Jean-Claude Baker House Is Sold

Normally, a property selling for under a million bucks—in this particular instance, for $915,000—especially in the Village of East Hampton, would not attract any notice.

However, the home that just sold to Allison and Davis Zeledon belonged to Jean-Claude Baker. The well-known restaurateur, who was found dead in his car outside the home in January 2015, first gained attention as the son of Josephine Baker, the famous American chanteuse who found fame in Paris nightclubs beginning in the 1920s.

Even allowing that the house is on the busy Pantigo Road, the new owners appear to have gotten a good deal. There is a long driveway and the 0.45-acre property is around the corner from Egypt Lane, which leads to the village’s estate section. The house itself, built in 1984, has three bedrooms and two baths, a renovated kitchen, a living room with a fireplace, and central air. At the very least, it is a fine investment property for the Zeledons.

Jean-Claude Leon Tronville had been born in Dijon, France, in 1943. It was at age 14, while working as a bellhop at a hotel in Paris, that he met one of the residents there, Josephine Baker. By then she was a legendary performer on both sides of the Atlantic, and her nicknames included “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.” (During one of her scantily-clad routines, she appeared onstage wearing only bananas.) She became a surrogate mother to him and they later sort of adopted each other. Several years later, Jean-Claude moved to West Berlin, where he began a career as a singer and also as a nightclub impresario by opening the Pimm’s Club. It grew to become a German version of Studio 54, on any given night hosting such celebrities as Mick Jagger, Leonard Bernstein, Jessye Norman and even Orson Welles squeezed in there. Among the performers was Josephine Baker.

In Ms. Baker’s later years, her self-proclaimed son served as her companion and manager. She died in 1975. Eleven years later, Jean-Claude Baker was living in New York, where he opened the high-end restaurant and piano bar Chez Josephine, which featured much of his mother’s Parisian memorabilia. Located on 42nd Street between Ninth and 10th Avenues, it was, according to the New York Times, “an anchor in the transformation of a grim strip of real estate into an Off Broadway theater district. From the start Chez Josephine was an eccentric pre- and post-theater spot … and with its ripe décor redolent of Paris from an earlier age and Mr. Baker’s effervescent hospitality, it gathered its own coterie of the famous.”

For those interested in learning more about this intriguing man and his adopted mother, one source is a biography he co-wrote titled “Josephine: The Hungry Heart.”