A Spy is Born: Josephine Baker, Pt. I (S6E1)

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine Baker grew up in severe poverty. In 1925, she sailed to Paris, where she sang, danced, and acted, becoming a sensation overnight. On the eve of World War II, French intelligence agents recruited her as a volunteer spy in the fight against Hitler.

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Above: 1930 poster advertising Josephine Baker’s latest show at the Casino de Paris. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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SHOW NOTES

Late-night audience at the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis (ca. 1920s). Baker attended the Booker on a regular basis as a girl, even skipping school to watch performances there.

"Josephine Baker in Bamville a.k.a. The Chocolate Dandies by an unknown photographer. Taken in 1925, this photograph shows off Baker's talents as a clown. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.

Josephine Baker, dancing in her famous “Banana dress” (1920s). These photographs showcase the overflowing energy of her choreography. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.

Josephine Baker with her pet cheetah, Chiquita. Baker appeared in promotional material and even took the feline with her to opera performances.

Advertisement for a performance at the Casino de Paris (1930s), which incorporates the figure of the now-famous Chiquita.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

---Baker, Jean-Claude and Chris Chase. The Hungry Heart. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1993.

---Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Josephine Baker in Life and Art: The Icon and the Image. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

---Lewis, Damien. Agent Josephine. BBS Publication: New York, 2022.

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TRANSCRIPT

The scratch of radio static is broken by a deep voice. It’s June 18, 1940, and a fifty-year-old man with short dark hair is dressed in military uniform, seated before a microphone in a London recording studio. He holds a sheet of paper with a short speech typed on it. The British government has given him permission to deliver an address over the airwaves to an international Francophone audience, aided by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The speaker is General Charles de Gaulle, and he is about to make history.

About a month earlier, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of France, de Gaulle’s home country. The Führer’s soldiers carried out their marching orders with unprecedented ferocity, overpowering the French with their hulking tanks and dive-bombing jets. France fell fast, and it fell hard. By June 14, Nazi jackboots were marching down the boulevards of Paris, and before long, a red, white, and black flag emblazoned with a swastika was flying from the top of the Eifel Tower. Refusing to surrender yet knowing that the Germans would almost certainly execute him if he stayed in France, de Gaulle resolved to wage his counteroffensive from abroad. With not a moment to lose, the general jumped in a car and sped toward the western coast of France. Then, he boarded a small boat and crossed the English Channel, docking in the southwestern county of Cornwall, England, on June 17. From there, the fugitive soldier was whisked to the British capital.

Today, before his microphone, he means to instill the spirit of resistance in his countrymen. He clears his throat and begins to read aloud in spare, supple French. The Germans may have triumphed thus far, he concedes, “But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!” This war is global, de Gaulle reminds his listeners, and France is not alone. “Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”

In certain respects, we should not remember de Gaulle’s appeal of June 18, 1940. It cannot have lasted much longer than four minutes, and it reached just a fraction of the French population. It wasn’t even recorded, quite probably because the BBC considered it unworthy of preservation. Nevertheless, we do remember it, and to say that we “remember” it is an outright understatement. It has gone down in history as one of the most significant addresses ever made in the French language. For generations to come, ex-servicemen and civilians alike would cite this speech as the great galvanic force that gave them the courage to rise up against the Nazis.

This radio broadcast—or perhaps one of the dozens that de Gaulle made later—had just that effect on an American-born woman living in a medieval castle in the south of France. This was perhaps the most celebrated woman of color in the world, singer and dancer Josephine Baker. She had called France home for fifteen years, and now more than ever, Baker was prepared to give her life to defend it.

In the mid-1920s, when Josephine Baker made her earth-shaking debut in France, she never could have imagined that she would one day serve that country as a spy. But that’s exactly what she did when Nazi Germany instigated the Second World War. The Nazis would have condemned Baker’s activities as a criminal offense and almost certainly would have put her to death if they had caught her. Today, we’ll hear how Baker escaped a hardscrabble life in the United States, how a treasonous naval officer convinced a French intelligence agency that it needed more spies, and why they recruited Josephine Baker of all people. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to episode 1 of Spy vs. Spy . . .

The Spirit of St. Louis: Josephine Baker, Pt. I

Hard Life in St. Louis

As an adult, Josephine Baker won fame and riches beyond imagination. This is all the more remarkable because she grew up in poverty, amid the racial hostilities of the Jim Crow era.

She was born Freeda Josephine MacDonald, on June 3, 1906, and went by Tumpty for much of her childhood and early adolescence. Why Tumpty? “I was fat as Humpty Dumpty,” she explained later. The daughter of Carrie MacDonald, a Black woman, Josephine never met her biological father, nor did she ever learn his full name. St. Louis city records refer to him simply as “Edw,” probably short for Edward. Despite the mystery of his identity, Josephine always suspected that her father was white. For the daughter of a Black woman, she had light skin. According to an acquaintance, Helen Morris, “You could always look at Tumpy and tell she was not entirely black.”

Within a few years of Josephine’s birth, her mother married a man named Arthur Martin. Josephine embraced him as her stepfather, always calling him “Papa.” The Martins moved into a small apartment, where the family grew to include four children in total. The kids slept together on a single mattress, crawling with bedbugs, in the same room as their parents. Conditions were cramped as well as unsanitary, but Josephine’s brother, Richard, had fond memories. At bedrime, he used to lie with his head at his big sister’s feet and try to stick his toes up her nose.

