Jean-Claude Julien Léon Tronville, more commonly known as Jean-Claude Baker (April 18, 1943 – January 15, 2015)[1] was a French-American restaurateur.
Biography
He was born Jean-Claude Julien Leon Tronville in 1943 in Dijon to Lucien Rouzaud and Constance Luce Tronville, who were not married when he was born, though they married later. At age 14, he struck out on his own, first to Paris where, as a bellhop in the Hôtel Scribe, he met Josephine Baker, an entertainer, activist, and wartime French Resistance agent.
Baker became the legal guardian of Jean-Claude, and he was then an unofficial addition to the 12 adopted children of her orphan "rainbow tribe".[2] He, in turn, took her surname.
He arrived in New York in 1973 and created Telefrance USA in 1976 owing to the lack of French-language programming on cable, in contrast to other languages that already had their programming.[3] He left the channel in 1981 by mutual agreement;[4] the channel ultimately shut down in 1983 due to the financial restructuring of one of its partners.
Baker ran a popular nightclub, Pimm's Cafe, in West Berlin during the 1960s,[5] and in 1986 opened the cafe Chez Josephine in New York.[6]
In 1993, he co-authored, with Chris Chase, a biography of Josephine Baker, Josephine: The Hungry Heart, described as a "shocking look into the star's seriously whitewashed past".[7]
