by Donald Bogle
One critic said that “the source of her genius122” could be found “in her mixture of opposites: a combination of earthiness and deep spirituality, of rowdiness and sweetness, all of it molded and bound together by the overriding sense of drama that Waters brought to every word and every story she ever sang.” “The subtlety of her123 diction and intonation,” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, “is such that her attitude toward a song sometimes seems to change from line to line. Yet in a performance like ‘My Special Friend Is Back in Town,’ she strikes a dazzling balance between singing, talking, and joking, and recalls the comedic personality and assurance of Fannie Brice.” “With her individual approach,” said jazz critic-historian Sally Placksin, “Waters made her songs the standard-setters for all time, and provided a jazz and popular music foundation that influenced countless other singers, from Maxine Sullivan to blues shouter Big Joe Turner, who called Waters the only singer he ever adored.”
Her emotional control in the 1920s enabled a broad spectrum of record buyers, male and female, Black and white, to appreciate her and to be affected by the music. Those young flappers of the Jazz Age, on their quests for self-exploration and self-definition, connected to tough-girl Ethel, who was already at the place that they sought to be. The flappers’ battle for independence had already been achieved in song by Waters—as well as Bessie and the other blues singers of the era. Though not yet thirty (when she recorded in 1925), she projected the maturity of an older, more experienced, worldly woman, the kind that other women could look up to and hope to emulate. Yet the voice itself still had the vitality and effervescence of a young woman. Waters was also on her way to becoming a progressive symbol as she shattered conceptions about the achievements possible for Black women. She was part working woman, part high-flung goddess, able to operate in a man’s world on her terms.
With its wide distribution system and its well-developed publicity department, Columbia got her records into the stores. Her “first five releases125 were all on the popular series,” recalled Frank Driggs, “and her identity left to the purchaser’s imagination.” Then Columbia listed Waters in its race record division: music that was being sold exclusively in Black record stores to Black record buyers. A catalog cover from the 1920s featured Ethel with Clara Smith, Barbecue Bob, Reverend J. C. Burnett, and in the center of the page, her idol Bessie. These stars of the African American community were not necessarily known to the larger white culture. But Waters’ recordings sold—as Dancer and Columbia had planned—beyond the race record market. Thus, later in 1929 Columbia again included her on its popular lists. In a period before the term “crossover” was used—which meant that a Black artist was reaching record buyers Black and white—Waters was now selling in the white record stores too. The California Eagle reported that “Shake That Thing” sold some 800,000 copies. Gradually, too, mainstream media would begin to publicize her.
Following the Plantation Club engagement, it was back to the TOBA circuit, playing theaters and auditoriums and doing one-nighters in Washington, D.C., Wilmington, Delaware, and Newark, New Jersey. Various titles were used for the shows that she headlined: The Ethel Waters Floor Show, Ethel Waters Vanities, Ethel Waters Revue. In New York, she also played the Lafayette in revues like Tan Town Topics, Too Bad, and The Black Bottom Revue.
She also moved into a spacious seven-room apartment at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue. Though African Americans continued to move uptown, Harlem still had its share of established white apartment dwellers, and 580 St. Nicholas was just such a residence: fewer than a dozen African Americans lived there when Ethel moved in. But it soon became a lively hot spot; a much-discussed meeting place for poets, essayists, and other artists of the Harlem Renaissance. On any given day or evening, you might see writer Eric Waldron, or the poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, or artist Aaron Douglas, or literary figure Charles S. Johnson. Johnson’s secretary, Ethel Nance, who lived in the building, said, “All you had to126 say was 580 and they knew you meant 580 St Nicholas.” It was that popular and that well known a building.
Living high and caring less, Waters didn’t hold back on spending, even though her income fluctuated: sometimes money poured in; other times it was a drought. A woman named Bessie Whitman, described as a personal maid, was hired to keep her personal items in order at home and often at the theater when Ethel was in shows. Sweet-tempered and efficient, Whitman had a cool personality that was apparently well suited to Ethel’s hot one. “She was an angel,” said actress Maude Russell.
