slept with whoever made her “o’s” “q”: chorus boys, industry titans, and her secretary, Georges Simenon, later the author of five hundred books, and the only man to match her in sexual stamina and appetite.
According to lovers, it was “body to body the whole time” with no sentimental software and Josephine in the lead, often upright and dancing. Unlike the piteous Janis Joplin model of pop star promiscuity, however, the stag line of suitors was long. She accumulated dozens of marriage proposals (Simenon included) and forty thousand love letters in one year.
Josephine’s ability to snag men’s hearts sprang from more than the primitive lure of the dancing goddess. She was seriously charming, a velvet battering ram that could knock down any door and enter laughing. Like every great siren, she combined an irresistible engagingness with a personality as prismatic as an oil slick.
For her, the mix included a rare “gift for intimacy,” down-home candor, a fast mouth, a “delicious temper,” and an effervescence that just wouldn’t quit. Plus she handled herself with seductive authority. An “adorable” despot, she made it clear that she was one big woman. With the superiority complex native to sirens and pathbreakers, she thought she was a hotshot, a semidivinity anointed by destiny for great things.
Even so, she needed a helping hand. As is often the case with
sorcières,
a man mentored her and boosted her up the ladder. Pepito, aka Giuseppe Abatino, was a sleek self-created count, with a monocle, diamond rings, and a genius for spin. During their nine-year affair he not only recharged Josephine’s career through lucrative film and business deals but reshaped her image. Insistent that she grow artistically and personally, he transformed her from
la belle sauvage
to “La Bakaire,” a soignée chanteuse and cosmopolite.
By 1930 her metamorphosis was complete. She threw the
sorcière
’s delirium as before, but with a fire-and-ice curve. Singing French torch songs as she vamped down spiral staircases in four-foot plumes, she exuded the fascination of a “beast for sex” laced into the corset of a “little lady.”
She won Paris anew and lived as befitted her new persona at a baronial villa, Le Beau-Chêne, with a snakeskin-upholstered Voisin coupe in the drive. True to her divine pedigree, she strolled nude through the gilt salons (once greeting George Balanchine at the door in three strategic flowers) and populated the premises with a huge menagerie of “sacred” animals—monkeys, pigs, chickens, cats, parrots, and thirteen stray dogs.
Beneath the elegant packaging, Josephine also arrogated the goddess’s privilege of “unrestrained free love . . . unbounded by human conventions.” Despite Pepito’s management of her image and career, he had no control over this sovereign sexpot. She test-drove every stallion in her path, from the Swedish crown prince on his swan-shaped bed to the architect Le Corbusier in a steamer stateroom bound for South America. Two lovelorn Hungarians resorted to violence, a draftsman stabbed himself, and a cavalry officer dueled Pepito.
After Pepito’s death from cancer in 1935, Josephine tried her hand at marriage again. Her choice was the pick of the boulevards, a handsome blond money god and lady-killer, Jean Lion. But Josephine, like her nondomesticated ancestor Inanna, didn’t take well to marital captivity. She absconded with Maurice Bataille (making love nine times one afternoon) and danced nude at a neighbor’s dinner party. The union lasted fourteen months.
During World War II the polymorphic Josephine changed identities once more. A natural roadie and adventuress, she enlisted in the French resistance and traveled through Europe and Africa, infiltrating embassy parties as a singer and relaying coded information in invisible ink.
Although weakened by a life-threatening illness in Morocco, she opened a Red Cross club for black Americans and trekked across the desert to entertain the Free French forces. None of this crimped her amorous career. For five years she slept with the chief of counterintelligence who “worshipped her,” and toyed with such Moroccan pashas as El Glaoui, the fabled king of the south.
After the war her mythomania went to her head. Not content merely to channel the goddess’s life force, she sought to reinstate a mythical matriarchy. She acquired a consort, fourth husband Jo Bouillon, and set up command headquarters at a fifteenth-century castle in the Dordogne that flew her flag from the turrets.
