Josephine Baker at A Primavera do Jeronimo

Josephine Baker – jazz-legend, cabaret star, and war-time spy with secret underwear!

written by Alex Pollard

It was to a packed house at the Teatro da Trinidade in 1941, that Josephine Baker – jazz-legend, star of the Follies-Bergère cabaret and Hollywood, civil-rights activist, life-long bisexual, lover of Frida Kahlo and French novelist Collette – made her Lisbon debut – while acting as a wartime spy for the French resistance!

In 1941 Josephine Baker arrived into Lisbon from Tangiers via Casablanca, carrying coded messages about Nazi troop positions and travel documents for French spies written in invisible-ink on her sheet music and pinned inside her bra: “It was my first mission. I was radiant and I knew I was wise. As wise as innocence”.

Once in Lisbon she used her wit, beauty and celebrity to seduce German diplomats at after-show parties in the Trinidade Theatre, making notes of anything she learned, and leaving them in books on the shelves of a nearby bookshop (Livraria Barateira – now closed) for her French contacts to collect later.

Josephine Baker’s life was filled with drama and passion – born in poverty and segregation in the USA in 1906, married at 13, but became an international celebrity as a cabaret star in Paris in the 1920s, travelling around the world (including her Lisbon visit and lunch at Primavera in 1939), and was the first Black woman to lead in a Hollywood film. American author Ernest Hemingway described her as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw”.

But as the Second World War broke out and the Nazis approached she had to leave France; she volunteered for the French Resistance, supporting resistance fighters and Jewish refugees, providing them with documents, money, food, clothes, and forged documents -and later travelling internationally with secret messages for the French, English and Americans (which was the reason for her visit and performances in Lisbon in 1941).

After the war she was officially acknowledged by President Charles de Gaulle for her war-time contributions and decorated with medals. She returned to performing in the 1950s, married her fourth husband, and went on to adopt 12 children from around the world – her ‘Rainbow Tribe’. In 1963 she was the only woman to officially speak at Martin Luther King’s civil rights ‘March on Washington’.

By the early 1970s she was in poor health and virtual poverty, but was rescued from destitution by her friend Princess Grace of Monaco. When she died in 1975 she was buried with full French military honors in Monte Carlo; but in 2021 she was inducted, with huge ceremony, into the French National Pantheon as a ‘Hero of France’ – the only Black woman (out of only 6 women).

Although known to all fans of jazz and cabaret, and universally adored by the French and much of Europe – Josephine Baker’s outspoken criticism of American racism damaged her popularity in the USA.

At ‘A Primavera do Jeronimo’

When passing through Lisbon in 1930, Josephine Baker had received horrifically racist coverage in the newspapers (which is uncomfortable to read*). But this celebrity cleverly faced-down the hostility with great style when she changed ships in Lisbon in 1939, on her way to Rio, by approaching journalists at the same newspaper (Diário de Lisboa) asking “We’re in Lisbon for a few hours. And knowing the name of this great newspaper, we’d like to ask you to recommend a typical restaurant with true Portuguese cuisine.” The journalists were thrilled to find this celebrity in their offices, and the cheerfully positive media coverage she generated in this way included a lunch-time photograph that you can still visit at the modest ‘A Primavera do Jeronimo’ restaurant: Travessa da Espera, 34.

The journalists reported that Baker (accompanied by her secretary, Madeleine Chailot, and a friend, Monique Lemb), had a substantial appetite for the good Portuguese food at ‘A Primavera’ – she ate: “…canned sardines, grilled sea bass, codfish cooked à Primavera, veal liver, lettuce salad, rice pudding and fruit, and at the end, they toasted with a glass of port wine ‘Cheers to Portugal’.”

‘That vibrant and colorful woman, like a pepper from the New World…’, the journalists reported the following day, even sang, but: ‘not with the stridency of jazz, but in a low, tango-like voice – so as not to cause a scandal in the peaceful streets of Bairro Alto’. “C’est le Portugal”, she said, filling the tiny room with her happy and mischievous laughter’.

*(“..a carbuncle …, poisonous and sadistic, like the disease of the same nickname. The black, that blot of ink limited to Africa, will disappear in the livid ocean of the Aryan race” – etc, etc).