As a child, Josephine never knew a time when money was not scarce. Carrie worked as a laundress, and Arthur hauled gravel with his horse and wagon, but their combined income could not support them and their children. Josephine was expected to chip in. Along with her brother, Richard, she would rise at five in the morning and walk the three blocks or so to Soulard Market, where the two of them collected discarded vegetables and took them back home to eat. In addition, Josephine devised several ways of making money. Sometimes, she did humdrum odd jobs—sweeping sidewalks or shoveling snow for the well-heeled, white families on Westmoreland Avenue. Other times she essayed riskier money-making ventures. Josephine led a merry band of neighborhood kids who occasionally stole coal from railway cars. Josephine used to climb up to the open roof of the vehicle, scoop up armfuls of the pitch-black cargo, and toss them down, her friends waiting below to collect the booty in sacks. Sometimes, the locomotive sprang to life while Josephine was still in one the cars, standing on a mountain of coal. The others shouted at her to jump down, but Josephine kept snatching coal and chucking it downward, leaping to safety at the last possible moment. The juvenile railroad robbers hawked their plunder at discount rates to wealthy white folks who wanted to heat their homes on the cheap.

This was intermittent, take-it-where-you-can-get-it income, and there were worse ways to spend an afternoon than pinching coal from a train. But Josephine learned that steady employment in more traditional—you might say, lawful—professions could easily prove soul-crushing. When she was just eight, her mother sent her to work as a maid in the home of a Mrs. Kaiser. Josephine’s taskmaster was cruel in the extreme. She beat the future superstar on a whim and at one time plunged the little girl’s hands into boiling water because Josephine had left the pot unattended. Josephine was forced to sleep in the cellar with the family dog. The silver lining was that Josephine loved—and would always love—animals. “Animals interest me,” she once explained, “because they are simple and uncomplicated as babies.” She became fast friends with the dog, whom she nicknamed Three Legs on account of an accident that had claimed one of his limbs. Another pal of hers was Tiny Tim, the family rooster. One day, Mrs. Kaiser, perfectly aware of Josephine’s fondness for the bird, plunked him on a scale and declared him fit for slaughter. She assigned Josephine the task of killing him, threatening to dock her pay if she refused. Josephine squeezed the rooster between her knees and slashed his throat with a pair of scissors, fighting back tears as blood flowed into a bowl.

In addition to enduring the harsh realities of working-class life, Josephine was confronted with the virulence of anti-Black racism. Nothing exemplified the volatile race relations of the area quite like the events of summer 1917. Earlier that year, the U.S. entered World War I, and factory jobs opened up across the nation as able-bodied men left home to enlist. That’s what happened in East St. Louis, Illinois, an industrial city on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. It was right across the river from St. Louis, Missouri, where Josephine lived. As part of the so-called Great Migration, southern Black Americans moved northward, pouring into East St. Louis to replace white residents who had gone to the trenches. Many white natives did not take kindly to the influx of Black labor. Tensions simmered until they exploded in deadly violence on July 2. White mobs descended on major thoroughfares, dragging Black passengers off streetcars onto the sidewalk, beating and shooting them indiscriminately. Rioters leveled guns at white doctors who tried to help the wounded. Some police officers showed indifference toward the violence while others stoked it. A journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the carnage like this: "For an hour and a half last evening I saw the massacre of helpless negroes at Broadway and Fourth Street, in downtown East St. Louis, where black skin was death warrant.” The attackers set fire to the homes of Black families, forcing them to flee. Many escaped to St. Louis, Missouri, across the river. Estimates put the death toll as high as 200, with more than 6,000 Black residents left homeless. The race riots scarred Josephine and her brother, Richard, both of whom watched the massacre unfold from St. Louis. “We could see the houses burning and the sky red with fire, smoke,” Richard told Jean-Claude Baker, Josephine’s adopted son and biographer.

Booking the Booker

Rather than memorizing multiplication tables or learning to write in cursive at school, Josephine spent many a weekday studying the art of vaudeville—song, dance, and comedy—at maybe her favorite place in St. Louis: the Booker T. Washington Theatre. The self-styled “House of Mirth, Merriment, and Music” opened in 1913 and stood at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Market. Blues musicians, female impersonators, and comedians frequented the venue. The performers were predominately Black, as was the audience. (Josephine was especially enamored of an act called William’s Dog and Monkeys, and, really, who wouldn’t be? At one point, a dog scampered about in full police uniform, and another trained canine pulled a wagon onstage with a monkey at the steering wheel.) The Booker opened for business at ten o’ clock in the morning and remained in operation until well past midnight. Fork over ten cents at the door and you could treat yourself to hours of entertainment. Because it was located a block or two away from St. Louis’s heavily trafficked Union Station, many of its patrons came in to kill time as they waited for their train.

Josephine attended the Booker the way other little girls might have gone to church—every Sunday, sometimes in the company of her siblings. Before long, she began to haunt the Booker on weekdays, too. When Josephine skipped school, the truancy officer, Albert Scott, went looking for her at home. Not finding her there, he asked neighbors if they had any clue where she was. They just laughed and advised him, “Try the Booker.” But just because she wasn’t at school doesn’t mean she wasn’t learning skills that would serve her later in life. She examined how the female impersonators made their quick changes and how singers forged intimate connections with audiences. For example, blues singer Clara Smith, frequently billed as “Queen of the Moaners,” did a bit where she picked the shlumpiest guy out of the crowd and crooned him a love song. Later in life, Josephine would incorporate the same basic gesture into her own routine.

