by Donald Bogle
Although publicity focused on Ethel now going dramatic, the play had been in rehearsal for only two weeks when McClintic and DuBose felt that Ethel could use a moody ballad for Hagar’s jailhouse scene. Heyward himself quickly wrote the lyrics. McClintic had to find someone to set the lyrics to music and decided to contact Jerome Kern, who composed the music for Show Boat, in Los Angeles. McClintic airmailed him a copy of Heyward’s lyrics and the play. Three days later, when McClintic received a call from Kern on the West Coast, he expected to hear that Kern was much too busy. Instead Kern, raising his voice because of a faulty connection, told him, “No, no, no356. On the contrary, I want to do it. In fact, I’ve already done it.” The song was “Lonesome Walls.” Alberta Hunter was also given a musical number, “Time’s Drawing Nigh.” The sets were designed by Perry Watkins, marking the first time a Black set designer worked on a major Broadway show. Previously, Watkins had worked with Orson Welles.
Throughout rehearsals, Ethel hoped her dream of telling the story of her mother, Louise, was about to be fulfilled. Playing Hagar was a form of cathartic self-therapy, the chance to examine and understand not only Momweeze’s fears but also her own. Perhaps she might arrive at some resolution about her fractured, distant relationship with her mother. Throwing herself into the role, she studied every scene of Hagar’s, every line of dialogue, every shift in mood, every subtlety, every nuance. Now nothing, no matter how painful or unattractive, could be held back in order to get at the gut of the character, just as Bessie and Ma Rainey had done with their characters in song.
Ultimately, because of her intense identification with Hagar and her determination to bring the character to a full realization, Mamba’s Daughters became one of her most ambitious yet disturbing theatrical ventures. Her approach to acting was different from that of most other trained theater actresses. “I don’t plan357. I don’t study,” she said. “I don’t rehearse much. I meditate about things—problems, roles, anything. I spend hours meditating. I’m so silent when I’m doing this that you’d never know I was in the house at all.” That was all well and good when she was at home. But at the rehearsals, Ethel, from day one, was never silent and was often impossible to work with.
“I’ve got to rest358 myself,” she said. “When I don’t rest I get mad and bitter and I’ll scream at people. I’m still a mite savage, I guess. Maybe there’s real craziness in me. I’ll say things I don’t mean. I can’t help it. I’ll say them.”
“She was the kind359 who would cuss out the whole cast with the foulest language you ever heard and then get sanctimonious and say, ‘Oh, Lord, they’re mistreating me,’ ” recalled Maude Russell, who later joined the production. Ethel “never had anything good to say about anybody,” recalled singer Revella Hughes. Hardest hit in the cast was Alberta Hunter. “Ethel gave me a bad time. She treated me like a dog. Fine artist, but, oh, she was so mean,” said Hunter. “She called me every name in the book and wanted to hit me. I wouldn’t answer back. I’d just look at her and turn my head and walk away. And that killed her. ’Cause she wanted me to let myself down to her level. But I didn’t do that.” Hunter always believed that Ethel was especially annoyed by the fact that she also had a song, which audiences appeared later to be moved by. “I would sing that song at the end, ‘Time’s Drawing Nigh,’ ” said Hunter, “and people would come backstage asking for me, not Ethel.” “Everybody had to like360 Alberta or be jealous of her and the way she handled an audience and got applause,” said Revella Hughes. Ethel “envied Alberta’s sincerity, the person she was.”
“She was suspicious of361 everyone. Just paranoid,” recalled Fredi Washington. “She wasn’t that way with me, though. But with everyone else. You couldn’t say anything to her. Anything could set her off.” Interestingly, there was perhaps another psychodrama transpiring onstage. In living out Hagar, Ethel Waters may have seen Fredi—despite the fact that they were not that far apart in age—as a daughter she had never had. Fredi was Lissa. From that vantage point, Ethel could never treat her as she did so many other cast members. She even wanted Washington to call her “Mother.” At the same time, Waters had seen Washington at the Negro Actors Guild meetings. Articulate, sophisticated, highly intelligent, and fiercely political, Washington commanded respect. Men like Duke Ellington pursued her. Her brother-in-law, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., had the utmost respect for her, even after he later divorced her sister Isabel. Paul Robeson adored her and was even rumored to have had a dalliance with her. And women generally admired her too. Ethel was one of those admirers. Washington’s performance as the haunted Peola in Imitation of Life had struck a nerve in Black America that even Ethel had been affected by. As always, Ethel saved all her warmth and that great sense of humanity for her character, just as she had done with some of her songs. But during rehearsals, everyone walked on eggshells.
Surely, there were times when even Guthrie McClintic and the Heywards must have wondered what they had gotten into. McClintic, however, understood the tremendous pressure she was under, not only to meet the demands of the role but to brace herself for an audience daring her to prove she had the goods to play the part. McClintic must have noted something else. Because Ethel didn’t have the training of other stage actresses, because she hadn’t taken acting classes that might have helped her to develop the character, she instead became Hagar. There was no line drawn between performer and character. “I am Hagar,” she had told the Heywards when they first talked about the character, and that had not changed. In the long run, McClintic appeared to have no major problems with her. Ethel knew that to make the character come alive, she had to trust him and listen to his advice.
