Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  So much happened that the rest of the year may have been a blur for Waters. Even before As Thousands Cheer opened, Ethel had performed on radio shows, most notably on a series of NBC broadcasts in New York. Then she signed a contract with CBS for a radio show—The American Revue—with a coast-to-coast hookup. “For several weeks, Ethel266 has been singing on the CBS chain but with only a sectional hookup,” reported the Chicago Defender. Now all of that changed. Sponsored by the American Oil Company, The American Revue aired on Sunday evenings from 7:00 to 7:30, beginning October 22, 1933. Accompanying Ethel was Pearl Wright. Also appearing weekly was the Jack Denny Orchestra. For a Black woman to be starring in her own radio program, though that was not how CBS chose to publicize it, was a major coup for Waters. Within the African American press, there was again great excitement about yet another career breakthrough. Her pay was $1,500 a week. As with everything else, she was optimistic and ready for the hard work she knew the show would require. Doing a radio show on one of her days off from the theater obviously meant even less time at home.

  So did her recording commitments. She went back into the Columbia studio on October 10 to record “Heat Wave” and “Harlem on My Mind” with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. At age thirty-seven she was still conscious of the competition of a new generation of singers such as Ivie Anderson and, soon, Ella Fitzgerald, most of whom idolized her. She rarely viewed them as fans and admirers. Her determination to hold claim to her turf brought out her paranoia—and also her ruthlessness. “If there was the267 possibility of another female vocalist sharing a bill with her, Waters would often make the proprietor or promoter take her off the program,” said music producer-promoter George Wein. “A long and arduous path in show business had left her jaded and a bit insecure. She was highly insecure, and she was mean.” On November 27, 1933, when Ethel was back at the studio to record “I Just Couldn’t Take It Baby” and “A Hundred Years from Now,” she heard that a young singer, then making a name for herself in clubs in Harlem, was also in the studio about to make her first recordings. The singer was eighteen-year-old Billie Holiday. Ethel sat in a chair at the back of the studio watching the young Holiday. She said nothing. Ironically, Ethel was then making her last recordings for the Columbia label.

  Major changes had come about at Columbia that affected her music career. In 1932, the record company, faced with a new financial dilemma, had filed for bankruptcy and was taken over by the American Record Company. Brunswick, its top label, released Ethel’s “You’ve Seen Harlem at Its Best” and “Come Up and See Me Sometime,” in which she talked as much as she sang, in a sweet send-up of Mae West. Also on the Brunswick label were her songs with Ellington’s orchestra—“Porgy” and “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love”—as were “Stormy Weather,” “Love Is the Thing,” “Don’t Blame Me,” and “Shadows on the Swanee.” But there were problems at Brunswick. Some of her material was uninspired. Then, too, said Frank Driggs, the “quality of their268 [Brunswick] recording suffered by using small, cramped and heavily damped studios.” In 1934, Brunswick’s top recording man, Jack Kapp, left the company to form American Decca. He took with him top Brunswick stars, including Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, the Boswell Sisters, Dick Powell, Guy Lombardo, and Ethel. She recorded eight songs for Decca in 1934, one of which was a new version of “Dinah” plus such stunners as “Miss Otis Regrets” and “Moonglow,” as well as “Sleepy Time Down South,” “Give Me a Heart to Sing To,” “I Ain’t Gonna Sin No More,” “Trade Mark,” and “You’re Going to Leave the Old Home, Jim?”

  During this time, a major shift had come about in her style and material. Many of her new recordings—including the later ones for Columbia—were dramatic pieces or show tunes. Gone was the raunchy Ethel. Then, almost shockingly, Decca dropped her. Except for two recordings for the Liberty Music Shop in 1935, she did not record again until 1938. Her career in the theater was still going strong. But in the world of popular music, four years is a very long time without regular record releases.