Josephine was eleven or twelve years old when her mother permitted her to work for a neighbor, a man in his fifties who went by the name of Mr. Dad. Josephine tidied up around her employer’s house, and in exchange he gave her money and clothing. “Then one day,” Baker related later, “he asked me to spend the night with him.” Afraid of what would happen if she stayed any longer, Josephine went home. A short while later, she heard a knock at the door of the family apartment. Her mother opened up to find Mr. Dad, drunk on cider. When he slurred his request to have Josephine to stay over, her mother insisted she obey. It’s unclear why Carrie would have put her daughter in this dangerous situation—maybe she viewed the older man as harmless or maybe she worried about losing him as as a source of revenue if she disobeyed. Whatever the case, the preteen refused. Her mother went ballistic over this brazen insubordination, taking hold of Josephine and beating her wildly, battering her face and tearing at her clothes. Crying out in pain, Josephine broke free and made a mad dash for the front door and then for the street, running without thinking, searching for somewhere to hide. Finally, she came to a stop in a courtyard outside a house with a court cellar attached to it. She crawled inside and hid until nightfall. “I begged God,” Baker recalled later, “‘Father, help me . . . let me die. I beg you! . . . I am so unhappy on earth.”

Such was her misery as she sat, teary-eyed and alone, her knees pulled tight against her chest. As the hours ticked by, however, she fended off her feelings of despair. Rather than die, the little girl resolved, she would leave St. Louis. At last, she peeked her head out of the coal cellar, and seeing that the coast was clear, she crept out of hiding and ran to the place she felt safest in St. Louis: the Booker T. Washington Theater. Inside, she went over to a white-haired man with a dark complexion by the name of Bob Russell, the director of a troupe of traveling vaudevillians. “I begged him for work . . . I said I had never danced but if I was allowed to I would do my best,” she recalled. The band leader gave her an impromptu audition, and climbing onstage, she jumped and twirled like she had seen other dances do. Baker remembered thinking, “Everybody was surprised to see how quickly I learned.” She must have learned quickly because she left St. Louis with Bob Russell’s company that night.

Baker told and retold this story over the years. Yet her brother, Richard, cast doubt on it during an interview with Jean-Claude Baker. Even so, that Josephine related this account over and over again says something about how she viewed the beginning of her career. Entertainment was not just her vocation but also her salvation, a ticket out of a city that had not been kind to her. It wasn’t the only time Baker mixed fact and fiction in the telling of her biography. A reporter once challenged her about a contradiction in her story, and she famously quipped, “I don’t lie. I improve on life.”

Josephine started her vaudeville career as a comic performer, and her comedic talents were discovered as a result of a happy disaster. The novice was to appear in a gaudy morality play titled Twenty Minutes in Hell, a fire-and-brimstone fantasia about a man who sells his soul to the devil. One scene took the audience to hell itself, during which the stage smoldered with crimson costuming and pyrotechnics. Josephine was cast in the role of an angel, dressed in pink tights and flapping a pair of great pasteboard wings while dangling from a wire. When it came time to do the scene, however, her wings got tangled in the scenery, and she spun around crazily, kicking her feet like an electrified frog. When the poor girl finally reunited with the floor, she went backstage thinking she had blown it, only to find Bob Russell teary-eyed with laughter. The snafu may have been a nightmare come true for the first-time vaudevillian, but it looked like a masterclass in physical comedy from where he was standing. “You’re a real clown, Birdy,” he chuckled, presumably using a nickname for her. “A born comic.” Baker was a comedian, through and through, and her knack for buffoonery would play an instrumental role in catapulting her from the stock of a travelling vaudeville company to the star of an international revue. We’ll hear about Baker’s ascent to stardom after a quick break.

Shuffling Off to Paris

The vaudeville circuit led to big changes in Joesphine’s life. For starters, she met a Philadelphia man named William Howard Baker, whom she married on September 17, 1921. She was fifteen years old. Josephine may have called William her “husband,” and he was nice enough, but her commitment to her spouse fell short of whole-hearted or even half-hearted. She would cheerfully put an ocean between herself and William in a few years’ time and eventually divorce him. The marriage a wash, but it did give her something that she carried with her for as long as she lived: the stage name of Josephine Baker.

In truth, Baker was more interested in stardom than romantic love, and she took a step in that direction one afternoon in 1921. Bob Russell’s company was in New York and Baker had some free time, she went to see Shuffle Along, a musical that was taking the Big Apple by storm. Written, directed, and performed by an all-Black creative team, it told the story of two rotten grocers who run for mayor in the fictional Jimtown, USA, hoping to enrich themselves in office. One of them wins, appointing the other his chief of police, and corruption ensues. The plot was simple enough but what made Shuffle Along a sensation was the comedic talents of its stars, its marvelous dancers, and its intoxicatingly toe-tapping, jazzy score. (Possibly play an excerpt here.) The show ran for a record-setting 504 performances, reportedly clogging Thirty-sixth Street with “curtain-time traffic,” and launched the careers of multiple A-list performers, including Florence Mills and Paul Robeson. Like just about everyone who went to see the musical, Baker was blown away and wanted to be part of it.

