by Donald Bogle
“I still remember that shaky moment I got up on the stage to audition,” said Holiday. “I told the piano player to give me ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon,’ which was popular then. I hadn’t finished the first chorus when Ethel Waters bounced up in the darkened theatre.” She was on the warpath. “Nobody’s going to sing on this goddam stage,” Waters informed everyone, “but Miss Ethel Waters and the Brown Sisters.” Said Holiday: “That settled that. ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’ was Miss Waters’ big number. But nobody told me. I didn’t have the faintest idea. So the stage manager handed me two dollars and told me to get on the bus and go home. I threw the money at him and told him to kiss my ass and tell Miss Waters to do the same. When I went out the stage door I didn’t have a dime to my name. I stayed around Philly a couple of days before I could scuffle up enough to get back to New York and tell Mom what happened.”
Added Holiday: “Later Miss Waters was quoted as saying that I sang ‘like my shoes were too tight.’ I don’t know why Ethel Waters didn’t like me. I never did a thing I know of except sing her big number that day for my big Philly audition.”
What Holiday didn’t know was that something similar had happened to Ethel on her way up in Atlanta when she had performed the blues songs that Bessie Smith had told her not to sing—and Bessie thereafter gave Ethel the boot. Great stars (it was as true of Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller as it had been of Bessie) often ruthlessly protected their territory. The public never saw this side of stars like Waters, Bill Robinson, and later Pearl Bailey, who would be thought of as some of the warmest, most humane of performers. But away from the public spotlight, all three were known by show people to be holy terrors. “Pearl was as mean325 as a hornet,” said Bobby Short. Robinson even carried a gold-plated pistol. The slightest thing could set them off. The story of Ethel’s treatment of Holiday made the rounds, which did nothing to endear Ethel to an upcoming generation of new performers. “Billie Holiday had told me she cost her a job once, when she desperately needed it,” recalled Lena Horne. “Miss Waters was not notably gentle toward women, and she was particularly tough on other singers.” Music producer George Wein felt that in the years to come, Ethel’s behavior even affected her place in music history. “Ethel Waters was an326 influence on Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Dinah Washington, and a host of other singers. But few ever acknowledged this debt. Billie, whose articulation and phrasing on early recordings clearly evoke Waters, always maintained that her sole influences were Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. I think the reason for this slight was Ethel Waters herself.”
On September 18, Ethel returned to the Apollo. Then came preparations for a big tour that would eventually carry her back to Los Angeles.
***
Throughout this time, she remained preoccupied with the prospect of playing Hagar in Mamba’s Daughters. Would this drama ever come to fruition? Meeting with the Heywards in New York, she learned that not only were they moving along with the dramatization, but they were also vigorously pursuing backers for the play. Talks were in progress with the prestigious Theatre Guild, which had launched Porgy and Bess. The couple informed her that her name was important in mounting the play. Because they had to have assurances that Ethel would be available, would she be willing to forgo any long-term commitments? A stack of offers, many of which were bookings at movie houses around the country that would pay $3,500 a week, sat on Harold Gumm’s desk. What was the holdup? Gumm wanted to know. Ethel, however, remained committed to the play—at quite a financial loss. Eddie also still wanted to form his own group and urged her to appear with him at engagements, which would mean a return to the old vaudeville-style entertainment. “We got very fond327 of each other,” said Ethel, an understatement if there ever were one, but which explained why, after rejecting the movie house offers, she agreed to tour with Eddie.
Neither Gumm nor anyone else could understand her actions. Gumm, Pearl Wright, Carl Van Vechten, Bessie Whitman, and a host of others had seen her through her relationships with Earl Dancer and Eddie Matthews. They were also aware of the various—still secret—women in her life. But this was a different kind of relationship. What hold did Mallory have over her? No matter what anyone thought, Waters genuinely enjoyed his company and his charged sexuality. Even more so than with Dancer and Matthews, he was a fine-looking escort, the perfect, well-dressed, handsome “husband” on the arm of a star as she made her way through social engagements and professional obligations. Ever ready to speak up for her, he provided a kind of armor that she believed shielded her from the world. Probably no one else saw it that way. Ethel in need of protection? Preposterous! Was there any tougher woman in show business? But like Dancer and Matthews, Mallory offered a certain security as well as a domestic respectability that she no doubt believed she needed. His family still appealed to her—and to her sense of propriety. The deceased brother, Frank, had been a likable, energetic young man. His educator sister, Arenia, whom Ethel may have known before she met Mallory, was just the type of refined, social woman Ethel had long favored.
