In the short clip entitled “Memoirs,” produced to promote Baker’s first autobiography in 1927, Marcel Sauvage, the actual ghostwriter of Baker’s autobiographies, sits at a desk while Josephine, dressed as Papitou in Siren, comes in to talk to him. Paul Colin, the graphic artist, is filmed drawing her from life (croquer sur le vif) to produce the illustration for the actual book whose cover is shown in the final shot. The short was created to advertise the Mémoires and Colin’s illustrations.1 Baker dictating her memoirs to Marcel Sauvage, while being drawn by Paul Colin, parallels the fictional situation of Princess Tam Tam, which then can serve as a comment on autobiographical genesis.2 The film scene purports to be authentic when it is actually a staged commercial venture. In comparison, then, the film is mere illusion, given that Sauvage actually went to see Baker and sat down with her to elaborate a text that creates a voice, Baker’s, and constructs the myth of the vedette. The actual situation of the interviews is unveiled in Sauvage’s preface to the published memoirs:
She was dressed in a pink dressing gown, slippers of the same color. Tall, slim, supple, laughing. (M, 7)
These memoirs have been gathered to this end [to testify to the phenomenon Josephine], but at several occasions, set apart by long periods of time. (M, 10)
In 1926, I would go to Miss Baker’s in the evening at 4 o’clock, a time when her maid would wake her up. Miss Baker would tell her story; she would laugh; she would play. As for me, I was taking notes. At the beginning, I went there with an interpreter; then Miss Baker knew sufficient French to speak it; it would then be thoroughly funny—and at times, very difficult. It required numerous visits because Miss Baker does not like to remember. She lives … her finger points to the floorboard, the floorboard is the present, it is the present … in the present. (M, 22)
If the two scenes correspond, they also stand in sharp contrast. The main protagonists of the clip, Baker (the star), Sauvage (the writer), Colin (the illustrator), roughly correspond to Alwina (the exotic subject), Max de Mirecourt (the writer), and Coton (the secretary). Indeed, Sauvage is being dictated to, told to write, while Colin’s talent is put to task by a jumpy and chirpy model. In the Mémoires, Baker is said to refuse to be seen as a writer. Although she prides herself on having written the preface to My Blood in Your Veins in her own hand, she claims that she cannot picture herself in the role of a novelist: “Pepito even imagined that I could be a novelist […] He thus wrote My Blood in Your Veins under the cover of my name. A novelist! Can you picture me, sitting down night and day, quill in hand … ? God knows that I have had other feathers” (M, 240). In Sauvage’s introduction, she is said to refuse to write again after her experience with Colin’s Tumulte noir: “You don’t know what it’s like: write? Ooh la la. I dance. I love to dance and I love only that. I will dance my whole life” (M, 8). The real Baker, with Sauvage’s help, is busy constructing her myth, whereas Max uses Alwina’s utterances as writing material, unbeknownst to her.
- On the artistic relationship between Colin and Baker, see Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998), 903-934. [↩]
- See Claudine Raynaud, “L’Espace autobiographique et la construction d’une vedette de music-hall: Les mémoires de Joséphine Baker.” Unpublished paper, “Genèse et Autobiographie,” ITEM-CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, 16 January 2007. [↩]
