Book Review: “Josephine Baker’s Secret War” — Zouzou In Casablanca
BY DEBRA CASH
The most famous Black woman in the world sweeps out of a chauffeured car trailing furs and wafting perfume. The checkpoint guards, agog, gather round, demanding her smile and her autograph. Pinned into her underwear are secret orders, with details encoded and written between the staves of her musical scores in invisible ink.
I am assuming that Shonda Rhimes or Oprah has already optioned the story of Josephine Baker working undercover as a member of the French Resistance for a major motion picture.
Hanna Diamond’s book is not the first history to explore the captivating story of the American-born, French-identified Folies Bergère star’s undercover espionage. Baker’s stint as a spy has been covered as recently as 2022 in British writer Damien Lewis’ Agent Josephine, and in various documentaries that offer the advantage of incorporating film clips of her dancing, singing, clowning, and generally playing up her gorgeous exoticism with a knowing wink.
Diamond, a professor at Cardiff University, is a historian who focuses on the experience of women in France during the Second World War. She worked deeply in specialized archives in France, the UK, Morocco, and the U.S., perused scrapbooks full of contemporaneous press clippings in a number of languages, and tried to sort through the facts and subterfuge of Baker’s own memoirs, that of her ex-husband, and one by her so-called “handler” Jacques Abtey (code name: Monsieur Fox, later Jack Sanders and M. Hébert). While she gets an A+ for effort, the details of Baker’s wartime exploits remain blurred.
Baker’s celebrity in the decade just before World War II was a mix of appreciation for her talents, anti-Americanism, and racial and gender stereotypes. Her “danse sauvage” and that banana skirt – not unlike the defining prop of Carmen Miranda’s towering fruit cornucopia hat – reinforced her image in the Revue Négre as a “natural,” “primitive” and, wincingly, gestured towards her identity as a monkey.
As she moved into films and operetta, Diamond writes, “Baker became a potent symbol of France, its commitment to freedom, and the accomplishment of its colonial project.” She also became a naturalized French citizen by way of her short-lived 1937 marriage to Jean Lion, a Jewish Frenchman, whose identity and family connections would become salient as France fell to Nazi collaboration and occupation.
Baker, in turn, Diamond writes, “enacted her French identity” overtly — in public performances and her signature ballad “J’ai deux amours” [“I have two loves”], repurposed to affirm that one of them was her American homeland and the other, even more beloved, was France — and covertly, taking risks for France in wartime. Recruited as a spy for the Gaullist Free French resistance primarily in North Africa, she — and her handlers — used the circumstance of always being the center of attention to France’s advantage.
Early on, Baker was able to get meetings with an Italian cultural attaché and Japanese ambassador under cover of a social engagement and glean information that confirmed what French military intelligence already suspected. Rehearsing for new shows, performing for the troops — both French and British — sending out Christmas parcels to soldiers and, most photogenically, parading through the streets of Paris with a menagerie that at one point included a kangaroo, a goat, a pig, and a cheetah in a diamond-studded collar, Baker was unmistakable, a symbol of French savoir faire in tough times.
Sometime in early June, 1940, she left Paris and made her way to her chateau in the Dordogne (Diamond supplies another biopic-ready detail — allegedly she had decanted petrol into champagne bottles). From there, Baker’s career in espionage took off in earnest. She was assigned to help rekindle relationships and regular, secure communication links between the French and British under the cover of a concert tour that would take her to Lisbon and then to South America, Abtey representing himself as her secretary/tour manager. (The Axis and Allied powers were both present, and acting openly, in Lisbon at the time, which had branded itself as a place on the continent to resume the good life and get away from nuisances like bombardments.)
Diamond scrupulously highlights the inconsistencies in the canonical stories of Baker’s war career, putting them in the context of the wider war effort and its major players. She confirms that there was real intelligence for Baker and Abtey to share, which included locations and specialties of the divisions of German troops in western France and “photographs of a landing craft that the Germans planned to use to attack the English coast.”
Diamond traces Baker’s movements through occupied France and beyond. In Marseilles, where she appeared in a production of Offenbach’s La Creole, thence to Algiers (with many of her animals and 28 pieces of luggage!), ostensibly in search of a “warmer climate” to deal with health issues. She and Abtey had hoped to go to London to join de Gaulle and the Free French, but ended up remaining in Vichy North Africa, within French colonial territory. Baker, they announced there, would be performing in a charity gala. For the next few years, she would enjoy a rare freedom to cross borders, even at times when Abtey cooled his heels, unable to obtain the requisite visas.
If you didn’t know the ins and outs of British, French, and German military strategies in the ’40s, Diamond’s step-by-step explication will steer you in the right general direction. Nevertheless, it’s hard to keep the story of Baker and her exploits in the foreground when the discussion veers off into the terms of the 1940 armistice, Spanish aspirations, and the strategic importance of the port of Casablanca. Baker’s train-crossing trips across North Africa had her hobnobbing with many different dignitaries, sultans, and pashas, each of whom had their own ambitions, and sometimes informers. All, apparently, were charmed by Baker and dropped hints that she was able to piece together to share with the French. “It is very convenient to be Josephine Baker,” she said. “As soon as I’m announced in a city, invitations to my hotel rain down.”
