Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  A breakthrough came very soon. Appearing with Dancer in the show Plantation Days at Chicago’s Grand Theatre, she was spotted by the influential white critic Ashton Stevens of the city’s Herald and Examiner. As such Negro shows as The Chocolate Drop, Sissle and Blake’s In Bamville, and All God’s Chillun Got Wings were about to hit town, Stevens decided he “would need a little100 preliminary exercise in the Darktown drama. So south on State Street to the Grand Theatre I went.” There he watched Plantation Days, which was yet another compilation of songs, dances, and comedy routines.

  On its own, Plantation Days was a good show, said Stevens. But with Ethel, it was a great one. He liked her voice but was knocked out by her personality and her “way of sifting a song through that personality with ease, with certitude and with spell,” Stevens wrote. “Her ever so slightly comic gestures are as spare and fluid as were those of the lamented Bert Williams, and her enunciation is as clear as a carving. I know a lot of white women highly placed who could go higher on the lyric stage if they went to articulation school with Ethel Waters.” Summing her up, he added: “No part of this remarkable young woman—I should without too much chivalry guess her years as twenty-five—is as remarkable as the whole of her. She has the equipment for the life of song and dance; and she has what the little theater folk call the soul also. In her unostentatious way of dramatizing every song she sang, so that you could see as well as hear it, Ethel Waters reminded me of Yvette Guilbert [a popular performer of the time]. She neither moaned, groaned nor raved her ‘Georgia Blues’; she only sighed with satanic rhythm. And when she informed Mr. Dancer that ‘Mamma Goes Where Papa Goes,’ she did it with a wickedness that was beyond the touch of censorship. She is the most remarkable woman of her race that I have seen in the theater.”

  “After exactly one year101 and three months,” said Dismond, Earl Dancer had done the nearly impossible: he had finally “persuaded her to try white circuits.” Bookings on circuits like the Keith, the Orpheum, the Pantages were not easy to secure. Vaudeville remained fiercely competitive, and the headlining stars on such circuits were still the white ones. But Ethel’s name was getting around. Those who had observed her at the colored theaters on the TOBA circuit—and who had heard the records and also paid attention to the records’ sales—were persuaded by Dancer and the Casey Agency to book her. It was also apparent that whites at those theaters would find her style entertaining. And so Ethel and Dancer played the B. F. Keith Theatre in Toledo; the Palace and the State-Lake Theatre in Chicago; the Palace Theatre in Milwaukee; the Majestic in Cedar Rapids; the Orpheum Theatre in St. Paul; the Orpheum in Winnipeg, Canada. “As Waters and Dancer they played the Orpheum in its entirety. Their act was marvelously received,” said Dismond. “The Keith office then booked them East with equal success. Mr. Dancer, at this point, retired from the stage to take over her management.” Dismond also commented: “Miss Waters was acclaimed the greatest feminine artist since Aida Overton Walker.”

  Soon Negro show business circles were abuzz with stories about the two. Everyone knew they had to be lovers, and soon the word was out that the two had married, that the rapaciously bisexual Ethel had settled into a permanent relationship with a man. Waters was mum on the details of a marriage to Dancer, but Dancer never had any problem in letting people think the two were man and wife. For the next several years, he was often referred to in the Negro press as Ethel’s husband, and she did nothing to dispel such assumptions.

  During this period with Dancer, she saw even more clearly the difference between white and Black audiences. She recalled that “when I first stepped102 before a white audience, I thought I was a dead duck because no one tried to tear the house down. They merely clapped their hands. Such restraint is almost a sneer in the colored vaudeville world I came out of.”

  But during this period, she did not stop appearing at Black theaters and clubs, and continued to experiment with different types of music. Since the days at Edmond’s, she had searched for material in which to better tell a story. Blues music—with its suggestive lyrics and wickedly clever double entendres, which no matter what she said at this time and in the future, she somehow enjoyed—nonetheless was considered dirty music, hardly fit for all those Sunday churchgoers. Other popular female stars of the period stayed close to their musical roots, but Waters ventured into new territory. A song that affected her emotionally was the Hebrew lament “Eli Eli.” “A Jewish friend and103 neighbor in her old stomping grounds,” said the writer Alvin White, “had taught it to her, explaining its meaning.” Ethel learned to perform it in Hebrew, then had the opportunity to sing it publicly.