She spent the rest of her life trying to keep Les Mirandes afloat. Like a satire of matriarchal utopias, her female-ruled “Capital of World Brotherhood” ran on square wheels. Villagers bilked Josephine, servants robbed her blind, and estate management, even with Jo’s aid, operated on a harum-scarum basis.
When her Great Mother dream culminated in a “rainbow tribe” of twelve adopted children, her minifiefdom went into arrears despite lucrative performances and tours across France and America. A splurge queen of excess, hubris, and “indiscreet extravagance,” Josephine squandered 1.5 million dollars in ten years. By 1963 her marriage and matriarchal kingdom were finished, and her health and resources, on the skids.
But as often happens with self-mythologizers, she rose from the ashes and orchestrated a fairy-tale ending. In her sixties, she roared back—all flash, sequins, and hundred-proof pizzazz. As she traipsed through the lobby in a body stocking and face spangles for her 1973 Carnegie Hall opening, a bystander cracked: “I’d like to fuck her.”
Although her sexual liaisons tapered off, she lost none of her allure. Robert Brady, a wealthy American artist and connoisseur of women, fell in love with her, and the two were unofficially “married” in a Cuernavaca church. The next year she died in her sleep in Paris with rave reviews heaped on her bed. Two days before, she’d mounted a one-woman show that recounted the miraculous story of her life, with thirty songs, twelve costume changes, and a smokin’ Charleston.
Josephine received a sumptuous state funeral with a twenty-one-gun salute and the Légion d’Honneur and Médaille de la Résistance. But like other seductresses, she was a subversive who “broke all the rules” and accrued too much sexual power. She provided no humiliating love tragedies for public consumption and fooled few with her “jes’ folks” self-parodies.
She was an artist who got away with it: got the men, the orgasms, the kudos, and the big career. For that she earned hostility from every quarter. Racist critics called her a jungle ape and “dingdong,” and Hollywood filleted her as a tortured star in
The Josephine Baker Story.
Yet Josephine was a mammoth
sorcière
with a “personality like thunder,” heiress of the supreme African female deity, the double-sexed Mawu-Lisa. As in the Yoruban proverb, when she danced, she revealed the secret of the drum—cosmic eros—and shunted that power to earth. The Brazilians believed she was a goddess, and e. e. cummings said she was both “infrahuman and superhuman,” an “unkillable something . . . beyond time.”
Josephine always subscribed to her divinity and erected a statue of herself as the Virgin Mary at Les Mirandes. But she must have found a truer reflection of herself at her Temple of Love, where she swam nude in a pool surrounded by three marble incarnations of the sex goddess: Diana, Circe, and the “singing and dancing,” “quick darting” Aphrodite.
Rhapsodic incantations accompanied the bacchanal of music and dancing in the cave temples. To the strains of primitive lyres and drums, shamans chanted the life-and-loin-quickening deity into being. Poetry and erotic rapture are inextricably entwined, joined at the groin. That’s why great lines of poetry raise a “desirable gooseflesh” and why amorists always advised suitors to memorize poems as the “best weapon” in love. Women may have dominated this genre too in prehistory. The cosmic sex queen Inanna, goddess of “incantations” and “adorning speech,” put a “rising cedar” in Dumuzi’s pants with her lascivious verses, and priestesses wrote the aphrodisiacal
balbales
for the sacred marriage ceremony.
Cynthia the Golden, c. 25 B.C., and Maria de Ventadorn, c. 1165
In ancient Greece, hetaerae, by necessity, had to be adept “in composing and reciting . . . poetry.” Even the nonartistic Romans had a soft spot for poetry. Although women weren’t permitted to publish their verses, a siren with poetic gifts, such as Cynthia the Golden, could cut a wide erotic swath.
Cynthia not only gained literary fame with her epyllions and lyrics but captured Rome’s finest, including the elegist Propertius, who enshrined her in his poetry. Far from a hearts-and-roses lady balladeer, she was a
puella dura
(tough dame), educated like a man and fond of fast chariots, blue hair dye, and torrid sex in the public thoroughfare.
