Jean-Claude Baker, owner of Chez Josephine, a legendary restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district, died on January 15 at his home in East Hampton. He was 71 and the cause of death was suicide.
Mr. Baker opened the restaurant in 1986 as an homage to his adoptive mother, jazz chanteuse Josephine Baker. It quickly gained popularity with the pre- and post-theater crowds, as well as celebrities who included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Diana Ross and Rudolf Nureyev. Moving about the dining room clad in his signature red pajamas, Mr. Baker was a fixture at the restaurant, greeting all who passed through the door.
The restaurant released a statement following his death, noting, in part, “Throughout his eventful life, Jean-Claude fulfilled with passion and commitment his one true vocation: to bring laughter, joy and love to all who knew him. His larger-than-life personality and unfailing generosity touched everyone around him. His spirit was irrepressible. His love will endure in the lives touched by his special magic. A magic that his Chez Josephine family will do its best to continue in his honor.”
Proud of his mother’s legacy, Mr. Baker had said in interviews that the restaurant was a “shrine” to her, and he filled it with his large collection of Josephine memorabilia. “The spirit and vibe is part Josephine and part Left Bank bistro, modeled very much on Mother’s first Chez Josephine in Paris in 1926.”
Mr. Baker also spoke with Playbill about how he came to create a destination restaurant thanks to ambition and some theatrical luck. “I wanted to do something exciting and different,” he said. “In 1986, I found an old massage parlor on West 42nd Street, did a total renovation, filled it with my collection of Josephine memorabilia.”
Mr. Baker was born Jean-Claude Julien Leon Tronville in Dijon, France, on April 18, 1943, to Constance Luce Tronville and Julien Rouzaud. He met Josephine Baker in 1958 at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, where she was living at the time; he was a teenage bellhop living on his own.
When Mr. Baker was about 7, his father moved to Paris. Mr. Baker went to search for his father when he was 14, and his mother and three sisters remained in Dijon. He found his father living in a home for prostitutes, and his father disappeared shortly thereafter.
Mr. Baker relayed his story to Ms. Baker. According to a biography he wrote with Chris Chase about his mother, titled “The Hungry Heart,” Ms. Baker told the young man, “Don’t be worried, my little one; you have no father, but from today on, you will have two mothers.” In the waning days of Ms. Baker’s career, before her death in 1975, Mr. Baker supported her financially. He had taken her last name in the early 1970s.
Mr. Baker is survived by three sisters, Marie-Josèphe Lottier, Marie-Annick Rouzaud and Martine Viellard.
Funeral arrangements, under the direction of the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton, were incomplete at press time.
on Jan 20, 2015