Before the second world war, Josephine Baker had been “the Black Venus”: the world’s first female superstar of colour, dancing the Charleston dressed in nothing but pearls and a banana skirt, parading her pet cheetah, scandalising and delighting le Tout-Paris.
After the war, Baker became a prominent and outspoken US civil rights campaigner, famously speaking with Martin Luther King Jr at the 1963 March on Washington and adopting 12 children from eight countries to live with her in her chateau in the Dordogne.
During it, she was a spy. Shrouded in the fog of war, then recounted afterwards – often unreliably – in the memoirs of people (including Baker herself) with a story to spin, the entertainer’s wartime exploits have long been a subject for speculation and mythmaking.
But a new account, working from contemporary, often unused sources, has uncovered evidence that Baker was not only a highly effective agent but was also using the same celebrity that provided the perfect cover for her espionage as a powerful means to promote the cause of equal rights.
“Looking at her life through the prism of the war really helps us understand who she was, and to make sense of what she did later on,” said Hanna Diamond, a professor of French history at Cardiff University and the author of Josephine Baker’s Secret War, which is published on Tuesday.
“The war was so important; it’s the missing piece of her puzzle. She [Baker] was amazingly well equipped to be a spy; a performer, through and through. Her motivation came from the huge debt she felt to France, which had made her a star – and it had its roots in the racism she grew up with.”
Born in 1906 in St Louis, Missouri, Baker left school at 12 and in 1921 was cast in an early all-Black musical on Broadway. Four years later, she won a place in a Paris show, La Revue Nègre, and set sail for France. She swiftly became a huge star.
By 1939, when she was recruited by Jacques Abtey, an initially sceptical French intelligence agent who would become her handler and on-off lover, Baker was Europe’s highest paid entertainer and one of its best-known female celebrities.
Abtey taught her the tricks of the spy trade, such as using invisible ink, but it was Baker’s far-reaching fame – which meant everyone, everywhere wanted to meet her – and easy charm (which ensured they also talked freely) that were her real espionage assets.
From early 1941, Baker, under the aegis of the French secret services, travelled from Marrakech, where she was based, to Lisbon, Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, and round north Africa, giving concerts, attending receptions – and gathering and passing top secret information to allied agents.