SECRETS OF FOLIES BERCERE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 181, 1 August 1936, Page 6 (Supplement)

SECRETS OF FOLIES BERCERE.

JO. BAKER'S RISE TO FAME

(By GASTON VAUCLAIRE.—Copyright.)

(No. 1!.)

SHE came on with a rush, arms and liips working overtime, kohl'd eyes flashing and rolling, and nothing between her and the audience except a loincloth of bananas. I had gone along to the Folies that night because I had heard that she was good. But I was not anticipating very much. I had seen so many of these coloured artists. Usually it was only the novelty of their colour that attracted. That and a certain racial rhythmic quality in their songs, which I found grew monotonous. "She's unusual. She's vivid. A personality, and it gets across to the crowd. She'll be a hit." So I had been told. But I was saying sceptically to myself: "No. A season's mild success, maybe. We-haven't had a coloured woman outside the chorus line in years. There are enough colour-conscious people in Paris to carry this new one for a few weeks. But a hit—a sensation —in blase Paris? No." Such was my attitude, my mood, as I sat back in my stall) and focused on the coloured migrant from ''The Plantation" show, which, they told me, had made the fame of the French-owned Montmartre place in New York. The hit she registered on me thus came with extra force because it was entirely unexpected. I was astonished at energy with which she undulated her sinuous hips. I was amazed at the

adroit artistry of her manipulation of arms and legs as shapely as any I had ever seen, and as supple as so many snakes. Knew All the Tricks. Her technical skill fascinated me. She might be a jungle child, but she was professionally trained for stage work to the last hair. She knew all the tricks and used them so expertly that you forgot she was consciously putting on an act. In the midst of our civilised Paris she gave you the illusion of sitting in at an African jungle, party of the more sophisticated sort. At any. moment you expected to hear gorillas thumping their chests among the trees and baboons grunting their applause.

And the girl had personality. You would never mistake her for anybody else. Once seen, you would fnever forget her. She was not just a coloured performer. She was. an artist, and she was somebody. ... • ,

The pigmentation was just an added pungency, like a hot tangy sauce poured so generously over the familiar song-dance-and-sex dish; it made you gasp.

"This creature is going to mean something in Paris if she stays," said I to myself; and I went back-stage presently to have a talk with her in her dressing room. 'About fifty other men had gone hack-stage on the same errand; but I had a right of way in that place which proved useful on such occasions. To-day, of course, Josephine Baker is as much a part of Paris life as the President, Mistinguett, Carpentier and little Chiappe, once of the police.

Jo Baker had to give up using her hands and hold out her skirt, the golden shower was so large. Back on Broadway, she tohl me, she had been getting 25 dollars a week. The waiters up in the Montmartre painted pictures of Paris which gave her the idea that .she might make a lot of money there.

Meantime, she had to reach Paris. She couldn't save enough out of her salary to pay the fare. But a woman who came up to the Montmartre every night, and had the negro cult in her blood, gave her the money. Negro Piccaninny and Paris Star. The piccaninny who gave her first show before a dozen other piccaninnies in the cellar of her mama's house in St. Louis, Missouri, with, footlights made of candles stuck on old fruit cans—the little black girl who ran away with a coloured troupe when she was 13 because she felt nobody wanted her, and learned thus to sing, dance, make-up and fight, too—the lithe young negress ,wh'o .got her first real chance in the chorus of a black revue called "Shuffle Along I .' when she was IG—this youngs woman celebrated her twenty-first birthday' in Paris by signing a contract which her £000 a week!

_ She is 31 now, yet she retains still the lithe figure of an ingenue, an inexhaustible ardour, and a childish belief in luck and mascots. o .... One evening I went to a supper party at her Versailles chateau (she motors into the theatre, and out again to the country every night; she can't sleep in Paris). A marvellous place; a fairy palace she has created out of her littlegirl dreams, and given a mauve colour scheme, even down to the silk sheets on her huge Louis Quinze bed, and the collar round her pet chimpanzee's neck. There were a dozen of us. Jo presided in the poised, assured manner of

a princess of an ancient culture—a woman of the world, able to hold her own in any company. The little negro child, running about barefoot in the squalid negro quarter of St. Louis, Missouri, had come a long way in a very short time, and learned all the way up. It is in the business of learning as they climb that most of these successful stage stars fall down, once you meet them on social occasions away from the stage, far from the footlights. There were seven dishes on the menu in a perfectly served meal. She ate only one of them. They were the plovers' eggs that came with the first glass of wine. She ate three plovers' eggs and drank nothing.

