Jean-Claude Baker
American restaurateur
Jean-Claude Julien Léon Tronville, more commonly known as Jean-Claude Baker (April 18, 1943 – January 15, 2015), was a French-American restaurateur.
Early life and education
Jean-Claude Baker 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". He, in turn, took her surname.
Career
In 1968, Jean-Claude Baker founded a popular nightclub, Pimm's Cafe, in West Berlin called "the Berlin equivalent of New York’s Studio 54."
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. He left the channel in 1981 by mutual agreement; the channel ultimately shut down in 1983 due to the financial restructuring of one of its partners.
In 1986 Baker opened the cafe "Chez Josephine" in New York City.
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". The Times obituary claimed he "chronicled her every mood and move, constantly seeking to separate the fact from the fiction of her life".
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6169088. VIAF identifies the subject as 19786141. The Library of Congress control number is n93030874. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 2015, 1968 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Claude Baker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.