In 1922, she auditioned, re-auditioned, and re-reauditioned before finally landing a spot in the cast—not in the Broadway production but rather a touring company. She was just a chorus girl, and, as such, her job was not to stick out. But like many entertainers hungry for success, Josephine would shine even if it meant stealing the spotlight. In one early performance, the cast had just finished a big number, and many of them stood, motionless, waiting for the expected burst of applause. Josephine saw an opportunity and took it. The natural-born clown leapt out of the chorus line and acted a fool, crossing her eyes, sticking out her tongue, waving her arms, and strutting about like a constipated ostrich. Unfortunately, the stage manager would not tolerate Baker’s scene-stealing antics. He told her to pack her bags and catch a train home—she was fired.

But then, that night, Eubie Blake, one of the composers of Shuffle Along, called from New York to ask about how the performance had gone. The stage manager told him that it had gone swimmingly “except for Josphine Baker. She broke the line. I fired her.”

“How did the audience react?” Blake wanted to know.

Almost in spite of himself, the stage manager admitted, “The truth is, those crackers loved it.”

“Put her back in,” Blake directed. And that was that.

Baker must have stayed on Blake and Sissle’s good side because in 1924, they cast her in the follow-up to Shuffle Along, a musical revue called Chocolate Dandies. It was during a performance of Chocolate Dandies at New York’s storied Cotton Club that Josephine Baker caught the attention of the woman who would change her life forever, Caroline Dudley Regan. Mrs. Regan had journeyed to Gotham from Paris, where her husband worked at the American embassy. A budding impresario, Caroline wanted to resurrect Shuffle Along and take the show to the French capital.

Anyone living in or even just visiting Paris at the time would have appreciated the savviness of her scheme. The City of Lights had fallen in love with the rhythms and textures of Black culture, whether it originated in the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. In some respects, the craze had its roots in the 1900 Exposition in Paris, which featured two of the best-loved Black vaudevillians on the planet, Bert Williams and George Walker. The dynamic duo sang, danced, and acted comic skits, with the willowy Walker specializing in dandified tricksters while the stockier Williams played the dim-witted gull. The mania for Black culture, referred to as negraphilia, reached its apex during World War I. After the U.S. joined the conflict in 1917, the 369th Infantry Regiment, a largely Black regiment that would earn the moniker of the Harlem Hellfighters, fought alongside the French Army. With the Hellfighters came the 369th Infantry Band, whose stirring music inspired soldiers to charge into battle. But these were no ordinary military musicians. They were disciples not so much of John Philip Susa as of Duke Ellington. Under the direction of James Reese Europe, the Hellfigther Band introduced jazz to countless French (and British) servicemen who had never heard the genre, and by war’s end, the band had become one of the most talked-about musical acts in Paris (not to mention elsewhere in Western Europe).

When Caroline Regan saw Baker clowning it up in Chocolate Dandies—one production photograph shows Baker squatting, cross-eyed and bow-legged, her knees turned outward, her hands behind her back, a goofy grin on her face—she knew she had to have her for her Parisian production. She offered Baker the astronomical sum of $250 a week to star in the show. Baker asked her where she needed to sign.

Almost immediately, Baker transformed her public image in Paris. If she had mostly amused Americans as a buffoon, she enraptured Parisians as a dancer and sex symbol. Regan’s production premiered at the flagging Théâtre des Champs-Elysées under the title of La Revue Nègre (The Black Revue), taking the City of Lights by storm. On opening night, Baker danced as if in a hypnotic trance. Years later, a collaborator still remembered the all-consuming kinetic energy of her movements: “As she danced, quivering with intensity, the entire room felt the raw force of her passion, the excitement of her rhythm. She was exoticism personified.” The exotic and the erotic often go hand in glove, and Baker’s wardrobe—or lack thereof—certainly united them. She bumped and swayed to jazz almost entirely in the nude, placing her Blackness on exuberant display. La Revue Nègre ran for three months at the Champs-Elysées, and by the time it closed, Josephine Baker had become the toast of the town. Soon, she returned in one of her most iconic turns, La Danse Sauvage (The Savage Dance), another routine that exoticized and eroticized her. If you’ve seen one picture of Josephine Baker, there’s a good chance it’s from this production. (And if you haven’t seen a picture of her in this show, make sure to visit the Art of Crime website, where you can find one.) Baker danced topless, with strings of pearls cascading down from her neck and shoulders to conceal her nipples. Around her waist was nothing but a girdle of sixteen bananas. Paris loved Baker, so it’s no surprise that she took up residence there, eventually renouncing her U.S. citizenship and becoming a French citizen instead.

Megastar

As her fame increased, Baker worked hard to cement her celebrity status, taking steps to hone her craft and enhance her public image. To that end, she partnered with manager and music impresario Henri Varna. Over and over again, he had her walk downstairs, maintaining perfect posture as she balanced a tower of books on her head. Later, he gave her singing lessons, strengthening her voice. Other tips were geared toward keeping her in the headlines. Most notably, Varna had the bright idea to buy her an exotic pet, something along the lines of the giant anteater Salvador Dalí took for strolls on a leash. Varna paid a visit to a rare and exotic animal farm and came away with a domesticated cheetah. It was a match made in heaven—Baker adored her new four-legged companion and named him Chiquita. She had him photographed and featured the pictures on the cover of programs for her performances. One time, she put him on a diamond-studded leash and took him to an opera. He behaved himself for a while, reportedly perched in her lap like a house cat, only to jump down and stalk off halfway through. He leapt into the orchestra pit, giving the musicians one hell of a scare, while his frantic owner chased after him. Nobody was harmed, as far as I can tell, but the escapade made headlines as far away as the U.S. No doubt Varna was pleased with himself.

