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In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) the time-travelling character Gil Pender is at a party when Zelda Fitzgerald says, “I’m bored too, let’s go to Bricktop’s.” As they arrive at the club, it’s clearly Josephine Baker dancing and singing. Who was Bricktop, and for many, who was Josephine Baker?
Well, let’s start with the latter. La Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in 1906, an illegitimate child of a Black mother and possibly a white father. She was working by the age of eight and was first married at thirteen, with her second marriage at fifteen, giving her the name Baker. Poverty and ill-treatment seemed to define her early years until she started dancing. At thirteen, she went to New York and started in vaudeville, then in the chorus, gaining valuable stage and live audience experience. In 1925, she left for Paris. She was a sensation, dancing at the Folies Bergère, talking to Ernest Hemingway, courted by Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. Her song, J’ai Deux Amours (1931), is as haunting today as when she first sang it: I have two loves, my home and Paris—words that still resonate for many. In spite of several returns to America, she was never received as a major star there during the 1930s.
In 1939, war broke out and Josephine Baker would tour to entertain the troops. What very few knew, until much later, was that she was also gathering intelligence and smuggling it back to France. She had been recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, as an “honourable correspondent.” Notes on tiny pieces of paper were concealed in her lingerie, based on the assumption that, as a great female star, she would never be strip-searched. Her espionage and resistance work continued across the world as she toured until the war ended. Baker was later awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.
After the war she returned triumphantly to the Folies Bergère in 1949 and to America in 1951, a trip mixed with both acclaim and troubles for Baker’s racial outspokenness. Her work visa was revoked, resulting in her leaving the country and not returning for nearly a decade. This is not the place to detail her support for civil rights activism, but her friendship with Grace Kelly, later Princess of Monaco, originated in 1951 when Kelly took her arm and dramatically walked out of the Stork Club in Manhattan after Josephine had been refused service.
The ensuing decades were not kind to Josephine Baker professionally, and she also began fostering a vast number of children for what she called “The Rainbow Tribe,” which resulted in her going bankrupt and losing her home.
At the end of the 1960s she was still touring, still singing, but only in small, brief engagements. In 1975 Princess Grace invited Josephine Baker to perform at a gala in Monte Carlo. So extraordinarily successful was this that it transferred to Paris to become Joséphine à Bobino 1975. It opened to rave reviews on the 8th of April. I queued from twelve o’clock midday to seven o’clock to get tickets on April 10th. On April 12th Josephine Barker died, surrounded by glowing press notices. Baker received a full funeral at La Madeleine, attracting more than 20,000 mourners—the only American-born woman to receive full French military honours at her funeral. After a family service at a church in Monaco, Baker was interred at the Cimetière de Monaco. The posthumous honours are countless, both in America and France, perhaps the most extraordinary of which is that Josephine Baker became the first Black woman to be honoured in the Panthéon in 2022, in this temple to the great men of the French Republic.
Today, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross have all acknowledged Baker in some way. She inspired great artworks in galleries around the world, her films are cult delights, and her magic transcends time.
Bricktop is a different story but with overlapping elements. Born in 1894, she was christened Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith. The child of Black and Irish heritage, her flaming red hair and freckles were inherited from her grandfather. She began performing incredibly young and by sixteen was on the road touring. By the age of twenty she was in Harlem, New York, where she met Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. Bricktop moved to Paris in 1924, and Porter hosted many parties where he hired her as an entertainer, often to teach his guests the latest dance craze, such as the Charleston. In the late twenties, she was invited to sing at the Montmartre club Le Grand Duc, owned by Eugene Bullard.
In Paris, Bricktop later began running the clubs where she performed, including The Music Box and Le Grand Duc. She called her next club Bricktop, and in 1929, she moved it to 66 rue Pigalle. Her headliner was a young Mabel Mercer, who was to become a legend in her own right.
Mabel Mercer was born in 1900 in Burton-on-Trent to a young white English music hall performer and a father who was an itinerant Black American musician who died before she was born. At fourteen she left school and toured Europe with her aunt in vaudeville. By the 1930s, she was famous in Paris with admirers including Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Porter. When war broke out, she moved to New York, dying there—having never officially retired—in 1984. Mercer received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest civilian honour, in 1983. When President Ronald Reagan presented it to her at the White House, he called her “a singer’s singer” and “a living testament to the artfulness of the American song.” As a brilliant interpreter of lyrics she became a legend, about whom Frank Sinatra said, “Mabel Mercer taught me everything I know.”
