Josephine Baker was a Black bisexual icon who dated Frida Kahlo and helped defeat the Nazis
This photo of the incredible American-born singer and dancer Josephine Baker was taken in 1925 (Getty)
An icon in every sense of the word, Josephine Baker is the bisexual goddess we all truly aspire to be, and the story of her life is like something from an action movie.
She dated famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was a top cabaret dancer and helped to defeat the Nazis in France through her work as a resistance spy.
The extraordinary American hero wasn’t always destined for greatness though.
Born into poverty in St. Louis in 1906, Josephine Baker started work aged just eight to help support her family.
She dropped out of school and worked as a cleaner for a wealthy white family, whom she lived with.
By the age of thirteen, she was married for the first time and working as a waitress.
To earn extra money, Josephine Baker danced on street corners – marking the start of her career as an entertainer.
At 15, she married a second time after moving to New York where she started dancing in clubs in Harlem.
Here, Baker began to explore her sexuality and had her first relationship with blues singer Clara Smith.
At 19, Baker left America for a European tour with a dance troupe and she never returned.
Baker set up a life in Paris as she was offered a spot in La Revue égre (“The Black Variety Show”).
She rocketed to fame with her often comedic dances, including her infamous performance dance sauvage (savage dance) in which she wore a skirt made of rubber bananas and danced the Charleston.
Over the following decade, she became known in the high flying circles of Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway and soon she became the highest earning entertainer in Europe.
Talking about her time living in America compared to France, Baker said that she was sick of “living in a country where I was afraid to be Black”.
“It was only a country for white people. Not Black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States… A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it anymore… I felt liberated in Paris.”
Her entertainment career came to a halt in 1939 after France declared war on Germany.
Baker began performing for French troops to keep morale high, though she never performed in Paris once the Nazis occupied it.
She became acquainted with Jacques Abtey, an intelligence officer who recruited “honourable correspondents”, and Baker became a spy for the French resistance which helped take down the Nazis.
She sought out information held at Portuguese and Italian embassies, worked on obtaining information about Mussolini’s troops, Japanese politics and German agents who were active in Paris.
Abtey’s position in the resistance became compromised after Germany invaded France in 1940, and so he began to travel with Baker under the guise of “Jacques Herbert”.
Her fame gave her a great deal of freedom and meant that he could collect information on Germany and then send it back to those still fighting in France.
Baker eventually left the country to North Africa, where she would associate with foreign dignitaries and gather information which she would write down on slips of paper and store in her bra.
During her days as a spy, Baker became incredibly unwell and was hospitalised in Morocco for a year.
It wasn’t until 1943 until she recovered from the infection, and in the year following she was inducted into the French Air Force as a second lieutenant.
Following the war, she was celebrated as a hero and awarded the Medal of the Resistance.
She went on to adopt eleven children – her Rainbow Tribe – and spent the rest of her days campaigning against racism, and of course entertaining.
Baker passed away in 1975. She was the first American woman known to have French military honours at her funeral.
Is there a new Josephine Baker movie?
In 2022, it was announced that Studiocanal had commissioned a movie about Josephine Baker – a biopic – with writer and director Maïmouna Doucouré at the helm.
The biopic has also been endorsed by Josephine Baker’s sons, Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker, and the Rainbow Tribe, which is what she dubbed her adopted children, Variety reported at the time.
Speaking about the project, Doucouré said:“It’s a huge honor and also a beautiful challenge to board this project with Studiocanal. To think that through fiction I can tell her great and profoundly rich story, her beauty, her fights, her wounds and her humanity.”
The film was due to start shooting in 2023 but there have been no updates about the Josephine Baker movie since then.