In time another woman, named Bea, was described as the house manager, there presumably to make sure everything in the apartment ran smoothly, no doubt making sure that food was ordered and prepared, the apartment was properly cleaned, linens and clothes were laundered or sent to the cleaners, and the bills were paid. “When the Frigidaire needs127 a bulb,” recalled singer Etta Moten, “it is Bea who sees that it is replaced, a task to be performed. Bea, who is always willing. Silent. Bea, whose devotion is closer than that of a sister.” Also living there was Bea’s daughter, Marlene. Pearl Wright could also be counted on to double-check, supervise, inspect, and micromanage. Different women came and went, some of whom were “assistants,” others who were “secretaries to the star.” Waters’ relationship to Bea was no doubt another that was gossiped about. At one point, Pearl performed secretarial duties for Ethel. At another time, the choreographer Elida Webb was described as Ethel’s secretary. “The Waters household and the Waters payroll,” said Etta Moten, “is made up of old friends. People who have stuck by her in former days and would stick by her with or without money.” As time moved on, professional hairdressers arrived at the apartment to style Ethel’s hair. A masseuse would come on a regular basis. So would a woman who cared for Ethel’s nails and another who designed her clothes. Another came to alter or tailor outfits. People streamed into the apartment, some ever ready to do whatever they could to please the star: run errands, answer the phone, let guests into the house. Some were simply hangers-on, eager to do anything to be around the glamour and growing fame.
Family members like Momweeze and Genevieve also visited. Though they might disagree or quarrel, that never stopped Ethel from continuing to help them financially. During one of Momweeze’s visits, she may have mentioned her need of new furniture; Waters bought her a suite of living room furniture, to be transported back to Pennsylvania. It was a purchase that later created problems for her. No matter, while the money came in, she made sure it went right back out. Waters also still doted on Genevieve’s daughter Ethel and even asked if she could have her. Genevieve refused to give the girl up, but that didn’t stop Ethel from piling on gifts for her.
Some days a moody or dreamy Ethel liked to stroll through the neighborhood and stand by the Tree of Hope, a mighty elm that stood at 131st Street and Seventh Avenue and was long considered by Black entertainers as something of a good-luck charm. If a performer stood under it and made a wish for work, those prayers would be answered. Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Aida Ward, and Bill Robinson were among those who believed in the power of the Tree of Hope. For Ethel, those times when she sat or stood under the tree were intensely private moments when she paused to think seriously about where she was headed and where she wanted to be headed—and ask to be blessed. (Much to the dismay of Ethel and others, the Tree of Hope was cut down by the city’s parks department in 1934. It was eventually replaced.)
Neither she nor Dancer could have predicted the inroads that she was now making into New York’s music and theater establishment. Though she was still not at the place Dancer believed she should be, Ethel was on her way. The Italian artist Antonio Salemme sculpted a bronze bust of her. He also sought her company, won her favor, and squired her through the homes and studios of other artists in Greenwich Village. Through Salemme, she was introduced to Paul Robeson, whom she admired, as well as his wife, Eslanda. Everyone seemed eager to meet her. That included one of the arbiters of New York’s cultural scene, the writer Carl Van
Vechten.
