Josephine Baker Was the Star France Wanted—and the Spy It Needed

T he Negro, historically, has always been in the espionage business. Subalterns survive by being watchful, warily gathering intelligence about those for whom they labor. The flight from servitude, even from an identity, involves spycraft, too. Harriet Tubman was called Moses for a liberator who slipped the confines of caste when his mother placed him undercover among the reeds in that pitch-daubed basket. Brown skin could be cloaked in soot and stereotype or in learned airs. George Harris, one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s high-yellow fugitives, attained an inscrutable foreignness with the assistance of walnut bark: “A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared; and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural to him, he found no difficulty in playing the bold part he had adopted.”

In this respect, Josephine Baker, who clowned her way into the heart of les Années folles—France’s Roaring Twenties—and played the civilized primitive when she got there, might have been the smoothest operator of the twentieth century. A dancer, a singer, and the most celebrated night-club entertainer of her era, she was at once inescapable and elusive. She first captivated Parisians in 1925 when she appeared on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, nude save for her feathers. The next year, at the Folies Bergère, audiences saw stretches of brown skin intersected by pearls and a skirt strung with tumescent bananas. As her star rose, Baker was known to stroll the streets of Paris with her fellow-­performer Chiquita, a cheetah collared by a rope of diamonds. Without actually laying eyes on the woman, a visitor to Paris would see her everywhere: in photographs and on those Paul Colin posters, as a doll in a shop window, in the style of Parisiennes palming their heads with Bakerfix pomade.

Who was she, really? Baker homages are usually unsubtle and beatifying, embodied by contemporary Black denizens of the arts who managed to do what Baker couldn’t: carve out stardom on American soil. Diana Ross, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have played in her silhouette; Lynn Whitfield received an Emmy when she starred in HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story” (1991). In “Frida” (2002), Baker has an affair with the title character, a nod to the free sexuality of each; she rumbas through “Midnight in Paris” (2011). Cush Jumbo staged an acclaimed tribute show, “Josephine and I,” in 2015, and Carra Patterson recently played her, with strange showgirl malaise, in an episode of the horror series “Lovecraft Country.” Ruth Negga and Janelle Monáe are now slated to take their turn, in a pair of TV series about her. Last November, Baker was inducted into the French Panthéon, the first woman of color to grace the hallowed monument, among such figures as Victor Hugo and Marie Curie. “Stereotypes, Joséphine Baker takes them on,” President Macron said. “But she shakes them up, digs at them, turns them into sublime burlesque. A spirit of the Enlightenment ridiculing colonialist prejudices to music by Sidney Bechet.”