AGENT JOSEPHINE: American beauty, French hero, British spy, by Damien Lewis
In the first half of the 20th century, Josephine Baker was one of the most famous women in the world. Born into poverty in St. Louis, she became a star of the Paris scene in the 1920s. Stories of her strolling the Champs-Élysées with her pet (and sometimes co-star), a cheetah named Chiquita, had already made her a legend. In ‘Agent Josephine’, the prolific historian Damien Lewis takes this one step further in polishing this legend, arguing that Baker was a spy for the British.
Or more or less a spy. Lewis uses careful language to shield the title’s bold claim. In his author’s note, he writes that Baker told her biographer, Marcel Sauvage, “precious little about her war activities on behalf of the Allies, and very deliberately. She rarely, if ever, wrote about her wartime work in detail and went to her grave in 1975, taking many of her secrets with her.” A few pages later: “Baker had also played a little-known, clandestine role during the war, as a resistance fighter and possibly also as a special agent or spy.”
Baker was certainly an active member of the French Resistance. In her former home, Château de Milande, an entire wing is devoted to her war work. Lewis is an elaborate writer who can devote countless pages to his own biography: “My father and my stepmother, Lesley, live in France, in a beautiful medieval castle that they bought in a near ruin with cattle still in some places. of the buildings.” Sometimes he makes himself sound like the Indiana Jones of archival research, infusing the process with drama: “I knew the files I wanted existed and were supposedly open to the public, but where no official got their hands on them. .”
In his cinematic narration, Baker went on a horrific tour of Germany and Austria in 1928, where she witnessed firsthand the rise of fascism. During the early days of the war, she volunteered at a food bank in Paris. She became more active when the Nazis began occupying her adopted home and signed with the British Secret Intelligence Service, a CIA-related agency that collaborated with the French counterintelligence agency the Deuxième Bureau. Shortly after the fall of Paris in 1940, she convened a group at her castle to listen to a speech by de Gaulle.
Maurice Chevalier is used in the book as a kind of counterpoint to Baker’s heroism and courage. The two stars shared a stage in Paris, where it didn’t click. While she was working for the resistance, he sang light and uplifting popular songs on the German-controlled Radio Paris. Lewis quotes Baker about Chevalier: “a great artist but a very small man.”
In Lewis’s narration, there are deliberate echoes of Mata Hari, the World War I cabaret dancer who was found guilty of selling secrets to the Germans and shot. Baker certainly acted on her connections, including using her friendship with Miki Sawada, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to France, to gain entry to the embassy. And she used her own celebrity status — and a person who doesn’t fit anywhere, anywhere — as a cover, taking advantage of a tour of Lisbon and on to Morocco to escape France.
She brought a menagerie of exotic pets, including her Great Dane, Bonzo; Glouglou the monkey; Mica the golden lion tamarin; Gugusse the marmoset; and two white mice named Bigoudi and Point d’Interrogation. Lewis’s claim — that for Baker, unconditional love for animals was probably easier than relationships with humans — is both simplistic and probably correct. Either way, he quickly moves from this unusual foray into psychological analysis to return to his literary strengths, facts, and action.
Sometimes it feels like Lewis is content with the story Baker has consciously created for himself. The book dives in and out of the biography, from World War II to her troubled childhood as the daughter of a teenage mother; she was raised largely by her grandmother, who was born a slave. The United States is honestly portrayed as a country where racism is both widespread and overt. But France is idealized. Lewis quotes a Parisian club owner as telling a racist American patron, “You’re in France…and here we treat all races the same.” Lewis unreservedly accepts the claim, an overly simplistic and frankly inaccurate view of a country that struggles with race to this day. But, after all, this is a book that begins with Baker’s quote: “More is accomplished through love than through hate. / Hate is the downfall of any race or nation.”
Baker, a fascinating subject at a pivotal time in her life, still does not come alive on the page and remains unknowable. Perhaps her ability to conceal and charm is why she was so good at espionage, but Lewis doesn’t take much time to explore the question of how she came up with her own story. “I do not lie. I make life better,” she once told a reporter. But she is a complex woman, one who owned a Jewish prayer book, wore a djellaba in Marrakesh and had a Roman Catholic funeral when she died in 1975.
What is compelling is the ragtag, oddly chic crew of supporting characters that surround her in her adventures. There is Captain Maurice Léonard Abtey, who traveled to work in Paris by kayak on the Seine; Father Dillard, a Jesuit resistance fighter born in a castle; Hans Müssig, aka Thomas Lieven, “a German equivalent of James Bond” whose life story was turned into a thinly disguised book with the exceptional title “It Can’t Always Be Caviar.”
Wilfred “Biffy” Dunderdale is particularly memorable. The son of a shipping magnate (and supposed role model for 007), he drives around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, uses an ebony cigarette holder, and wears gold Cartier cufflinks. (The famed French jeweler makes so many cameo appearances in the book that Cartier should consider sponsoring, or at least sell replicas of the bracelet Baker commissioned a lover to engrave with the letters PFQA – for “stronger than love.”)
Lewis points out that the war years were ultimately Baker’s coming of age and real awakening. Baker returned to the American stages in 1951, where she was refused a room in New York, received threatening calls from the Ku Klux Klan, and was the subject of rumors that she was a Communist sympathizer. And yet she was ready to tackle her homeland and its problems; Baker spoke at the 1963 Washington March, prior to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Does it really matter whether Josephine Baker was a particularly active member of the French Resistance, or a real spy? Not to the French government. She eventually earned the Medaille de la Résistance Avec Palme, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur, and was buried in the Pantheon. All the equipment, in short, of a true French heroine.
Marisa Meltzer’s most recent book is “This Is Big”, about the founder of Weight Watchers.
AGENT JOSEPHINE: American beauty, French hero, British spy, by Damien Lewis | Illustrated | 592 pages | Public Affairs | $32