Black Venus

As the song says, she came a long way from St. Louis. Because she was cold in the ghetto there all during her childhood, Josephine Baker became a dancer to keep warm. As she grew into international fame as a stage and cabaret performer, the heat stayed on. New York had never seen anything quite like the red-hot way she sang and shimmied the Charleston and black bottom at the old Plantation Club. Paris, to which she moved in 1925 at age 19, had never seen anything like her at all. At the Folies-Bergere, she gave lessons in how to make an entrance. Down she would come on a mirrored platform clad in a bunch of bananas. Nothing else. "I wasn't really naked," she liked to say in later years. "I simply didn't have any clothes on."

That kind of talk never fooled her fans, who included Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway ("I was always popular because I was earning all the money," she recalled). Baker's art had more to it than just nudity, of course. It was the way she seemed to pass her songs from person to person in the audience, and the way the slinky soprano voice wooed the ears as much as the lithe body invited the eyes. By 1927 she had received an estimated 40,000 love letters and 1,192 proposals of marriage, one from a rajah who offered to get rid of his harem. Acting on the theory that the show never ended, Baker could be seen regularly strolling down the Champs-Elysees with two leopards or a pair of swans on a leash. Gradually she found France more congenial and became a citizen in 1937, eventually buying a medieval chateau in the Dordogne Valley where she slept in a bed used by Marie Antoinette. To the French, who adored her, she was simply "Josephine." In billings for her shows there was no need to add a second name.

Bitter Statements. Over the years she remained in the public eye; in the '50s she made several bitter statements about discrimination against her fellow blacks in the U.S. That did not prevent her from coming home periodically to perform in the U.S., notably for a four-concert Carnegie Hall series in 1973 in which she wore a spangled body-stocking and a towering headdress of flamingo-colored plumes. It seemed for a moment that the Folies-Bergere might rise again. "My whole life has been my art and the theater, and I really think the contact is necessary to stay fresh," Josephine Baker once said.

Last week, at 68, she was in Paris again starring in an elaborate new show celebrating the 50th anniversary of her debut. There a heart attack ended one of the most extravagant lives in show-business history. She had been working hard, rehearsing from 10 a.m. until midnight. As she herself put it: "For almost a septuagenarian, pas mal."

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