Part Two: Josephine Baker: The Actor and Spy Who Mighta Saved the World

Margaret continues her conversation with journalist and writer Laurie Penny about Josephine Baker, the first black woman to star in a film, who also helped fight the Nazis.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Coop People who did Coop Stuff,
because we've had a coup in which Robert Evans has
stopped pretending to be a different person than Sophie Lickterman.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right. I'm just the best voice actor there's ever been.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
That's that's right, and that's why you have those immaculate
accents that you totally do on your show and not mine.
I'm your host, Margaret Kilsroy, and each week we talk
about cool people who did cool stuff, which has never
been the name of the podcast. So this week we're

(00:39):
talking with Lori Penny. Hi, Laurie, how are you?

Speaker 3 (00:43):
I'm all right, how are you?

Speaker 1 (00:45):
I'm doing good on this day that is totally a
different day than the previous day that we recorded.

Speaker 4 (00:49):
It's also a different day. It's also a different day
from me than it is for you. That's true. It's
just going with here in London.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, we wanted to record in two different days, so yeah. Well,
and of course our producer is Sophie Lichterman. Sophie, how
are you doing? Sophie. Laurie knows that I'm famously accent blind,

(01:21):
but even I can tell a perfect Boston accent.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Classic Boston Sophie because she loves the Celtics so much.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Yeah, totally. Ian is our audio engineer. Hi Ian, You'll
have to say hi to Ian too him. Our theme
music was written for Spyon Woman. So this week won't
make any sense, Well, today won't make any sense unless
you go back and listen to part one. Where you
should go back to listen to part one talk about

(01:50):
Josephine Baker and where she comes from, which is mostly
a series of not nice things that happened, followed by
her doing really amazing shit and making it friends as a.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Web of fascinating and brilliant lies. Love. I love the
idea of it.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
Has this just amazing, amazing liar that's her talent in
so so many ways.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
And then she just becomes a spy, which I don't
actually know much about, but I feel I'm about to.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah no, and it's it's perfect. Everyone keeps thinking that
she wouldn't be a good spy because she's like an
actress person in the world. Right, there are some downsides,
but it works really well. So there's this intelligence agency
in France, or there used to be, and it's called
the Dooziem Bureau Bureau, god fucking whatever. It's called the Yeah,

(02:41):
thanks you, there we go, thank you, thank you. A
low yeah, as compared to the law, you can probably
actually pronounce all of this stuff. They're spies, and they
spy on stuff. They counter spy on other people's spies
of the French ci A. Essentially they or the French

(03:03):
M one six, m I six what's y'all's over and.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
M I six or M I five that's what we
could The M one is is a road?

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah? Wait why five? And why is the most crowded
road I've ever seen?

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yes, I've never known why it's five and six?

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Actually, yeah, are they different?

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (03:23):
One is one is Home affairs, one is one is
the FBI. One is the CIA exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
A g r U F s B sort of sort
of dell, yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Okay, okay, So the the those the m BR cut whatever,
they predate the CIA by a long fucking time, like,
you know, fifty.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Years at least.

Speaker 5 (03:46):
All.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, However, it's also woefully underfunded.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Not the CIA. They can have no fund fine CIA.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, And normally I would say I don't care for
countries for an intelligence. This is underfunded. There's this problem
with the Nazis, you know, and it will have impacts, right, yeah,
So one of the ways that they start financing their shit,
or rather they start setting aside this slush fund where
they're basically like intercepting spies, German spies in France and

(04:18):
then continuing to pretend to be those spies in order
to keep getting payments from Germany. Because Germany's spy agency
is really well funded.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
They're running faked spies in order to feel from the Nazis.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, basically, yeah, right. They're also relying primarily on volunteer
spies because they're broke as fuck. These volunteer spies are
called honorable correspondence and they are a sort of irregular

(04:52):
and they're probably not super trustworthy to be honest, although
actually they are rated as very trustworthy by the like
each of of French spies at this time has like
a rating of the information is like rated on a
like seed a scale.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Are you meant to be trustworthy if you're a spy?
I know, maybe I've misunderstood spying here, right. I may
not know much about about about lying, but I feel
like spies untrustworthy.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah that's fair.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
I honestly, sometimes spine seems like the most impossible thing
in the world because you're like, well, who's lying who's not?
I mean, I guess that's the whole thing, is trying
to figure out who's lying, he's not. There's a whole
things about it.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
But I don't know.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
It's much easier to just be like, I'm a partisan,
I shoot Nazis and then these people to do like
really complicated shit. You know, yes, communication, yeah, exactly, So
non violent communication with bullets.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, that's something different.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Oh, violent communication? Sorry, violent communication, all right. So they
recruit her the u z M Hero and it's a gamble.
They're like a lot of people like the guy who
wants to recruit her is like, I want to recruit
Jephine Baker And people are like, she's literally the most
photographed woman in the world. How can she be a spy?

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Right?

Speaker 1 (06:16):
But this is how it worked, and it worked because
of that. So this guy shows up at her house,
her big her chateau, and it's like, hey, do you
want to go be a spy for France? And she's
apparently she's like hanging out in boots in the garden,
like picking up snails in order to feed them to
her ducks. Oh yeah, it's like very like you know,
she has like two lives. You know, she's Josephine Baker

(06:38):
on stage and then she's like the lady who picks
up snails to go feed to the ducks, or.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Of secret dorkiness. Yeah, she just pulled her goat and
her pig and head cheet during her ducks.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, and her dog and her three different types of
monkeys and her mice, but we'll get to those.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
She's so glad she got so many animals. At the
beginning of this story, she's like running away from home
because they weren't. It's like the same kind.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Of person right the way through. I love it.

Speaker 6 (07:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
So they show up and this guy shows up and
he's like, yeah, you want to go spy for France,
And she's like, well, I fucking hate Nazis and I
fucking love Paris, so let's go. Or more specifically, she
says things like the way she's quoted in all of
the various honorifics from France, as she says, dispose of
me as you will. You know, she's willing to die
to fuck up Nazis. She also makes it very clear

(07:31):
up front that she has no problem killing Nazis herself
with her bare hands as necessary.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
This was this something that they suggested she should deal
Was she just like as an optional extra in case.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Has I think she just was like, I just want
to make it clear, like does this mean I get
to kill.

Speaker 3 (07:51):
Some Yeah, it's like you can have a weapon.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
It's like whatever, I don't care.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
There's nothing wrong with you I can't fix with my hands.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, and her handler is a guy named Jacques Abtay.
They start fucking, I think pretty much immediately because those spies,
which makes the whole like dispose of me as you will,
like kind of a kind of you say, yeah, both
of them are married. Both of their marriages on the rocks.

(08:28):
Sugar Lion has been cheating on Josephine. Josephine also had
recently had a miscarriage that broke her heart and put
some distance between her and Lion. And then Abtay, his
like wife I think was an Actually I don't think
his marriage was on the rocks.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
I think he was just being shitty.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
Because his wife. His wife was not Josephine Baker.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
That was the problem with this, yeah, exactly. And his
wife was like I think in England at this point
because the aforementioned the fall of France's imminent. One thing
I didn't realize is how everyone in France knew the
fall of France was eminent except the French government. The
French government was like, we have the line. I can't

(09:10):
remember the name of the line.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
You imagine the line. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
They're like, we're going to hold this and it's totally
gonna work, and like all of France is like getting
ready for like, well, we're about to become German. Maybe
we should get out of here, and yeah, including not lions,
TH's lions whatever. Abdey's wife I believe is in England
at this stright. So they give her her first assignment.