Born in 1880 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Van Vechten was the youngest child of a socially and culturally progressive couple. His mother, Ada Fitch Van Vechten, was a committed suffragist who fought for women’s rights and was influential in establishing the first Cedar Rapids Free Public Library. His father, Charles Van Vechten, who had amassed a small fortune in the insurance business, helped establish the Piney Woods School for Negro Children in Mississippi. Young Carl was reared to never address members of the colored population in Iowa by their first names. Instead, Black Americans were to be referred to as Mr., Mrs., or Miss, something rarely done by whites at the time. Growing up as something of a misfit, Carl was already six feet tall by age thirteen, gangly, and boldly effete, with protruding buck teeth. Interested in literature and the arts, his soul mate and sweetheart was Anna Elizabeth Snyder, herself almost six feet tall. They were together constantly until they graduated from high school. Anna went off to Wellesley College; Carl, to the University of Chicago. Fascinated by Chicago’s cultural life, Van Vechten especially enjoyed the Black nightclubs, ragtime, and those wild, far-out, highly imaginative Negro performers. Upon graduation in 1903, he took a job as a reporter with the Hearst newspaper Chicago American, but he was fired for poking fun at a leading socialite in an article. Later he moved to New York, where he first did freelance work and then became a reporter for the New York Times. But he took a leave of absence from the Times to head to England, where he married his childhood sweetheart, Anna. Europe’s cultural scene also excited him. Upon his return to the States, he became an assistant music critic at the Times. Always on the lookout for daring, innovative, cutting-edge talent, he wrote about Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova. In 1913, he left the Times again, then worked at the New York Press, but was again fired. He also divorced Anna, and when he refused to pay her alimony, he was thrown into jail for a month. Afterward he married the actress Fania Marinoff. Considered to be “flippantly fastidious and a128 voyeur,” Van Vechten was the subject of much discussion and speculation. There were always whispers about his possible male lovers, notably the literary publicist Mark Lutz, as well as writer Harold Jackman, a friend of the African American poet Countee Cullen.
During those New York years, Van Vechten, the writer, came into his own. His essays on music and the ballet, titled The Music After the Great War, were published in 1915. There followed Music and Bad Manners, released by Alfred Knopf in 1916; The Music of Spain, in 1918; and seven novels. An admirer of Black writer Walter White’s novel The Fire in the Flint, Van Vechten won an introduction to social activist and race man White through Knopf. Afterward he met such African American luminaries as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Paul Robeson. Believing the work of African Americans heralded a new cultural awakening, Van Vechten did much to promote the essays, novels, poetry, and music of Black artists in New York. His commitment to the growing Harlem Renaissance proved invaluable. In 1925, he persuaded Vanity Fair to publish poems by Hughes and Cullen. And he successfully lobbied Knopf to publish the twenty-three-year-old Hughes’ first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues, for which Van Vechten wrote the preface. Also published by Knopf were such writers as James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, as well as others who were pushed and promoted by Van Vechten. During this time and in the years to come, Van Vechten also photographed a virtual Who’s Who of African Americans in the arts in the first half of the twentieth century: Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, Leontyne Price, William Warfield, James Baldwin, Alvin Ailey, and Mahalia Jackson. In addition, he photographed William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Martha Graham, Lotte Lenya, and Edward Albee. In time, because of his ties to Black figures of the Harlem Renaissance, he was dubbed a Negrophile or, as Zora Neale Hurston said, a Negrotarian.
Together, he and his wife Fania were very much a New York couple, always on the scene at the theater, at the clubs, at parties, openings, dinners, and receptions. Their apartment on West 55th Street was the site of many glittering gatherings, filled with the movers and shakers of the art and literary worlds: H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, the critics Jean Nathan and Alexander Woollcott, Cole Porter, Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Gertrude Stein, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Salvador Dali, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Fannie Hurst, who later wrote Imitation of Life. After 1924, the parties were very much integrated. Among those in attendance were Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Nella Larsen. Langston Hughes recalled one party at which “Chief Long Lance129 of the cinema did an Indian war dance, while Adelaide Hall of Blackbirds played the drums, and an international assemblage crowded around to cheer.” Of the Van Vechten parties, Hughes once said: “They were so Negro they were written up as a matter of course in the colored society columns just as though they occurred in Harlem.”