  Publicity about the good Ethel continued as she received even more coverage in mainstream publications. Few stars were more media-savvy than Waters, who knew when to smile and laugh while never showing the temper that everyone backstage was familiar with. She also appeared as determined as ever that the public understand her struggles. “When you hear Ethel269 Waters crooning ‘Stormy Weather’ and other blues songs into the microphone,” Nelson Keller recounted in the magazine Radio Stars, “you might think that the mournful tones she gets into her voice are just good showmanship. In reality, she is pouring out the heartbreaks and disappointments, the struggles and trials of her early life, for this colored girl has overcome terrific handicaps. Now she is successful. But when she remembers those other days, well, she’s got a right to sing the blues.” In the “Talk of the Town” section of the December 23, 1933, issue of The New Yorker, Waters was the topic of a piece titled “Success.” The theme was—as Ethel had intended—the triumph of talent and drive over adversity. “Ethel Waters is having such a delightful present that she doesn’t brood over her past, which is well, perhaps. She used to be a scrubwoman in a Philadelphia hotel, and before that she did washing and ironing. Now she has a seven-room apartment on Seventh Avenue and automobiles, and makes $1,500 a Sunday for one radio broadcast, $3,000 apiece for movie shorts, a lot more from phonograph records and still more from ‘As Thousands Cheer.’ ”

  Throughout the interviews, she portrayed herself as basically humble, although there were always suggestions of her toughness. The story that Waters told the writers from Radio Stars, The New Yorker, and other publications was fundamentally true, but she also altered some of the facts and presented a sanitized version of her tough life. The press was not told that her mother had been raped. “Her mother and father were poor, hard-working people,” wrote Radio Stars. “Ethel was born in a poverty-stricken little shack in Chester, Pa. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother, unable to keep the infant and work, sent Ethel to live with her grandmother.” The circumstances of her birth no doubt were still too painful for her to deal with publicly—and they might well have been too shocking for the public to hear at that time. Shrewdly, Waters used the mainstream press to further construct an image and a narrative she felt appropriate, especially in light of the Depression: now she presented herself as a heroine who had survived an impoverished childhood, a heroine with yearnings for acceptance and approval. Unlike other stars who often had a phalanx of publicists, managers, agents, and assistants to create and promote a public image, Waters basically did it on her own. She intuitively understood what would work best for her public during the Depression. She also appeared to believe her own publicity. Waters continued to express pride in her “people.” “When people say I put little tricks in my songs, I laugh. It may be a trick to white people, but it’s just natural to Negroes. I love my people. We get along like cats and dogs, but I love ’em,” she told the press.

  If publications weren’t writing about the good Ethel, then they were writing about Ethel, the larger-than-life star. In December, the Pittsburgh Courier spotlighted the glamorous Ethel with a headline and subheads that read:

  Lovely Jewels and Clothes270 Have Not “Made”

  the Great Ethel, But They Have Glorified Her

  Radio, Stage Star Has Some Gorgeous Gowns—She Is

  Tall and Slender and Knows How to Wear Clothes,

  The Modistes Say—Looks Ritzy, But She Is Not High-Hat

  It was a seemingly paradoxical image that she promoted. On the one hand, Ethel understood—and enjoyed—the fact that fans wanted her to be glamorous like the Hollywood stars. A woebegone ghetto girl image only worked for her if it was something she had overcome. Yet it could never look as if success had gone to her head. She remained the down-to-earth Ethel. Still, as the Pittsburgh Courier pointed out, almost as an afterthought when it spotlighted her glamour: “Miss Waters has promised to tell Courier readers more about her intimate life. You will want to
learn more and more about this great star, who climbed, by her own efforts, to a place in the sun.” For as long as she could, she kept those intimate details about her life private. She closed 1933 with the lid still tightly locked on details about the problems with Eddie, and the possible estrangement from little Algretta.