The Mallory family’s stability was just what her family had lacked. Was she trying to rewrite her own troubled family history by becoming part of a balanced one? From her own family, she still felt pressured and alienated. Her rivalry with her sister Genevieve was as strong as before. So too was her need for some signs of affection from Momweeze. At times, she no doubt felt she had better luck with her father’s side of the family, with her half-brothers, with whom she was in communication and who were so proud of her success.
For Eddie’s part, could anyone fathom what went through his mind? Still, he remained flattered that the great Ethel Waters had chosen him as her latest man, and now he saw even more clearly the advantages—and opportunities—the relationship could bring him. He kept pushing for the tour.
Finally, Ethel made plans to head back on the road. Again, Elida Webb and Andy Razaf were brought in to help her create a show, and some forty cast members were hired. Called Swing Harlem Swing, the show traversed the country, playing the Royal Baltimore (where it broke records); the Howard in Washington, D.C.; then Chicago, Boston, Chicago again, then Pittsburgh. In Washington, she took additional engagements with Lucky Milliner’s band at Loew’s Capital Theatre. Then it was on to Philadelphia and Cleveland.
On October 31, 1936, shortly after she arrived in Cleveland, Ethel turned forty. For a female entertainer, such a milestone could be brutal. Ethel understood that the heated sexuality, which helped make her a star and which she both valued and lamented, might be in its waning days. Despite all her success, something still had not clicked for her. Was her life really any different now than it had been in 1929 when she had fled to Paris and London with Matthews and Algretta? Would there ever be that balance that she believed she wanted? Would there ever be any relief from the unending emotional and physical fatigue? On the day of her fortieth birthday, she wrote Van Vechten:
Darling Pal328—
Thanks loads for your telegram. Its made me feel at home again as I was kinda Blue today here in Cleveland you see I had halfway planned being home in New York to just have one good spree & as usual things turned out different so I had to jump from Phila 2 o clock Fri morning & landing here by car 7 o’clock Fri nite. Tired & weary and I guess everybody that has me in mind don’t know where I’m at and you are the only person in the world who can think—does of course I get a package with all the cards & telegrams in them But today is what counts. . . . All this lamenting must be a sure sign that the Rocking chair is trying to overtake me—
Well darling Love to Fania & I’ll be seeing you when I get home and Im praying I get to Calif-oh yes Im still enroute an help me pray that I get a chance my ability & not my shape-Thank God I’m still happy domestically. Thanks again for your good cheering message
Always your native Mama-Ethel
P.S. God you don’t know what a relief it is to seal a letter without putting a check in it and starting off with enclosed you find check Ha Ha
; From the rest of 1936 into 1937, she remained on tour, returning to some of the cities where she had already played and packing in audiences all over again. New Year’s Eve was spent in performance at Chicago’s RKO Palace Theatre. In 1936, a list was published of the top-earning Negro stars for the year. First place went to Bill Robinson, who had pulled in almost $30,000, followed by Stepin Fetchit, who had earned over $28,000. In third place was Ethel, who had earned over $23,000. The movie salaries of Robinson and Fetchit, both under contract to Twentieth Century Fox, had enabled them to earn hefty sums. Ethel could pride herself in commanding big bucks even without work in pictures.
An offer came from Herman Starks for another appearance at the Cotton Club with Duke Ellington. Perhaps magic would strike again and she would have another hit like “Stormy Weather.” The new show was set to open in March 1937.
In late January 1937, she arrived in Los Angeles. As she debarked from the train, accompanied by Mallory, she was once again given a queen’s welcome. There to meet her was Bernice Patton, the Hollywood correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier; Black actor Oscar Smith; Harry Levette, whose entertainment columns appeared in the Los Angeles Sentinel and the Chicago Defender; and a lineup of other admirers who had waited over two hours for her train, which arrived late. A huge gathering in her honor followed.