Most within the Black artistic scene were at ease in socializing with him. Others were not. Countee Cullen and Jessie Fauset kept a guarded distance, and for a time, so did Bessie Smith. Having first seen her perform at the Orpheum Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, on Thanksgiving 1925, Van Vechten wrote about her the next year in Vanity Fair. Two years later she attended one of his parties; this event became the stuff of legend. Much like Ethel, she preferred being with her “own people.” The ways of the ofays could be baffling. At Van Vechten’s, she performed for his guests. She also had quite a bit to drink. Finally, she was ready to leave. With her ermine coat wrapped around her and with friends by her side, Bessie headed for the door. At that point, Fania ran up to the Empress of the Blues and threw her arms around her. “Miss Smith, you’re not130 leaving without kissing me good-bye,” said Marinoff. Annoyed and then enraged by this presumptuous display of affection from a woman she barely knew, Bessie hauled off and knocked Fania to the floor. “Get the fuck away from me!” she exclaimed. “I ain’t never heard of such shit.” The room turned silent. Helping his wife up and trying to make the best of a very awkward moment, to say the least, Van Vechten said quietly, “It’s all right, Miss Smith. You were magnificent tonight.”
Others were outraged in 1926 when Van Vechten’s novel, Nigger Heaven, a tale of life among Harlem’s social and artistic sets, was published. Its sales soared, and so did controversy. The use of the derogatory word in its title by a white writer was offensive and insulting to many. Though Walter White and James Weldon Johnson defended Van Vechten’s novel, others, like W. E. B. Du Bois, condemned it. “A blow in the131 face, an affront to the hospitality of the blackfold and to the intelligence of whites,” said Du Bois. But Nigger Heaven proved important to the Harlem Renaissance primarily because it brought Harlem and its artistic scene into the consciousness of mainstream America.
Ethel also despised Van Vechten’s use of the word. “I’d heard of his132 book Nigger Heaven and had condemned it because of its obnoxious title—without reading it.” Moreover, she was as suspicious of Van Vechten as she was of most whites. Far more aware of white perceptions or misconceptions of Black women than her rival Baker, Waters was not going to be anybody’s idea of an exotique. Nor was she going to let herself be viewed as forbidden fruit: the sexy or oversexed “primitive” Black woman who represented freedom from the restraints of a dying Western culture. Years later Van Vechten himself admitted that early in his career he had viewed blacks as possessing “an appealing primitivism” that might “save a rotting civilization.”
But for Ethel, still trying to fully establish herself on the “white time,” it also meant being a part of the white time’s social world. That Ethel had no interest in whatsoever. “White people generally bored133 me,” she said, “and we didn’t speak the same language.” But Dancer must have prodded her to mix and mingle in new circles. After all, she had enjoyed the company of white artists she’d met in the Village. For some time, Van Vechten had sought to meet her. In fact, he appeared almost desperate to do so. He had first heard her perform “Georgia Blues” at the Lafayette Theatre when James Weldon Johnson had taken him there. Afterward Van Vech
ten followed her career closely.
In 1926, he wrote a groundbreaking piece for the March issue of Vanity Fair, one of the nation’s most sophisticated publications, highlighting significant trends and accomplishments in the arts. His article was titled “Negro ‘Blues’ Singers: An Appreciation of Three Coloured Artists Who Excel in an Unusual and Native Medium.” Numerous Black women were making names for themselves, but he focused on three great blues goddesses: Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters. Writing about the performance of Bessie Smith on that Thanksgiving evening in 1925 when he had first seen her in Newark, he noted her astounding effect on an audience that was hardly your bourgeois or artsy-fartsy Negro set—“not a mulatto or high yellow visible among these people. . . . These were all chocolate browns and ‘blues.’ ” He commented on “the power and magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman and her plangent African voice, quivering with pain and passion, which sounded as if it had been developed at the sources of the Nile.” He also noted the way “the crowd burst into hysterical shrieks of sorrow and lamentation.” He added: “If Bessie Smith is crude and primitive, she represents the true folk-spirit of the race. She sings Blues as they are understood and admired by the coloured masses.”