Bricktop became known for her signature cigars, and as the “doyenne of café society” she drew many celebrated figures to her club, including Cole Porter, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald mentions the club in his 1931 story Revisited. Her protégés included Ellington, Mercer, and Baker. The Cole Porter song Miss Otis Regrets was written especially for her to perform, and Stéphane Grappelli wrote a song called Brick Top, which they recorded in Paris in 1937.
During World War II, she closed Chez Bricktop and moved to Mexico City, where she opened a new nightclub in 1944.
In 1949 she returned to Europe and started a club in Rome called Roman Chez Bricktop on the Via Veneto, where she entertained guests including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, and Martin Luther King Jr. Bricktop closed her calub and retired in 1961 at the age of 67, saying: “I’m tired, honey. Tired of staying up all night.” Afterwards, she moved back to the United States.
She made a brief cameo appearance as herself in Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary Zelig, in which she “reminisced” about a visit by Leonard Zelig to her club and an unsuccessful attempt by Cole Porter to find a rhyme for “You’re the tops, you’re Leonard Zelig.” She preferred not to be called a singer or dancer, but rather a performer.
Bricktop also broadcast a radio programme in Paris from 1938 to 1939 for the French government, just prior to the Nazi occupation, and she was a dedicated life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Bricktop died in her sleep at her apartment in Manhattan in 1984, aged 89.
Alberta Hunter was a jazz and blues singer and writer born in 1896; she never knew her father, a Pullman porter. She became a singer at an early age, performing in brothels and low bars. Gradually she climbed up to cabaret and by 1917 was touring Europe, including Paris. Author William Barlow wrote: “The Europeans treated her as an artist, showing her respect and even reverence, which made a great impression on her.” She had a strong career throughout the twenties and thirties, making many records, and performed with Bricktop in the 1940s in New York. In 1944 she took a USO troupe to Casablanca and continued entertaining troops in both theatres of war during World War II and into the postwar period. In the 1950s she led USO troupes in Korea.
On her mother’s death in 1957 she retired, until 1976 when she was at a party given for Mabel Mercer. There she met agent Charles Bourgeois, who asked her to sing and connected her with Barney Josephson, who offered her a two-week engagement at his Village club, The Cookery. The appearance was an overwhelming success, turning into a six-year run and a revival of her career. After this Alberta Hunter never retired, dying aged 89 in 1984.
Our final boundary-breaker follows in the footsteps of her illustrious predecessors, although outside France she may not be as well known. Lisette Malidor was born in Martinique in 1944, one of eight children, her mother a seamstress and her father in the banana export business. Lisette left for Paris at the age of 14 where, from 1961, she worked small jobs as a domestic and trained as a beautician. Her luck changed in 1967 when she was hired at a hairdresser on Rue Milton in Paris. In 1970, while also selling evening programmes at the Casino de Paris, she was noticed by choreographer Roland Petit, who offered her an audition. Selected, she took dance classes and joined the Casino revue.
The role of leader of the revue Zizi je t’aime!—a show created in December 1971 for Roland Petit’s wife and star Zizi Jeanmaire—was entrusted to her in 1973. Her celebrity was immediate, and newspapers compared her to a “new Josephine Baker,” a comparison she later explained to Baker when they met: “I went to her and told her that I was delighted to meet her, but that it was not my doing that I was compared to her as ‘the new Josephine Baker.’” In 2010–2011 she paid tribute to Joséphine Baker with a musical show of her own conception, presented at the Jean-Vilar Theatre in Suresnes.
Eventually the management of the Casino de Paris noted that “the concept of revue, which made the heyday of the music hall and the legend of the Casino de Paris, is no longer in tune with the times,” and in 1975 Roland Petit filed for bankruptcy of the Casino. Lisette Malidor then continued her career as a lead performer at the Moulin Rouge (1976–1979) and at the Folies Bergère (1983–1985). Later, as both dancer and actress, she starred in a dozen films, including Joseph Losey’s La Truite, and on stage in many roles including French classics by Racine and Molière. Today, aged 80, she lives quietly outside Paris, still wanting to celebrate her life and, of course, the life of Josephine Baker.
These women have much in common, and not just the role the city of Paris played in their lives. They all refused to be defined by their beginnings. The lives they were offered were not the lives they chose. They left behind troubles, looked ahead, pushed boundaries, learned as they went along, nurtured their talents, and showed the world exactly what they were capable of.
There’s a song entitled It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish, with the line you’re going to finish on top. Written by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, it was cut from the 1970 show Eleanor, but it neatly summarises these women. Thank you, Josephine, Bricktop, Alberta, Mabel, and Lisette for your contributions to music, culture, and of course, Paris.
