by Donald Bogle
“I’ll work on it242 with Pearl,” she told them. “This song should be given a dramatic ending. I’m gonna see if I can’t give it that. But if I do, I will only want to sing it at one show a night. I want to give it everything I got. That will take too much out of me if I have to sing it more than one show.” Of all the songs Ethel Waters sang in her long career, “Stormy Weather” would be one that affected her emotionally. Another would be “Supper Time,” but the latter, so she believed, would tell the story of her race. “Stormy Weather” told the story of the inner workings of her soul and her romantic despair. The song said something about her life with Eddie Matthews. It brought to mind a question that often preoccupied her: where was her marriage headed?
The situation with Eddie had grown worse. Though she refused to discuss it publicly in the years to come, she felt betrayed by Matthews. Whether it was other women or his indifference to her, no one could say for sure. Still, Ethel seemed to need something that Eddie offered. Maybe it was his fundamental masculinity, or maybe it was that same charm that had first won her over. Regardless, she had become depressed about her situation, which brought to the fore her vulnerability and her deep personal insecurities. Worse, she had no idea what to do about the marriage, how to save it or how, if necessary, to end it.
***
Rehearsals for the twenty-second edition of the Cotton Club Parade proceeded without major problems. Also on the bill were the Nicholas Brothers, singer Sally Gooding, comic Dusty Fletcher, Cora La Redd, and George Dewey Washington. The orchestra was Duke Ellington’s. Having already recorded “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “Porgy” with Ellington, Ethel considered him a master and would say later that Ellington’s “is the greatest of243 all orchestras.” Ellington would also be quoted as having said that Waters “was one of the finest singers he had ever listened to.” Yet Ellington, in the years to come, said little about her. In his memoirs, he would comment on a cavalcade of stars he met, from Stepin Fetchit to Orson Welles; musicians he knew or worked with, such as Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Sonny Greer, and Lawrence Brown; and singers, like his favorite Ivie Anderson, as well as Herb Jeffries, Mahalia Jackson, Tony Bennett, and Lena Horne. But he chose to say nothing about Ethel. According to Lena Horne’s daughter, Gail Buckley, he joked privately, both tongue in cheek and with a degree of sincerity: “My dear, she wrote244 the history of jazz.” That was how Ellington may have believed Ethel felt about her own importance. But these would have been private feelings, not public ones.
Her opening night, in April, was a sold-out star-studded affair, with the likes of Ethel Merman, Sophie Tucker, Johnny Weissmuller, Jimmy Durante, and Milton Berle all seated at tables around that horseshoe-shaped room. With a cast of fifty artists and eighteen chorus girls, the show was divided into acts and comprised skits, dances, comedy routines, and of course, great songs. In some respects, it was high-gloss vaudeville but with everything polished to perfection and without any sign of the old crudeness or makeshift quality that could make vaudeville such an enjoyable guilty pleasure. Ellington and his orchestra opened the proceedings with the overture. The first scene of the first act was a comedy skit called “Harlem Hospital”; it was rather typical fare, wickedly funny and naughty, with Sally Gooding as the head nurse and Dusty Fletcher as Dr. Jones. The evening was off to a lively start. In the ninth scene of act one, Sally Gooding returned to do the ribald song “I’m Lookin’ for Another Handy Man.” This was precisely the kind of number Ethel may have at first feared she’d be asked to perform, but she was now in another league. Not until the eleventh scene of the first act, which was called “Cabin in the Cotton Club,” did she finally appear. It was the moment the crowd had been waiting for.
Behind her was a backdrop showing a log cabin. In the foreground, Waters stood under a lamppost. Her face was illuminated by a midnight blue spotlight. The mood—one of melancholic isolation—was set. Because of her own domestic trials, she sang “Stormy Weather” in the most personal way. Refusing to perform the song as a wail, instead she was about to dramatically tell a story of discontent and despair, of love gone bad, of a woman’s effort to hold on to herself. And so she began. “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky / Stormy weather / Since me and my man ain’t together / Seems to be raining all the time.” She continued: “Life is bare / Gloom and misery everywhere / Stormy weather / Just can’t get my poor self together / I’m weary all the time . . . / All I do is pray the Lord above will let me walk in the sun once more.” In “Am I Blue?” she had communicated heartache but in a more melodic, controlled way. In that song, she was speaking of the lover who had hurt her. In “Stormy Weather,” she sang about the way in which a broken love affair, or marriage, altered the way she looked at the world. When she sang “Am I Blue?” she was over Earl Dancer. When she performed “Stormy Weather,” she was still caught in the grip of emotional distress and pain about her relationship with Eddie.
