In November 1940, at the Spanish border, the most recognizable woman in Europe handed over her travel papers, and the checkpoint dissolved into happy chaos. Border guards crowded in. German officials hovered. Autographs were requested and granted, smiles distributed like party favors.
The paperwork got the briefest of glances.
Nobody looked at her sheet music, which was covered in invisible ink: the positions of German divisions in western France, troop numbers, airfields, and photographs of the landing craft Hitler was building to invade Britain.
Nobody looked under her dress, where more photographs were pinned.
And nobody looked twice at the quiet man traveling as her secretary, who was in fact a French intelligence officer carrying the rest of the packet; more than 50 classified documents bound for Charles de Gaulle in London.
Why would they? She was Josephine Baker. She was the banana skirt and the Charleston and the pet cheetah with the diamond collar. She was an entertainer, a decoration, a delight. It did not occur to the men at the border that she could be anything else, for the same reason it had never occurred to anyone, anywhere, her entire life.
She had been counting on that since she was a child.
The Washerwoman’s Daughter
She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, the daughter of a washerwoman, into the kind of poverty where a childhood is something that happens to other people. She scrubbed floors for white families as a little girl. She slept in cardboard. She was 11 years old in 1917 when white mobs burned Black East St. Louis across the river: a massacre she would speak of for the rest of her life, the refugees streaming over the bridge, the fear that a mob needs no reason.
She danced her way out. Street corners, then vaudeville, then New York, and in 1925, at 19, a boat to Paris with an all-Black revue. Within a year she was the most talked-about performer in France. Within a few more she was one of the most famous women on earth; the Folies Bergère, the films, the cheetah named Chiquita she walked down the Champs-Élysées, the mountain of love letters and marriage proposals, the crowds.
France did not treat her as an equal exactly; it exoticized her relentlessly. But she could sit anywhere on a train, could eat in any restaurant, could buy a château. Coming from Missouri, that was not nothing. That was everything at the time.
In 1930 she recorded the song that became her signature: J’ai deux amours.
I have two loves, my country and Paris.
In 1937 she married a French industrialist named Jean Lion, and became a French citizen. The United States of America responded by revoking her citizenship. American law at the time did not permit her to hold both. The country she had scrubbed floors in, the country whose mobs she had fled at 11, formally cut her loose for the crime of marrying a Frenchman.
A Frenchman who was Jewish. Which meant that when the Nazis arrived three years later, Josephine Baker was everything the Nazis hated in one person: Black, bisexual, married to a Jew, and adored by the public.
Other stars in her position performed for the Germans and called it pragmatism, a necessity, survival.
But she had a different idea.
France Made Me What I Am
In September 1939, as France declared war, an officer of French military intelligence named Jacques Abtey came to assess whether the famous Madame Baker might be useful. The Deuxième Bureau did not, as a rule, recruit women, let alone celebrities.
Abtey left the meeting struck by her certainty. Her answer to his questions: “France made me what I am.”
The plan was almost insultingly simple. Josephine Baker went to parties: embassy parties, ministry receptions, the Italian embassy, the Japanese embassy — rooms full of Axis diplomats and officers who could not resist being seen with her, who talked freely around her because a showgirl was not a person to seriously consider. She smiled and listened and wrote what she heard on her arms, on the palms of her hands, on scraps in her underclothes, secure in the one fact she had known since Missouri: no one suspects the entertainment.
When France fell in 1940, she refused to perform in occupied Paris and withdrew to Château des Milandes, her estate in the Dordogne, where she sheltered resistance members and refugees. At one point the Germans, hearing rumors, came to the château to have a look. She received them at her own front door and charmed them blind while the people they were looking for waited inside her house. They left with nothing, happy.
But Josephine took the hint and prepared to move the operation south.
Then came the border run of November 1940, the sheet music, the pinned photographs, the autograph mob at the frontier. Then on to neutral Lisbon, where the documents went into the pipeline to de Gaulle and she went, naturally, to more embassy parties, harvesting Axis gossip in three languages. In early 1941, she and Abtey shifted base to Casablanca, running a liaison post between the resistance and British intelligence, and helping funnel passports to Eastern European Jews escaping through Spanish Morocco toward South America.
And then her body nearly quit.