In December 1926, scarcely a year after her arrival in Paris, Giuseppe Abatino opened a cabaret with Josephine’s name emblazoned on the façade. Chez Josephine, as the nightspot was called, drew crowds eager to watch Baker dance and sing, accompanied by Chiquita along with other members of her expanding menagerie, including a pig by the name of Albert. Men and women flocked to the dance floor, bathed in the glow of blue chandeliers, drinking champagne and eating confections whipped up by the in-house chef. “I want people to shake off their worries the way a dog shakes off his fleas,” Baker proclaimed. “I never amused myself more. I made jokes . . Everyone did the Charleston, the boys, the maîtres d’hotel, the cook, the cashier, the errand boys . . . the goat [another one of her pets] and the pig . . . all in the midst of streamers, balls and all night the lights keep changing.”

Baker’s ascent was now unstoppable. Within a year of her arrival in France, she is said to have become the most photographed woman in the world, her face appearing in the pages of newspapers and magazines across Europe and the U.S. Her popularity led to a string of movie appearances, beginning with her starring role in Siren of the Tropics in 1927. (You can watch the whole film on YouTube, in case you’re curious, and it’s worth watching if you want to get a sense of Baker’s delightful physical comedy.) In addition to acting onscreen, Baker trained as a vocalist and enjoyed a dazzling recording career. Soon, she was touring in European capitals, singing, dancing, and doing comedy. Just like that, Baker was a megastar.

Vive la France

Baker had thousands of fans around the globe, but she could not always count on a warm reception when she traveled. In 1935, she planned a triumphant return to perform in her native country, her first time back in a decade, booking passage aboard a liner destined for New York. A friend and fan of hers, Miki Savada, the grillionaire granddaughter of the Mitsubishi founder, agreed to pick her up from the docks. She pulled up in a Rolls-Royce, a Japanese flag mounted on it. Mikki’s driver chauffeured her and her friend to Baker’s hotel. When the superstar attempted to check in, however, the receptionist was plainly surprised to learn that Miss Baker was Black. All of a sudden, Josephine’s room was no longer available. The receptionist offered no explanation, and, really, none was necessary. Mikki had the two of them driven to several other hotels, only for Baker to be denied service again and again. After a few stops, Mikki’s chauffeur began to complain about having to shlepp a Black woman around town. More and more mortified by the minute, Mikki had them dropped off at an apartment she used as an artist’s studio. Baker had held her head high until now, but as soon as she and Mikki went inside and closed the door, she burst into tears and collapsed to the floor, curling up in a ball. She had hoped for a hero’s welcome in New York City. Instead, it had told her to get the hell out. Her engagements met with disappointing reviews, and Baker sailed back to France, broken-hearted.

Anti-Black animus was by no means unique to the United States, and as the Nazis came to power, Baker found herself on the receiving end of it. As part of her 1926 European tour, she scheduled her first performance for Berlin. Hitler was not yet in power—he became the German chancellor in 1933—and his far-right ideology was still pretty fringe. Amid the genocidal ravings of Mein Kampf, the Führer derided Black people as racially inferior to Aryans, maligning them as “half-apes.” Hitler’s footmen, the Brownshirts, may have grumbled about the “immorality” of Baker’s Berlin debut, but she was by and large a hit in the German capital. Yet the tide of Nazism had risen markedly by the time she returned just two years later. When she took the stage of Theater des Westens, a storied opera house, detractors booed and heckled from the crowd, drowning her out as she sang. The following day, a Nazi-loving newspaper fulminated, “How dare they put our beautiful, blonde Lea Seidl [an Austrian actress] with a Negro on the stage!” Understandably worried about her own safety, Baker hired a team of bodyguards. Her stint in Berlin was supposed to last six months, but she broke things off after just three weeks.

Now fast-forward to 1937, when Baker found herself square in the crosshairs of top Nazi officials. That year, she headlined an extravaganza titled En Super Folies, organized in conjunction with France’s International Exhibition of Arts and Technology. The show was made up of of several routines, each one set in a different part of the world. In one, which took place in the freezing wasteland of the North Pole, Baker portrayed the fictional Queen of the North, traversing her domain on a sled drawn by dogs. The exhibition caused Nazi veins to bulge, though not so much because of Baker’s contribution. What rankled them most was a single painting by Pablo Picasso, among the most famous he ever painted, which went on display at the same exhibition, Guernica. This fever-dream hellscape was inspired by the brutal fire-bombing of Guernica, a Spanish village, carried out largely by the German air force. The painting’s jagged and tortured composition includes, among other horrors, impaled horses and screaming women. Picasso’s provocation had the desired effect of provoking Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister. Primarily in response to Guernica, Goebbels distributed a leaflet attacking the “degenerate” art of the day. For the cover illustration, the propaganda minister did not choose a reproduction of Picasso’s painting or even a picture of the painter. Instead, the front page featured an image of another artist whom Goebbels and his ilk decried as “degenerate”: Josephine Baker. Following the Germans’ lead, Benito Mussolini banned Josephine from performing in Italy.