“That song was the perfect245 expression of my mood. I was working my heart out at that time and getting no happiness,” she said. “I have some unflattering things to say about most of the Negro men I have known romantically. My second husband, Clyde Edward Matthews is a prime example.” Marrying him “was a bad decision. If there’s anything I owe Eddie Matthews, it’s that he enabled me to do one hell of a job on the song ‘Stormy Weather’ when I did it for Herman Stark at the Cotton Club.”
“I found release in singing it each evening,” she said. “Only those who have been deeply hurt can understand what pain is, or humiliation. Only those who are being burned know what fire is like.” “Stormy Weather” made it clear that there was no turning back with Matthews.
On that opening night, the audience, unaware of the turmoil of her domestic life, knew nonetheless that emotionally Ethel Waters was going the distance. When she completed the song, the Cotton Club was silent. Then there was thunderous applause. Dan Healy recalled that Waters was called back for a dozen encores.
The first act continued with performances by the Nicholas Brothers and others. At the end of the act, Waters reappeared for an entire company finale. Her next and final appearance—in a skit—was at the opening of the second act. But with the exception of the performance of the Nicholas Brothers, Waters had already brought the show to its high point. The following day she was the star that the town was talking about. Bing Crosby would remember slipping off to the Cotton Club to see Ethel. Then chorus girl Lena Horne would never forget Ethel’s rendition. On May 3, Waters recorded “Stormy Weather” with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. It became a number one hit that stayed on the charts for eleven weeks. “Stormy Weather” became “the biggest song hit246 of the past ten years,” Variety reported. Though “Stormy Weather” was recorded later by Guy Lombardo and Ted Lewis as well as by Ellington with Ivie Anderson and still later by Lena Horne, no recording had the impact of Waters’. The spring edition of the Cotton Club show itself was such a hit that a shortened version of it—with Ethel, Buck and Bubbles, and Florence Hill—played the Capitol Theatre for two weeks beginning on May 26.
Among the many famous people who heard Waters at the Cotton Club was the composer Irving Berlin, who was then working with Moss Hart on a new show called As Thousands Cheer. Seeing her standing alone under the lamppost with the midnight blue spotlight, he didn’t have to study her performance. He didn’t have to think about it. Berlin was powerfully moved by her. That night, he decided that he wanted Waters for the revue, which was about to go into rehearsals. The next day a call was made to Dan Healy. Berlin wanted to buy out Waters’ contract—but there was no actual contract. Afterward Ethel met with Berlin, Hart, and producer Sam Harris to discuss the production.
At this point in his career, Berlin was already a major American songwriter. He was a self-made man who had the fierce upward-climb-from-out-of-nowhere drive that Ethel respected. Born Israel Baline in 1888, the son of a cantor who immigrated with his family from Russia to New York, he had grown up poor on the
Lower East Side in a section that was then referred to as “Jewtown.” His father died when Israel was eight. Later changing his name to Berlin, he threw himself into show business and pitched his songs to Tin Pan Alley. By 1913, he had his first Broadway show, Watch Your Step, which starred the legendary Vernon and Irene Castle.