(09:37):
They want to know if Mussolini is going to join Hitler,
if he's going to join the Axis forces. It's hard
to imagine in retrospect that anything else could have happened,
but it was actually an unknown at the time, and
considering Franco didn't write, there was not actually an assumption
that all of the Fascist countries would fight on the
same side. So she goes over to the Italian embassy.

(09:58):
They like her there, they trust her. After all, she
backed Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, right, yeah, And she gets
information out of a guy I think by nagging him.
Oh yeah, just like can do that ship. That's what
you gotta do, That's what you gotta do. Yeah, you

(10:19):
could do that ship. Your biceps a looking kind of
weak from you even like lift with your tries.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
Yeah, I bet you, I bet, I bet You're not
going to join any any Nazi alliance.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
You know that, But you couldn't. You just wouldn't be
that kind of person. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
Yeah, So she talks them into joinings. I mean yeah,
but yeah, and this guy like basically like whispers to
her like, oh no, we're totally going to join Hitler,
and so she goes and it's like, oh yeah, totally,
that's interesting. I am and nobody there's no reason I
would tell anyone that. And apparently at this point she's like, yeah, like.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Me a bit you can say to me, honey, And she.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Like is literally writing the notes on her like arm,
like she's in school, you know. Yeah, because when people
are like what the fuck you do it, she's like
not not the people she's spying on, but like later,
and that's for sure when people are like how do
you get away with that? She's like, I'm Josephine Baker, Like,
no one's gonna second guess me.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
So it works, she's yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
And so she's the one who breaks the news to
the Allies that Mussolini is going to join the Axis
Powers and this is really fucking bad news, but it's
also really important news for the Allies to have. And
next up, they're like, all right, what about Japan. What's
Japan going to do? Because Japan at the time is like,
what joining Axis? We would we would never do that.

(11:45):
It's like not our thing. This is shortly after Stalin
had made a deal with Hitler because we cannot go
an episode without bringing up the Malota ribbon. Trump packed
It's in that contract with cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, that's one of my favorite pacts.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Yeah, top five past easy, easy. And the Allies are
basically like, all right, well, Germany, Italy and Russia are
all on one side. We're kind of in trouble here, right,
If Japan joins, we're kind of just entirely fucked right.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, they never do that.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
No, they would never do what Yeah, which kind of
like I mean, looking at it, I'm like, if Germany
hadn't betrayed Russia by invading it with the Nazis have
won the war.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Americans. Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean it's one of
those things. Also, if they had just like stopped, like
not instituted the Battle of Britain, not invaded Russia, focused
on Northern Africa, Yeah, it's potentially like at least a
situation where they can hold on to European dominance and
probably a big chunk of the Mediterranean too. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
Yeah, but it was all because you know, the people
who one were strong and brilliant and clever are not
at all because Nazis made mistakes.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, right, you know, it's complicated, but Nazis made a
lot of mistakes.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, we're in a pretty good position after the fall
of France. It would have been really hard to dislodge
them if they hadn't have done a bunch of really
stupid shit.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
There's like parts in this that are like, as I'm
reading about it all I'm like, oh, this.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
This was closer than I thought.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
I mean this obviously you look at some of it
and you're like, oh god, this is close, right, I
don't know whatever. There's just moments where it's.

Speaker 6 (13:34):
Like like there's you know, there had been prior to
the Nazi invasion.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Like one of the reasons why Stalin has a series
of panic attacks is that, like the Germans, even before
the Nazis took over in the Weimar years, had a
pretty long history post war of collaborating and training with
the Red Army that's who. Like, as the German military
was re arming after World War One because they're a
paria nation, because the Soviets are a pariah nation, they're

(14:05):
doing like combined arms training together for a so interesting
of the nineteen thirties. Okay, Yeah, it's like they had.
It's much like the kind of collaborations between the two
countries actually go back both further than the Nazis coming
to power and significantly further than the Molotov Ribbon trop back.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, so she's
trying to find out, Josephine's trying to find out Japan's
going to join the war and fuck everything up. I mean,
spoiler alert, Japan was on the axis side of World
War Two for anyone who's not familiar with that part
of it. So Josephine, she's tight with the Japanese ambassador's

(14:48):
wife in a almost like like she calls her her sister.
This is when when she went back to the US
and she was getting kicked out of all these hotels.
Oh she was that was the friend is the Japanese
ambassador's wife. So she's in with the Japanese embassy, but
she would have to leverage and betray that trust in

(15:10):
order to find out what Japan is going to do
in the war. Man, So she does, yeah, right, choice, that's.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, you know, I don't feel like it is.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
I feel like Howard choice, but it's a very obvious one.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah, Like, I mean, yeah, if there's a good situation
to betray your friend, it's when they side with the Nazis. Two.

Speaker 7 (15:34):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, a little bit of a no brainer.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
Like USSR is over here being like, oh, thank god
Finland joined the Access Power So the winner war makes
us look like who we were on the right side.
So she leverages her connections with the Japanese ambassador to
find out that yes, Japan is going to join the
Access Powers. So she passes that along too, and the
war itself is kicking off. At this point. Germany in

(16:02):
the USSR did their joint invasion of Poland in September
nineteen thirty nine, and it seems like most of France
is like, I think we're just going to kind of lose,
which is in fact what ends up happening. But for
a little while, for eight months, you have this quote
unquote phony war, and it's eight months of not much
happening on the Western Front. The Western Powers have declared war,

(16:22):
but they aren't really doing much besides economic actions. The war,
of course, wasn't phony on the Eastern Front, although in
some ways the Eastern Front didn't exist yet.

Speaker 6 (16:31):
Because one of my favorite factors, so the phony war
is one thing it's called.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
The other nickname they had for it was the sits Creek.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yeah right, And actually this whole time, Josephine has complaining
about the sits Kreek basically because her whole thing is
she's like trying to she doesn't succeed, obviously, she's trying
to get France in England to just fucking invade Germany, just.

Speaker 2 (16:55):
Like let's go, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
How is she one per trying to do.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
This if the others doesn't have any.

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Impact, because I'm us making that time.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I don't think she's like pulling strings.
I think she's just making it clear that her opinion
is whereat war, let's destroy them.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Like she has a fairly like simple she does incredibly
complicated strategy all the time. But it's just like she's
just like, well, let's just fucking do the thing. It's
like often seems to be her her strategy in a
very effective way. And the war, of course, isn't phony
on the Eastern Front. There's refugees pouring out of everywhere.
It's also not phony to French civilians who are pouring

(17:34):
away from the border with Germany. Josephine was not willing
to just to just do behind the scenes shit. She's like, well,
I can fly a plane. I like giving people stuff.
So on Christmas nineteen thirty nine, she signs up with
the Red Cross and flies aid to the refugees, goes
on a bunch of different missions. Yeah, what flying across

(17:58):
enemy lines to refugees and Europe, I think.

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
She starts performing for the troops as well, which is
most of what people know about her wartime activity because
a lot of the other stuff was undercover for a
very long time, right, She starts singing his anthem that
she'd actually written a while earlier. Je vu a moire.
I have two loves, and her two loves are Paris
and her country, and I think this means the USA,
although it's kind of funny because she hates the USA.

