COLORED COUNTESS

Evening Star, Issue 19662, 15 September 1927, Page 16

COLORED COUNTESS

ENTERING THE NOBILITY BELLE OF THE EOLIES BEBGEBE. Josephine Baker, tho colored dancer and star of the Eolies Bergorc in Paris, is now tho Countess di Abatino, wife of the Italian Count Pepiti di Abatino of Palermo, whose father is a colonel in the Italian army. The wedding took place before, too mayor of tho 9th Arromlisscment in Paris on June J, Josephine’s twentyfirst birthday, but the secret leaked out only the other night. It was the bride herself who announced the event at a party given to a number of friends at the cabaret which she runs in tho line Fontaine. Tho wedding was attended only by the count’s relatives and a few friends of tho dancer.

“1 hardly know how it happened,” the Countess of the Eolies Bergero said. “ The count used to come to my cabaret every night to dance with me, and about a month ago he asked me to marry him. I thought it was a joke, and said ‘Yes,’ and when he said fie really meant it I laughed again, and said I would keep my word. “His mother came up from Palermo to look me over, and she being satisfied, wo had the knot tied on my birthday. Tbe count, who is a timid, delicatelooking man of twenty-eight, was first struck by Miss Baker’s figure, but since the mairiage ho has forbidden her to have any more photographs taken in daring poses. “ He will not dance with me at the Eolies,” said the dancer, “ but as soon as my engagement ends there he will play in a moving picture with me.” When Miss Baker was asked why she had kept the wedding secret, she replied with a dazzling smile: “Oh, because I am only twenty-one, and this is the first time I have ever been married, and I didn’t know what the etiquette BLACK, BUT COMELY.

Josephine Baker may be, as staled, tho first woman of color to become a European countess, but not so many years ago there seemed a prospect of a woolly-beaded South African balf-casto claiming admission by hereditary right to our own House of Lords. He was the son of a former Earl of Stamford, but it was proved that the marriage of his father to a Zulu belle had been more picturesque than legal, and the Stamford peerage passed to a distant relative. Possibilities of further complications of the kind seem to lie in the statement of a recent traveller in New Guinea that ho was introduced to a “ good-looking half-caste boy, tbe son of an Englishman who is heir to a peerage and has married a Papuan woman.”