In 1941, after a stillbirth, an infection almost killed her; she spent the better part of 19 months in a Casablanca clinic, gray and wasted, through surgery after surgery. Rumor reached America that she was dead, newspapers ran her obituary. She was not dead, though, of course. She was working.
A world-famous invalid can receive an endless parade of sympathetic visitors, and no policeman on earth thinks to wonder why the well-wishers keep coming. So the sickroom became a message drop, and the intelligence kept moving through a woman who could barely stand.
When the Allies landed in North Africa she got up, put on a uniform, and spent the rest of the war performing for the troops across Africa and the Middle East…with one condition she never once waived. The audiences had to be desegregated.
American commanders, running a Jim Crow army, wanted her voice badly enough to seat Black and white soldiers together to get it. She made the US military integrate its own audiences years before it integrated itself.
France commissioned her a sub-lieutenant in the women’s auxiliary of the Free French Air Force. When it was over they gave her the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, and, in time, the Légion d’honneur. The showgirl finished the war a decorated officer.
And in all that time, the Germans never suspected a thing.
And That Made Me Mad
Now prepare to get angry.
In 1951, at the Stork Club in New York, she was by then a world figure, a war heroine, and a legend. And Josephine Baker sat at a table and was refused service.
A young actress named Grace Kelly, dining nearby, was so disgusted that she took her whole party and walked out with Baker, arm in arm. When Baker protested the treatment publicly, the columnist Walter Winchell, a man with the power to end careers, smeared her as a communist. And Josephine’s American bookings evaporated.
On her US tours she refused, everywhere, to perform for segregated houses, forcing club after club in Miami and Las Vegas to integrate for a night whether they liked it or not. America’s answer was to make her show business poison.
On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, a 57-year-old woman stood at the Lincoln Memorial before a quarter of a million people, hours before Dr. King described his dream. She was the only woman given a speech from that podium all day.
She wore her Free French uniform. With all her medals.
The United States had taken her citizenship, taken her bookings, and taken 40 years of chances to do right by her. So she stood in front of it dressed in the uniform of the country that had let her fight; and told the crowd the plain truth: she had walked into the palaces of kings and queens, and she could not order a cup of coffee in an American hotel, “and that made me mad.”
Ma France, C’est Joséphine
Josephine had adopted 12 children from around the world, her “Rainbow Tribe,” raised at Les Milandes. By 1968 the money was gone and the château was sold out from under her.
In 1969, evicted, she sat on the back steps of the home she’d owned for three decades and the photographers caught it, and the picture of the destitute legend went around the world.
Grace Kelly, who was now Princess Grace of Monaco, found her. She gave Josephine a villa near Monaco, financial support, and in 1975, alongside Prince Rainier and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Grace helped mount a comeback: Joséphine, a retrospective of her 50 years on the Paris stage.
Opening night at the Bobino sold out; Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Grace herself sat in the crowd; the ovations went on and on. The reviews were rapturous.
Four days into the run, on April 12, 1975, Josephine was found in her bed, felled by a stroke, the glowing newspapers spread around her. She died that day, at 68, having gone out, quite literally, on her reviews.
France gave her a funeral with full military honors, the first American-born woman ever to receive them, and 20,000 people filled the streets of Paris. She was buried in Monaco, near where Grace would one day rest.
And then, on November 30, 2021 — the anniversary of the day she became French — the French Republic carried Josephine Baker into the Panthéon, the mausoleum of its immortals, alongside Voltaire and Rousseau and Hugo and Curie. Her family kept her body in Monaco, so the Air Force pallbearers bore a cenotaph draped in the flag, her medals on the lid, and inside it soil from the four places of her life: St. Louis, where America made her; Paris, which made her free; Les Milandes, where she hid the hunted; Monaco, where a friend from a nightclub in 1951 caught her when she fell.
She was the first entertainer, the first American, and the first Black woman in the building. President Macron said it in four words: “Ma France, c’est Joséphine.”
My France is Josephine.
She had two loves and spent an entire life finding out which one loved her back. The country of her birth revoked her citizenship for her choice of husband, smeared her for objecting to a lunch counter, and has never restored the passport it took. The country of her choosing gave her a spy’s work, an officer’s rank, a soldier’s funeral, and a tomb among its gods.
The washerwoman’s daughter from St. Louis is in the Panthéon, and the men who wouldn’t serve her coffee are…where? Nowhere at all.
Her name was Joséphine, and she was punk AF.
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