Many stories are told about Baker’s time in the French Resistance. One is that she joined the French guerrilla freedom fighters known as the Maquis. It is said that the group took Baker underground and taught her to shoot in the darkness of the sewers beneath Paris, until she got so good behind the scope of a rifle that she could snuff a candle at twenty yards. But what is most widely known and accepted is that Baker’s role as a spy was much like her roles onstage: she could seduce and manipulate the minds of men already eager to be manipulated. She could easily entice men in power to confide
...more
