The Measure of a Man

by Sidney Poitier

  A filmmaker such as Stanley Kramer was an artistic wedge during that period, but art doesn’t solve social problems. It’s a reminder, it’s an irritant, it clarifies, it focuses, but it doesn’t solve. Potential solutions were ignored until America was forced to confront them. Thurgood Marshall went all over the country in pursuit of solutions, and he sometimes had to dodge Klansmen on his way from court to the airport, or travel from town to town at night, or go home unannounced, or be picked up at railroad stations by patriots in darkened automobiles who sought to protect him. And hard as the NAACP tried, that fearsome anti-solution activity very seldom reached the newspapers. The NAACP had, by that time, become an irritant. It was just, “Oh, those people, they’re having problems. They’re complaining again.”

  But something was brewing among the students, and that began to catch on in the late fifties and then take tenacious hold in the early sixties. When they started sitting in, it was small, and they were way ahead of the country. The country was reading about their activity in little bits of coverage that slowly began to appear in the newspapers. Finally they said, “Oh, my God, what’s happening here?” As if suddenly someone were creating a crisis. As if this civil disobedience were out of the blue, with no roots to it.

  That’s how that began to mushroom, but it wasn’t an easy journey. Those ten years between The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were rough. The government found itself asked to defend the rights of people who were denying the rights of others. The government was placed in the position of decreeing that what was on the statute books in the cities and states was improper and defied the Constitution. And the young black students were saying no to the status quo very vocally, and they were laying themselves on the line.

  There was turmoil, but there was progress as well. But then Vietnam sidetracked some of that progress with new forms of division in the country, and then protest took on a different tone, creating a more violent reaction. There were riots. There were killings. It was like three steps forward, two steps back, at least in terms of the sentiment expressed in The Defiant Ones—the feeling that there’s more that joins us together than separates us.

  But one progressive step that wasn’t reversed—and the most fundamental change—was the enforcement of the Constitution with regard to suffrage for blacks. But that was a long time coming. You’re talking way back to W.E.B. Du Bois. You’re going back to historians like John Hope Franklin. You go through men like A. Philip Randolph, the head of the sleeping-car porters. You go through Roy Wilkins. And then you go through artists like Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. And there were more extreme views—people like Marcus Garvey, who was so frustrated, who said, “These people are so intractable, they’re so bullheaded with their wrong-headedness, let’s all go back to Africa. Let’s just get out of here.”

  All of that energy was coming up smack against the written laws of the states, and all of the laws of the states were backed up by the Constitution. And yet whenever you got too close to the truth there, they would say, “But the law says that you’re not a full citizen; you’re only three-fifths of a human being, and only a full human being can vote. Only a full human being can vote.”

  That was the kind of world I was asked to reenter when Walter Mirisch came to see me about playing the part of a Philadelphia police detective accidentally pulled into a murder investigation in a small town in the Deep South.

  When I looked over the script that became In the Heat of the Night, my primary issue was the character of a local businessman who had enormous influence in the life of that town. At one point the character I played, Detective Tibbs, found it necessary to question this man. The local police chief, played by Rod Steiger, accompanied me, and we drove up to the mansion on a hill. I was very respectful during our conversation, but in time I had to ask the inevitable question—“Where were you on the night of the murder?”—and he hauled off and slapped me. Obviously, as far as he was concerned, I had stepped over the line in suggesting the possibility that he could be in any way clouded by suspicion. So he whacked me across the face.

  In the original script I looked at him with great disdain and, wrapped in my strong ideals, walked out. That could have happened with another actor playing that part, but it couldn’t happen with me. I could too easily remember that Miami night with the gun pointed at my forehead, that fifty-block march with those guffawing cops in the patrol car behind me. I told the director that the script needed to be changed.

  He said, “Well, what do you suggest?”

  I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll insist upon.” I said to Walter, “This gentleman of the Old South is acting out of his tradition, where his honor demands that he whack me across the face.” And I said, “You want a moment, you want a really wonderful, impressive moment on the screen?” I said. “Shoot this scene so that without a nanosecond of hesitation, I whack him right back across the face with a backhand slap.”

  Walter said, “I like it.”

  It turned out to be a very, very dramatic moment in the film.

  The town pillar turned to Rod Steiger’s police chief and said, “Gillespie, did you see that?” And Steiger said, as only Steiger could say it, “I saw it!” Then the actor who was playing the old man closed the scene. He turned to me and muttered, “There was a time when I could have had you shot.”

  For me personally, the emotional center of the film was another scene, one in which Chief Gillespie and Detective Tibbs drove past a field of cotton, a beleaguered-looking crew of field hands dragging their cotton sacks between the rows. Gillespie turned to me and said, in effect, “None of that for you, huh?” But the camera recorded my face as I observed these people. For me the actor, as I watched these black men and women picking cotton, my thought was that I knew I was on the right track with the kind of parts I had been insisting on.

