Long Way from St. Louis

For more than a quarter-century, Josephine Baker of the Folies Bergere and other Parisian spots has been the cream in French coffee, but she never thought she could be the same kind of success in the U.S.A. This week La Baker was learning better. Billed into Broadway's big, brassy Strand Theater for a three-week run, she had made such a hit that she was thinking about a U.S. tour.

Josephine, 45, who got her start in the all-Negro musical Shuffle Along (1922), gave the Strand's customers her latest continental routine. When she came onstage in a skintight, rhinestone-encrusted, white satin gown designed for her by Parisian Couturier Christian Dior, her brown-skinned elegance made bobby-soxers gasp and their boy friends whistle. Anybody who thought a quarter-century in Paris might have made "Josephine" languidly European soon realized his mistake. For all her high-styled gowns, Josephine was still mugging, swaggering and strutting with the free & easy abandon of a pig-tailed kid on a St. Louis street corner. "I Love You." Few of the customers had heard Baker's French, Italian and Spanish specialties before, but when she delivered them in her big soprano with a shake of satiny shoulders and a dip of swiveled hips, the exotics were as easy to take as Tennessee Waltz. In one number, dressed as an Arab street hawker in mountainous fez and awning-striped poncho, she passed out presents of flowers and haberdashery, shook hands, hugged small fry, shared a bottle of champagne with front-row customers, all as though she were an old friend just back from a short trip abroad.

When Josephine tells her Strand audiences "I love you," she obviously means it. But she is still surprised at her big success. Twice before, when she interrupted her expatriate career to try out her talents in U.S. musicals, the critics were unkind. After she made a big hit in Havana this winter, she let U.S. showmen persuade her to try again.

"I Want to See." Josephine still prefers life in France. A French citizen since 1937, she spent the occupation in North Africa as a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force doing intelligence work, driving an ambulance and, in her spare time, entertaining troops. Off-season nowadays, she lives in a 12th-Century chateau in the Dordogne Valley with her third (and second white) husband, Bandleader Jo Bouillon, her mother, brother and sister, and a whole menagerie of monkeys, dogs, cats and parakeets.

Her memories of the U.S., like the remembrances of Singer Ethel Waters (see BOOKS), include some bitter episodes: a poverty-stricken childhood, discrimination in hotels, restaurants and theaters. When she goes on tour this time, she thinks, maybe folks will be friendlier. "I want to see what will happen," says Josephine. "I'm curious."

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