(18:23):
I sort of write my first read was I have
two loves Paris and my country. And I kind of
like it because I like the fact that Paris doesn't
consider itself part of France. It's like always amused me.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
Yeah, it's kind of like London and the reci of
the Ukay, it's a different place.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
Yeah, that makes sense. That's kind of like the rest
of the UK and England. They would like to be
different places.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
It's like Texas and the rest of the United States.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah, would prefer to be different places. But if you
would prefer to be different and stand out from the crowd,
you can do so by having the same stuff as
other people who stand out from the crowd, by purchasing
stuff from our fine advertisers.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
What how'd I do? Is that gonna work? We're gonna
We're gonna make stuff book. That's fine, that's fine. Yeah,
Big Stuff is investing.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Excellent, excellent, here's some maths, and we're back. So she
started writing songs for the British troops who were stationed
in sad bunkers on the Western Front. She started writing
a bunch of songs in English about like I didn't
write down the titles of it, but they're like, I
don't know, I missed London and everything's sad.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
I don't actually remember.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
But she writes a bunch of songs for the British
people who are like sitting around in the sitskrig.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
I really like this name.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'm going to use that all the time now, all
of the times in my life. When I talk about
the Phony War, I.

Speaker 4 (19:47):
Bet there was like in at least in every one
of those bunkers, there was one person who kept doing that.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
You just wouldn't let it go. And have you heard this?
So that's actually where they started to real wool.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
No, they just sent that guy into no man's land
as a scout and then he came back successful. He's
actually the real hero. We're going to pivot to hit no.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
So she starts working.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
So she's flying missions, she's she's writing songs, she's done
all the spine. She starts working at soup kitchens for
the Red Cross, and her presence cheers everyone up. And
she's doing two things here, well, okays, as mutual aid,
she's doing two things. She was directly materially helping people, right,
she was also cheering people up her presence. I mean

(20:37):
she's like, I don't know who's a famous.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Person she's turning up?

Speaker 1 (20:42):
Yeah, the famous Beyonce. Beyonce is like, right, you know, yeah,
do we know that she's not?

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:58):
So I think her mutual aid were was entirely sincere,
but it was also a great cover for spying because
Germany's spy oparass has been pouring spies into France, and
it has been for like a decade now, right, like
building up towards this shit. But it's just it's just
ramping up more and more and more, and they're going
from like a couple dozen arrests of spies per week
to like hundreds of arrests of spies per week, and

(21:19):
there's just more that keep pouring in. And so she
is hanging out at the like she's just fucking trying
to figure who's the spy constantly. Meanwhile, she divorces her
husbands number three yeah, yeah, so the foreny war doesn't last.

(21:40):
O mean, I'm trying to remember why she divorced him. Ah,
he's cheating on her, right, and this is before she's
cheating on him. Actually his affair was when they started
falling out. And then also she miscarries, and which unfortunately
she does multiple times during her life.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
She's very sad about it.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
So the phony war didn't last, and for the West
it soon went from phony war to Germany took over
the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Germany just kind of
fucked them up with new tactics and new weapons.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
And methamphetamine. You know, don't don't don't don't you know?
This is this is this is amphetamine erasure, Margaret.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
I'm sorry, Well, considering our main sponsor is methamphetamines, that's right. Yeah,
the only productivity method.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Crystal meth. Do you know how many fibers are in
your coat?

Speaker 3 (22:41):
I do not.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Crystal meth count the tile room.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
So the methods and no, I'm not gonna phrase it
that way. So the Germans invade France and the French government.

Speaker 6 (22:57):
For copper wire.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Just just spun out.

Speaker 6 (23:02):
Dudes being like look man, France has a shipload of copper.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Grab this ship, we take it back home. We can
be fucking lit up for weeks.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
See, that would rule if that's what they had done.
If it was like the Scrounger's army and they just
like poured in and ripped out all the wire and
then went home, just.

Speaker 6 (23:20):
Taking suda fed from France's many pharmacies exactly exactly.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
That's what the is for, man, we need pseudo exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
But the French government said, I regret that I have
but one Suita fed to leave in my wake, so
that the enemy is distracted. Yeah, and they flee. The
American ambassador apparently William Bullet. This was like basically a
side note in this book I was reading. But it's
fucking weird. He took over Bullets, William Bullet took over Paris.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
He's not friends Amy Soon, No.

Speaker 5 (24:03):
I know it.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
It's funny because this is not a normal American name, but.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
William Bullet's not.

Speaker 6 (24:09):
That's like, that's like the if you're, like, I don't know,
like a Japanese film producer making a racist stereotype movie about.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
America, that's what you call one. Yeah, call him William Bullet.

Speaker 6 (24:21):
Yeah, William Bullet, Johnny Gunn, ted aar fifteen.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yeah, the American characters also come on.

Speaker 4 (24:29):
That guy's like, everybody clearly refers to that guy as
Bill Bullet.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Oh, absolutely, Oh you're right, you're right.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
But William Bullet.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, and he insists, he's like, I will it's William Bullet.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
And he didn't want me to call him William Bullet.
I would, I would Bill you. I'm gonna call you
Bill Bullet, Like I'm not calling you. That's much less fun.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, So Billy two Guns, he takes over governing the city.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
He apparently finds a phone, like one functioning phone, and
he like calls Berlin and he's like, hey, we're like
not resisting. Could you please not murder everyone when you
show up?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah, okay, call that an open city.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah that specifically, Yeah, they refer to it as an
open city. And so Josephine could have fled. She was
a superstar, and she was arguably still a US citizen
since her marriage and citizenship in France were sort of
contested because of the whole marriage issue. She did not flee.
She absolutely could have been like one of the people
on like the last planes out right, and instead she

(25:36):
keeps doing her thing in the city. She's performing. She
walks like ten miles uphill each way from her chateau
to the Red Cross Center to keep feeding people. She
keeps performing, and then after performing goes and volunteers more. Oh,
this is where the meth comes in. How could one
possibly anyway? Yeah, she just basically works tirelessly.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
France.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
It's sort of abandoned. No one really had made enough plan.
This is according to this book I read. I have
a feeling when I start doing more stuff on partisans,
people will be like, hell, hell no, here were all
our plans and stashes of guns. But at least from
an organizational like governmental level, people hadn't really made enough
plans to fight back, hadn't really made enough plans about
like what would happen if France fell? And the intelligence

(26:24):
agency with a French name I'm bad at pronouncing, was
definitely caught in disarray. They they didn't set up a
rearguard to keep up the fight, They didn't evacuate or
burn their files in a timely manner. They managed to
get some of them out all at the last minute.
A whole ton of files actually literally using signal just
keep that auto delete on. Yeah, I know that happens

(26:45):
when you take enough mess. Well, they didn't have it
yet to capture off of the Germans. Yeah, so they
they they store tons of files in a dairy among
cheeses in central France, but other tons of files they
just like put on the last train out of France

(27:06):
and so the Nazis are like, yo, stop, this trainer
will shoot you, and they're like okay, and so then
they come on and they just take all the files
and then the government Nazis get all the fucking files
from the fucking French FBI and in a cheese warehouse. Yeah, yeah,
the ones that got out.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
There's just so bits of this do sound like it's being.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Written to make fun of friends.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, trunk person who knows very very little about the
European history apartments. Why will the French do files in
a or just like this is what happens at the
end of the riker's room when everyone's very very tired
and just wants to go home. I don't know, cheese warehouse,
like cowboy guy sends the files to the cheese weak
house like see you all.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Tomorrow, which is Basically what's happening is everyone's very tired
and wants to go home, but instead the Germans are invading. Also,
one thing that the and forgot to do was do
something with all of the German spies they had arrested.
So they're just all in prison and then the Nazis
come in and say, oh, hello, Franz, welcome to not prison.