The next three dishes she passed and then, when the piece do resistance— which was veal, deliciously cooked with

Bronze Dancer's Exotic Allure.

little young vegetables—was served, she nodded to the butler, who brought her a thick sandwich. "What have you got there?" I asked her. ITer painted lips revealed her flashing teeth, her liquid brown eyes danced with laughter. "Cannibal sandwich," said she. "This is a party, so you must forgive me indulging. This is my good time—my favourite dish. I do not allow myself to eat it too often." She took it in a slim hand with gilded finger nails, and ate it with relish: rawchopped meat and onions, between wholemeal bread and fresh butter. Cigars and cigarettes were passed. She smoked nothing. I perceived the secret of that enormous vitality, that marvellous figure, preservied in a member of a race notori-

ons for early fading and obesity among tlie females. Slie disciplined herself rigidly. We, whites all, had indulged; but she had not. We had drunk; but she had not even sipped water with her meal. She took what her palate and body hungered for, but in small quantity; and her well-exercised human machine extracted from it the last scrap of nutriment —of bone, muscle and nerve. There was not enough left over to make fat.

I figuratively took off my hat to her. I thought of all the wild stories told of her—and of all her pranks. To millions she typified erotic sin, scented and gilded. - The 'mere legend of her had provoked riots in Vienna and other big cities east of Paris, and closed theatres to her in place where lascivious shows were no new thing.

But what was she, really? A hardworking professional artist, guarding health and figure, preserving her energy, luxurious, yet lonely.

She had only one real friend and' confidant. "He was her Italian manager, Pepito Abatino. She relied on him to keep her' right, in business, contracts, and in conduct. What he said she should do, she did. And that in itself is a self-discipline which not one in fifty stage stars I know, spoiled, or arrogant, or stupid", would' have the intelligence and the will-power and the self-control to do.

She could learn, too. She was really only a dancer when ehe burst on Paris— a dancer, and a woman. But she realised that if she were going to build up from that, she would have to add other items to her repertoire. You can't hold Paris for ever on dancing. The ebbing of the Charleston craze might easily leave her as demode as last year's hat.

So she went to school again, took singing lessons, elocution lessons, engaged the best teachers of the acting art; and when she came back to Paris in 1929 she was an allround revue artist—the world's best exponent of typically negro dances, an excellent singer and mime, and an accomplished actress. The Lucky Rabbit's Paw. Still, underneath the cultivated mask of her professional artist's determination to keep on top, and make money by preserving her assets, she remained a child. This party was not to celebrate any stage success. It was to share with some chosen friends her joy at winning half a million francs at the races — half a million francs on two horses nobody but Jo had fancied at Longchamps. " - Jo is no follower of form, or the repository of inside stable information. She had followed a hunch that she [ coiild toot go wrong that day, and had picked the longest-priced outsiders in sight. . Just, as she thinks that her early childhood, miseries must be due to a dog howling when she was born—a sign of bad luck for the! babjr, that—so she places Implicit faith in the age-old good luck symbol of the rabbit foot. Men have given her money, diamonds, pearls, one even an ostrich. But of all the gift givers, the one she remembers with emotion- is a total stranger, who once threw on to the stage a rabbit's foot. I Maybe it was the paw of a rabbit he had shot in the country, find eaten for dinner, and possibly it was to show his distaste and not his admiration for her performance. No matter; a rabbit's paw is a good luck token, and. Jo picked . it up and treasured it, as . something more valuable than a diamond.

Undoubtedly her luck was in. She went on, and up. And her superstitious reverence for the rabbit's paw rose with every step up in her salary, denoting the growth of her appeal as a boxoffice attraction in what is notoriously the world's most fickle city. Not that the possession of the paw prevented her from saying her prayers in her dressing room before going on (sometimes she has to hurry, 'because the call boy is pressing, but she figures ' that a kindly God understands and forgives), and again, in her scarlet silk pyjamas, before climbing into her mauve-sheeted Louis Quinze bed. (To be "continued.)