Eddie and everyone else at the apartment on West 115th Street knew to stay out of her way. Most were probably relieved during those times she stayed in her room to meditate on the role. Ethel also dieted, which may have added to her irritability. She got her weight down to 168 pounds, a far cry from the 217 pounds she weighed while touring in As Thousands Cheer.
On January 3, 1939, when the curtain went up on Mamba’s Daughters at the Empire Theatre, it was one of the great opening nights in theater history as the elite from the worlds of Harlem and Park Avenue came together to see Miss Waters go dramatic. From the Park Avenue world came Tallulah Bankhead with her husband, actor John Emery; socialite Brenda Frazier; Arturo Toscanini, Katharine Cornell, Aline MacMahon, and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. From Harlem, there were Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and his wife Isabel; Mr. and Mrs. Will Vodery; Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Douglas; Hazel Scott; Fannie Robinson (without her husband Bill); and Andy Razaf. Of course, Carl Van Vechten was there with his wife, Fania. That evening, the audience may have felt the play was wobbly and still overlong. Some theatergoers might even have shown up to see the great blues singer fall flat on her face. But each moment Waters was onstage, the audience sat spellbound. In one scene as she smoked a pipe, it became an indelible iconic image. In the scenes with Fredi Washington, Waters let all her warmth and love shine through. As she held the girl in her arms, it was for many one of the most moving moments in theater history.
“I was a teenager362 when I saw Ethel Waters in Mamba’s Daughters,” recalled actress Julie Harris. “She was a woman who worked in cotton fields. And had a baby. . . . And the baby was taken away. And the girl grows up. And they have that confrontation scene. And Ethel was in the field hand’s dress. And a cotton handkerchief over head. And this girl—slender and beautiful—sat watching her. And they said, ‘This is your mother.’ And Ethel’s arms went out. And the girl didn’t know what do. But those arms—those arms were out there and out there until the child couldn’t resist it and ran to her mother. . . . I’ll never forget that feeling. It was just so powerful.”
Future television director James Sheldon was another teenager who saw the play. He had collected Ethel’s recordings and was a great fan. But he was startled by her heartrending characterization. It was a dramatic transformation that he never forgot, which he would consider one of the greatest theater pe
rformances he had ever seen.
When Ethel strangled the character Gilly Bluton, she was so forceful that actor Willie Bryant “was almost rendered null and void as he was bounced off the floor,” the press reported. A stagehand actually had to provide smelling salts for Bryant.
“Seldom have I seen363 a first night audience so excited, so moved, so carried away by ‘make-believe,’ ” said Van Vechten. “The fact is that the audience and the critics were enjoying what is known as ‘great’ acting, a phenomenon so rare that any generation is granted only a few examples of it, a phenomenon almost unheard of on our contemporary stage.”
“I’ll never forget that364 night,” recalled actress Rosetta LeNoire. “They took I don’t know how many curtain calls. Finally, Ethel Waters just stood there with the company all bowing their heads and the tears came down their faces. Then the house went wild.” Barbara Stanwyck proclaimed Waters one of the world’s greatest dramatic actresses. Another actor who felt the same way was Ethel’s castmate Canada Lee, who watched and studied her nightly. Within a few years, Lee would triumph as Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles’ dramatization of Richard Wright’s Native Son, work in Hollywood in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul with John Garfield, and then give a poignant performance in Cry, the Beloved Country. His career, however, would be wrecked during the postwar era with the rise of McCarthyism. But for Canada Lee, now at the start of his career, no actress left him as moved and inspired as Ethel. She was “the greatest actress of365 all time,” he said. “Miss Waters has real genius. I’ve been in the wings and watched her. There is something about her personality that awes you—like being in the presence of a queen.”
By one count, Ethel took twelve curtain calls; by another, seventeen. Patrons were “howling for her366. They were not applauding. They were screaming.”
Backstage, an emotionally drained Ethel sobbed almost uncontrollably. “I just bawled367,” she said. Obviously, it was hard for her to “come down” after the performance, and to those who then saw her, she appeared to be talking out of her head. “Can’t stand there and bow to them,” she said in her dressing room. “I get choked and368 dizzy and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll sing for them. Give me a little cold cream to rub on my face and I’ll go out there and sing. I’ll get in a chorus line and dance. I’ll make them laugh. I can still do that. But I can’t stand there and bow when they’re like that.”
The next day the reviews appeared. Most critics found the play lacking a strong, cohesive narrative, but they couldn’t stop praising Ethel. “A performance such as369 no playgoer can ever forget,” exclaimed Alexander Woollcott. “Count this a great democracy and add the name of Ethel Waters to the list of this theatre season’s immortals,” wrote Burns Mantle in the New York Daily News. “Her playing is notable for dignity and comprehension; for the technical assurance which makes her acting seem without technic, as seeming which must always be the aim of technic,” wrote Richard Lockridge in the New York Sun. “The character which emerges from the grave simplicity of her acting is, it seems to me and seems to almost everyone, of compelling stature.”
