Princess Grace’s intervention — the offer of a villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in the south of France near Monaco — prevented Baker and her family from becoming literally homeless. It was a genuinely generous act from someone who had been a friend through some of the most difficult periods of Baker’s postwar life. The villa was comfortable; it was not the château; and Baker spent the remaining years of her life in a reduced material situation relative to what she had built.
She continued performing. The Carnegie Hall concert in 1973, the London Palladium appearances, the Paris shows leading up to the Bobino retrospective in 1975 — these were not farewell tours in the elegiac sense; they were professional engagements by a performer who had not stopped working because her financial situation had changed. She was drawing on the same professional discipline and the same capacity to give a full performance regardless of the circumstances around her that she had been applying since the Jones Family Band circuits of her mid-teens.
The 1975 Bobino retrospective — the fifty-year anniversary of her Paris debut — was financed by the network of friends and supporters she had built across her life: Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, others from the overlapping worlds of international celebrity and European aristocracy that Baker had inhabited since the 1920s. Sophia Loren was at the opening. Princess Grace was at the opening. The critics who attended gave her the reviews of a career: extraordinary, commanding, undiminished.
She died four days after the opening, surrounded by those reviews. She was sixty-eight years old.