(28:13):
By the way, who were all the people who arrested?
You tell us who all the spies are, right, So
a lot of French spies get executed right off because
the Nazis capture all their files and shit, yep, yep, yeah,
they don't capture anythingbout Josephine at this point, and so
Josephine she vows to never perform in France for the Nazis.

Speaker 4 (28:37):
And unlike that she must have been in so much
danger though absolutely even if they hadn't found out about
about her spine.

Speaker 1 (28:45):
They personally hate her. Gebels has like specifically been like
Josephine Baker's I don't like her. She's mean or whatever
she called me. She looked at me funny once another supermarket.
But she does have one advantage fantastic amounts of money
and she happens to be already renting a or possibly owning.

(29:06):
I don't know how it refers to as renting. But
she has a fucking medieval castle in southern France. Yeah
it's cool, but it is hard to hide. Not a
safe ass, right, And so what she does is she
doesn't hide. She hides the fact that she's a spy.
So she takes off to her medieval chateau in southern France.

(29:27):
And it takes Germany a while to take all of France.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
You know, you have like there's a decent amount of
France there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, it's not a it's not a Rhode Island.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
And prepper queen that she is, she fills her car
with champagne poddles full of gasoline that she's been hoarding,
oh boy, so that she can make the trip if
the gas stations are gone.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Hey bonus.

Speaker 6 (29:57):
If you run into trouble on the road, you've already
got molotovs. Yeah, what's that campaign? Yeah, you are ready
for a variety of situations.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
What's the big place? The quote from the Good Place.
If you ever have a problem, throw a molotov at it,
And now you have a different problem.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, yes, absolutely, Yeah, so she had the same problem.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
So she gets out and it's possible. I think she's
like helping bring a bunch of a bunch of folks
she knows. I think mostly Jews out with her at
this time. I've read one thing that's like, and she
got a whole bunch of Jewish folks down to her chateau,
and another one that was like she put her solid
gold or like her gold piano in one of the
trucks or whatever. I've read a bunch of different takes

(30:45):
on how she gets I don't know. There's one version
where it's one car full of champagne molotovs, and another
one where it's like three trucks full of pianos. I
don't know the answer. German troops bomb the road as
people flee because they suck their Nazis.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
She makes it to her fucking castle, and she's friends
with the locals because she's just friends with everyone. Everyone
likes her. She's genuinely charming and cares about people, and
so she winds up in this resistance fighting cell that
was pulled together as a unit from like the local
people of the town and like the groundskeepers and shit
at her fucking castle. The local blacksmith ran a clandestine

(31:26):
radio tower out of her castle to keep contact between
the resistance in England.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
Her that's just a brilliant sentence.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, totally. Her farm hand on the grounds who was
a pole who'd fled the Blitzkreek. He dies running messages.
The man who ran the local train station. He has
a wooden leg from fighting in World War One, and
the Germans like show up and are like asking him questions.
I think about Josephine Baker and he's basically like, you

(31:55):
see this wooden leg.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Fuck you.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
They shoot him, but the heels doesn't tell them anything.
And she gathers up a crew, including a ton of
Jewish folks that she's rescued that she maybe drove down,
and she fills her castle with guns, which is a
good thing. This is I just wish, this is amazing.
And she plants a tobacco plant.

Speaker 3 (32:20):
Were you about to say you wish you had been there?

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Maybe it would have gone badly, but I would have
been in a castle full of guns.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
So it's like.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
We all die sometime, you know. She planted a tobacco
plant by the entrance to the castle in memory of
her enslaved fairly recent ancestors who had been forced to
grow it. She helps a whole bunch of Jewish folks
hide out. I think like more people are showing up.
France officially surrenders agree to become a Nazi puppet state,

(32:55):
the Vichy on June twenty fifth, nineteen forty. They pay
forty million ranks to the Nazis every fucking day. Resistance
is an instant death penalty. And the Jamais they didn't
sell out and become Nazis, fortunately they did the resistance
thing instead. Technically, legally they were beholden to the Vichi.

(33:16):
They just didn't do it.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Right.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, and so now they're the only good FEDS, which
are illegal FEDS fighting against Nazis. And this is remember
how they were like stealing money from the Germans by
running fake spies all at the beginning of this. Yeah,
this is when they bust that out because their official
resources have dried up. But they've set aside this rainy

(33:42):
day fund and they make friends with one other important
anti Nazi force that is often overlooked in history books,
the Mafia. Yeah, so they're fairly good at finding German spies.
This is the main thing that they do, right, is
that they counterspy and find spies. So then they turn

(34:05):
But now you're not going to arrest spies. You're not
the government anymore. And also didn't really work well when
you just arrested Nazi spies. So these two anti Nazi
crime enforcers whose names were Big Louis and Little Pierre.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
There they were. Oh man, you love to see it.
Never change, crime, guys, never change change. This is this
is my family, Like, this is the side that I'm
that I'm proud of. Look on one side of my family,
I don't know, there were white people in America for
a while, probably not a great story. The other side

(34:44):
of my family mobbed up as hell, and nothing, nothing
problematic ever came from the mafia. Well, of course, and big.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Medium someone in between.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, Big Louis and Little Pierre might have been cut,
no way to know.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Just Goldielucks. The one in the middle is just named Goldilocks. Yeah,
Big Louis apparently specifically, he has these quotes about how
he was like, look, I've done some bad stuff in
my life, but I want.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
To make my grandma proud. There we go oh yeah,
and so he just murders Nazi spies. M you love
to see it?

Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, Her handler boyfriend shows up at her castle unannounced,
right because everything is completely in disarray. There is no
like am I five or six or seven or eight
is referring to themselves as like blind at this point,
they've lost their eyes in France. And so her handler
boyfriend shows up on announce. He's a new name and

(35:44):
a new identity card. His name is Jack Sanders and
he's an American.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
That is also a pretty American name.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, totally be like, why did you write your middle
name as American?

Speaker 4 (35:56):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Nothing? Jack a man.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
And it doesn't it sounds like a brand of crackers.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
That's truly multiple ways.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yes, I do like the idea of like a British
spy pretending to be an American and then like in
the tense moment of the movie giving himself up and
he refers to French fries as chips.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Every one of the Chuck Montana, You're doing such an amazing.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
Which state did you say you were from, mister Montana?

Speaker 3 (36:35):
One of the end one.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
South was southern Wisconsin.

Speaker 5 (36:42):
Mm hmmm, says the name of this town and then
he like slides across a piece of paper that just
had has Luton written on it. Right, Lester, but love
Yeah again literally any town in the UK, yeah, would break.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
Which Australians called luga baruga I've heard, which is amazing adurable.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
I really hope it's too durable.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Loga baruga. I am.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
One time was hanging out with Laurie in London and
I couldn't stop laughing. I was sleep deprived from the
flight and I was on the subway, and the subway
in London is just full of fake names that are
all designed to make Americans laugh while they're sleep deprived.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Nonsense.