Most striking about the photographs taken that day was again the appearance of Ethel and Eddie. Mallory, in hat and overcoat, beamed and looked like a heartthrob. Yet Ethel, though stylishly dressed in luxurious top coat and cloche hat with an expensive handbag, again looked heavier and matronly. Her eyes appeared tired, even somewhat distended. Having previously transformed herself for Minnelli’s glamorous costumes in At Home Abroad, she looked as she had in Chicago shortly before she returned to Broadway. Her weight gain didn’t go unnoticed. One columnist remarked that she might have better luck with movie work and “she would sing much329 better if she lost some of those . . . er . . . hips.”
Settling into the home of a Black family, the De Cuirs, she quickly prepared for two major engagements. Still traveling with her were Sunshine Sammy, the Brown Sisters, and a striking young chorus girl named Myrtle Quinland, whom the press promptly dubbed “the girl who came330 west with Ethel Waters.” The first two-week appearance was at the Trocadero nightclub, a favorite hangout for the film colony. Her opening proved to be star-studded with such A-listers as Henry Fonda and his wife; producer David O. Selznick and wife Irene Mayer Selznick; Cesar Romero; Joan Bennett; and Stuart Erwin and June Collyer. Talks began with Darryl F. Zanuck, now at Twentieth Century Fox, about work in a new film. Zanuck continued to be a fan, but in the end, the talks led nowhere. She also met with Charles Butler, the important Black casting director who helped fill roles for Black performers in major Hollywood features.
But then, Ethel suddenly took ill and was placed under a physician’s care at the home of Irene De Cuir. The official explanation was influenza. But it was puzzling. No matter how ill Ethel might feel—be it stomach problems, headaches, nervous anxieties, or plain exhaustion—she inevitably went on with the show. But this illness seemed different from past afflictions. The weight gain had led some to believe she might be pregnant. “Ethel Waters, awaiting a331 visit from the Stork?” asked the Pittsburgh Courier. In the end, this “illness” might have been the second of the miscarriages that Ethel revealed years later. With possible thoughts of motherhood on her mind, she knew that at the age of forty, her chances were turning slim. If this was the second miscarriage, it had to have been all the more heartbreaking for her. Once she recovered, nothing more was said.
Following the Trocadero, Waters performed at the Paramount and then made a special appearance at the Lincoln Theatre, located on Black LA’s Central Avenue. The West Coast critics liked her, but there were comments about her weight. Philip Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that she had “triumphed at the Paramount332 Theatre” but added, “Miss Waters’ matronly proportions are no drag on her dusky voice.” In a city where there was an even greater emphasis on youth and beauty than in New York, the comments made her all the more conscious of her appearance.
Leaving Los Angeles, the tour moved on to San Francisco and then Kansas City, where Ethel found herself caught in a controversy. Booked into the Mainstreet Theatre, an exhausted Ethel arrived in the city in the early hours of the morning. While preparing for her appearance, she was informed—apparently for the first time—that the Mainstreet Theatre did not admit African Americans. Immediately, she asked if there was a Negro theater where she could give a special performance—just as she had done at the Lincoln in Los Angeles. When told that there was no such theater, she decided to give a midnight performance for Kansas City’s Black patrons at the Mainstreet. The price of admission would be 50 cents. Assuming that was the end of the matter, she was stunned when that midnight performance became the target of a boycott. A prominent Black citizen in Kansas City, the owner of a Negro newspaper, was infuriated that local Negroes would not be admitted to the regular show. Who wants to stand “in the alley until 12 o’clock midnight in order to pay 50 cents to see a Jim Crow performance at the Mainstreet Theatre?” When Ethel learned of the proposed boycott, she dismissed it. “I love my people333,” she said, “and I want the white people to realize how much my people love me.” She was not prepared for the anger and sense of injustice of the Black townspeople. Though the organizer wanted it known that the protest was not against Waters but rather the town’s race policies, the boycott was still on. Thousands of handbills with the words “Custom Becomes Law” were distributed to some sixty thousand African Americans in greater Kansas City, who were urged to “sit at home at the time of the special performance.” A sound truck with a sign that read “Down with the Show” traveled through the downtown district—as did crowds of protesters.