Van Vechten wrote an essay on Mamba’s Daughters in which he praised the production as a milestone in “the Negro’s progress in370 American theatre.” Past breakthroughs, said Van Vechten, had been the one-act plays of Ridgely Torrence and Eugene O’Neill, The Green Pastures, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and the Negro versions of Macbeth and The Comedy of Errors. ‘Whatever may be said for or against the play, the performance of Ethel Waters in the role of Hagar calls only for the highest superlatives,” wrote Van Vechten. “When Miss Waters leaves her dressing room to walk on the stage (the same dressing room employed by Maude Adams when she played Peter Pan) she leaves Ethel Waters behind her and steps into the very soul of Hagar. It is not an easy matter to communicate feeling to an audience in an inarticulate part, but Miss Waters succeeds in communicating that feeling, as only true artists can, the moment she appears in the court-room scene at the beginning of the play. Some actresses would have stopped there. Not Miss Waters. As the play progresses the feeling is intensified, the character grows in stature, until at the very end, just before the play is over, the tension of the emotion created becomes almost unbearable.”
Van Vechten also perceptively asked: “What is to become of Miss Waters in the theatre? Few roles immediately suggest themselves as appropriate. . . . I believe a revival for her of Scarlet Sister Mary, which Julia Peterkin hoped she would create in the original production, would be an excellent idea, but I cannot help feeling confident that in a Greek play, particularly in The Medea, Ethel Waters would more securely establish herself as the world actress of the first rank she indubitably is.”
But amid all the accolades, one major critic had been unmoved by Waters. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote that Waters’ “limp, plodding style, which371 she seems unable to vary, results in a performance rather than in the expression of a character. . . . Although Miss Waters plays with her usual rangy and gleaming wholesomeness, she does not go very deep inside her part.”
The Times review enraged those first-nighters, none more so than Carl Van Vechten. One of the great heated discussions in Broadway history ensued. Livid that the most influential theater critic in the United States had failed to see the power of her performance, he contacted many of the most important theater artists. An ad ran in the New York Times that read:
The undersigned feel that372 Ethel Waters’ superb performance in Mamba’s Daughters at the Empire Theatre is a profound emotional experience which any playgoer would be the poorer for missing. It seems indeed to be such a magnificent example of great acting, simple, deeply felt, moving on a plane of complete reality, that we are glad to pay for the privilege of saying so.
Judith Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Norman Bel Geddes, Cass Canfield, John Emery, Morris L. Ernst, John Farrar, Dorothy Gish, Jules Glaenzer, Helen Hall, Oscar Hammerstein, Ruth Kellogg, Edwin Knopf, Ben H. Lehman, Fania Marinoff, Aline MacMahon, Burgess Meredith, Stanley Reinhardt, Carl Van Vechten.
The all-powerful critic at the Times was not accustomed to this type of backlash. Nor was the newspaper itself. Nor was the theater world. Guthrie McClintic sent the following telegram to Van Vechten:
Dear Fania and Carl373
I was deeply moved by your testimonial to ethel waters this morning in the times. It was warming to know you shared my own feelings concerning her. It was an unprecedented and reassuring gesture you made full of high courage. Thank you.
Guthrie.
Van Vechten also received a letter from Ethel:
Dearest Carlo—Fania
This is my first free day of not having to go down & rehearse. Also I’ve been suffering terrible pain with a sprained thumb. But pain or no pain you’ll never know how grateful to you both for that beautiful tribute you paid me in the Times because when I say you’ll never know I mean you will never be in a position for me to ever be able to show or prove just how I would go to the mat for you. I’m saying this in my funny way knowing God will explain my meaning to you both. And I’m closing this by saying that my feeling toward you both is what Hagar feels toward Lissa so as long as I live—breathe I’ll be your devoted and grateful friend
Ethel Waters
Afterward Atkinson did something theater critics almost never do. He saw Mamba’s Daughters a second time and re-reviewed it, focusing mainly on Ethel’s performance. “Perhaps it was the374 grippe,” he wrote. “When the play at last gets underway, driven on in a whirl of turgid emotions, Miss Waters is magnificently the mistress of them with as much variety as the part permits and tremendous depth of feeling.”
In another respect, it didn’t seem to matter to Ethel what Atkinson thought. Nightly, her adrenaline shot up, and nightly, she found it as hard as on opening night to “come down,” to release Hagar from within herself. When friends and professional associates came backstage afterward, they found her often still wearing her costume.
She believed it was Hagar they wanted to see and “would have resented finding Ethel Waters in her place.” On such occasions when she spoke to the press, she revealed more about herself, her art, and her moods than she realized, and certainly more so than she had done in the past. Not that she spoke of Mallory or other relationships—that was still forbidden territory. But she spoke of perhaps the one thing in her life that truly had meaning for her: her desire to express onstage, first in song, now in drama, what was in her heart. And sometimes her conversation seemed a stream of consciousness dialogue with herself, when she dropped some of the self-censorship that characterized her past interviews. Always she spoke of the critical response.
