HEADLINERS: Charleston Forever

Under the long, lemon-tinted gown and the towering headdress of aigrette plumes, the tall, tawny body is heavier now. The warm eyes seem smaller, softer, in a face fleshed with age. But the quick, bright smile is as vivid as ever; the remembered throb of her voice still husks the rafters—a rising, clear-toned shout. At 53, Josephine Baker, the supple emigre from St. Louis who sailed into the heart of Paris on the high old tides of the ’20s, is still a top banana of the boulevards. It is three years since her last “retirement,” but Paris Mes Amours, her new revue at the Olympia Music Hall, promises to pack them in as long as Paris has the price.

The show brings back just about everything that ever belonged to the girl who was the toast and tattle of France, whose sexy, banana-girdle routines led the Lost Generation through the rhythms of le jazz hot. There is a showboat Cakewalk, some St. Louis blues, a song of Harlem in hard times and of Negroes in Paris; there is a flash of the old Folies and the new ballets; there is Josephine doing a Gypsy ballet and “The Charleston Forever” in black gold-spangled tights.

The reason for her return is no secret: Josephine needs money. After World War II, after the excitement of helping the Resistance and the pocketful of citations (including the Legion of Honor), Josephine opened an orphanage for children of all races and creeds. But her lavish experiment in international race relations used up a fortune of 300 million francs ($600,000). Josephine decided to go back to work. The sentimentalists who come to cheer her chocolate arabesques are the financiers of her mission; they are also her accomplices in creating an illusion—that Paris and Josephine Baker have not really changed in three decades.