Speaker 4 (37:30):
Cockfosters, yeah, yeah, But the thing is the thing is
that the train line goes to cock Fosters, So every
single stop says this is a Piccadilly Line train to Cockfosters,
and all of the not English people in the train.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Completely lose thisshes. It's very delight It makes going to
pick someone up at the airport on the train completely
worth it. Yeah, everyone has a great time.

Speaker 6 (37:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
And also, nobody I know has ever been to Cockfosters.
I don't think it's real.

Speaker 1 (37:59):
No, I why would it be real that doesn't make
any sense.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's just it's sexycinnati. I don't believe it happens. I
don't believe anyone's really there. Well, is this just in
that fake state? I it's probably a tack scheme of
some sort.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah, all right, so Jack Sanders has shown up. The
US is still neutral, So being the US is like
actually a thing that one would do as a spy.
Whereas very soon, well not very soon from France's point
of viewer, but they wish we came in a lot sooner.
The Nazis are after I know, I know the ocean, Yeah,

(38:41):
swinging a baseball bat. So the Nazis were after him
because of all the files that got turned over to
the Nazis, you know. And eventually more spies show up
at her castle, and her castle becomes I think the
center of resistance on a spycraft level. At the time,
it's like kind of the center of where the French
intelligence like rebuild. As far as they can tell, there's

(39:03):
like other places they're doing it, including in the heart
of it all, like VICI.

Speaker 4 (39:08):
So the French resistance is rebuilding in a Josephine Baker's
castle full of refugees and guys and guns and a cheetah,
a goat in a pig. Yeah, in my head, Kenn,
they made it. It's but please don't tell me otherwise.
I just don't want to know.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
There's positive news about all the animals, and I think
it's I don't know whether it's I have a feeling
when I start studying the French resistance more, I'm going
to start running into the more like partisans on the
ground stuff and it's going to be a little bit
more distracted from this. But from a like intelligence point
apparatus point of view, yeah, as far as I can tell.
And a blacksmith running a radio tower is how they

(39:51):
communicate with England.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Thank you for saying it again. It pleased me so
much for.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
The first time.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
So French nazis aka v G guys, or maybe it's
actually a regular Nazi. At this point, some dude shows
up at the castle and he's like, I want to
see Jason Josephine Baker. I hear there's guns in here,
and so all the resistance people will like go fuck down,
funk off down to the dungeons because it's a castle,
and go hide.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Like a scene.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, yeah, I guess literally, yeah, like yeah, so these
like leather daddies were in all blacks show up and
are like hail Hitler and present her with a search
for it, and she talks to the main guy and
she yells at him for invading France. Good, I mean,
you know, this helps prove that she has nothing to hide,

(40:43):
she's not afraid of him.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:46):
So he pokes around for a little bit and is
like you have been worn, I can't do an accent,
and you know, fucks off soon after I think the
next day. Okay, So there's this Jesuit priest resistance guy
and his name is father Victor Dillard, and he's up
in Vechi and he sends them maps of where all

(41:09):
the German Air Force stuff is, like where they're staging
for all the the blitz and all of that, where
they're bombing the shit out of England. Yeah, and he
has decrypted where all of the defenses are for all
of the shit that's bombing England. It also includes a
list of all the German spies in England. Plans for

(41:30):
a possible Nazi invasion of Ireland based on arming the
IRA and teaching them how to blow stuff up in
exchange for helping invade England. Yep, because the IRA was
on the wrong side of this one.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Well that's it, you know again just kind of like
with what we were talking about the Soviets. That's also
goes back further than the Nazis. During World War One,
right before the Easter Rising, there was a German ship
full of guns that got captured by the British, like
right before it was able to liver said guns to
the IRA for an uprisings of the Imperial Germans.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, because like actually cover that in one of our
episodes about oh god, what's his name, the gay Irish Knight,
Roger Casement. Yeah, he was the one who arranged for
that shipment of guns. Yeah yeah, which is so funny
because I'm like, Roger Casement, good, you know, but i mean.

Speaker 6 (42:22):
Like Imperial Germany, Imperial England, like they're all kind of
morally not wildly different from one another.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
He's not morally a approachable people who did absolutely great
stuff all the time and it wasn't comp.

Speaker 1 (42:36):
Right, Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is the information that
Father Victor Dillard has gotten. He doesn't re enter the story,
so he dies in Dick how a couple of years now.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
Dock Cow.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
He dies in dock How in nineteen forty five, which
is a.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Yeah, that's.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
So they get this information right. But they get it
it's like a really sketchy way, this like super spycraft
way where this well not this very spycraftway. This guy
shows up and he's like, I got to see Josephine
Baker and people are like, this is the same day
after the Nazis came here.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
This is a trap.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
Finally, Josephine Baker's like what's up and he's like, I've
got like news for you from father Victor Dillard. I've
got all this stuff. Let me give you these papers.
And she's like, no, I've never heard of the resistance.
I have no idea what you're talking about. And they
send him away because they don't trust him. And what
they do is the local chief of police is like
kind of on their side, what is on their side?
So they call him and they're like, arrest this guy.

(43:36):
And they go and they arrest him and they like
interrogate him basically, and then they decide like, all right,
this guy's for real. And he had actually before he
left the castle, he had hidden the papers in the
castle and then left, so they almost turn away like
the most important fucking information, right. But yeah, so they

(43:58):
have all this crazy information and they're like, we have
to get this to the Allies. This is before they
had the tower set up and all that shit. And
so the crew decides that while the rest will stay
and fight, she and her boyfriend Handler needed to get
to Lisbon in Portugal to get these documents to Britain.
I would say, to get them to the Allies. But
Britain's alone.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
I think at this.

Speaker 3 (44:19):
Point this is a massive, massive empire.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
That's true. Okay, fair enough, Look, I mean the story.

Speaker 4 (44:29):
Sorry, it's just like I feel their correct the record
here that we always talk about it as like a
plucky little island stands alone, and so we did have
a giant empire, and actually quite a lot of people
were recruited to fight alongside this. It probably didn't make
much of the difference to ordinary London is being you know,
hammered by the Blitz. Because again, when people talk about

(44:50):
in the particular, Americans, even like you know, Americans with
very decent policies politics will talk about England and talk
about the British when they mean the British ruling classes,
and that's never been the total experience of the English
level and the British and like that it's always been
for them. Yeah, it's them, but like colonialism always starts

(45:13):
at home and they only like one of the reasons
that we ever had to had to have an empire
a tool was that they exploited our working class just
about as much as they could to find where to
ship the excess population so they could become white people.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
No, I mean that that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
And I think one of the reasons white Americans with
good politics to it is because they want an out
where they're like, I know, we suck, but there's like
one place is worse.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, right right, it's just it's bad.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
But we don't know this bit of our history as
the collective British we like we talked about before, we're
not thought it.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
Yeah, and it's this just giant howling in the.