Berlin’s career would span decades, but it would not be free of controversy. In the early part of the twentieth century, Berlin wrote “coon songs.” His show Yip! Yip! Yaphank featured a minstrel section with the song “Mandy” as its centerpiece. Performed by a male chorus in blackface and in drag—Mandy herself was played by a Black actress—the number was considered tasteless and racist. He had also contributed the story and several songs to the 1930 Al Jolson film Mammy, one of which was a little number called “To My Mammy.” There were also often accusations and gossip that Berlin, influenced early on by ragtime, hadn’t written some of his material—that instead he had a personal ghostwriter, a “little nigger boy” whom he kept hidden away. Once Berlin had asked an associate, “Did you ever hear247 the story of the little nigger boy?” “Yes, I have,” the man told him. “Do you realize,” asked Berlin, “how many little nigger boys I’d have to have?” In time, Berlin would write some fifteen hundred numbers and the scores for nineteen Broadway shows and eighteen Hollywood films. Among his most famous songs were “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “God Bless America,” “Blue Skies,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” and “White Christmas.”
Moss Hart was another self-made man. The son of a one-time cigar maker, he had grown up in a tenement on New York’s East 105th Street. He had previously worked with Berlin on the lackluster revue Face the Music, but his great collaboration was with George S. Kaufman. The two first worked together on Once in a Lifetime in 1930. In the years to come, Kaufman and Hart would create such classic productions as You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. In 1949, Hart would write the screenplay for the groundbreaking film on anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement. He would also direct such major theater productions as My Fair Lady and Camelot. In time known as the “Prince of Broadway,” Hart would win the Pulitzer Prize and Tonys as well as earn Oscar nominations. These men of the theater wanted Ethel for their new Broadway venture. It was the very kind of production she had been working toward ever since Earl Dancer had pushed her to play the white time.
Changes in the economy had now brought about changes in taste in Broadway entertainment. The old fare wasn’t working as it once had. Those studied operettas were no longer as popular, and extravaganzas with all those giddy chorus girls were becoming too expensive to produce. Besides, the Hollywood musicals offered a bevy of chorus girls amid dazzling choreography devised for the camera. Audiences had become captivated by the brash, snappy new talkies. To compete and offer something new, Broadway was about to open its arms to smart, sexy, sophisticated revues with glamorous, witty stars. Such shows would become popular, and As Thousands Cheer would be among those leading the pack.
Ethel learned that As Thousands Cheer would be a satirical topical revue with sketches and musical numbers developed around the format of a daily newspaper. There would be “headline” numbers about political figures, society folks, international celebrities. There would also be human interest stories, even a weather report. One sketch would look at the end of Prohibition. Another would poke fun at the divorce of Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Still another, under the banner “Franklin D. Roosevelt Inaugurated Tomorrow,” would look at what outgoing President Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Hoover really thought about a number of things, including their successors, Franklin and Eleanor. Others sketches would be performed on Mahatma Gandhi, Aimee Semple McPherson, Noël Coward, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. The title “headline” of each sketch would be projected onto the curtain at the theater. Moss Hart wrote the material. Hassard Short would stage it.
During her discussions with Berlin, Hart, and producer Harris, Ethel also learned that As Thousands Cheer would feature three other stars: Clifton Webb, Marilyn Miller, and Helen Broderick. Webb, who had been in show business from the age of three, was then a song-and-dance man with impressive credits. In 1929’s The Little Show, he had performed what came to be a standard, “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans.” Later he would make such a name for himself in Otto Preminger’s Laura, Titanic, and the Mr. Belvedere series that most moviegoers would have no idea that he had been so big a musical theater star. Tall, slim, elegant, and a stylish dresser, Webb was a rather prissy, arrogant, fussy performer. Because he was so devoted to his mother, Maybelle, he was gossiped about as a mama’s boy.
The leading lady was the then very popular Marilyn Miller. Blond and delicate, the daughter of vaudevillians, she had been on the stage since she was six years old. Though she didn’t have a big voice, she knew how to put a number over, and she was a good dancer. She was already a figure of legend and lore with a list of admirers who were some of the most celebrated and powerful men in the theater. In 1920, she had introduced “Look for the Silver Lining” in Jerome Kern’s Sally. Quite taken with her, Kern wrote “Who?” for Miller. George Gershwin wrote “How Long Has This Been Going On?” for her. A Ziegfeld star, Miller had been pursued by Ziegfeld himself. She’d also had two well-publicized marriages. One was to a younger man, Frank Carter, who was killed in an automobile accident. When Miller, then appearing in a show, heard the news backstage, she reportedly said: “I’ve never missed a248 performance, and I’m not going to miss one now.” She went on that night. Her second husband was Jack Pickford, the dissolute brother of screen star Mary Pickford. He was rumored to have died of syphilis. Miller had been away from Broadway since 1930, and she was ready—with As Thousands Cheer—to let the customers know what they had been missing.