  With the great success of As Thousands Cheer, other opportunities came that she refused to pass up. She accepted an offer for late-night performances at the nightclub Palais Royal where she was the only African American performing. Music for the show was written by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. She also signed up for two movies. One was a musical short called Bubbling Over—an RKO Radio film directed by Leigh Jason and shot at a studio in the Bronx—in which she appeared with Hamtree Harrington and Frank Wilson. For Bubbling Over, she earned $3,000. The other, The Gift of Gab, was a Universal feature film starring Paul Lukas, Gloria Stuart, and Edmund Lowe. Waters was one of a series of big names making cameo appearances or performing musical numbers: such stars as Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Andy Devine, Binnie Barnes, singer Ruth Etting, Victor Moore, and critic Alexander Woollcott. Ethel’s cameo was filmed in New York. Still, with the play, the nightclub work, the movies, the recordings, and the radio show, she was now possibly the highest-paid entertainer on Broadway.

  But her radio show The American Revue ran into problems. In January 1934, just as Ethel’s contract was to be renewed by CBS, the radio network’s Southern affiliates complained. “Rumors are going the271 rounds of New York,” reported the Negro press, “that Ethel Waters may not sign the contract to star on the American Oil Co.’s program each Sunday as heretofore, because the arms of the prejudiced ‘cracker’ South are reaching across the Mason Dixon line to halt her in her flight as one of radio’s leading luminaries.” By February, headlines in the Black press reported that Southerners were protesting to sponsors of this show with a colored woman as its star.

  “Ethel Waters’ Sponsors Cut272 Georgia and Florida from CBS Broadcasts,” read one headline.

  Entire Radio World Awaiting Result of South’s Attacks on Famed Star’s Air Appearances Sunday Evenings at 7— Will She Get New Contract?

  South Demands Ethel Waters273 Quit the Radio.

  “One of the most vicious forms of race prejudice is attributed to the rumored withdrawal of Ethel Waters, singing comedian, from the radio,” reported the Chicago Defender in its February 17 edition. “Southern listeners are said to have complained of the star of As Thousands Cheer in their letters to the sponsors.” Walter Winchell also reported that the South was angry about the program. The very problem confronting her in 1934 would face an entertainer like Nat “King” Cole more than two decades later when his television program The Nat “King” Cole Show also ran into problems from Southern affiliates. After little more than a year, Cole’s show was also canceled. Not known as a fighter, Cole nonetheless gave a fairly hard-hitting interview to Ebony magazine in which he stated that the real problem lay on Madison Avenue, which failed to find him a major sponsor. Always the movie studios, the radio networks, and the television networks showed perhaps too great a concern about the Southern market. Waters was one of the early Black stars whose radio career would be in jeopardy because of that market.

  The radio show was important to Ethel. Nightly, families gathered around the big box in their living rooms, listening to songs or jokes or suspenseful dramas, or to headline news. Radio—that great new national collective experience—made the country and the world smaller places. For entertainers—white entertainers, that is—radio could be a gold mine. On a single broadcast, as a guest, a performer could reach a huge audience, broaden his or her fan base, and quickly become nationally known. Others hosted their own shows and became top radio stars. Past vaudeville stars such as Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Fred Allen were all able to use their radio careers to settle permanently in one place without the constant stress of packing up and traveling for months at a time to one city after another. For Ethel, radio could also give her a chance not to have to return to performing on the road. Movies also offered stability. You got up in the morning, went to the studio, and then returned home to your family and friends. But as negotiations and discussions went on with CBS, Ethel knew such a settled life might not happen for her. Finally, it appeared as if the network had given in to pressure from the South. The last airdate for The American Revue was February 25, 1934. Other reports surfaced that Waters had been undermined on her show by jealous white blues singers. Another stated that Ethel herself had decided not to renew her contract. Neither of those reports had much credence.

  True to her nature, Ethel issued no public statements about her anger over the cancellation of the show. Important as her program had been, the rug had been pulled from under her.

  By March 1934, she had finally come to terms with the sad fact of life that it was officially over between Eddie and herself.

  ETHEL WATERS, HUBBY SEPARATE

  Blues Queen Sings “Eddie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”

  So read the headline in the April 7 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier.