Speaker 4 (45:59):
Public historical record, which is of course why people have
been so upset over the last ten years when people
started talking about the empire, just talking about it, Yeah,
because it is incredible how much is not generally known
even the recent history of Ireland. And look if we
knew more about the recent history of Ireland. And look,
you have people trying to negotiate in terms of the

(46:22):
like the Northern Ireland Border Protocol who have no idea
about the last few years of Irish history.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
It's absolutely nuts. Rant over for now.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
No, no, no, it's I think that is really important.
I think it is really important that when we talk
about I mean even when we talk about like the Germans, right,
you're like, well, Germany was the site of resistance against Nazis,
and Millie, I don't know. I don't have the numbers
off to my head. A fuck ton of German people
died at the hands of the Nazis, right, and including

(46:53):
all different types of people.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
But if you want to not die, yes, the products
and services, much like buried with thousands of rams heads,
if you were an Egyptian pharaoh, purchasing these products and
services will make you immortal. You will never die if
you buy these products. And that's a guarantee I feel

(47:17):
comfortable making because there's actually no way for you to
assue me over it. To buy this philactory.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
And we're back, so we're talking about how they have
to get these documents to Lisbon and so that they
can get to Britain. She is the only person of
their crew who can legitimately claim a reason to travel, right.
Everyone else is like, like, you're not supposed to leave France.

(47:50):
Anyone over forty is not supposed to leave France because
you could be leaving under forty. Sorry, it's not supposed
to leave because you could be going and join an
army or whatever. But like, really, they don't want anyone leaving.
But if you're fucking Josephine Baker, you gotta perform. And
so she was like, Oh, we're going to go on
the South American tour.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
We just have to go to.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
And so they get on a train down to Spain
and she brings along her her assistant. They say, playing
down to Sam train.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
Yeah, handlet slush boyfriend.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, which is actually going to make this next part
extra gross because some of the information was encoded in
secret and secret inc invisible ink, which at the time
was primarily semen.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Wow, I thought it was piss.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
I don't know the book I was reading was said Semen.
And then the spies were all like embarrassed because they
kept getting accused of being chronic masturbators because they would
like just have to go make.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Some because like semen shows up on a black live
so they're literally just writing and come, I think, so yeah, yeah,
that's fucking dope.

Speaker 6 (48:54):
I know extreme.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
This is the most frantic one king you can imagine.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah, just sit back and think of England because you
need to.

Speaker 6 (49:08):
We got some great intel this week. The bad news
is man, I am shooting ghost loads.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
It is dust like.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
So she writes on her sheet music and her probably
her boyfriend's come of that song Adua Moir and my
two loves just think spying and come, and she writes
us all down. But they also have the actual documents
because its not enough to just have the encoded stuff.
They need like the photos and shit. So they put
secret compartments in some of the suitcases. And what they

(49:42):
do is they bring a fucked on of suitcases, just
a mountain of stuff because she's fucking Josephine Baker. Yeah right,
and if she's found, she's one hundred percent fucked, right,
because it's not just invisible and seamen stuff. It is
like here's some photos of the ink where or they're
fucking of the air force bases, right and like how

(50:03):
they're defended and shit, no one looks at her luggage.
They all just stare at her. They ask her for autographs,
and shit, she makes it to Lisbon. They from a
get on a plane in somewhere in Spain, I'm not
sure where, and fly to Lisbon. Lisbon is the espionage
capital of the world. Just then, because all of it's
like neutral but close to everything, you know, And they

(50:25):
pass on documents to some guy who's named Major Bacon,
who also has a funny name. And this trip is
what re forges. You know, this is okay when I'm
making the claim that like Josephine Baker saves the world
or whatever, right, and there's like plenty of people who
you can say, in World War II, save the world.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Bill Bullet and Major Bacon.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
Right yeah, now, actually Bill, Bill Bullet, all he did
was like tell he he just told Berlin that it's
no open city. Please don't kill us, right enough? Yeah,
but Major Bacon, who's British. I believe this, This is
what reforges the connection between French and British intelligence agencies.
And also is like here's the information about the fucking

(51:07):
blitz and that feels like real major shit. You know
that feels like world event changing shit and yep, so
Josephine Baker saves the world. And then all the while
she's giving radio interviews in Lisbon about like celebrity bullshit,
where she's like, oh, I'm here to sing, you know,
which is cool, Like I mean, her singing isn't bullshit,

(51:29):
it's like really fucking good, right, And they're like, all right,
you've reforged these connections. We have arranged safe passage for
you and your boyfriend Handler to go to London and
you can sit out the rest of the war. Well
unless London falls, yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
Right Ley, which is currently being massively bombed.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
It's true.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Yeah, So Josephine Baker she's like, no, I'm not going
to run from a fight.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Fuck that.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
She goes back to France, she goes back to her castle,
she goes shows back up and they're like, look, we
know that you promised to not ever perform in Nazi France.
But here's the thing. We're broke and it'd be really
sick if you got paid a whole bunch of money
because you're like a superstar, and also your celebrity access

(52:13):
to information is more important than your unvarnished reputation. So
this is another thing that she burns. She burns her
own credibility. Yeah, and so she starts performing. She has
done like almost every role of a rebel besides like
literally the murdering Nazis with their bare hands part. She's
done mutual aid volunteering, she has done spy shit, She's

(52:36):
smuggled documents, she's fundraises, she's provided sanctuary, she helps people escape.
She like, fucking does it all propaganda. We'll talk more
about that. She also so, now, okay, what's her next trick.
She smuggles folks out of the country. In particular, she
smuggles to two people out of the country. One is
her old gay male lover, Fred Ray, who is her

(52:57):
co star and a lot of stuff back in the day,
and he's openly gay, and the Nazis were like, fuck
this guy, We're going to fucking kill him, right, And
he also had fought in a French foreign legion against
the Nazis, which is like, so now they double don't
like him. And another is a German Jewish film producer,
Rodolphe Solompson, who had already fled Germany with his family

(53:18):
and so Fred and Rodolph and his family. They're going
to go flee and they're going to go to Morocco
ostensibly to perform again this but it's more than that.
North Africa is the next theater opening in the war,
and she needs to be where she's useful. Also, the
Nazis were onto her kind of They were like, right,

(53:41):
I think they weren't onto her as a spy yet.
That's going to common about a year or so. But
they're like gonna fuck this lady Tip and so they
blacklist her and so she needs to get the fuck
out before they arrest her.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
She can't.

Speaker 1 (53:52):
She cancels the last bit of her shows in Marseille
and she gets on a steamer along with a great Dane,
three monkeys and two mice.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Oh hell yeah, it's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Everyone is like what are you doing? Leave the animals
and she's like, no, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, And it kind of works in that, like hurt,
she's not gonna fly under the radar, so she flies
over the radar, you know, yeah, or breaks through the
radar or whatever. And my metaphor doesn't work right. But
she gets to Africa and she's immediately arrested by Vichy
police for breach of contract because she owed more shows

(54:40):
to the fucking people in Marseille. It takes her like
a week to sort that one out, because it's not
a we're going to murder you crime.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
You know.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
She's rescued her, her friends and herself. She then immediately
sets to work using her connections to get passports for
Jews fleeing Europe. Then she gets sick as fuck paranatitis,
which is basically stomach is bad to squeamish folks like me.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
She spends eighteen months in the hospital in the middle
of all this shit. At one point, she's so close
to death that the poet Langston Hughes and Chicago writes
her obituary and published it by accident because everyone thought
she was dead. He'd written that she was quote as
much a victim of Hitler as the soldiers who fall
today in Africa fighting his armies. The Arians drove Josephine

(55:29):
away from her beloved Paris. Josephine had to write a
attraction to her own obituary saying, quote, there has been
a slight error. I am much too busy to die.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Nice. Yeah, this was like that whole like five six
year period was like the Golden Age for one liners,
some really truly incredible lines. Yeah, oh god, my favorite to.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
Fight your own death, isn't it? Like do you want
to be a spy or not? We're moving on now.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
No, sorry, So her hospital room becomes a resistance center
for spies because they can meet there, because they're under
the pretense of visiting Josephine Baker, because like lots of
people are coming and visiting. So while she's sick, she
gathers information about AXIS North African access defenses, about the tides,