The other star, Helen Broderick, was a scene-stealing deadpan comedienne, whom Moss Hart had once described as “part vitriol and part249 my favorite person in the world.” Broderick would also go to Hollywood, where she would appear in such Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals as Top Hat and Swing Time. She was also the mother of future Academy Award–winning actor Broderick Crawford.
Well aware that these were seasoned pros who were accustomed to backstage battles as well as being in the center of the spotlight, Ethel understood that they might possibly be territorial. No one was going to upstage them. No one was ever going to steal their thunder. To a novice, they could be a fearsomely intimidating trio. Even to a veteran, they could be formidable. But Ethel was no novice, and veteran that she was, she wasn’t frightened of anyone. Her vulnerabilities were always offstage, never on. She was confident enough to know that she could hold her own. If someone pushed her, she would push back. Perhaps she mumbled her motto to herself: “I’ll show them bitches.”
Ethel soon learned, however, that her white costars would receive billing above the title. She would not. The ads would read:
SAM M. HARRIS
presents
MARILYN MILLER
CLIFTON WEBB
HELEN BRODERICK
in a new musical revue
AS THOUSANDS CHEER
by IRVING BERLIN and MOSS HART
with ETHEL WATERS
Staged and Lighted by
HASSARD SHORT
For a woman who had sold huge numbers of records, who had played the Palladium and the Café de Paris with European café society at her feet, who had already starred in three Broadway shows, who was known to the theatergoing public and critics alike as a one of a kind star, this may have seemed like a slap in the face. What it boiled down to was that As Thousands Cheer was a white show with a special guest star appearance by a colored artist. Was this second-class treatment? Yes, but Waters knew that this was a unique opportunity to expand her horizons and to further stretch the boundaries of her career. Her other shows had not been long-running hits. Perhaps this one would put her into a whole new ballgame.
Then, too, Irving Berlin let Waters know there would be four
songs for her in As Thousands Cheer. One would be a deliciously playful, sexy piece called “Heat Wave.” Another would be a dreamy lament called “Harlem on My Mind,” relating the mood of a Black star in Europe, missing her hometown. The other was “To Be or Not to Be.” But most significant and perhaps surprising for Ethel would be the fourth song. Berlin hoped to inject social content into the show, something new to this type of entertainment. Perhaps he was also trying to make amends for his past coon songs. The new song, “Supper Time,” which he believed was “the most unusual song251 in my whole catalogue,” would be the tale of a woman preparing an evening meal for her family, knowing that her husband has been lynched. For Broadway, this would be powerful stuff. It could also be risky. Carefree theatergoers might reject it. Critics might find it overreaching and even exploitative of a real social and racial issue. Ethel knew, however, that the four Berlin numbers were among the best material she would ever have for a Broadway show. She had no second thoughts about joining the production.
Her schedule was packed. Almost immediately—in late summer—she went into rehearsals for As Thousands Cheer at the Amsterdam Theatre. At the same time, she performed on radio. Waters knew the radio appearances were important to broadening her audience. It was also good money. In August, she starred in a production of Stormy Weather—a revue put together with Waters, George Dewey Washington, and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band, that was to play movie theaters, beginning at New York’s Loew’s State Theatre. Harold Gumm had informed her of offers that had come in for appearances in Europe. During this time, she also received a movie offer for one of Warner Bros. short Vitaphone films, to be directed by Roy Mack and to be shot quickly in Brooklyn. Eager to be back in front of the camera, she agreed to do it. Called Rufus Jones for President, the sixteen-minute movie starred Ethel, along with Hamtree Harrington, Edgar Connerly, the Will Vodery Girls, and a pint-sized six-year-old wonder named Sammy Davis Jr.