  From the way it was in my early days in America, to the point at which I was playing a senior detective representing the Philadelphia Police Department, solving a murder mystery in rural Mississippi—that was movement. But the true progress it represented didn’t come from unbridled rage any more than it came from polite submission. Progress then and now comes from the collision of powerful forces within the hearts of those who strive for it. Anger and charity, love and hate, pride and shame, broken down and reassembled in an igneous process that yields a fierce resolve.

  SEVEN

  DESTRUCTION OR RESURRECTION?

  THOSE OF US fortunate enough to be in the movie business and to have our faces spread across the screen for many years become slightly iconographic figures, mythic figures, whether we want to be or not. Those who are given the designation “stars” cease to be simply actors and become a part of the collective unconscious, part of the dream fabric of the culture. It’s a tremendous responsibility, and one that members of my profession take on with highly varying degrees of success.

  There’s a mystery to the relationship between life and an individual human personality, and I think the camera sees that mystery. The individual human personality has, bound up inside itself, a connection to all the wonders of the universe. When an artist is genuinely at work in his craft, he’s more fully calling on those connections to the universal.

  What does the camera capture when it looks at me? I’ll leave that for others to assess. But staring back at that lens from within myself, I feel that so much of what I’ve otherwise kept hidden is captured and filtered. What emerges on the screen reminds people of something in themselves, because I’m so many different things. I’m a network of primal feelings, instinctive emotions that have been wrestled with so long they’re automatic. The things I don’t like about myself, the things I do like about myself, the things I’m not but I’d like to be, the things I am but don’t want others to know about—these are all percolating inside. All these contradictory aspects are the basic me. Courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, fear and joy, love and hate—that’s what makes up the
actor so that’s available to the camera.

  The lens sees what it sees; it’s entirely neutral in its gaze. It’s not looking for my best or my worst, and there’s no guarantee that it will capture something truly representative. It can’t mirror the self completely, but I do know that it can tell when I’m thinking, and I know that it can tell when there’s something I’m trying to hide.

  When I play anger in a scene, it’s different from when I experience anger in life. Anger in life is so genuine that it’s instantaneous. It may be triggered explosively; it may be triggered at a low level and, depending on what follows, then escalate or subside. That’s life. If someone slaps my kid and I see it, then I’m ready to take that person apart. Correct? Okay, now the actor who doesn’t have a child but must play such a reaction in a film, where does he go for examples of the feeling? Where does he go for as close as he can get to the stuff of that emotion, and how does he access it so instantaneously that it’s as if, in fact, it were real life?

  He goes to his sense memory. He goes deep inside himself into a place where all his individual sense memories are stored, and that place them connects him with the universe. That connection gives him access to more than just the memory of what anger is like and what unfairness is or other kinds of impositions or slights or offenses that would trigger anger are like. There’s a network of intuitions and instincts. I mean, the raw instincts—a genuine network of connections of those forces, energies, and awarenesses that drive humanity. The entire result of the actor’s life experiences to that point have been collected in that sense memory, and every one of them is registered there, many of them that wouldn’t ordinarily be available to the conscious mind. But in acting, a creative moment requires that the actor enter there. And the camera sees that contact with the sense memory. So what it picks up is something that’s almost indescribable. Some people call it presence, while others say the camera likes that actor. Whatever label we apply, the camera sees something; it just simply sees it.

  On a mundane level you might say that a particular actor has an expressive face. Even when there are no lines being said, you know something’s going on in that mind, in that soul. He’s just standing there looking off into space, but there’s something going on that seems real and alive and genuine.

  That’s because he’s entering that creative place. Or maybe not so much entering it as being receptive to it. It could be said that this place, unto itself, gives off a sense of its own existence, and it comes through, maybe even unknown to the personality itself. Because a mind is operating. Because a heart is beating in that chest.

  DURING FIFTY YEARS in Hollywood, trying to learn how to portray life on the screen, I just may have learned a little about life. If that’s in fact the case, I must give credit to some excellent teachers and some extraordinary fellow students.

  As for the craft itself, I’ve never worked with a good actor from whom I didn’t learn something useful. During the filming of In the Heat of the Night, Rod Steiger’s work was a constant reminder of how lucky I was that I had found my way to two of the greatest teachers of any era, Paul Mann and Lloyd Richards. I arrived at the door of their workshop in the 1950s with no understanding of “an actor’s technique.” Before they took me on, I had been a-c-t-i-n-g! Pretending, indicating, giving the appearance of experiencing certain emotions, but never, ever really getting down to where real life and fine art mirror each other.

  Steiger was a product of the Actors Studio, and his approach to his work fascinated me. His preparation period for a scene was astonishing in its depth. First he explored everything objectively. Then he made subjective everything that he’d found in his objective exploration. In this final process, he would zero in on his character so completely that for the entire period of making the picture he would speak in the same cadence. Even sitting down to dinner in the evenings. Even on weekends, when we ventured out to a movie or dinner or when we sat around the motel just running our mouths about various things. Working or not, he would remain completely immersed in the character of that southern sheriff. He spoke with the same accent and walked with the same gait, on and off camera. I was astonished at the intensity of his involvement with the character.

