Recommended Reading - The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase. I have been wanting to make a series of Josephine Baker posts for a while now. Josephine is a sort of patron saint in my personal pantheon. I have admired her for as long as I can remember, and as I learned more about the complex, beautiful, talented, incredibly flawed and contradictory person that she was, I felt a personal attachment to her life and legacy. I celebrated my 23rd birthday at Chez Josephine, a little slice of 1920s Parisian heaven run by Josephine’s 13th son Jean-Claude, where I had a baptism by apple martini (I’m not even joking - the maître d’ was so pleased our party came dressed appropriately and in period, he brought us complementary drinks, but in carrying them over he tripped and… the rest is glorious history). I left a drawing of Josephine to thank Jean-Claude for that wonderful birthday evening, and before long he honored me with a commission for his New Year’s menu and his friendship. Every trip to his restaurant has been nothing short of magical, a dive into a period that feels more like home than anything - full of dimmed red lights, flowing champagne, gorgeous anecdotes about Nureyev, Broadway giants and of course Josephine herself. It’s difficult for me to put Josephine into a neat little summary, and so I am going to focus only on her wartime contribution in the following entries devoted to her. But I must recommend this incredible biography Jean-Claude wrote. When we met, he asked if I had read his book and I told him I only read one of Josephine’s autobiographies. He made a face and cried, “Bullsheeet!” and inscribed a copy for me. It’s a fascinating, loving and complicated account of all the mysteries, inconsistencies, loves and tragedies of Josephine’s life written by a man who I think truly loved her and had a penetrating and understanding insight into her life. I can’t praise it enough especially because the read is so illuminating considering the fact that Josephine herself told so many wildly different and misleading accounts of her own life in the seven or eight autobiographies she wrote.

Recommended Reading - The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase.

I have been wanting to make a series of Josephine Baker posts for a while now. Josephine is a sort of patron saint in my personal pantheon. I have admired her for as long as I can remember, and as I learned more about the complex, beautiful, talented, incredibly flawed and contradictory person that she was, I felt a personal attachment to her life and legacy. I celebrated my 23rd birthday at Chez Josephine, a little slice of 1920s Parisian heaven run by Josephine’s 13th son Jean-Claude, where I had a baptism by apple martini (I’m not even joking - the maître d’ was so pleased our party came dressed appropriately and in period, he brought us complementary drinks, but in carrying them over he tripped and… the rest is glorious history). I left a drawing of Josephine to thank Jean-Claude for that wonderful birthday evening, and before long he honored me with a commission for his New Year’s menu and his friendship. Every trip to his restaurant has been nothing short of magical, a dive into a period that feels more like home than anything - full of dimmed red lights, flowing champagne, gorgeous anecdotes about Nureyev, Broadway giants and of course Josephine herself.

It’s difficult for me to put Josephine into a neat little summary, and so I am going to focus only on her wartime contribution in the following entries devoted to her. But I must recommend this incredible biography Jean-Claude wrote. When we met, he asked if I had read his book and I told him I only read one of Josephine’s autobiographies. He made a face and cried, “Bullsheeet!” and inscribed a copy for me. It’s a fascinating, loving and complicated account of all the mysteries, inconsistencies, loves and tragedies of Josephine’s life written by a man who I think truly loved her and had a penetrating and understanding insight into her life. I can’t praise it enough especially because the read is so illuminating considering the fact that Josephine herself told so many wildly different and misleading accounts of her own life in the seven or eight autobiographies she wrote.

Tags: history josephine baker recommended reading black history