  In February 1925, she was invited to participate at a midnight fundraiser at New York’s Palace Theatre to benefit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Located in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side, the cathedral was one of the city’s monumental structures; construction had begun in 1892, but it remained incomplete. Some $15 million was needed. “One who has seen104 it with the imagination of [an] architect has said, speaking particularly of the lofty nave,” reported the New York Times, “that nothing comparable to this superb design has ever been conceived or executed in America, and that the cathedrals of Europe may fairly be challenged to surpass or even equal it.” But the cathedral was important in another respect. “In its realization, men, women, and children of this community should have part, whatever their affiliations of creed, for it is a free house of prayer and a great common church, where tens of thousands may share in a service or where one may kneel alone. Contributions to its building involves no credal obligation, no lessening of loyalty to one’s own church.”

  Spearheading the theatrical fundraising drive was E. F. Albee. Among the showbiz folk enlisted to perform were some of vaudeville’s most famous names: Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Jack Benny, and Bert Wheeler. Seats for the general public were priced at $2.50. Box seats went for $3. “Every top act in105 vaudeville scrambled to get on that bill. Since Ethel was a top artist, the committee sent her a special invitation,” recalled Alvin White. Actually, the invitation was a sign that New York’s entertainment establishment had begun to take her more seriously. “The directors decided that she would close the long show,” said White. “That spring night, twenty-two of vaudeville’s greatest went on ahead of Ethel. It was nearing three o’clock when her act was announced. The crowd was getting restive but the Waters name was magic. Then, the usual fanfare by the orchestra, the heavy curtain rose. Onstage, dead center, was a grand piano.” There sat Ethel’s accompanist. But there was no Ethel.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Ethel Waters was scheduled to appear in this closing act,” it was announced, “but she hasn’t been seen or heard from, we ask your indulgence.” At that point, noise was heard offstage. Then there appeared a “tall, brown skinned woman, in a worn sweater and a gingham apron.” “May I help you?” she was asked. “We were expecting Miss Ethel Waters. Who are you?” The woman answered “sarcastically in Harlemeese,” “Well, I ain’t Sophie Tucker.” It was Waters, doing a replay of the old vaudeville routine she had often performed with Ethel Williams. The audience laughed. Waters then “walked slowly over to the piano, took a position and announced, ‘I’m ready.’ ”

  Once she opened her mouth to sing, the audience realized it was “no popular song for which she was famous, but the highly emotional Hebrew lament ‘Eli, Eli.’ . . . Ethel knew full well what she was singing . . . and you’d better believe, she knew how to project that song most effectively to her audience of which, the majority surely was not Protestant. And it listened in stunned, respectful silence. Heck, I didn’t know a damned word Ethel was singing, neither did my girlfriend, New York born and bred. When the song ended, Miss Waters stood, bowed in reverence. Slowly, she looked up at the audience, a patented Waters smile lighting up her face. The silence was murder—then it was shattered with thunderous applause that shook the old theater, quite accustomed to applause—but none like this. There was heavy foot stomping before t
he jam packed theater rose to its feet shouting its pleased approval. They couldn’t believe it even if they had heard it—a Black woman singing a cherished Hebrew traditional number in its original tongue. Once again, Miss Waters dropped her head acknowledging the tribute only this time, when she looked up, tears were mixed with that wonderful smile. It had been a magnificent performance by a magnificent performer, Ethel Waters at her very best.”

  In late Spring of 1925, Waters received an offer for an appearance at New York’s Plantation Club in a show to be called Tan Town Topics. It was precisely the kind of opportunity she and Dancer had been waiting for. Located at 50th Street and Broadway above the Winter Garden Theatre, the Plantation Club was owned by Sam Salvin; one of many clubs, cabarets, cafes, and late-night joints where theatergoers could be further entertained in the city that never slept. Its management included the Shubert brothers, major players in New York theater. Eager to boost attendance, Salvin had worked with an up-and-coming producer named Lew Leslie to acquire fresh talent in 1922. At the time, Leslie, who would later emerge as an important figure, was still feeling his way around. With Salvin, Leslie hit pay dirt by hiring Florence Mills, who was then appearing in Shuffle Along, to perform in late-night floor shows at the Plantation Club.

