She was the first international black superstar, the "ebony Venus" who later reinvented herself as "Mama of the world". Born the illegitimate child of an African-American maid in St Louis Missouri, Josephine Baker became the sensation of Paris at the age of 19. One lovesick fan committed suicide in front of her. Music-halls fought bidding wars to employ her. Only a few years after she stole food and coal to support her family, Josephine Baker was the best-paid performer in 1920s Europe, driving a convertible car upholstered in lizard skin and parading a pet cheetah on a leash. An archbishop called the black singer and dancer "the embodiment of decadence", but French people bought Josephine stockings, beauty products, cigars, perfume, jewellery and dolls - even "Charleston" Camembert cheeses with her image on the carton.
Black Americans were eager to escape the racial segregation of 1920s America for a more tolerant Europe. In 1925, a talentspotter lured Josephine and her troupe from the Plantation Club in Manhattan to Paris. The US writer, Janet Flanner, attended the premiere of Baker's Revue Negre at the Theatre des ChampsElysees on October 2nd. Flanner described the show in her book, Paris Was Yesterday. "She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs," Flanner recalled.
"She was being carried upside down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood, like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instant of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue . . .
"Within a half-hour of the final curtain on opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the grapevine up to the cafes on the Champs-Elysees, where the witnesses of her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what they had just seen - themselves insatiated in the retelling, the listeners hungry for further fantastic truths."
Two years later, when Josephine supplanted the French star Mistinguett at the Folies Bergeres, her famous costume consisted of a belt of foam-rubber bananas and a few pearls. A vaguely aristocratic Sicilian civil servant named Pepito Abatino waited outside her dressing room one night. Abatino became her lover and agent, signing Baker's contracts and sharing her wealth. By the age of 23, the poor girl from Missouri owned the first of four cabaret-restaurants in Paris and New York and a 30-room mansion with three gardeners in an expensive Paris suburb. Her success in Europe deluded Josephine into believing she could be a star in the US too, despite institutional racism. In 1935, none of the big US hotels frequented by whites would even allow her to enter their lobbies. She blamed Abatino for her US failure and the couple split up.
Seventy-five years after her Paris debut, 25 years after her death, a tourism promoter in Perigord, in the Dordogne, Jean-Louis Chedal, has spent £2 million on the Chateau des Milandes, Josephine Baker's home for 30 years. "It's sleeping beauty's castle!" Baker exclaimed when she first visited the 15th-century monument in 1938. She rented Les Milandes for 10 years, turning it into a safe house for the French resistance during the second World War, then buying it to turn it into France's first tourism theme park.
Local notables - many of whom remember sipping champagne with Josephine Baker by her poolside - showed up along with dozens of journalists from Paris for the recent inauguration of Chedal's exhibition: "Josephine Baker, Woman of the World". As you enter the chateau, a life-size wax figure of Josephine, one of several produced by the Musee Grevin, stands in the foyer, draped in a white and gold Balmain gown. "J'ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris" coos Josephine, singing Vincent Scotto's 1930s classic. The French critic, Aldophe Borchard, called hers "a voice that could make you weep . . . a curious instrument that sounds like a saxophone, a muffled horn and a flute". Janet Flanner also captured the eerie enchantment of "her high, airy voice, half child's, half thrush's".
In the former billiard room, a wax model of 2nd Lieutenant Josephine Baker receives the insignia of a Knight of the Legion of Honour from a French officer. Baker signed up for General De Gaulle's Forces Francaises Libres (FFL) in 1940, saying: "France has made me what I am . . . I am ready to give my life for France". Among the resistance men who claimed to have spent the night in her chateau - and her arms - was the late Francois Mitterrand. The turret of Les Milandes hid a resistance radio transmitter. In one heroic performance, Josephine charmed German troops into abandoning their search of the castle. She was so nervous, she later admitted, that she urinated in her trousers. When Les Milandes became too dangerous, Baker became an FFL agent in North Africa, hiding secret documents in her bra and carrying sheet music inscribed with messages in invisible ink.
