COLOURED COUNTESS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19933, 31 August 1927, Page 7

COLOURED COUNTESS

ENTERING THE NOBILITY BELLE OF THE FOLIES BERGERE. LONDON, June 30 Josephine Baker, the coloured dancer and star of the Folies Bergere in Paris, is now the Countess di Abatino, wife of the Italian Count Pepito di Abatino of Palermo, whose father is a colonel in the Italian Army. The wedding took place before the mayor of the 9th Arrondissement in Paris on June 3, Josephine’s twentyfirst birthday, but the secret leaked out only the other night. It was the bride herself who announced the event at a party given to a number of friends at the cabaret which she runs in the Rue Fontaine. The wedding was attended only by the count’s relatives and a few friends of the dancer. “I hardly know how it happened,’.’ the Countess of the Folies Bergere told me this afternoon. “The count used to come to my cabaret every night to dance with me, and about a month ago he asked me to marry him. I thought it was a joke and said ‘Yes,’ and when he said he really meant it I laughed again and said I would keep my word. ‘ ‘ His mother came ‘up from Palermo to look me over, and she being satisfied, we had the knot tied on my birthday. ’ ’ The count, who is a timid, delicatelooking man of twenty-eight, was first struck by Miss Baker’s figure, but since the marriage he has forbidden her to have any more photographs taken in daring poses. “He will not dance with me at the Folies,” said the dancer, “but as soon as my engagement ends there he will play in a moving picture with me. ” When Miss Baker was asked why she had kept the wedding secret, she replied with a dazzling smile: “Oh, because I am only twenty-one, and this is the first time I have ever been married, and I didn’t know what the etiquette was.” Black but Comely. Josephine Baker may be, as stated, the first woman of colour to become a European countess, but not so many years ago there seemed a prospert of a woolly-headed South African halfcaste claiming admission by hereditary right to our own House of Lords. He was the son of a former Earl of Stamford, but it was proved that the marriage of his father to a Zulu belle had been more picturesque than legal, and the Stanford peerage passed to a distant relative. Possibilities of further complications of the kind seem to lie in the statement of a recent traveller in New Guinea that he was introduced to a “good-looking half-caste boy, the son of an Englishman who is heir to a peerage and has married a Papuan woman.”