  Performing well-written scenes from In the Heat of the Night with Rod Steiger and Lee Grant was an illuminating experience. Whatever Lloyd Richards and Paul Mann had taught me about technique had fallen snugly into place and allowed me to hold my own, pound for pound, among heavyweights like Steiger and Grant. Throughout the making of that film I sensed that I was on the threshold of discovering what acting really is, which is a way of getting at the core of what life really is.

  I always knew that first-rate actors had exceptional gifts, but I also knew that an exceptional gift, in and of itself, didn’t necessarily a first-rate actor make. It was essential that the actor’s gift be subject to a technique, a learned procedure, a discipline, in order for him to constantly function at close to his best. I had fumbled about for years trying to find that “learned procedure,” that “discipline.” I can’t tell you how difficult it was for me to put together all the pieces of an effective technique.

  There are things that we don’t accept in theater—won’t accept, shouldn’t accept in theater—that we have to accept in life. Those are what we call accidents. Some theatrical accidents happen because actors fail to look at causality. Maybe we should all be questioning cause all the time to see if what it appears to be is what it in fact is. Be aware that even if B appears to follow A all the time, proximity doesn’t guarantee causality. But no matter whether we misplace, misread, or misidentify it, there is always a cause.

  Discovering cause and effect, learning to follow it like a beacon, was a turning point for me. That’s when my internal measure as an artist kicked in. Thanks to fine actors like Steiger, Grant, Ruby Dee, Marlon Brando, Alice Childress, Frank Silvera, Spencer Tracy, Canada Lee, and the many others whose examples over the years slowly led me to the light. I was closer than ever to not only being able to recognize the fine line that separates high-quality “indicating” from first-rate organic acting, but also closer myself to successful performances on that side of the line where the real pros worked.

  While I wasn’t home yet in the truly professional sense, I was a long way from those early times back in the theatrical woods when I was told by fellow inexperienced actors and by some not very good drama teachers, “You have to take diaphragm lessons. You have to be able to speak from your diaphragm so that you can be heard up in the last row of the theater. You must learn to bring your voice from the diaphragm, push it up, squeeze it out so that it will resound into the audience.”

  Well, I almost squeezed myself to death trying to be heard in the balcony. I’m serious. I was constipated during half my early performances. My stomach was always in one of those Canadian isometric exercises. I mean it was like a knot, I developed such muscles around my diaphragm from squeezing everything out of me all the time.

  Other widely held attitudes with no real basis in fact were slipped to me as gospel from the actors’ bible. For example, if I was playing a tough guy, I was to remember that all tough guys walked tough, talked tough, breathed tough, smelled tough, spit tough. That forced me into caricatures you wouldn’t believe. To play a tough guy I would go around with my hands ready to strangle somebody, my mouth twisted; I would lower my voice and really be breathing fire, you know what I mean? Well, I looked ridiculous trying to play a tough guy. Not that I couldn’t play a tough guy—but I was under the impression that in order to be the tough guy, you had to create that tough guy out of external appearances.

  When I began to learn what acting and life are all about, I realized that some tough guys look very feminine, some are skinny and not particularly tall and not particularly strong, and some have voices that are kind of tinny. Some of them, if you were to assess them on first impressions, look like priests, others like file clerks or service station attendants or bookworms. I wince when I think back to the tim
es when I was playing tough guys and squeezing my diaphragm. I must have looked something awful up there on the stage. But in the beginning there was no one to tell us that acting at its best was a complex, yet simplified, way of reacting to life’s circumstances, and that human beings off the stage spend a large part of their lives doing just that: reacting.

  Things might have been otherwise for many talented but inexperienced young actors who have dropped by the wayside if someone had told them that the emotional elements that make up human responses are basically the same in every personality, and have been for millions of years. Why couldn’t we have been told that human beings are multitalented in their ability to respond? Our reactions are similar across humanity, yes; but the range of reactions is tremendous. We can respond with anxiety—because we want something to happen, or we don’t want something to happen, We can respond with nervousness—physical and emotional—because we’re overwhelmed by anxiety over the anticipation of something happening or not happening. We can respond with fear—or a mixture of fear and trepidation and some happiness. A little joy, a lot of joy, other forms of pleasure, or fear of those joys and pleasures. Loneliness, boredom, frustration, self-pity, embarrassment, shame, love, hate, shyness, low self-esteem, exaggeratedly high self-esteem, the fear of rejection and the fear of dying.

  In the absence of a guiding light in my early acting, I moved blindly, with misconceptions pointing the way, and as a result I was too many years in coming to understand my craft. But I finally discovered that there’s no difference between actor and audience; neither is a stranger to the experiences of life. I’m broadened as an actor the moment I realize that when people sit in a theater and watch me expressing feelings similar to their own, they can tell if I’m really experiencing those emotions or if I’m faking them. Deep down inside, where they’ve had these same experiences and same responses, they know whether I’m interpreting them in a genuine way or just play-acting. Living consciously involves being genuine; it involves listening and responding to others honestly and openly; it involves being in the moment. This is all equally true of effective acting. Acting isn’t a game of “pretend.” It’s an exercise in being real.