Josephine: The Hungry Heart

The dancer and stage idol Josephine Baker (1906-1975) has smitten audiences and biographers during her life and since, but here the chronicler is someone special: one of her ``Baker's dozen'' of adopted children. Working in collaboration with freelance writer Chase, the French-born Jean-Claude--``I've never even been her fan,'' he claims--offers an effusive, peppy version of Baker's long and restless professional and personal saga. The drama began inauspiciously in St. Louis, Mo., and ended in Paris; most of the story centers on Baker's private and public bravado as she won fame, first among Parisians in 1925 in La Revue Negre , for her onstage eroticism and what she called her ``frenzy.'' Seduction was one of her career's persistent themes: seduction of men and of a public by an African American star who almost always had to consider the power of racism in society. The fact that she was given little as a child, as the book recounts, may have made Baker both generous and rapacious as an adult, and her son offers countless tales, remembered conversations and amusing Gallic gush, as well as details of the colorful past and present of the ``rainbow tribe'' of his siblings. He is proprietor of Chez Josephine, a Manhattan restaurant and nightclub. Photos not seen by PW . (Feb.)