During the Middle Ages—not a high tide for siren-poets—a renegade band of female troubadours briefly revived the breed. These privileged twelfth-century chatelaines, known as
trobairitz,
benefited from an oblique revival of goddess worship called courtly love in which suppliant men hymned the virtues of an idealized great lady. Most
trobairitz,
however, failed to sing their ordained part in the duet, the vulva-exalting song of Inanna, and composed heartbreak laments instead.
Maria de Ventadorn, “the most sought after lady ever,” was an exception, a queenly soul who commanded that her lover should “do
her
bidding” in her tenson. But the oppressive medieval regime wore her down; her husband departed for a monastery and left her silenced and legally enslaved to her two brothers.
Louise Labé, 1522-1565
By the Renaissance women’s lot had improved, and poetic
sorcières
made a comeback, especially in Venice among the cultivated Venetian courtesans. Farther north in Lyons, a thriving literary center and site of an ancient Roman temple to Venus, a poet-siren of a most unusual cast blazed into French history.
How unusual a sixteenth-century pageant makes plain. It was 1542, and the scene was a royal tourney in honor of Henri II and his siren-consort, Diane de Poitiers. Pennants snapped in the breeze, trumpets flourished, and armored knights vaulted into the arena, brandishing pikes, swords, and war axes.
One knight, with the motto
Belle à Soi
(Beautiful to Oneself), acquitted himself with such valor and broke so many lances that Diane and the king requested an interview. But when the knight lifted his visor, a young female face appeared—the blond, beautiful Louise Labé, better known as Captain Louise.
Even with her own violations of the feminine norm, Diane de Poitiers couldn’t have imagined a seductress like Louise. Light-years ahead of her time, Louise Labé jumped the gender divide, charted her own amorous destiny, wrote dazzling poetry, and became “one of the most celebrated women of her time.”
Her background ran true to form for
sorcières:
rebellion against an antipathetic mother figure (a cruel stepmother), a compensatory intimacy with men, and an extraordinary education. Her father, a rich merchant, provided his only daughter with distinguished tutors and allowed her to share lessons in sports and classics with her three brothers. She developed proficiency in martial arts and dressed in a doublet and velvet beret with a plumed feather.
At seventeen she found a lover and muse who awakened her poetic gifts and two years later made a match most calculated to foster these gifts. With a
sorcière
’s determination to get what she needed creatively, Louise married a doting, wealthy older ropemaker. He gave her freedom and financial security and helped her open a stylish salon for Lyons “men of quality.”
At these salons Louise wooed the select company with her conversation—to which one wrote an ode—and readings of her poetry and chose the crème de la crème for lovers. Suitors courted her with poems and daring deeds and wept on her doorstep, in such numbers that her man-killer reputation spread to Switzerland, where John Calvin denounced
La Belle Cordière
(the beautiful ropemaker’s wife) from the pulpit as a whore and public menace.
In a contemporary engraving, she’s more than beautiful. With eyebrows arched high over Bette Davis eyes, a puckish nose, a plump underlip, and an ironic half smile, her face radiates character and mischief. And she’s dressed to kill, in a resplendent
finistrella
gown with a French hood falling in heavy folds down her back.
But it was her poetry that drew men like postulants to her home. Under the spell of her verses, her fans and lovers orchestrated their publication and appended twenty-four eulogistic poems of their own at the end. The inspiration, typically, was reciprocal. After this volume appeared, Louise became famous, hailed throughout Europe as the tenth muse and “France’s greatest lyric poet.”
Yet her collection was nothing if not subversive. Her twenty-three sonnets, three elegies, and long “debate” all proclaimed female intellectual equality and erotic supremacy. These showoff poems deliberately employ the erotics of speech with intent to charm. Although they assume a Petrarchan disguise of amorous lament, they’re blatant vehicles of self-parade and seduction.