(56:24):
and helps pave the way for Operation Torch when the
Allies fuck up AXIS forces in North Africa in the
US gets involved a little bit more directly in the war,
I believe. So eighteen months she gets out and she
goes on to start passaging messages back and forth as
she travels across North Africa, performing to raise money and performing.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
For the troops.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
And the main way that she's carrying information is invisible
inc on her sheet music. And then the other thing
is notes pinned inside her underwear because she's like, I'm
Josephin Baker. No one's going to strip search me.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
And she's right.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
The entire war goes by, and when Strip searches her
and she's like, you know who else sucks besides Germany?
The fucking US army. It's segregated, so she refuses to
play for a segregated army and only will play when
the black and white soldiers sit together. This is amazing
also that local folks like North African folks are allowed

(57:19):
to attend her performances. At one point, cool she's singing
and performing for the troops and the base they're at
is bombed and there's a bombing raid on the base.
She doesn't stop singing because they're like, oh, they got
to get you out of here, and she's like, well,
the soldiers can't leave.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
So I'm not fucking leaving. Also based and the.

Speaker 1 (57:40):
Other thing, she is doing all of this out of
her own pocket because there's no money for troop entertainment,
so she just burns ten million francs of her own
money to travel the world being a spy performing for troops.
So she works as a diplomat. She is talking with

(58:02):
people across Northern Africa about why they should support the Allies. Specifically,
she helps connect the free forces of France with Egyptian stuff.
I don't really know enough about the course of the
war to say how influential this is. I just like,
straight up, I don't know. By nineteen forty two, it
is clear that the Nazis are onto her. She keeps going.
She's less of a spy at this point, and she

(58:23):
is just and just gets quotes because it's still fucking amazing,
an entertainer and a fundraiser for the war effort. The
leader of Free France gives her a fancy bejeweled medal
at some point. There's like all of the people keep
listening off her medals and all of the articles, but
I never care about that, and so I don't pay attention,
so I didn't write them down. Gives her a fancy
bejeweled medal for her service in nineteen forty three, so

(58:45):
the next time she's in Beirut she auctions it off
to raise money for the resistance. Great and in nineteen
forty four she joins the Free French Air Force properly
and becomes a second lieutenant. This is an all women unit,
and I think it's mostly for propaganda purposes, and I'm
not entirely certain. I wasn't able to like find more

(59:05):
information about that. I mean, she can fucking fly, right.
She's a pilot. She's flown missions with the Red Cross
for refugees, and she's flying along as the Allies march
into access territory and start liberating camps. She's like flying
along and she starts performing for refugees and for Holocaust
survivors as they like are freed from concentration camps. And

(59:28):
it's kind of I don't know, I just I think
it's fucking cool. So when Paris was retaken, she goes
and she just sells all of her jewelry and shit
and raises money and gives it directly to poor folks.
It's no longer now that like Paris is retaken, and
now that the war is fucking winding down, she's not like, oh,
I'm going to give all my money to like the
military effort or whatever. She's just like or the French government.

(59:51):
She just like directly gives it to poor people.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
You're already thinking about putting things back together.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
Yeah, totally. And she burns her entire fortune during the
course of the war. She like actually puts it all
on the line in her life and even her fucking
reputation by playing her fucking Nazis to raise money and
get info.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
It's so brave, Yeah, someone as the bravest bit of it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
Yeah, because like if she had died before that and
no one knew that she was like a super cool spy,
it would have been like, oh, she was cool, and
then like I don't know, and then.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
She steaded performing for the Nazis and sold out.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Yeah, totally, and for.

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
Somebody who has like like right at the beginning, we
were talking about different ways of telling your story, and
she clearly wanted to own it and to make up
things about herself again and again and be in charge
of it. So to risk that the story people would
have about her was really really awful. It's just the
bravest thing a person that that can do.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Yeah, No, you're right, because I mean she clearly isn't
afraid of death, Like you don't become a pilot or
a spy because you're afraid of dying, you know why.
Yeah that's true too, right, Yeah, And I'm guessing I
don't know how long cheetahs live, but I stop hearing

(01:01:11):
about Hiquida before she takes all of her animals over.
So I'm I'm presuming Shakida lived a natural life span and.

Speaker 4 (01:01:19):
Like and had a long, happy life somewhere else, because
cheetas never die.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Yeah, that's what I meant to say. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
So after the war, she goes back to performing, but
she has a newfound seriousness. She rebuilds a lot of
her famousness. She kind of like when I say struggles financially,
I like, I don't know how much bother she was
by it or not, you know, but she's like, doesn't
reach the same level of like, fuck off money. Yeah,

(01:01:45):
but I think that that might be not as much
important to her at this point anymore, you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:49):
Know, just dispertely leaves money. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
In nineteen fifty one, she returns to the US, not
to live there, but to to use her fame to
force places to desegregate. This nightclub in Miami was like segregated,
and they were like, hey, we want you to come
play here, and she's like, I'm a fucking plan for
a segregated club.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Fuck you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
They're like, we'll give you ten thousand dollars, which I
don't have the I forgot to do the money calculator.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
But it's like about forty million dollars in modern money. Yeah, yeah, roughly.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Yeah, And no matter how much money they offer her,
she's not going to play for segregated audience. So they desegregate,
and then she goes on a US tour that went
way the fuck better than last time she tried, you know,
twenty five years earlier or fifteen years earlier. And when
she fought to desegregate the Stork Club, which is an

(01:02:39):
old bougie asshole club in New York City, some assholes
and some asshole and the press called her a communist.
So the US kicked her out of the country because
even though they were getting slightly better about racism, they
were really anti communist.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
It was a it was a two steps forward several
other steps back, so.

Speaker 3 (01:02:59):
You can deal.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
Yeah, she was banned for twelve years nineteen sixty three.
They lifted it in nineteen sixty six. She goes to
Cuba and plays in Havana for actual communists. I have
like no belief that she became a communist or something,
but I think she was about what she was about.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Yeah, And she worked for the NAACP in the US.
She spoke she was the only official woman speaker at
the nineteen sixty three March on Washington alongside Martin Luther
King Junior, and she used the fact that she was
the only woman who was like given a place to
speak to invite other black women up to speak, and

(01:03:37):
specifically Rosa Parks and Daisy Baits came up and gave
small speeches basically like as part of her speech, because she.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
Was like, this is so completely crazy. I'm like, yeah,
they dunce.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
Yeah, I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
And if you read all these articles about her.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
Always did the most base thing she could. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
And when she spoke in nineteen sixty three, she wore
her free French uniform.

Speaker 7 (01:04:02):
Oh god, just unerringly based. Yeah, like a base seeking missile. Okay,
there's gonna be one little I'll get to it. This
next part, isn't it. When when Martin Luther King Junior, dies,
his widow asked Baker if she would take his place
as leader of the movement, and for the first time,

(01:04:23):
she let her own safety influence her decision. She said
her children were too young to lose their mother, and
her first duty was to them. Because now let's talk
about her children, who kind of don't Okay. So she
adopted twelve kids from around the world, called them the
Rainbow Tribe, in an effort to show that quote, children

(01:04:46):
of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers. So
she raised them all different religions, including not necessarily the
religions that they would have been otherwise born into. Okay,
And there's a lot of criticism from a optees today
about the way that adoption agencies work, especially around international
adoptions and things like that. She also arranged tours of

(01:05:08):
her chateau so that tourists could come see how happy
her Rainbow Tribe was, and the kids would sing and
dance for the tourists.