On the eve of World War II, Baker was clear-eyed about where her allegiances lay and why. As her return to the United States had made painfully clear, she had little cause to hope for more than second-class citizenship in her native country. Her awareness of the entrenched racism in America only intensified her devotion to France. It was not just the country where she had risen to fame; it was where she belonged. The rise of Nazi Germany posed an existential threat to the happiness she had found in Paris. As Hitler set his sights on world domination, Baker voiced a readiness to kill Nazis with her own hands. She would never go that far, but she would put her life on the line to spy for the French Resistance in the fight against Germany. We’ll hear how Baker joined the French intelligence agency after a quick break.

The Aubert Affair

Josephine Baker spied for an agency called the Deuxiènne Bureau, the Second Bureau. Incidentally, the organization sprang from earlier hostilities between Germany and France. France lost the Franco-Prussian War to the Germans in 1871, leading to the unification of Germany. The French conducted a post-mortem and concluded that they would have fared better if they had gathered, analyzed, and acted on military intelligence more effectively. France established two agencies with the aim of preventing that from happening again. The first was aptly named the Premier Bureau, which handled information related to French and her allies. Meanwhile, the Deuxiènne Bureau concerned itself with intelligence regarding enemy armed forces. The Deuxiènne Bureau often cooperated with the British Secret Intelligence Service (the SIS) in its efforts to keep tabs on France’s adversaries.

The intelligence officer who recruited Josephine Baker was a guy by the name of Captain Maurice Léonard Abtey, or Jacques for short. Though French by birth, Abtey was the picture of Aryan beauty—blond-haired, blue-eyed, and well-proportioned. He was fluent in French, English, and German, and could also hold his own in Arabic. He studied at the Center for Advanced Germanic Studies in Strasbourg before joining the ranks of the Deuxiènne Bureau. The intelligence agency saw him as a strong candidate because he had immersed himself in German language and customs, enabling him to think like the enemy. Abtey was known as something of an eccentric. He commuted to work by kayaking along the Seine, the picturesque river that undulates its way through the heart of Paris. In fact, Abtey was most at ease on the water. An hour of alone-time in his kayak was a welcome respite from the high-stakes demands of espionage. Abtey reported to a senior officer named Paul Paillole at the Deuxiènne Bureau.

A little less than a year before Jacques Abtey brought Baker into the fold, the Deuxiènne Bureau faced a grave intelligence breach. This emergency encouraged the agency to expand its team of operatives, including the recruitment of Josephine Baker.

The story started with William Alfred “Biffy” Dunderdale, a British spy who loved choice wine, fast cars, and beautiful women. In fact, Dunderdale to some degree inspired the fictional secret agent, James Bond, and we’ll hear more about him in a later episode. One day, in summer 1938, Dunderdale phoned the Deuxiènne Bureau with an urgent message. Taking care to keep his call as brief and uninformative as possible (you never knew when a German spy was listening in), Dunderdale asked if he could come by for a meeting the very next day. The staff at the German desk exchanged inquisitive glances and inquired if the matter were serious. “It’s serious,” came Dunderdale’s terse reply.

The next day, he parked his Rolls-Royce in front of the Deuxiènne Bureau, walked inside, and took an old elevator down into the nether-regions of the building, which were located beneath the storied Church of Invalides. Dunderdale strode down a corridor that led to a locked iron door. The British agent rang a bell in the ancient stonework before declaring his name and the reason for his visit through an opening covered in wire mesh. Satisfied that Dunderdale was who he said he was, the doorkeeper ushered him in.

Once he was alone with Jacques Abtey and Abtey’s superior, Paul Paillole, Dunderdale unclasped a leather briefcase and produced a thick envelope, addressed to a mailbox in Dublin, Ireland. Thanks to the combined efforts of the FBI and MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, Dunderdale had learned that Germany’s military intelligence service, the Abwehr, was instructing its operatives to post sensitive intelligence to this mailbox. The Germans had registered the mailbox anonymously, in the neutral country of Ireland, where German spies could more safely handle top-secret intelligence.

Natrually, Paillole and Abtey wanted to know what was inside the envelope Dunderdale brought with him. Making use of a tried-and-true spy hack, they steamed it open, allowing them to access its contents without breaking the seal. Stuffed with papers, the parcel held sensitive information about the location and capabilities of French naval vessels in the Mediterranean. The details was handwritten, and the writer had simply signed off as “A.” Abtey and Paillole photographed the documents, returned them to the envelope, and resealed it. It was then posted to its intended destination. Nobody would have a clue they had looked inside.

The implications of this discovery were grave. France boasted the fourth most powerful navy in the world, after Great Britain, the United States, and Japan. If war broke out between France and Germany, this information would unquestionably give the Germans an edge on the seas. Whoever compiled this dossier, moreover, was quite probably a member of the French navy. The first line of one of document read, “The Mediterranean fleet can set sail in twenty-four hours.” France’s warships had recently prepared to launch on short notice if necessary, but this information was not widely known. In other words, Paillole and Abtey almost certainly had a traitor on their hands.

