Freda Josephine McDonald: June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975

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✪ Freda Josephine Baker (née McDonald) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress, and a spy for the French Resistance Underground during World War II. Her performance career was centered primarily in Europe, in France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture: the 1927 French silent film Siren of the Tropics.

During her early career, Baker became on of the most famous & celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in its 1927 revue Un vent de folie caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting only of a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became a culturally iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after marrying French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She later opened her home in France to adopt twelve children; whom she referred to as the Rainbow Tribe.

Baker was an agent for the French Resistance during World War II and also worked with the British Secret Intelligence Service and the United States Office of Strategic Services; to an extent which was previously not publicized until 2020, when French documents detailing her wartime service were finally declassified. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation and the Croix de Guerre by the French military She was also named a Knight of the Legion of Honour by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker’s favorite song was “J’ai deux amours” (“I have two loves: my country and Paris”). Baker was a Freemason.

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Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri. Baker’s mother, Carrie, was adopted as a young girl in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald; the latter of whom was a freed slave, and both of African descent.

Baker’s official website identifies vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her biological father. However, in his 1993 biography entitled Josephine: The Hungry Heart, Baker’s foster son, Jean-Claude Baker, states otherwise. Jean-Claude Baker failed to unearth the identity of Baker’s biological father (which he described as “the most painful mystery of her life”); however, he, Baker, and others believe her father may have been a white man. He added Eddie Carson “played along” with the assertion he was Baker’s father.

Josephine McDonald spent her early childhood life at 212 Targee Street (known by some St. Louis residents as Johnson Street) in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Louis; a racially mixed low-income area near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing. as a child, she was often poorly dressed and hungry. She eventually developed street smarts playing in the railroad yards of Union Station.

Baker’s mother married Arthur Martin, “a kind but perpetually unemployed man,” with whom she had a son and two more daughters. Baker worked in a laundry after being placed there by her mother due to her family being impoverished. At eight years old, Josephine began working as a live-in domestic for white families in St. Louis.

At age 12, Josephine dropped out of school. At 13, she began working as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur’s Club at 3133 Pine Street. During her adolescence, she also lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis; sleeping in cardboard shelters, scavenging for food in garbage cans, and making extra money from street-corner dancing. It was at the Old Chauffeur’s Club Josephine met Willie Wells, whom she would marry at age 13, but that marriage lasted less than a year. Following her divorce from Wells, she found work with a street performance group called the Jones Family Band.

In her teens, Baker struggled to have a healthy relationship with her mother, who opposed her becoming an entertainer and scolded her for not tending to her second husband, William Howard (Billy) Baker, whom she married in 1921 when she was only 15 years old. However, Josephine soon left Billy when her vaudeville troupe was booked into a New York City venue. They finally divorced in 1925, just as her career success was beginning. She would continue to use his last name professionally for the rest of her life.

Baker’s unrelenting badgering of a local show manager led to her recruitment for the St. Louis Chorus vaudeville act. At the age of 13, she headed to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance and performed at the Plantation Club.

After several failed auditions, Baker finally secured a role in the chorus line of a touring production of the groundbreaking and hugely successful Broadway revue “Shuffle Along” In “Shuffle Along,” Baker was the end dancer on the chorus line. Fearing she might be overshadowed by the others, she used her position to ad-lib, introducing a hint of comedy into her routine to make her stand out going off-script, yet engaging audiences. She started in “Shuffle Along” with one of the U.S. touring companies: however once she came of age, she was transferred to the Broadway production, where she remained for several months, until the show closed in 1923. Baker was next cast again on the chorus line in “The Chocolate Dandies,” a dance/music revue which opened on September 1, 1924. The show ran for 96 performances, before finally closing on November 22, 1924.

A 1936 interview with The New York Times, Baker reported after the Plantation Club she became acquainted with a Mrs. Caroline Dudley. “She was interested in art and she got up a Negro revue and took us to Europe.” Dudley’s “Revue Nègre” was scheduled for a tour of European capitals. In 1925, Baker sailed to Paris opened on October 2 in La Revue nègre at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She was 19 at the time.

In a 1974 interview with The Guardian, Baker explained this was her first big break:

“No, I didn’t get my first break on Broadway. I was only in the chorus in ‘Shuffle Along’ and ‘Chocolate Dandies.’ I became famous first in France in the twenties where I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris where they got to know Miss Baker.”

In Paris, Baker became an instant sensation & success for her erotic dancing and appearing practically nude onstage. After a successful tour of Europe, she broke her contract and returned to France in 1926 to star at the Folies Bergère, setting the standard for her future acts.

In later shows in Paris, she was often accompanied on stage by her pet cheetah, “Chiquita,” donning a diamond collar. As part of her act, Chiquita would frequently escape into the orchestra pit to terrorize the musicians and add another element of excitement to the show.

Baker’s popularity grew until she became the most successful American entertainer in France. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw” and spent hours talking with her in Parisian bars. Picasso depicted her alluring beauty in several works, and Jean Cocteau became a personal friend.

Baker sang professionally for the first time in 1930. During this time, she released her most successful song, “J’ai deux amours” (“I have two loves: my country and Paris”). In a 2007 book, Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street claim “by the 1930’s, Baker’s assimilation into French popular culture was made complete by her professional association with the song.” Baker also went on to star in four films, which found success only in Europe. In the words of Shirley Bassey, who has cited Baker as her primary influence, “I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer.”

