Headliners included Xavier Cugat, Paul Robeson, Yma Sumac, Carmen Miranda, Nat King Cole, and Josephine Baker.

This story has an antecedent in the "French Collection" series of 1990 when Mariena's mother, Willia Marie Simone, goes to France and plunges into the demimonde there that includes Picasso and Josephine Baker.

In 1975-76, it staged "American Women of Style," which included Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan.

Others in Barbette's European circle included Josephine Baker, Anton Dolin, Mistinguett and Sergei Diaghilev.

Other speakers at the conference include Josephine Baker, executive director of the Washington public charter school board, which approves applications from new charter schools and oversees existing ones.

Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Niddy Impekoven, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.

Asked why he married so young, despite boasts of the hundreds of prostitutes he needed to satisfy his sexual appetites, not to mention affairs with a number of famous women (these later included Josephine Baker), Simenon conjured up two stories.

Famous guests over the years have included Pablo Picasso, Charles de Gaulle, Marianne Oswald, André Gide, Peggy Guggenheim and Josephine Baker.

The figures evoked in this witty, finely researched mosaic of songs and anecdotes include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Texas Guinan and Josephine Baker.

Her protégés included Duke Ellington, Mabel Mercer and Josephine Baker.