Speaker 3 (01:05:16):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
And then here's one part that I found one source
and that confuses me. When one of her kids, who
is Argentinian, was fifteen and like came out as gay,
she kicked him out of the house and sent him
back to Argentina. And it's really that's a bumb I
don't it. I believe so, But it's like, and it's

(01:05:39):
interesting because she's bisexual. She saved this gay man's life
on purpose, who she was also her Yeah, she also
converted to Catholicism later in her life. And I don't
know if those are related.

Speaker 2 (01:05:52):
Maybe she just got listed, yeah, debased.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Yeah, And I as far as I can, all her
kids who've now also mostly lived full, complete lives and died,
I think her kids tend not to be her biggest
fan about the way that she raised them.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Right, Well, you can't, you can't get it all right, yeah,
And it's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
Like and you can see where it's coming from and
all the like singing and dancing. Shit, that's like what
she fucking did and what she loved.

Speaker 3 (01:06:23):
You know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
So her last marriage, I know, I know, we're it's
not done.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
Oh it were.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):
This is the this is the winding down. Her last
marriage was to an artist named Robert Brandy was about
thirty years younger than her. It's referred to as a
platonic marriage and it was never legally sanctioned. It was
in an empty church in Mexico. They kept it away
from the press because they didn't want to deal with
all the bullshit. In nineteen seventy five, she performed in
Carnegie Hall and there was a standing ovation before she

(01:06:52):
came on stage, and she cried because the night and
day difference from her treatment. The last time she tried
to play Carnegie Hall, like you know, thirty fifty whatever
years earlier. That's a few days later, at sixty eight
years old, she slipped into a coma and died of
brain bad stuff. About twenty thousand people showed up for

(01:07:13):
her funeral procession in Paris. She was the first American
woman buried in France, with full military honors and a
twenty one gun salute.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
Damn.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
A few years ago she was reburied in the Pantheon,
France's Tomb of Heroes, and she's the first American of
any gender race to be buried there, as well as
the first pilot and as well as the first black woman.

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
God damn. Yeah, she just fucking did everything.

Speaker 3 (01:07:41):
He really did, like you feel like, and he just
started getting up earlier in the morning.

Speaker 6 (01:07:48):
No, I will say she was probably exhausting to be around. Yeah,
oh sure, yeah, smuggling shit via the air and spying
on the look you know some of us.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Yeah, but you do you have a.

Speaker 3 (01:08:03):
But do you ever just dick around? Do you have
to just think, no, I'm just not going to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:08:07):
Yeah, hang out with my monkey and dick around games
with my cheetah and like go to my pig and
that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
No, And the worst part is this somehow she's still
hand collected the snails to feed her ducks.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
Yeah, that's a full day for me. Yeah, I'm on
snail dude, that's like eight hours here.

Speaker 3 (01:08:29):
Yeah, no, they're not that fast. Famously, Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Actually snail's pace specifically referring to the pace at which
one can find them and put them in the bu
I don't know if you knew the etymology of that. Yeah,
that's a true fact, true facts with Margaret. Yeah, so
that's just beIN Baker, who saves the world.

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Amazing story talking about moments that saved the world. And
it's funny.

Speaker 4 (01:09:03):
I wrote something a couple of years ago about alternate
histories and how all these stories ab alternate histories. But
other seventy years, these histories of alternate histories, often when
you go to the alternate future, or it goes to
one moment that's changed, and it always ends up in
if this had not happened, then the Nazers would have

(01:09:28):
won the war or some other fascist future, and it's
always I don't know, it's this anxiety that if that
were always I mean I think, particularly a few years ago,
but this ongoing anxiety that we're just one of butterfly
wing flaps, one little butterfly wings flap away from a

(01:09:49):
fascist future. And I think, like all these amazing individual stories,
it doesn't make them most amazing and it doesn't make
it more scary the fact that all of them had
to happen.

Speaker 6 (01:10:01):
A lot of people had to save the world, right,
but effort, that's I mean, I think if we're if
we're really drilling down into it, it's like, you know,
the I think the likelihood was always less that the
Nazis will take over the world and more that like
the Nazis would not be forced out of power in

(01:10:21):
Europe absolutely to all acoustic completion and all sorts of
like a lot of really terrifying things that don't involve
you know, the Third Reich invading Delaware.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
No, that's such a good point, And that's part of
how like a lot of the if the Nazis won
is all about them taking over the US because it's
being written from an American audience.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
Whoever, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:46):
I did that. Yeah, when you're saying the world I
didn't really seem in America.

Speaker 1 (01:10:51):
Yeah, oh yeah, no, sorry that And when I say America,
I mean the United States of America, not the entire
two continents that that name. Yeah, yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah,
forgot that. You know, you you British people don't realize
that the world is entirely America.

Speaker 3 (01:11:10):
Germans coming to Yeah, it was so great talking to
you guys. Honestly this is.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
On that note, do you have anything that if people
enjoyed you here, how can people listen to more of
what you do, or watch your TV shows or read
your book?

Speaker 3 (01:11:32):
Well you can.

Speaker 4 (01:11:33):
I've written quite a few books. My latest is called
Sexual Revolution, and it's available from all good and a
number of bad bookstores. I work on various TV shows,
including You Might Have Seen a Haunting and Blind Manner
or Carnival Row or a few other things I'm not

(01:11:54):
allowed to talk about yet. And but also you can
you can find my writing online on the blue Bird
site at Penny Penny Red and on sub Second lots
of other places. Honestly, if you just google me, see
what comes up first, it will be whatever people are
most interested in. So I don't know, it's lazy for
me to trust the algorithm, but I'm not as tired

(01:12:17):
as Josephine Baker because it's it's one place in the
morning here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
Well, you're stayed up late because of the blitz that
still is going on.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
Well no, that's just general my estate. It's not going
on still. But that's how time works, you see.

Speaker 2 (01:12:37):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
But if you come and visit just to check, yeah, no,
I probably should.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Sophie, do you have anything you want to plug for
Cool Zone Medium? Yeah? I am Sophie lester Man. You
can find me on the internet at www dot ivice
dot com. That's my personal website. Yeah, and I love
I love the Celtics, which I call the Celtics.

Speaker 1 (01:13:03):
Yeah, that's important. That's how we know that you're a spy.
If you want to find me on the internet, I'm
at Magpie Killjoy on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
The thing I want to plug is that all of
June twenty twenty three, if anyone you're listening to this,
I will be kickstarting a game called p Number City,
to tabletop role playing game where you can drive around
on motorcycles that are likely to explode and fight against
the god King and do all kinds of actually fairly
like Roaring twenties kind of stuff, but with more magic

(01:13:34):
so you can.

Speaker 3 (01:13:35):
Back this sounds brilliant. Can we play it?

Speaker 1 (01:13:38):
Yes, you can, but only you. Everyone else is to
back it first.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
Fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
I'll go cry alone in my room. I'm sorry, but
it's just the way it is. No, No, it's okay.
Don't give me any special treatment. Yeah, after all the
things I've done. Yeah, and we'll see you all next week.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media.

Speaker 4 (01:14:02):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.