Despite her popularity in France, Baker never attained an equivalent success in America. Her star turn in a 1936 revival of “Ziegfeld Follies” on Broadway was not commercially successful; and later in the line up she was replaced by Gypsy Rose Lee. Time magazine referred to baker as a “Negro wench … whose dancing and singing might be topped anywhere outside of Paris.” Other critics said her voice was “too thin” and “dwarf-like.” Unable to completely fill the Winter Garden Theatre. This review contributed to Baker giving up her American citizenship and becoming a legal citizen of France and giving up her American citizenship. In 1937, Baker officially became a citizen of France after marrying the French industrialist Jean Lion.

During the late 1920s, Baker also endured severe hostility performing in Germany and Eastern Europe; where she was targeted by storm troopers with ammonia bombs who told her to “Go back to Africa.” This abuse reportedly motivated her to actively participate in the French Resistance against the Nazis.

In September 1939, when France declared war on Germany in response to the invasion of Poland, Baker was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, as an “honorable correspondent.” Her mission was to socialize with high level Germans at embassies, ministries, night clubs, charming them withy here performer’s persona while secretly gathering information. Her café-society fame created numerous opportunities for her to rub shoulders with those who were privy to important classified information, from high-ranking Japanese officials to Italian and Vichy bureaucrats.

The Deuxième Bureau also shared any information Baker acquired through her social espionage with Wilfred Dunderdale at the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in London. In North Africa, Baker reported via the American diplomat spies to London. Baker’s espionage work went far beyond merely gathering information at social events. She also had a pilot’s license and during the Phoney War she flew missions collecting detailed intelligence on German troop movements, including the precise locations and activities of enemy airfields and harbors.

Completely confident in her celebrity status and all the protections it afforded, Baker continued operating without raising suspicion for the entire duration of the war. To covertly transport sensitive information, she utilized methods of writing notes on her hands and arms, pinning notations inside her clothing, and using invisible ink. Her boldness paid off and allowed her to smuggle vital intelligence across borders to deliver critical reports to the French Resistance.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, Baker left Paris and went to the Château des Milandes, her home in the Dordogne in the south of France. The Château des Milandes became, especially in World War II, one of the most important hideaways where she would shelter resistance fighters and Jewish refugees, providing them with documents and even money for food, clothes, and forged documents she usually financed herself.

Her estate also provided a working location as the center of French Resistance activities; including a substantial radio transmitter to maintain contact with Allied forces. The wine cellar at Château des Milandes was also converted to an armory. As an entertainer, Baker moved freely around Europe, visiting neutral nations such as Portugal, as well as some in South America. She relayed a constant stream of classified information for transmission to England, about airfields, harbors, and German troop concentrations in the West of France. Baker often wrote notes on her sheet music in invisible ink.

From a base in Morocco, Baker made tours of Spain, pinning notes with the information she gathered inside her underwear. She also regularly toured to entertain British, French, and American soldiers in North Africa. Because the Free French movement had no organized entertainment network for their troops, Baker and her entourage managed all the arrangements for the most part on their own. They allowed no civilians and charged no admission.

After the war, Baker was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.

In 1949, a reinvented Baker returned in triumph to the Folies Bergère. Bolstered by recognition of her wartime heroism, Baker the performer assumed a new gravitas, unafraid to take on serious music or subject matter. The engagement was a rousing success and reestablished Baker as one of Paris’ pre-eminent entertainers. In 1951, Baker was invited back to the United States for a nightclub engagement in Miami. After winning a public battle over desegregating the club’s audience, Baker followed up her sold-out run at the club with a national tour. Rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences accompanied her everywhere, climaxed by a parade in Harlem in honor of her becoming the NAACP’s “Woman of the Year.”

In her later career, Baker began to face financial troubles. She commented, “Nobody wants me, they’ve forgotten me.” However, family members encouraged her to continue performing. In 1973 she performed at Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation. The following year, she appeared in a Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium, and then at the Monegasque Red Cross Gala, celebrating her 50 years in French show business.

Although based in France, Baker supported the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s. In the 1950s, the FBI tracked everything she did, and kept an open a file on her activities. Baker often refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States. Although she was offered $10,000 by a night club; the club eventually agreed to meet her demands. Her insistence on performing for racially mixed audiences helped to integrate live entertainment shows in the Las Vegas Valley. In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Baker was the only official female speaker to speak at the March.

During this time, Baker began adopting children, forming a family which she often referred to as the “Rainbow Tribe.” Baker raised two adopted daughters, French-born Marianne and Moroccan-born Stellina, and ten sons, Japanese-born Janot (born Teruya) and Akio, Colombian-born Luis, Finnish-born Jari (now Jarry), French-born Jean-Claude, Noël, and Moïse, Algerian-born Brahim (later Brian), Ivorian-born Koffi, and Venezuelan-born Mara.

For some time, Baker lived with her children and an enormous staff in the château in Dordogne, France, with her fourth husband, Jo Bouillon. Bouillon claimed Baker bore one child of her own in 1941, but it was stillborn and during an incident that precipitated an emergency hysterectomy.

In her later years Baker converted to Catholicism. In 1968, Baker lost her château owing to unpaid debts. Afterwards Princess Grace offered her an apartment in Monaco. In 1968, Baker was back on stage again at the Olympia in Paris. In 1968, she performed in Belgrade and at Carnegie Hall. In 1973, at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium and at the “Gala du Cirque” in Paris in 1974. On April 8, 1975, Baker starred in a retrospective revue at the Bobino in Paris, “Joséphine à Bobino 1975” celebrating her 50 years in show business.

Four days later, Baker was found in her bed in a coma after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. She was taken to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, where she died at age 68, on April 12, 1975. Baker received a full Catholic funeral which attracted more than 20,000 Mourners at L’Église de la Madeleine. She was the only American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral. After a private family service at Saint-Charles Church in Monte Carlo, Baker was interred at the Cimetière de Monaco. ✪