Her Life Was a Cabaret

Josephine Baker Was Born Into a Difficult, Racist Age. Through Song and Dance, She Sensuously Rose Above It.

She was limber, and she was wicked. She had the gift of looking just this side of muscular, and yet quite feminine. Dancing onstage, she could be a blur. It's as if there were mercury in her shoulders, something that could lift her up and spin her around.

Her act was a taunt and a tease. It also was a celebration of herself. She knew sex, and she knew the lit and unlit dreams of men. And she played with those dreams as the lioness does the fawn.

The clean light of Paris loved Josephine Baker, and in the 1920s she turned that metropolis into her own revolving feast. The powerful and sometimes haunting imagery from her Paris days (and much more) dominates a new exhibition of drawings, prints, posters, photos and memorabilia at the National Portrait Gallery. Showing through March 18, "Josephine Baker: Image and Icon" is aptly titled.

She seemed all her life such a startling creation, an invented soul who lived better by the year. Her imagery proved too powerful to ignore, and in the end, America, blacks and whites -- she could jangle the emotions of both -- had to give her respect, give her honor.

The exhibition tracks her life in ways both intimate and giddily resonant of her stardust.

Born in St. Louis in 1906, young Josephine took to the vaudeville road in her teens. She rolled the coin in America as far as it would go: nightclubs, vaudeville, Broadway. A black woman -- and reminded of it daily -- she sailed for Europe before the coin fell to the curb, taking her with it. In Europe, the coin was off the curb and gleaming like a diamond. She smiled with such raw and infectious joy.

In Paris, as the cabaret seasons passed, as the summers came and went, she kept dazzling. She sang, she laughed, she clowned. Home was an ocean away. On winter evenings an expatriate, even in a crowd, can feel lonely. Sometimes she cried.

French artists drew her, photographers snapped her. The lithographs were colorful and bawdy. Politicians gaped at her on the stage and wondered about her America. She forced literary lions to write about her.

The poet e. e. cummings said of her: "She enters through a dense electric twilight, walking backwards on hands and feet, legs and arms stiff, down a huge jungle tree as a creature neither infrahuman nor superhuman but somehow both: a mysteriously unkillable Something, equally non-primitive and uncivilized, or beyond time in the sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic."

During World War II, she took part in the Rey-zis-tonce, spying on the Germans.

In 1961, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her wartime service. Two years later, she showed at the March on Washington. It was hot as hell on the Mall. Still, she wore her Free French uniform and her Legion medal. She strode proudly right beside the Mississippi sharecroppers. She looked approachable -- and regal. Sammy Davis Jr.'s jaw dropped at the sight of her; he gave her a lift in his limo afterward.

She died in 1975, and then -- with many beginning to study and ponder her life -- she began to grow like a monument.