Filled with fire and patriotism, Baker began to attend parties at the Italian and Japanese embassies. “Sometimes,” Abtey said, “she would write along her arms, and in the palm of her hand, the things she heard. I told her this was dangerous, but she laughed. ‘Oh, nobody would think I’m a spy.’”
The two—who quickly became lovers—then took off under the pretext of a tour, with Abtey posing as Baker’s ballet master. They smuggled out information for the Allies written in invisible ink on sheet music. Tasked with setting up a transmission center in Morocco, Baker and Abtey made the country their home base (complete with Baker’s menagerie of monkeys and mice, whom she refused to travel without).
In Morocco, Baker would seduce royals and officials, including the famous El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh. (When Baker fell seriously ill, it was rumored that El Glaoui’s wives had poisoned her soup.) She also helped countless European Jews, including a member of the Rothschild family, obtain Moroccan passports, thus saving their lives.
Baker toured Europe and Africa, pinning secret information to her bra. One night, while performing outdoors for American soldiers on tour in Algeria, German planes began shooting from overhead. Amazingly calm, Jean-Claude and Chase write, Baker decided to help herself to a buffet while all around her took cover. As the attack intensified, she finally got down on the ground with everyone else. “Me, belly down, among soldiers from Texas, Missouri, and Ohio in my 1900 Paris dress, must have been an irresistibly funny sight,” Baker recalled years later. “Mostly because I kept on eating my ice cream.”
America, Forget It
As a woman who gradually became “more French than the French,” Baker would have a complicated relationship with her home country. On one of her first trips back to New York City after her Paris success, she was turned away from multiple segregated hotels. “‘America will not welcome home her own daughter,’ she said in tears,” her friend Miki Sawada said in The Hungry Heart. “I could not believe this could be the same woman I had seen in Europe, standing triumphant on the stage, showered with flowers. Here she was, huddled before me on the floor, weeping.”
On her infrequent forays back to America, Baker would be appalled by the nation’s continuing inequality and injustice. While appearing in Ziegfeld Follies in 1936, she was devastated that her white back up-dancers were not allowed to touch her onstage. According to The Hungry Heart, she was also verbally abused by her Follies co-star Fanny Brice, who snapped, “‘Ah, you n-gger, why don’t you talk the way your mouth was born?’”
Baker also had a complicated relationship with members of the African American community, who felt that she had abandoned them for Europe. Baker didn’t help matters by often insisting on speaking French to her American friends and wearing her most elaborate evening gowns while staying in the impoverished St. Louis of her youth.
In the decades after World War II, Baker would become increasingly involved in the blossoming American civil rights movement, attending the March on Washington and speaking out publicly. Her friend Thelma Carter told Jean-Claude and Chase about a particularly memorable incident that occurred while on tour in San Francisco: