What was it about outsiders, I wondered, that attracted the curiosity of others? What made such personalities tick? What were the forces driving them—forces that kept them intact and in motion, moving to the beat of their own drum, no matter what? Was theirs a way of life rooted in sacrifice and challenge in defense of nobler purposes and higher values? Or was it a lifestyle of out-of-control appetites in a materialistic environment? Were outsiders simply trespassers, obliged by the nature of their lives to be constantly on the alert, known as “one of those” but never as “one of us”?
For me as a young man, the most relevant question was. How might such an outsider expect his life to unfold? What were the penalties? What beauties occurred and what scars resulted from all those times when a life-altering situation suddenly jumped in his face, blocked his path, issued a threat, or laid down a challenge? Daring him to pass through if he were foolish enough to think he had the stuff to do so. “You gotta get by me, if survival is what you’re after. So suit up, Mr. Outsider. To get where you think you want to go, you have five minutes to become a flesh-and-blood person walking in shoes you’ve never even tried on. But first you’ve got to outmaneuver me.”
Only in my sixties did I fully absorb my outsider status and begin to settle into some kind of comfort with it. I’d been on the fringes for fifty-odd years whether I knew it or not, so at last I accepted the likelihood that I would always be an outsider.
I live in Beverly Hills now, but I’m still an outsider there. And Hollywood let me know my place from the beginning. Back at Columbia in the early days I was doing a picture called All the Young Men. Cast and crew combined were close to a hundred people, and I was the only black person on the set. I qualified hands down as the only black person on the set. I qualified hands down as the quintessential outsider. Accordingly, I felt very much as if I were representing fifteen, eighteen million people with every move I made.
One guy in particular, an electrical grip, took great delight in asking the cinematographer if he wanted to use a tiny spotlight to highlight my eyes. Whenever the cinematographer said yes, the grip would shout across the soundstage for one to be fetched by his subordinates. The N word was a nickname for that particular spotlight, and this guy used it with relish.
Years later, Arthur Ashe made reference in his book to the many times in his professional life when his response to similar situations wasn’t his natural response, but rather the calculated response required of someone walking on the edge. Johnny Johnson of Ebony magazine and Berry Gordy, Jr., of Motown have spoken of the same experience. Long-term outsiders know that struggling on the edge can be beneficial in ways more far-reaching than the personal reward any individual outsider might reap. Ashe, as a black man in a white sport; became an ambassador for this country. When he went to South Africa with the U.S. Tennis Association, he had to be “accommodated”; he had to be dealt with. Outsiders know that their struggle is being watched. Silently, often dangerously, they bear witness.
In the early fifties I made the rounds of every casting office in New York City, and I would walk through and stick my head in and say hello, and the secretaries and the receptionists and even the agents themselves got to know me.
It was in 1954 that a guy from the New York office of MGM called and said, “We’re doing a film, and we’re looking for some young actors.”
I said, “How young?”
“Well, you know, it’s gonna be high school.”
I said, “Oh, yes, I know some guys.” I automatically eliminated myself because I was about twenty-seven years old at the time.
I gave them a list of these actors, and they were in touch with them, but they called me back and asked if I would stop in for a test. Well, we did the test, and they sent it to California, and Richard Brooks, the director, was interested. Then they looked at my other pictures, whatever else I had done, and lo and behold, they offered me the part.
Now in New York City, as a black actor in the theater, there weren’t but so many things coming my way. As a matter of fact, Broadway had almost nothing for a black man. Over a period of years there was Lost in the Stars and a play called Deep Are the Roots. Porgy and Bess and a few other musical presentations were in the repertoire, but with all the black actors and singers and dancers available in New York City, trying for careers in the theater, there wasn’t enough work to fill a thimble, as my mother used to say. Naturally, there were those of us for whom that didn’t sit right in terms of fairness.
I mean, in those days, there would be forty-odd plays on Broadway, but none having to do with our culture, our community, our lives. We used to petition the Actors’ Equity Association, and we would try to raise the question of more employment opportunities for us, but those of us who petitioned wound up being blacklisted. I was one of the young black actors who became persona non grata, charged with being a troublemaker.
The head of the Negro Actors Guild was a man named Leigh Whipper, whom I considered to be in cahoots with the very forces that were trying to keep us out of sight and out of involvement and out of participation. One day, on 125th Street at 7th Avenue, I ran into Mr. Whipper as he came out of a little tobacco store on the northwest corner of the intersection. He spotted me, walked right up, and started chastising me about my friends, meaning my leftwing friends. Then he got personal.
Whipper felt that we blacks should be accommodating and take whatever the system was able to give. This guy was a lot older than I was, so I didn’t say anything disrespectful to him; I just listened to what he said. He was blowing off his steam and getting hotter under the collar, and then he said. “Look at this, look at this.” He opened his coat and there was a gun stuck in the waistband of his pants, and he said that he would use it on me and all my friends if we fucked with him. But I wasn’t a fuck-wither, you know?
So I just kept my cool, and I let him blow. And when he was finished dressing me down and appeared satisfied that he had put me in my place, he walked away. But what he was telling me wasn’t new. I mean, as young black actors we all knew that he was rabidly against the way we saw things.
Well, that was the background, mind you, against which I got this particular job offer from MGM.
I went out to California to do the movie Blackboard Jungle. I went to the wardrobe fitting. I did all the necessary preliminaries, and I met with the cast. We did the first reading and were scheduled to start work in four or five days.
Then I got a call from the front office, from one of the studio lawyers. He said, “Could you come up? I’d like to talk to you for a second.”
I said, “Sure.”
I went up to the front office to meet this man, a man I didn’t know from Adam, and he said to me, “You know, we’ve been told that you know some people who are questionable characters.”
“What people are you talking about?” I asked, though I knew instantly what he meant.
Then he came clean and said, “Paul Robeson. Canada Lee.”
These, of course, were some of the most stand-up people in those days for things racial, and I was proud to be associated with them.
I said, “So what is it that you want from me?”
He said, “Well, we need you to sign a loyalty oath.”
And I said, “What am I supposed to do by signing the oath? I must swear what?” It drove me wild that these men could see red but couldn’t see black. That was galling enough. But what also appalled me was that I was being accused of being sympathetic toward, respectful of, even admiring of Paul Robeson and Canada Lee—men I did respect tremendously! How could I not admire men of such courage and integrity? Robeson had come to my house and played with my children, which filled me with pride. I got to know him well enough that he became concerned about me, urging me to be careful in my association with him.
Well, this studio lawyer—it seemed to me he didn’t fully believe in what he was doing. I think he was ashamed of himself, because I sensed that he was trying to disassociate himself a little bit from what he was
asking of me.
I held my ground and said, “Well, I’ll have to think about it.”
He said, “Okay. You think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I left the office knowing full well that I would be heading back to New York within the week, because nothing in the world was more offensive to me than what he was asking. Here I am in a culture that denies me my personhood. I’m taking the Jim Crow car in all trains below the Mason-Dixon line. I live in a city in which I’ve been rebuffed at the doors of many restaurants, a city where Josephine Baker gets turned away and barred from fashionable nightclubs. I’m living with the constant reminder that the law of this land once declared me to be three-fifths of a human being, and that only one hundred years earlier the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court had declared people of my race to be “so inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Everywhere I look, everywhere I turn, every attempt I make to articulate myself as otherwise is met with resistance, and here this guy is saying to me, “We want you to swear your loyalty.”
To what I wanted to know.
Okay, I went back to rehearsal and Richard Brooks asked me what had happened.
I said, “Nothing.” I said, “The guy’s gonna call me tomorrow.”
Brooks didn’t say anything more, and the next day I went in to work, and there’d been no phone call. The third day I went to work, rehearsing, getting ready, and still there was no phone call.
The day the shooting started. I said to Richard, “You know, I haven’t heard from that guy, but I gotta tell you what he wants from me. And I gotta tell you there’s no way. He wants my soul.” And I was struggling to explain how this was a question of my integrity. I said, “I have to let him know there’s no deal makeable here. This is not something that’s for sale.”
And Richard Brooks looked me in the eye, and he said, “You know what? Fuck him.” And we started shooting the picture.
I’ve always wondered, Did Richard say something to the studio? Did he say. “You’re forcing me to find another person on such short notice; I can’t do it, and it’s gonna cost me to delay, and it’s gonna cost the studio money”?
I don’t know what he said, or if indeed he said anything. Maybe the guy himself began to say, “Jesus Christ, what am I doing here?”
Whatever happened, all I know for sure is that I never heard from that guy again.
Not long after I finished that movie, I was back in New York, and I got a call from David Susskind, the television producer. He said, “I’ve got a script that’s just the greatest, and I want you to play it.” He sent it to me and it was fabulous, something called A Man Is Ten Feet Tall. I loved the title; it really spoke to what the movie was about.
I told David, “I love it. I want to do it.”
He said, “Great, we got a deal.”
We were just about to go into rehearsal, no contracts yet, when I got a call from an NBC guy who said, “Could you come in?” So I went in to see him, and again he gave me this form to sign. It was a loyalty oath, and once again it made a point of asking me to disassociate myself from this man I so greatly admired, Paul Robeson.
Well, at this point I couldn’t hold back what was inside. I didn’t permit it to explode, you know? I was much more in control than that, but I couldn’t hide my feelings. I told him that the man he was talking about was a man I respected a great deal, and yes I knew him, and yes I liked him. I liked the fact that he was a stand-up guy. He was a good person to me, I said, and I could not and would not, under any circumstances, be a party to anything that denigrated him.
To sum it all up I said, “Thank you very much, but no thanks,” and I left.
I called David Susskind, and I told him what the situation was, and he said, “Let me have a go at this.”