  Mills was an instant smash with swanky downtown patrons. “That’s when the Plantation106 Club began to get popular,” recalled Noble Sissle. Afterward the Plantation Club—whose patrons were mostly white—became known for its classy Negro entertainment and its extravagant floor shows. Out of the club had come The Plantation Revue, which moved to Broadway starring Mills in July 1922. That show took Negro musical theater in a new direction. Without a real storyline, it was a revue with skits and routines, the kind of thing that had been done on the road. Just as significantly, whereas Shuffle Along had featured two men, the team of Miller and Lyles, as heroes off on a set of adventures, in this new revue Florence Mills was a Black woman who stood front and center.

  After Broadway, Florence Mills returned to the Plantation Club for other popular revues, and, in the world of Negro entertainment, she became its darling and attained a level of recognition in the States and abroad just about unequaled by any other Black female star before her. The only other Negro female star who had a comparable success had been Aida Overton Walker in her Broadway shows with Williams and Walker. Eubie Blake adored Mills. So did Noble Sissle and Lew Leslie. Audiences adored her, too. Ethel professed to admire her greatly. Yet though Mills was the opposite of Ethel in many respects—she was small, delicate, sweet-tempered, and plucky—Waters was probably too ambitious not to have viewed her as something of a rival. Ethel was also aware that while a producer like Leslie and an owner like Salvin had considered Florence classy, that was hardly the way they thought of her. Now, however, Mills was temporarily away from the club, and Ethel was offered the chance to step in. At first, Ethel was hesitant, still uneasy about performing for a white audience. That’s when Earl Dancer stepped in. He browbeat, hounded, hassled, and nagged Ethel repeatedly. Finally, she agreed to audition.

  That day, she stood before Salvin and the songwriters Harry Akst and Joe Howard, who asked her to sing a new number they had written for the show. It was called “Dinah.” Waters performed the song—as they wanted—at a rapid pace. But the men were not satisfied. Then Akst and Howard suggested that she sing the song her way. Waters took the material home and worked on it. The next day she stood in front of the men again. This time she performed “Dinah” at a more leisurely pace, savoring the lyrics and the dreamy melody, making it really her own. She was hired. Dancer recalled that he agreed “for Ethel to go107 in the show only if I could choose or reject her material inasmuch as I wasn’t producing the show.” At this point, Dancer was trying his best to call all the shots.

  Ethel went into rehearsals for Tan Town Topics. Will Vodery conducted the orchestra but the production ran into problems. Nothing jelled nor jumped. In need of serious revisions, the show’s opening was postponed. Brought in to doctor Tan Town Topics and get it into shape was a man Ethel had great confidence in, Will Marion Cook. Considered a master among Black entertainers, Cook’s background prepared him for anything but a career in Black musicals. Born in 1869 in Washington, D.C., a thirteen-year-old Cook was sent by his parents to study the violin at the Oberlin Conservatory. Three years later he was in Berlin studying with the violinist Joseph Joachim. In New York, he studied under Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music. When the two clashed, Dvořak kicked Cook out. Afterward he knocked about and soon began working in Black musicals. Few people seemed to better understand such shows—what made them work and what spelled doom—than Cook. “Will Marion could take108 a song and fix it,” recalled entertainer Bessie Taliaferro. “He could coach performers. He’d be stomping his feet, trying to get some spirit, some soul in them, and his eyes would be piercing. Ethel Waters wouldn’t do anything unless he approved.”

  While Ethel studiously paid attention to Cook, a young dancer also did so—and to Ethel too, observing the rehearsals closely but silently. In fact, Cook had brought the young dancer into the show. As fiercely ambitious as Ethel and as hell-bent on stardom, the dancer had made something of a name for herself as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along and as a lead in the Broadway show Chocolate Dandies. But she had attained nowhere near the success of Ethel. Still, this young dancer, Josephine Baker, was so hungry to make it that those around her must have sensed her day was about to come. Hers had been a childhood every bit as impoverished as Ethel’s. She, too, carried the “stigma” of having been born “out of wedlock”—in St. Louis in 1906. Some whispered that her father was the Black musician Eddie Carson. Others gossiped that he was a Spaniard who had taken up with Baker’s mother, Carrie McDonald, a washerwoman, who later married a man named Arthur Martin and had three other children. So poor was the family that young Josephine had stolen to eat, had bathed in the same water as the rest of the household, had acquired little more than a fifth-grade education, and by the time she was a teenager, had left home to perform on the road. Again, like Ethel, she had an early teenaged marriage. For Baker, there was a second marriage while she was still a teenager. Her first husband was Willie Wells. Her second, whom she wed in Philadelphia, was Willie Baker. Though she left Baker, she kept his surname for the rest of her life.