These intelligence officers worked overtime to ascertain the identity of the mole. They had precious little to go on apart from what they could glean from the documents: they were possibly looking for a member of the navy with knowledge of warships in the Mediterranean and possibly with a name that began with the letter “A.” To fill out the picture, they consulted an ace handwriting analyst, who drew up a profile of the suspect. He concluded that their man was, well, a man, aged about thirty, with a sinewy physique. The suspect further appeared not to have attained a high level of education and also lacked a “strong personality.” This analysis would come in handy, but it would not suffice to unmask the traitor.

Palolle and Abtey thought it best to bide their time and wait for “A” to make his next move. Maybe then he would slip up in a way that shed light on his identity. Their patience paid dividends. Before long, another parcel landed in the Dublin mailbox, whereupon Dunderdale swooped in to intercept it. In this communication, “A” alerted his contacts in the German intelligence service that he was about to deliver a veritable trove of documents. Then, in mid-August, Dunderdale obtained yet another missive from “A,” this time postmarked from Antwerp. The point of origin struck agents of the Deuxiènne Bureau as significant. Antwerp was in Belgium, a neutral nation, and because it was a neighbor of both Germany and France, it would make an ideal rendezvous point for operatives working in those countries. Might “A” have traveled to Antwerp for an in-person interview with Abwehr officials?

Paillole and Abtey hatched a plan to find out. Anyone who checked into a hotel in Antwerp was required to fill out a registration card on which they printed their name, date of birth, profession, and nationality. If the Deuxiènne Bureau could obtain those cards and search them with a fine-toothed comb, they might uncover the name of their culprit. Aided by several Belgian colleagues, Paillole gathered all relevant records dated August 16, 1938, the date of A’s latest dispatch, from various hostelries in Antwerp. Next, Abtey and a fellow intelligence officer sifted through the resultant pile of registration cards, keeping an eye out for one that looked like it might belong to A. Finally, they came across one that had been completed by a French officer named Henri Aubert, born July 12, 1914. Part of Jacques Abtey dismissed the discovery as “too good to be true,” but despite initial doubts, he wasted no time in bringing the registration card to Paillole’s attention.

More than one Aubert had enlisted in the French navy, Paillole and Abtey learned, but only one was a twenty-something with the first name Henri. He worked on a destroyer based out of Tulon in the southeast of France, aboard a ship called the Vanquelin on the Riviera. Pulling a few strings, Paillole procured a sample of Aubert’s handwriting and compared it to the messages retrieved from the Dublin mailbox. It was an identical match. The next course of action was clear enough yet far from simple. The French authorities needed to capture Aubert and try him for his crimes, but Paillole wanted to make the arrest without the Germans’ knowledge. If the Abwehr believed that Aubert was still feeding them reliable information, the Bureau could use that to their advantage, sending the Germans junk intelligence in A’s name. Striving for the utmost secrecy, Paillole and his team plotted to strike on a Sunday. Aubert had been assigned to guard duty that day, but apart from him, hardly anyone would be aboard his vessel, the Vanquelin. Attired in plain clothes, one or two agents from the Deuxiènne Bureau boarded the ship and met up with the captain, dressed in full uniform, complete with white gloves and a saber at his hip. The men proceeded to Aubert’s cabin and knocked at the door, which opened to reveal a muscular young man. Before Aubert had time to salute his commanding officer, the agents shoved him inside, bolting the door behind them. Their quarry was trapped. Speechless, Aubert looked from his captain to the newcomers, swiftly intuiting the reason for the intrusion. What was worse, a set of naval codebooks lay open on his desk—he was copying them out for delivery to the Abwehr. Naval vessels used these ciphers whenever they communicated over the radio. With this intel in their possession, the Germans could decipher the movement orders for French vessels. As a member of the Deuxiènne Bureau put it, “Had we been at war, the enemy would have read our movements like an open book and we would have faced disaster.”

The Vanquelin’s captain broke the silence that had fallen over the room. “Aubert, you have dishonored the Navy. All you have left to do now is atone for your crimes.”

Every traitor has a self-justification for selling out his country. Some do it out of lofty ideological convictions, but others not so much. Aubert’s motives for turning traitor were as banal as could be, and it took about two seconds for the Bureau to discern them. Scouring the naval officer’s desk, they discovered several letters from a woman named Marie Maurel. Zipping his lips when it came to his own offense, Aubert opened up about her, unprompted. “She is my friend,” he protested while they removed the letters. “This matter is none of her business.” Enough said. Paillole sent his men to have a little chat with Mademoiselle Maurel. She was his mistress, they soon found out, and she liked to live in luxury. Aubert resorted to the high crime of peddling intelligence all so he could hook her up with a love nest. Maurel was very much aware of where the money was coming from and even accompanied him to Antwerp to meet with German intelligence. An Abwehr operative who made her acquaintance later called her “cold as a fish . . . He was under the law of this girl. We owed this choice recruit to her.”

With Aubert behind bars, Paillole and company entered the next phase of their mission. Out of an abundance of caution, several of his colleagues recommended that the Navy change its codes post haste, but Paillole disagreed. To do so, he warned, could tip off the Germans about Aubert’s detainment. Instead, Paillole directed one of his men to type up a new dispatch under the guise of A. He explained that he had typed this message rather than written it by hand as a precaution, to ensure that nobody could identify his handwriting. The letter was duly deposited in the Dublin PO Box, and a reply arrived in short order. The Germans applauded their inside man for the added security measure and thanked him for his usefulness. The Abwehr paymasters also promised to compensate him for his troubles. The spies shipped a novel to the home of Marie Maurel, Auber’s paramour, with banknotes hidden between its pages. Over the next few months, the Deuxiènne Bureau funneled this payment for shoddy intelligence—along with several others—into a slush fund. They could use the account at a later time.

