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40 Fascinating Facts About the Fabulous Josephine Baker

Khalid Elhassan July 2, 2019 24 min

Josephine Baker - Josephine Baker - Chanter L'amour

19. She Was a Big Time Animal Lover

Josephine Baker and Chiquita the Cheetah. ThoughtCo

Baker loved animals, and when a club owner gave her a pet cheetah named Chiquita to use in her dance show, she was ecstatic. She kept the big cat after the act ended, and travelled around the world with Chiquita the Cheetah by her side, riding in her car, and sleeping in her bed. She also had a pet goat named Toutoute that lived in her nightclub’s dressing room, as well as a pet pig named Albert, upon whom she doted, grooming and gussying him up with expensive perfumes. Albert lived in the nightclub’s kitchen, where he got so fat from feeding on scraps, that at one point he became too big to make it out the door, so the door frame had to be broken down.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.