I said, “Fine.” But I went on to explain that I simply couldn’t do this. I knew all about the rightwing, leftwing tug-of-war stuff. I was perfectly capable of interpreting it on the basis of how it affected me as a young black man in America. My political awareness had matured by then. Yes, I was definitely, by then, inclined toward the left of center. Yes, there I found more people like Phil Rose and David Susskind, people demonstrating a genuine willingness to receive me as an equal. This was reason enough, I suppose, for the FBI to keep an eye on me, given the fear and panic of those terrible cold war days of madness. A time in which a young. African-American male was at odds with his times and in constant search for answers to the core conflicts in his life. Conflicts that had little or nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the cultural forces rooted inside him and the multitude of daily surrenders demanded of him by their social surroundings. Balance is what he was looking for, but he hadn’t yet learned its name. In time he will come to know it as a state of being. It can only be found at a place that is widely believed not to exist. Truth is that there is a place of space that does exist between two opposites everywhere, and somewhere therein dwells a point at which balance can be found.
The people who were kind to me were kind to me, you know? If I had dug into their motives, I might have found that they were politically different from me, or maybe politically in tune with me. Yes, I knew liberals and progressives and Democrats and Republicans and fellow travelers, communists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites; but whatever they were was their choice—and they were free to so choose.
Blacklist or no, I was determined that I was going to be an actor, because I felt a deep connection between myself and the craft. And blacklist or no, I swore I’d find jobs, or I’d work in a little theater, I’d work in off-Broadway theater, I’d work in Harlem, I’d work as a porter or janitor or wherever I could find jobs. To support my family, I would go out and work as a carpenter’s helper if need be, which I did.
I was fine working in the little restaurant and washing my dishes and putting on the barbecue and selling it for eighty cents a meal. I would far rather wash dishes and work over a grill any day than sign a loyalty oath I considered repugnant.
But some weeks later I received a call from David Susskind and he said to me, “I want to go into rehearsal.”
I said, “David, what do you mean? I told you I can’t sign that thing.”
He said, “Listen, I think these guys are nuts. Let’s just go into rehearsal and see.”
So we started in and we did that play, and it was a bombshell. The story was about this guy working on the docks, the only black guy in the gang. And a white kid drifts on, a kid from the South, and he gets hired and put in the same gang that I’m in, and he turns out to be a wonderful kid with a remarkably philosophical outlook on life. He and I become very close friends, to the chagrin of the bad guys. It was like a morality play. It was a wonderful presentation on television, and later we did it as a film. It was called Edge of the City on the big screen.
For the television show, which aired October 21, 1955, on NBC, the part of my wife was played by a young actress named Hilda Simms. She was a very fair-complected African-American woman who had become a star on Broadway playing Anna Lucasta. Her complexion was so fair that on the black-and-white television screens of the day she looked white.
Well, when we went on the air that evening, the switchboard at NBC lit up; it was jammed, you hear me when I tell you? I mean jammed. Jammed from the first scene throughout the whole teleplay, which ran for an hour, live television, a Philco Playhouse presentation. The Philco people were deluged with letters as well, people writing about this being such a scandal. Such an issue.
The critics thought the piece was excellent, but the country just wasn’t used to it.
The wonderful irony, of course, is that Hilda Simms was black—just not black enough to suit the country’s perception at that moment.
The curious thing about being an outsider is that you never know where your guardian angels are lurking. Had that studio guy called back, I would have said, “Hey, I can’t oblige you. What you want me to do is sign away my loyalty. You’re fucking wi
th my dignity.” Had he called back and I’d said that to him, I wouldn’t have gotten work at MGM, you follow? And the guy at NBC. When I said, “No, I’m outta here” and left, did that guy say to David, “Look, I talked to the kid, and he didn’t give much, but listen, what are we doing here? Why don’t you go ahead and make your movie.” Again, I don’t know what happened. All I know for sure is that whatever list I was on that prompted these encounters with studio and network attorneys didn’t in the end have any discernible effect on my career.
By the same token, these were the days of the big studio contracts. In Blackboard Jungle, the kid who played the bad guy, Vic Morrow, was offered a contract at MGM. All the other guys were talking about who else was being considered for a contract. But it never entered my mind that there was a chance of that for me. The great good fortune in that situation is that I never was considered, because had I been considered, the temptation would have been to accept. That’s guaranteed salary, you know? I probably would have wound up on suspension more often than not, because I probably wouldn’t have done the stuff they offered me. But by remaining an outsider on the free market, I was able to pick and choose my projects, which led to work I can still stand behind, work informed by my life experience, work aligned with my values.
In 1955 I was sent to Atlanta to do publicity for Blackboard Jungle. I went down primarily to do black newspapers and black radio. When I was done, I was at the airport, ready to leave, but I was hungry and decided to have a bite. So I went to a very nice restaurant, where all the waiters were black; the maître d’ himself, dressed in a tuxedo, was black. He recognized me, I suppose, from some movie.
I appeared at the entrance to this restaurant, and he said, “May I help you?”
I said, “Yes, I’d like a table.”
I saw his eyes widen a bit. “Are you alone?” he asked.
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Mr. Poitier, I’m sorry. I could give you a table, but we’re going to have to put a screen around you.”
The Measure of a Man Page 8
