The Daily Mail
2013-08-22
Annabel Venning
Under scorching stage-lights, Josephine Baker stepped out in front of the audience entirely naked, but for a few strategically-placed flamingo-feathers.
Her male dance partner carried her upside down, her long, slender legs stretched out in the splits.
He set her down, and she began to dance. As the light played on her coffee-brown skin, her body seemed to become almost molten as she wound herself around her partner.
She was, she later recalled, lost in the eroticism of the moment, ‘intoxicated . . . driven by dark forces I didn’t recognise,’ as she writhed seductively before shuddering to a climactic halt.
For a few moments the Paris audience remained silent, as if stunned. Then they rose to their feet as one and erupted in ecstatic applause.
She was hailed as the ‘Black Venus’. Picasso dubbed her the ‘Nefertiti of now’. Author Ernest Hemingway called her ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’.
It was the start of an extraordinary career. Josephine Baker, the girl from the St Louis ghetto, rose to become one of the greatest divas ever, an icon of the Jazz Age, talented and glamorous, but also decadent and amoral.
Today, all that many people remember of her is that she danced naked except for her famous tutu made of (fake) bananas…
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