  “It was the right thing to do,” she said, “but I guess every woman knows that breaking up a marriage is never anything to celebrate. It is the toughest of all good-byes, even when your man is a louse. You have put in years trying hard to make your marriage work. When it fails, you, the wife, are the loser. I knew all this then, but it had become simply impossible to go on.”

  Harold Gumm informed the press of the couple’s separation. Also revealed was a little-known fact about the two: they had not married before the trip to Europe as everyone had generally assumed, and as Ethel had led the public to believe, even though she had never issued a public statement. Instead the marriage had not taken place until Rhapsody in Black was touring Chicago in 1931. Indeed, Waters and Matthews had been living “in sin.” None of this seemed to bother Ethel—this very religious, seemingly devout woman, who still lived according to her own rules and her personal standard of morality. As with Dancer, Ethel would not look back on her relationship with Eddie, nor would she reconsider her decision. But her feelings may have run deeper. In later years, she would confess having loved “Pretty Eddie” more than the others. Yet no one was certain if the “Pretty Eddie” she referred to was Matthews or another Eddie who would soon come into her life.

  The Negro press cornered Dancer for a comment about the breakup. Then living in California where he managed the career of dancer Jeni Le Gon and where he sought work at the studios, Dancer said that he “knew all the time274 the match wouldn’t hold out.” He also tried to appear diplomatic. Ethel was “a fine girl,” he said. “I like Eddie. He is a fine chap. Just didn’t figure they’d last long together.”

  Her marriage hadn’t worked out. Neither had her hopes for motherhood, but Ethel had not given up the idea. By now, she had begun “adopting” other children. It must have surprised her friends. But Ethel appeared to see herself as something of an earth mother, there to care for the unwanted or those in need of special attention and love. Her apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue was full of kids, at this time twelve, whom Ethel helped support and looked after—or rather had her staff look after. Some children stayed overnight at her apartment. Others went home at the end of the day. Always Ethel was in contact with the parents, some of whom would be in and out of the apartment, most of whom were thrilled that such a big star had taken an interest in the welfare of their little ones. Three children actually lived with her and they all called her “Mom.” Singer Etta Moten recalled that during a visit to Waters’ “sumptuous seven room apartment275,” the children were all over the place, in and out of one room or another, making requests, asking questions, playing games, and clearly vying for Ethel’s attention. After a light breakfast, Moten recalled that she and Ethel had gone into “the large Venetian blinded . . . [tastefully] furnished living room. Scarcely had we been seated ere a lovely little two and a half year old baby girl came into the room and without a word
except a clear hello to me, climbed up into Ethel’s lap. She settled her little brown head upon her ‘Mommie’s’ bosom and very soon her measured breathing told us that she was asleep. This was Marlene, one of the many god-children.” Shortly afterward other children “came in at ten minute intervals, to bring a message, make a request, or to thank ‘Mommie’ for some favor which had been granted.” That day, one nine-year-old ran up to Ethel and asked, “Mommie, Mother and Dad want to know if I’m going to camp this year.” “Yes, both you and your sister,” Ethel told the girl. “Another wanted to know how to adjust the General Electric ice box,” said Moten, “which Mommie had had moved into her home. There was a pile of clothing and a trunk to be packed, Ethel explaining by saying they were clothes and toys which she was sending to a half brother who had a family of six.” By taking in children in need of a stable, comfortable, loving environment, often it looked as if she were desperately trying to relive her own childhood, to make things turn out differently, not only for the children but herself as well.

  In some respects, it had to have been madness for Eddie Matthews. Perhaps he could tolerate one child or two or even three. But twelve children—and the prospect of more to come—was another factor that had to have damaged an already frayed marriage. And, of course, Eddie realized that despite Ethel’s protestations of wanting to be a good wife and do all she could to please her husband, there really was no way to talk to her, to have a conversation about what would work for the two of them.

  Ethel herself could preside over it all with a queenly air. There was Bessie Whitman to clean up after the children. A new secretary, Laura Baxter, would also help out. So would Pearl Wright and other friends and young women who were often at the apartment. Still, her home had to have been something of a three-ring circus.