Ethel ended up playing at midnight to an almost empty theater. Only 117 people showed up. This was one of the rare occasions in her career that she was visibly distraught and “cried onstage because334 of the ordeal.” “The famous singer was335 so upset by the failure of the special show that she was forced to cancel an engagement at the Lincoln High School where she had been scheduled to sing before the student group.”
News of the protest was carried by Black newspapers around the country. Among theater columnists, there was, however, sympathy for Ethel. “One of the advantages336 of living in the North is that colored actors and theatergoers are seldom forced to take part in such embarrassing incidents as occurred in Kansas City when Ethel Waters was boycotted by members of her own race,” wrote theater critic Theophilus Lewis in the Pittsburgh Courier. “The Kansas City incident, by the way, is a striking illustration of one of the by-products of race prejudice. It is a problem that is always bobbing up to bedevil the colored actor. The true artist wants the world to enjoy his talent. Certainly he wants the members of his own race to enjoy it. Most of our artists would probably refuse to appear in a theater that refuses to admit members of their race. But artists do not handle their engagements. They are arranged by their business managers. When the artist discovers that the theater in which he is playing discriminates against Negroes he is usually tied up with a contract which he cannot break without putting his future career in peril.”
To Ethel and others in show business, Lewis was stating the obvious, but it was important that the general theatergoer understand the contractual issues by which she and other Negro performers were legally bound.
Chapter 12
Living High
ON MARCH 15, she opened at the Cotton Club, relocated in 1936 to Broadway and 48th Street. Neither the Negro press nor the entertainers wanted to see the club moved out of Harlem, but times were changing. As Ethel knew, Harlem itself was no longer the great social magnet for the rich and the sophisticated, the rebels and the intellectuals, that it had been in the past. Eventually, the Cotton Club would close its doors altogether in 1940.
Staged by Clarence Robinson, the new revue proved to be
another dazzling evening of great entertainment, starring Ethel, Duke Ellington, dancer Bill Bailey, and the fantastic Nicholas Brothers, along with a cast of two hundred other performers. Not much new material came from Ethel that evening, with the exception of her song “Where Is the Sun?” But the old songs “Stormy Weather,” “Heat Wave,” and “My Man” kept the crowd happy. The one snag in the evening? Mallory. With Duke around, many wondered why Eddie was accompanying Ethel. No doubt Herman Starks had asked too. But Ethel most likely had been insistent. “While the show’s billing337 tells you that Duke Ellington is the production’s musical dish,” wrote one columnist, “you also get the chance to hear and see 15 music mad men under the direction of Eddie Mallory during Ethel Waters’ stay on the stage. Like Broadway, the correspondent failed miserably to find a place for the fill-in band or even its right to jam into the picture but [Herman] Starks has asked me to accept ’em and so I must, or did, even though with reservations.” Later Frank Schiffman negotiated to bring a version of the Cotton Club show to the Apollo in order that Harlem’s colored folks could see it. Ellington, however, elected not to be a part of the new show.
During the run at the Cotton Club, a special birthday party was given for child star Harold Nicholas. The press noted that little Harold wouldn’t give his age. But there were eleven candles on the birthday cake. Like everyone in show business, including stage mothers, Viola Nicholas knew it was best to be mum about her son’s age, indeed to keep him a kid as long as possible. Harold was actually at least fifteen. Ethel attended the celebration along with Ellington, the Nicholas family—Viola and her son Fayard—and other stars, including a man from Ethel’s past, Earl Dancer, on a visit from the West Coast. By Dancer’s side was his protégée dancer Jeni Le Gon. Dancer had promoted Le Gon and secured her work in such movies as Hooray for Love, in which she had a delightful dance sequence with Bill Robinson. Though he would never be the kind of forceful figure he had been in vaudeville and New York theater, Dancer had established himself on the West Coast. Having once vowed never to see him again, Ethel was on good behavior. Later, she surprised many when she showed up at the Sky Club for the opening of its new floor show The Mikado Jumps, which starred newcomer Jeni Le Gon and was produced by Earl Dancer. For his part, Dancer never completely got over Ethel, whom he considered his greatest “find,” his greatest “creation.” By now, Earl’s presence had little effect on her, although frankly, she still may not have liked the idea of him standing there with another woman.