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice turned. Aubert was tried and sentenced to death. His mother begged for clemency, to no avail. On March 8, 1939, a firing squad executed Ensign Henri Aubert, who went to the grave with genuine contrition. Maurel was given a more lenient punishment. She went to prison for three years, callously indifferent to the fate of her lover.

Not long after Aubert’s execution, a package arrived at the Deuxiènne Bureau. An agent unwrapped it to reveal a spy novel by the French writer, Charles Robert-Dumas. Robert-Dumas was best-known as the inventor of Captain Benoît, an intelligence officer who famously worked for the Deuxiènne Bureau. Robert-Dumas’s novels became best-sellers in the 1930s as Western Europe inched toward war. Tucked inside the volume was a scrap of paper with a single word written on it: “Congratulations.” The parcel could only have come from the Abwehr, Paillole concluded; the authorities had kept Aubert’s trial and execution under wraps but the Germans must have found about them and grown wise to the game the Bureau had been playing with them. The Nazis had eyes and ears all over.

Josephine Baker, Honorable Correspondent

In many ways, the Aubert affair had ended positively. The French had caught the bad guy with the help of Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale—a reminder of the value of their alliance with the British. Yet there was also a feeling that the Deuxiènne Bureau should have caught Aubert sooner, and there was little doubt about the cause of the delay. As vital as it was to France, the Bureau was woefully understaffed and underfunded. On account of these unfortunate financial limitations, adding to the payroll was out of the question. Luckily, the Bureau had another option. In the past, the agency had recruited what were known as Honorable Correspondents (HCs), volunteer spies from all walks of life. According to Demian Lewis, author of Agent Josephine, the key qualifications from becoming an HC were “a certain independence of means, for no one could afford to pay them; an unbending moral rectitude, and a heartfelt patriotism.”

In 1938 or ’39, a Bureau affiliate nominated an unlikely HC candidate: Josephine Baker. Somehow, the intelligence officer had become aware of the entertainer’s devotion to France. The recommendation was met with skepticism, much of which boiled down to plain, old gender bias—the Bureau was always a bit of a boys’ club. Then again, Jacques Abtey maintained that a female HC could fly under the radar more easily than a man precisely because she was a woman in a male-dominated arena. There was also the problem of Baker’s day job. Givne her line of work, Pailolle prejudged her as superficial and fragile, “one of those shallow showbiz personalities who would shatter like glass if exposed to danger.” Others worried that Baker’s star stature would work against her. Spies were supposed to blend in with their surroundings, not draw attention, and nobody turned heads like Josephine Baker.

Abtey decided to give her a shot, making an appointment to speak with her about possibly joining the Bureau as an Honorable Correspondent. He hopped in a car with a colleague of his, who took the wheel, and set out for Baker’s home address. They drove to Le Vésinet, an affluent suburb on the western outskirts of Paris, picturesque with its parklands and lakes. At last, Marouani pulled up to Baker’s sumptuous pad, a neo-Gothic mansion. When the two stepped out, a greeting emanated from the gardens: “Hello!” Abtey turned to see the glamorous superstar as he had never expected to: emerging from some bushes, she had a plain felt hat on her head and a hand in the pocket of well-wron gardening trousers. In the other, she held a small tin can full to the brim with snails. Baker had no intention of cooking them for escargots. Nope, this catch was meant to feed her flock of pet ducks. Baker set the can down and invited them inside.

Abtey attended the meeting under an assumed identity, so his colleague introduced him as an Englishman by the name of “Mr. Fox.” Baker raised an eyebrow and scrutinized him. A Brit come to recruit her for the French intelligence service, huh? Looking back on his first encounter with the celebrity, Abtey realized that she was sussing him out as much as he was her. A white-coated butler showed them inside. The three of them took a seat in front of a warm fire, and the butler uncorked a bottle of champagne, pouring a glass for each of the visitors.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Fox,” Baker began, playing the warm-hearted hostess. Then, raising a glass, “To France.”

Abtey explained the responsibilities of an HC. Baker had friends in high places—she knew career diplomats at the Italian, Japanese, and Brazilian embassies, to name a few—and she would be expected to coax intelligence out of them without betraying her role as an Honorable Correspondent. Backstabbing high-powered officials in service to the enemies of France would inevitably expose Baker to danger. She could very easily land in prison, and in the worst-case scenario, she could wind up dead. Abtey asked if she appreciated the risk. Her answer nearly awed him for its impassioned directness. “France has made me all that I am,” she began. “I shall be eternally grateful to her . . . I gave my heart to Paris, as Paris gave me hers. Captain, I am ready to give my country my life. Dispose of me as you will.” Abtey remembered staring into her “beautiful, slightly misty eyes” as she made this pronouncement. Dusk had fallen, and Baker looked stunning in the failing light—a “true goddess of the night,” as he put it. Seated beside the fire, he made his decision; Baker was in.

“You will accept me to work for France?” she asked when he indicated as much, scarcely believing him.

“From now on, you are one of us,” he confirmed.

France would fall to Nazi Germany in less than a year. Next episode, we’ll hear how Baker quite literally risked her life as a spy for the French resistance.