What we don’t learn in Josephine Baker’s Secret War is what she did to steel herself against the risks she was taking. Was it all acting? A belief that her charmed life would never end?
Beginning in 1941, it almost did. Baker’s fragile health landed her in a hospital in Casablanca, as the war intensified and the US joined the Allies after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 1942, her convalescence served as a cover for American vice consuls in Casablanca to meet at her bedside without arousing suspicion of German or Vichy officials. We don’t know exactly what was discussed there; once again, Diamond cautions about what the historical record can and cannot confirm. Screenwriters will have a field day with it and with the scene of Baker leaping from her bed in her pajamas on November 8, 1942, under a rain of leaflets bearing the American flag and a picture of FDR and a message from Eisenhower telling the residents of Casablanca that the Yanks were coming to liberate them from Axis aggression. Baker, it would later be learned, had provided names of Nazis in hiding as well as put the Americans in touch with friendly Muslim (Diamond spells it Moslem) leaders and tribesmen.
Although her death had been widely reported in October 1942 — perhaps based on a rumor started by Maurice Chevalier — by December 1942 Baker had recovered. She went to Marrakech, returning to performing for racially-mixed troops. She also returned to parties and receptions where she could mingle with powerful people who had access to useful information. When she was invited to tour the British camps in the Middle East during the summer of 1943 and then took a taxing journey across North Africa and the Middle East (Diamond appends a helpful map), she seems to primarily have taken on a propaganda role, raising money for the French Resistance.
For the Arab peoples of the region, war’s shifting alliances made it possible to imagine an end to French colonial rule. While Diamond argues that she worked to restrain potential violence by nationalists in Morocco, Baker was on the wrong side of history.
Officially enlisted as a second lieutenant officer in the Women’s Air Force — she loved wearing the khaki uniform — Baker was able to return by Liberty ship to Marseilles (hiding a dog in her coat) after the liberation of Paris in 1944. Another marriage, more performances, her famous, pre-Angelina Jolie “rainbow tribe” of adopted children, and her support for the Civil Rights movement in the United States kept her intermittently in the spotlight. In 1961 she received the Legion d’honneur — a recognition she had long sought — for her wartime services to the Republic.
When she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1975, one of her sons noted it was less like a funeral and more like an opening night. Josephine Baker was bid farewell by her beloved France with a 21-gun salute. Her coffin was surrounded by an American flag and two tiers of tricolor flags.
You can almost hear the swelling of La Marseillaise as the credits roll.
JOSEPHINE BAKER'S SECRET WAR:
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN STAR WHO
FOUGHT FOR FRANCE AND FREEDOM
BY HANNA DIAMOND, YALE UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Joséphine Baker in 1940. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
I am assuming that Shonda Rhimes or Oprah has already optioned the story of Josephine Baker working undercover as a member of the French Resistance for a major motion picture.
Hanna Diamond’s book is not the first history to explore the captivating story of the American-born, French-identified Folies Bergère star’s undercover espionage. Baker’s stint as a spy has been covered as recently as 2022 in British writer Damien Lewis’ Agent Josephine, and in various documentaries that offer the advantage of incorporating film clips of her dancing, singing, clowning, and generally playing up her gorgeous exoticism with a knowing wink.
Diamond, a professor at Cardiff University, is a historian who focuses on the experience of women in France during the Second World War. She worked deeply in specialized archives in France, the UK, Morocco, and the U.S., perused scrapbooks full of contemporaneous press clippings in a number of languages, and tried to sort through the facts and subterfuge of Baker’s own memoirs, that of her ex-husband, and one by her so-called “handler” Jacques Abtey (code name: Monsieur Fox, later Jack Sanders and M. Hébert). While she gets an A+ for effort, the details of Baker’s wartime exploits remain blurred.
Baker’s celebrity in the decade just before World War II was a mix of appreciation for her talents, anti-Americanism, and racial and gender stereotypes. Her “danse sauvage” and that banana skirt – not unlike the defining prop of Carmen Miranda’s towering fruit cornucopia hat – reinforced her image in the Revue Négre as a “natural,” “primitive” and, wincingly, gestured towards her identity as a monkey.
As she moved into films and operetta, Diamond writes, “Baker became a potent symbol of France, its commitment to freedom, and the accomplishment of its colonial project.” She also became a naturalized French citizen by way of her short-lived 1937 marriage to Jean Lion, a Jewish Frenchman, whose identity and family connections would become salient as France fell to Nazi collaboration and occupation.
Baker, in turn, Diamond writes, “enacted her French identity” overtly — in public performances and her signature ballad “J’ai deux amours” [“I have two loves”], repurposed to affirm that one of them was her American homeland and the other, even more beloved, was France — and covertly, taking risks for France in wartime. Recruited as a spy for the Gaullist Free French resistance primarily in North Africa, she — and her handlers — used the circumstance of always being the center of attention to France’s advantage.
