"She is like Salome, she has seven veils" -- Paris, October 1928: All hell breaks loose : "She had no shame in from of those crackers" -- Terror before the opening : "Josephine, don't you jump out that window!" -- Elvira, Carrie, the beginnings : "Grandma often talked about slave days" -- Childhood in St. Louis : "There are no bastards in my family!" -- Race riots, and Tumpy leaves town : "Oh God, why didn't you make us all one color?" -- Josephine marries at thirteen : "She cut his head open with a beer bottle" -- Life on the T.O.B.A. circuit : "It was going from one dinky theater to another" -- Josephine tries marriage for the second time : "She was a little snip, about fifteen years old" -- On the road with Shuffle Along : "Some of those girls treated Joe like a dog" -- You can go home again, if you don't stay there : "My mother, poor woman, I was ashamed of her" -- In Bamville, or The Chocolate Dandies : "She'd be laughing, to her the work was joy" -- Summer of '25: heat and Harlem nights : "She was hanging over Seventh Avenue, stark naked" -- Mrs. Reagan comes to Harlem : "I got off at Lenox Avenue ... I was happy" -- A shipboard romance, and Hello, Paris : "Men and women kissing in the streets!" -- Josephine checks out poets, painters, waiters : "I wanted to seduce the whole capital" -- The good times roll : "We need tits" -- Josephine betrays a friend : "She had flown, she had been stolen from me" -- The Folies-Bergè: everyone goes bananas : "I was manicured, pedicured ..." -- Enter Pepito : "He used to beat the hell out of her" -- Condemned by church and state : "They denounced me as the black devil!" -- Sex and the (sort of) married woman : "She saw him with his pants off, we didn't" -- A star of the Ziegfeld Follies : "I don't want to be refused in a hotel" -- Bad times in Harlem : "She insisted on speaking only French" -- Trashed by critics, envied by peers : "My God, how does it feel to be a big star?" -- Another husband, more lovers, and sex, sex, sex : "She knew I was gay but she had to possess you."
Josephine goes to war : "I am ready to give the Parisians my life" -- Arabian nights : "As a mistriss, she wanted the whole treatment" -- Rediscovering her race : "My people, my people, I have abandoned them!" -- Josephine, heroine of the resistance : "That German cow in my blue satin sheets!" -- Josephine dumps a millionaire for a bandleader : "I can't marry Claude, he's much too jealous" -- Breaking the color bar in Miami : "She wanted to go down in history, like Lincoln" -- The fued with Walter Winchell : "She broke my heart, I am a finished man" -- A career collapses, a universal mother is born : "I want to adopt five little two-year-old boys" -- Life is a cabaret at Les Milandes : "Jo [Bouillon] would seduce young men" -- More comebacks, more babies, more losses : "In 1959, Josephine Baker was a has-been" -- Twenty lawsuits and the Legion of Honor : "I can't take care of six hundred acres and eleven children" -- The March on Washington, and the death of JFK : "I'm not the star, just another sister" -- Uncle Fidel, and last gasps at Les Milandes : "I know God will not abandon me" -- Down and almost out in Paris : "What happened to all that money?" -- Princess Grace to the rescue : "I want to be buried in the nightgown of my agony" -- Maman is tough on the kids ... and herself : "At a certain age, one should stop having sex" -- A plan to make three million dollars in America : "She knew how to profit from her friends" -- Josephine marries "in spirit," and wrecks a tour : "Once men get what they want, they keep walking" -- Josephine is sick but won't admit it : "It was her last chance to reconquer Paris" -- Going out in a blaze of glory : "We always believed she was immortal" -- An open letter to my second mother : "You were a hustler; I'm a hustler too."
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