  Show business was in her blood, her bones, the sum total of her existence, just as it now was for Waters. Though the two women had similarities, they also had great differences, and they would never be friends. Theirs was a rivalry that would last for decades even though their careers would take them down vastly divergent paths, and despite the fact that their images would be polar opposites in subsequent decades. Throughout her six-decades-long career, Josephine Baker would never relinquish her sex goddess status. Ethel, however, would be eager to divest herself of hers, onstage, that is, but not off.

  At the Plantation Club, Ethel, the star, may not have thought twice about Josephine, but Baker thought a lot about Ethel and soon was working hard in hopes of grabbing attention on opening night. Having already surprised the critics with her smash performance in Shuffle Along—brazenly stealing the show at times—she now envisioned doing the same in Tan Town Topics. “I was still in109 the chorus and might well have passed unnoticed except for my bobbed hair gleaming with oil and my eyes, which I was learning to roll in all directions,” said Baker “I spent . . . my time memorizing Ethel Waters’ songs. I enjoyed it, and after all, you never knew.”

  On opening night—June 23, 1925—an apprehensive Waters said a prayer in her dressing room before going onstage. All the preshow anxieties and tensions went right to the pit of her stomach. As the headliner at the Plantation Club, she was expected to carry the production on her shoulders. If it tanked, she would be responsible. Also on her mind must have been the club itself, which was celebrated as much for its décor and design as its entertainment. “I had never seen anything as magnificent as the Plantation,” recalled Baker. “It looked
like paradise with its bright lights and starched tablecloths.” The Plantation Club, as its name indicated, recalled the days of the Old South. “Lew Leslie had the110 whole interior taken out and decorated as a plantation,” the entertainer Ulysses S. Thompson told an interviewer. “Watermelons . . . and lights—little bulbs—in the melons. There was a well, where you could draw the water out, and statues of hogs and corn.” A backdrop also depicted a river scene with a papier-mâché steamboat. Even an advertisement for the show that appeared in the New York Times depicted a pickaninny figure eating watermelon. All of this, of course, conjured up the idea of the Negro’s nostalgia for the sweet days of the Old South—when everyone knew his or her place, when life supposedly couldn’t have been better. “The performers were white111 blacks,” said Baker, “in accordance with the vogue for light-skinned entertainers.” That may have been true of the chorus girls. But neither Waters nor Florence Mills were considered light-skinned. Seated at the tables were the white patrons—dashing young men and glamorous young women, dressed to the nines, ready to party into the wee hours of the morning.

  Still adjusting to the way a white audience responded, Waters was now psychologically better prepared. Not lowering her standards—white people might not understand her work, she said, but “I wasn’t going to112 change it”—she nonetheless understood when she was communicating, what tricks of the trade were most effective, when to employ different techniques or a different approach to reach them. Each evening throughout the engagement, the high point occurred when she stepped forward to sing “Dinah.” Not an earthy gut-bucket blues number, “Dinah” was pure gorgeous melodic pop, a reminiscence of a lovely lass from South Carolina. “Dinah / Is there anyone finer / In the state of Carolina,” the song asked. ”Dinah / With her Dixie eyes blazin / How I love to sit and gaze in / To the eyes of Dinah Lee.” Another lyric stated: “But if Dinah / Ever wandered to China / I would hop an ocean liner / Just to be with Dinah Lee.” Waters’ clarity not only revealed her complete comprehension of the lyrics but brought its images to life. Yet oddly enough, no one ever questioned that here was a woman singing about her sweet yearning for another woman. As Waters sang it, it might well be a sister recalling a sister. Or a mother recalling her daughter, or an aunt recalling her niece. Or maybe, just maybe, a girl recalling a girlfriend. Nonetheless, her “Dinah” had the Plantation Club patrons humming and sweetly smiling around the tables—and then humming and sweetly smiling as they left the club and wandered out onto the city streets. Later such male stars as Bing Crosby would record the Akst-Howard song and so would other female singers. But because of her dreamy, nostalgic delivery through which she transported the listener to another time and place, “Dinah” would forever be associated with Ethel. It was her song, just as ”Stormy Weather” would be in a few years.