Early on, Baker was able to get meetings with an Italian cultural attaché and Japanese ambassador under cover of a social engagement and glean information that confirmed what French military intelligence already suspected. Rehearsing for new shows, performing for the troops — both French and British — sending out Christmas parcels to soldiers and, most photogenically, parading through the streets of Paris with a menagerie that at one point included a kangaroo, a goat, a pig, and a cheetah in a diamond-studded collar, Baker was unmistakable, a symbol of French savoir faire in tough times.
Sometime in early June, 1940, she left Paris and made her way to her chateau in the Dordogne (Diamond supplies another biopic-ready detail — allegedly she had decanted petrol into champagne bottles). From there, Baker’s career in espionage took off in earnest. She was assigned to help rekindle relationships and regular, secure communication links between the French and British under the cover of a concert tour that would take her to Lisbon and then to South America, Abtey representing himself as her secretary/tour manager. (The Axis and Allied powers were both present, and acting openly, in Lisbon at the time, which had branded itself as a place on the continent to resume the good life and get away from nuisances like bombardments.)
Diamond scrupulously highlights the inconsistencies in the canonical stories of Baker’s war career, putting them in the context of the wider war effort and its major players. She confirms that there was real intelligence for Baker and Abtey to share, which included locations and specialties of the divisions of German troops in western France and “photographs of a landing craft that the Germans planned to use to attack the English coast.”
Diamond traces Baker’s movements through occupied France and beyond. In Marseilles, where she appeared in a production of Offenbach’s La Creole, thence to Algiers (with many of her animals and 28 pieces of luggage!), ostensibly in search of a “warmer climate” to deal with health issues. She and Abtey had hoped to go to London to join de Gaulle and the Free French, but ended up remaining in Vichy North Africa, within French colonial territory. Baker, they announced there, would be performing in a charity gala. For the next few years, she would enjoy a rare freedom to cross borders, even at times when Abtey cooled his heels, unable to obtain the requisite visas.
If you didn’t know the ins and outs of British, French, and German military strategies in the ’40s, Diamond’s step-by-step explication will steer you in the right general direction. Nevertheless, it’s hard to keep the story of Baker and her exploits in the foreground when the discussion veers off into the terms of the 1940 armistice, Spanish aspirations, and the strategic importance of the port of Casablanca. Baker’s train-crossing trips across North Africa had her hobnobbing with many different dignitaries, sultans, and pashas, each of whom had their own ambitions, and sometimes informers. All, apparently, were charmed by Baker and dropped hints that she was able to piece together to share with the French. “It is very convenient to be Josephine Baker,” she said. “As soon as I’m announced in a city, invitations to my hotel rain down.”
What we don’t learn in Josephine Baker’s Secret War is what she did to steel herself against the risks she was taking. Was it all acting? A belief that her charmed life would never end?
Beginning in 1941, it almost did. Baker’s fragile health landed her in a hospital in Casablanca, as the war intensified and the US joined the Allies after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the spring of 1942, her convalescence served as a cover for American vice consuls in Casablanca to meet at her bedside without arousing suspicion of German or Vichy officials. We don’t know exactly what was discussed there; once again, Diamond cautions about what the historical record can and cannot confirm. Screenwriters will have a field day with it and with the scene of Baker leaping from her bed in her pajamas on November 8, 1942, under a rain of leaflets bearing the American flag and a picture of FDR and a message from Eisenhower telling the residents of Casablanca that the Yanks were coming to liberate them from Axis aggression. Baker, it would later be learned, had provided names of Nazis in hiding as well as put the Americans in touch with friendly Muslim (Diamond spells it Moslem) leaders and tribesmen.
Although her death had been widely reported in October 1942 — perhaps based on a rumor started by Maurice Chevalier — by December 1942 Baker had recovered. She went to Marrakech, returning to performing for racially-mixed troops. She also returned to parties and receptions where she could mingle with powerful people who had access to useful information. When she was invited to tour the British camps in the Middle East during the summer of 1943 and then took a taxing journey across North Africa and the Middle East (Diamond appends a helpful map), she seems to primarily have taken on a propaganda role, raising money for the French Resistance.
For the Arab peoples of the region, war’s shifting alliances made it possible to imagine an end to French colonial rule. While Diamond argues that she worked to restrain potential violence by nationalists in Morocco, Baker was on the wrong side of history.
Officially enlisted as a second lieutenant officer in the Women’s Air Force — she loved wearing the khaki uniform — Baker was able to return by Liberty ship to Marseilles (hiding a dog in her coat) after the liberation of Paris in 1944. Another marriage, more performances, her famous, pre-Angelina Jolie “rainbow tribe” of adopted children, and her support for the Civil Rights movement in the United States kept her intermittently in the spotlight. In 1961 she received the Legion d’honneur — a recognition she had long sought — for her wartime services to the Republic.
When she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1975, one of her sons noted it was less like a funeral and more like an opening night. Josephine Baker was bid farewell by her beloved France with a 21-gun salute. Her coffin was surrounded by an American flag and two tiers of tricolor flags.
You can almost hear the swelling of La Marseillaise as the credits roll.
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