The Most Famous Black American in Europe : JAZZ CLEOPATRA: Josephine Baker in Her Time <i> by Phyllis Rose (Doubleday: $29.95; 302 pp.,illustrated; 0-385-24891-1) </i>

The fascination with Josephine Baker, both in the United States and abroad, seems endless. Her story has been told numerous times, beginning with her first autobiography, published in France in 1927 when Baker was 21, and continuing in recent times with Baker’s final autobiography, written by her last husband, Jo Bouillon, (published posthumously in France in 1976 and in English translation in 1977), with biographies by Stephen Papich (1976) and Lynn Haney (1981), and, most recently, with a children’s picture book that purports to be about Baker’s early life in St. Louis and to be based on Haney’s “Naked at the Feast.”

What distinguishes Phyllis Rose’s contribution to the literature on the life of Josephine Baker is that the author has chosen to analyze the Baker phenomenon in the context of her time, not to exploit but to examine and explain our continuing fascination with her. Not for Rose the facile description of Baker as a poor black girl from St. Louis who tied a string of bananas around her waist, danced the Charleston, and took Europe by storm in an era when she could not get service in most American public facilities.

Rose, whose “Woman of Letters” was nominated for the National Book Award in 1978, also is the author of “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” (1983), a superb analysis of intimacy and conventionalism. She uses all the skills she honed in her previous books in “Jazz Cleopatra,” enlarging her scope to include the unique woman-world relationship in which Baker functioned for most of her life. But in writing about Baker, Rose had to struggle for objectivity. As she confides in her preface: “When I started this book, I wanted something from Josephine Baker: a certain spontaneity, fearlessness, energy, joy. . . . It did not take me long to sense that I might be participating in the very phenomenon I was trying to describe, and the thought was so disturbing that I could only continue my work through sheer discipline and control, which were the very qualities from which I had been seeking relief.”

Rose is not alone among biographers of Baker in devoting the largest portion of her study to Baker’s early years. Baker’s was a true rags-to-riches story. At age 8, she was sent to live and work in the homes of whites, one of whom made her sleep in the basement with the dog and punished her for using too much laundry soap by pushing her hands into scalding water. After Josephine was released from the hospital, her mother sent her to live and work in another white home where the husband made improper advances.

Convinced that her mother did not love her, and thirsty for love, she was married twice by age 14. She also had begun her career in show business. Her first big break came when she lied about her age and was hired for the chorus of one of the touring versions of “Shuffle Along,” the first black musical to play on Broadway. Her ability to mug--crossing her eyes, twisting her rubber-like body into all sorts of humorous contortions--brought her national fame and the attention of Caroline Dudley, a white woman who was taking an all-black show to jazz-hungry, post-World War I Europe.

In Paris, Baker’s unique combination of sophistication and naivete, glamour and humor, proved so intriguing that she soon became a cause celebre. She hardly knew what to make of it and, realizing she was over her head, sought out one of the few other black American women in Paris in the early ‘20s--Bricktop, hostess and entertainer-in-residence at a small Montmartre club. Bricktop took her in tow, advising the nearly illiterate Baker, who was suddenly besieged for autographs, “Baby, get a stamp.”

Then Pepino Abatino came along. Bricktop called him “the no-account count.” Rose suggests that Bricktop was jealous of Abatino for taking Baker away from her friends. Unfortunately, Bricktop is not alive to dispute that, although I suspect that Rose is correct. Rose is most certainly correct in asserting that Abatino is responsible for Baker’s elevation from a flash-in-the-pan to an enduring French star.

Nearly every page of Rose’s first section on Baker’s life contains a cogent statement of how Baker, the star, was a cultural symbol rather than an individual. She discusses the influence of African art forms on Paris artists and suggests that Baker’s body was viewed as an African object. She discusses racism versus exoticism and the Parisian association of jazz with freedom.

Baker went on a European tour as the clouds of war began to gather, and Rose discusses how the German cult of the body (nudism found its greatest number of aficionados among Germans in the period between the wars) eventually led into Nazism. Even the contemporary concern with blood--racist theories about black blood versus white blood and scientific discoveries that prove that human blood cannot be distinguished by race--is addressed, as Rose points out, in one of Baker’s own autobiographies.

Rose balances her analysis of Baker’s time with an equally compelling analysis of Baker’s own personality. Baker’s incredible ability to communicate with an audience derived from her hunger for love, a hunger that could not be assuaged except on a grand scale. The reason Baker continued to “mug” for the camera: “From the later ‘20s date the striking photographs of her in glamorous designer dresses crossing her eyes, and at this stage of her life, eye-crossing seems to me to function like a magical gesture of self-defense in a specifically erotic arena. It wards off the relentlessly erotic gaze of whoever might have been looking at her as, mythically, one warded off vampires by making the sign of the cross. Afraid in some way of evoking undiluted sexual excitement, she thwarts the deeply provocative contact of eye with eye not just by averting her own eyes but by jamming them grotesquely up against one another.”

In the later sections, devoted to Baker in the war years and from the end of the war until her death in 1975 at age 69, a short time after a triumphant stage appearance, Rose analyzes Baker herself more than the times in which she lived, suggesting that Baker adopted children on the same grand scale on which she required love. Rose points out that in Baker’s later years she began to feel a sense of control over her role on “the stage of history” (as opposed to being on the defensive during the earlier years, when history, and her audience, seemed to control her). Yet Rose never loses sight of Baker as symbol, pointing out that Baker served as “a magnet for other people’s meanings” even in death: “In the spring of 1975, racial tension was already enough of a problem in France so that it made political sense to call attention to and honor a black woman who had loved France signally and to whom France had been notably good.”

Rose’s book is not likely to excite Hollywood producers. Anyone who can write a sentence such as “Variously cited in the press as a panther, a tiger, and a jaguar, Chiquita made great copy, providing an objective correlative for Josephine’s jungle elegance” is not likely to get many calls. But it is the finest and most insightful book that has yet been written on the phenomenon that was Josephine Baker and on the world that made Josephine Baker a phenomenon.