josephine baker: pygmalion in africa

Josephine Baker…Pygmalion in Africa

The most sensational woman anyone ever saw. Or ever will.

- Ernest Hemingway

She was the talk of Paris, dancing wildly on the stage wearing bunches of bananas around her waist…and little else.

She was a French Resistance worker who transported secrets during World War II…

… and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, Légion d'Honneur, and Rosette of the Résistance.

She was the only woman who spoke at the March on Washington in 1963…

…the mother of twelve adopted children of various races, whom she called “the Rainbow Tribe…”

…and the only American woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.

Baker was the first black female to star in a major motion picture, integrate an American concert hall, and become a world-famous entertainer.

She was born to a single mother in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906 and escaped poverty by dancing on the stage.

On a trip to France she discovered that she could sit and eat dinner with her white friends in public.

France became her home.

There were four marriages, countless lovers, and a lifetime affair with Belgian novelist Georges Simenon.

In 1935 Baker starred in Princesse Tam Tam, a French film with a Pygmalion theme. The Hollywood version of Shaw’s play was not filmed until a year later.

Princesse Tam Tam was banned in the US because it featured an interracial couple.

The Pygmalion story was already familiar to French theater audiences: It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most influential dramatic work (1762).

Shaw’s Pygmalion had a run in Paris in 1923—and flopped.

Princesse Tam TamAlwina (played by Josephine Baker) is a young African woman who lives by her wits.

She meets a French novelist, Max de Mirecourt (Albert Préjean), who’s traveling in Tunisia.

Max finds her fascinating and makes two plans: He will put her into his next novel—and he will use her to make his wife jealous.

Max becomes Alwina’s teacher. The training goes well, and he brings Alwina to Paris, where he passes her off as a princess from India.

Max’s jealous wife, Lucie, asks a maharajah to devise a plot against Alwina.

The maharajah hosts a grand ball and arranges for exotic music to be played.

Alwina can’t resist the wild beat of the drums. She throws off her shoes, tears off her skirt, and dances provocatively, revealing she isn’t a princess from India after all.

But there’s a surprise in store for the movie audience.

Alwina never came to Paris at all: What we we’ve been seeing is the plot for Max’s new novel.

Max goes back to his wife. His novel is a success.

He gives his Tunisian estate to Alwina, who lives there with her husband and infant.

In the last scene, Alwina’s goat is inside their house, eating the novel Max wrote about her: Civilization.

Some similarities between Princesse Tam Tam and Shaw’s Pygmalion are worth noting.

Both Alwina and Eliza…

have learned to live by their wits

are regarded as less than human at first

are taught by men who make their living through words (Max as a novelist, Higgins as a phonetician)

pretend to be members of high society

are caught up in practical jokes they don’t understand

eventually defy their teachers

choose other men as their husbands

There are shared themes. One of them is freedom…

Eliza: “Oh! if I only could go back to my flower basket! I should be independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I'm a slave now, for all my fine clothes.”

Dar (Alwina’s lover): “If the birds of the sky eat from the hands of man, they lose their freedom.”

Another theme is the problem of which is better: natural or artificial.

Higgins: “I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.”

Alwina: “There are so many fake things here.”

Max: “Some fakes are prettier than the real ones.”

Both Pygmalion and Princesse Tam Tam have problematic endings.Eliza marries the unimpressive Freddy Eynsford-Hill.

Alwina’s exciting story was just the plot for Max’s next novel and never happened at all.

Perhaps both Shaw and filmmaker Pepito Abatino were exploring an important psychological truth:

The combination of creativity and romantic love doesn’t work as well with living men and women as it does in mythology.

Princesse Tam Tam is one of many Pygmalion movies that have appeared over the years. It deserves attention because…

•It was produced a year before the Shaw film

•Its star helped integrate the entertainment industry

•It shares so many features with Shaw’s play

•It spotlights the problems inherent in a romance between a creator and his creation

Princesse Tam Tam