The exhibition contains magnificent nude photographs of Josephine in the 1920s, many of them never shown publicly before. The young dancer initially refused to pose naked, but finally accepted on the understanding that the pictures would be seen only by the artist Paul Colin, one of whose original red and black posters for the Revue Negre was recently auctioned for more than £200,000 at Christies. Josephine's prudishness evaporated with her success and a few months later she was boasting to a French journalist: "They like my derriere a lot in Paris . . . it's my bottom they send bonbons and flowers to. If it fell ill, if it sagged, I would no longer be famous at all. What flattered me the most was hearing that it was spiritual and witty. Since I heard that, I barely dare sit on it!"
Two dozen of Josephine Baker's lavish stage costumes were lent to the exhibition by an anonymous donor who had kept them in a trunk in a damp cellar since her death 25 years ago. Although he refused to comment, the costumes apparently belong to Akio Bouillon, the eldest of 12 children adopted by Baker and her fourth husband, the French orchestra conductor Jo Bouillon. Baker's brood included children from Asia, South America, Scandinavia, France, Israel and Africa. She wrote a book about them entitled The Rainbow Tribe.
The longest of Baker's many attachments, the marriage of "Jo and Jo" was not happy. Bouillon was notoriously bisexual, and Baker was enraged by his flirtations with, among others, the chateau valet. Nor was Josephine chaste; biographers record affairs with the writers Georges Simenon and Ernest Hemingway, the actor Jean Gabin and the architect Le Corbusier. King Muhammad V of Morocco and Fidel Castro - whom she visited twice in Havana, and whom her children called "Uncle Fidel" - may also have been lovers.
Jo Bouillon was horrified by Josephine's financial extravagance and could not understand her need to keep collecting children. Their domestic scenes, during which she threw furniture out of chateau windows, were legend throughout the Dordogne. After 25 years together, Bouillon left Les Milandes to open a restaurant in Argentina.
The saddest photo in Les Milandes shows Josephine Baker sitting on the back step of the chateau kitchen one morning in 1969, barefoot, clutching her pet cat and a few possessions in a plastic bag. The castle had been sold at auction the previous year, but Baker refused to leave, even when its new owner began closing off rooms to her. She sent her children to stay with friends before making her last stand in the kitchen, sleeping on a camp bed and eating tinned food. The new proprietor cut the water. When Baker went to the tap outside, the guards locked her out of the kitchen. She sat on the porch for seven hours before an ambulance came to fetch her.
Of Baker's children, only Akio, a 48-year-old Korean-born bank employee, attended the opening of the exhibition devoted to her. "Mama has been out of the public eye for 25 years," he explained. "I want people to talk about her again." Two of his brothers complained to the local newspaper that "Josephine Baker, Woman of the World" portrays only their mother's show-business career and neglects her later struggle against racism.
Thanks to the friendship of Princess Grace of Monaco and the French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, Josephine Baker made a triumphant come-back in the spring of 1975, six years after she lost Les Milandes. Mick Jagger was among the stars who attended. Two telegrams were read at the opening, one from then President Valery, Giscard d'Estaing, the other - a complete fabrication - from Baker's 12 children. At the age of 68, Baker gave an astonishing performance, but she suffered a stroke in her sleep and died - of happiness, her friends said - on April 12th.
When I asked Akio Bouillon what Josephine Baker was like as a mother, he looked into the distance and stifled a sob. Before marrying her in 1947, Akio's adoptive father described his bride as "a raging torrent, an arson attack, a nightingale".
The tale of the poor black girl from Missouri still seems romantic to the French public. Her children grew up at Les Milandes, but they were traumatised by their father's departure and their expulsion from "sleeping beauty's castle". "I had a wonderful mother!" Akio Bouillon insisted.
Then, after a moment's reflection, he adds, "It wasn't easy. I wouldn't wish parents like mine on anyone".
Le Chateau des Milandes in Castelnaudla-Chapelle, Perigord, is open every day from April to October, entrance fee 48 French francs. Tel: (05) 53-59-31-21.
