And what a story it is!
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A queer musical history
By
Michael Bronski
The Josephine Baker Story
Ena Wood
Sanctuary Publishing
How to order
"Josephine Baker is a St. Louis washer-woman's daughter who stepped
out of a Negro burlesque show into a life of adulation and luxury in
Paris... [but] in sex appeal to jaded Europeans, a Negro wench always
has a
head start." So read the Time magazine review of Baker's
heralded American tour in 1936, after she had been the toast of
Europe for 15 years. The racism Baker thought she had left behind was
still rampant. It's no surprise
that Baker-- like Garland two decades later-- became a gay icon for
her ability to be extravagant and overcome endless obstacles. In her
chatty and informed biography,
The Josephine Baker Story (Sanctuary Publishing,
cloth, 350 pages, $25), Ena Wood charts the amazing life and
times of "LaBaker"-- as she was called by her adoring
French fans. Baker's life reads like a novel written by a cross
between Toni Morrison and Danielle Steele--
she rose from poverty in the US, became famous for dancing nude
except for a skirt made of bananas in the Folies Bergere, worked for
the French resistance, spoke out vehemently against the Nazis (and
all forms of
racism), married numerous times and become a glamorous international
star who performed until her death in 1975. Madonna move over!
Wood's biography is standard-issue, with no great surprises
and culled mostly from preexisting works and general histories.
Still, it is a far sight better than the other Baker biographies over
the past
two decades. Lyn Haney's 1981 Naked at the
Feast glossed over the fascinating complications of her life, and
Phyllis Rose's "feminist" 1989
Jazz Cleopatra took an oddly hostile tone to the performer.
Wood could be better
at grappling with the deep contradictions of Baker's life and
politics-- as when she supported Mussolini's 1935 invasion of
Ethiopia, seeing it as a great leap of freedom for Ethiopians, or her
very public approval for Eva
and Juan Peron (maybe it was Evita's fabulous sense of style)-- but
she is good at delineating what made Baker a star and why she is as
vibrant today as she was 80 years ago.
| Author Profile: Michael Bronski |
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Michael Bronski is the author of
Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility and The Pleasure
Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the
Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes
frequently on sex, books, movies, and
culture, and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
| Email: |
mabronski@aol.com |
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