by Donald Bogle
On March 27, she went back into the studio with Eddie to record “Lonesome Walls,” “If You Ever Change Your Mind,” “What Goes Up Must Come Down,” and “Y’ Had It Comin’ to You,” all on the Blue Bird label. For Eddie, these were important recordings that would only enhance his reputation as an orchestra leader.
But Eddie had other things on his mind as well, a business proposition: he wanted to open a restaurant. He already had a partner, his musician friend, Charles McKinley Turner, who was known throughout Harlem as “Fat Man Turner.” A bass fiddler, Turner conducted the band Fat Man and the Arcadians at the Arcadia Ballroom. Friends for twenty years, Eddie and Turner were weary of traveling on the road. Their proposed restaurant would bring in additional income. It would also have fine food and an elegant design. With all the people that Eddie and Ethel knew, the place was bound to be packed nightly with high-paying customers. It couldn’t fail. All he needed was seed money to get started. But this was only one of the endeavors that Eddie sought Ethel’s help with. There were also real estate deals. Mallory convinced her to invest “a big slice of387 my savings in some Harlem properties he was interested in, including a bar and grill,” she recalled. She also realized she would “lose money and I don’t say I was beat out of it. All I knew was that whenever I mixed up romance and my bank account, I seemed to end up with no dough and even less of a love affair.”
In the spring, the bar and grill, called Fat Man on Sugar Hill, opened in Harlem’s Sugar Hill section. Ads were taken out to publicize it.
When in New York388 visit
Fat Man on Sugar Hill
(rendezvous of colored celebrities)
Choice wines and liquors
155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, New York City
Famous for its southern barbecue & fried chicken
Eddie Mallory—hosts—Chas. Turner
Fat Man on Sugar Hill indeed drew celebrities, Black and white, all of whom came because of Ethel. On opening night, Tallulah Bankhead with husband John Emery was greeted by a jubilant Ethel at the entrance—and later was photographed eating the restaurant’s famous ribs, which Bankhead, a Southerner, exclaimed she loved. On another occasion, Katharine Cornell arrived in diva style and grandeur and had so much fun that she literally fell “off her chair one night; not from intoxication or even excitement—just an accident.” Also making their way there were Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Maxine Sullivan, and Artie Shaw. Eddie was pleased. In photographs with Eddie, Emery, and Bankhead, though, Ethel looked rather somber. Perhaps she saw then that her relationship with Mallory, despite this new venture, might be nearing its end.
Ethel, however, found it hard to rest. She also continued to find it even harder to leave Hagar behind. She did all she could to promote the show. A radio broadcast of the play proved successful with listeners. When she appeared on singer Rudy Vallee’s popular radio show, she not only sang but performed a dramatic sequence from the play. “Mamba’s Daughters was the high peak of my career,” she said at the time. Such a chance didn’t “come anybody’s way often, and if I never have another to equal it I’ll still be thankful for it. For once I did do something that was big. Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell are my idols because they gave me my chance and believed in me.”
Mamba’s Daughters closed after 161 performances in the spring of 1939. Producers denied that slumping ticket sales caused the demise of the drama. Some believed that Ethel had become so high-strung and so emotionally drained by the role that the “closing was ordered because Miss Waters needed a rest. The role of Hagar is a terrific one and the nightly performances in the role with two matinees tossed in made the work pretty hard for Ethel Waters.” There were tentative plans to reopen the show in the fall.
Then came an offer for an appearance on a pioneering television broadcast as part of the World’s Fair of 1939–1940. Having opened on April 30, 1939, the fair was the largest, most sprawling of its kind, with fairgrounds that took up 1,216 acres of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York. Countries from all over the world participated to spotlight the wonders of the future—“the Dawn of a New Day.” Among the exhibits was a time capsule to be opened 5,200 years later in the year 6939. Inside were writings by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann as well as an assortment of other items that future generations might admire or be puzzled by: a pack of Camel cigarettes; a kewpie doll; a copy of Life; a Mickey Mouse watch; a Gillette safety razor. Also on exhibit were a car-based city of the future and television sets.
Since the 1920s, experiments had been conducted on transmitting visual images to a small box that could sit in American homes. Now the National Broadcast Company planned a live broadcast of Ethel and other actors in a sequence from Mamba’s Daughters. The radio broadcast of the drama had been one thing, but to do a performance that could be seen excited her. Of course, there were very few actual television sets in 1939: only the nation’s visionaries and eccentrics had them. There were about two hundred sets in the New York area. The night of the broadcast, NBC’s studios were packed with hundreds of people eager to see how television worked. Sitting in the control booth were Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and his wife, Isabel Washington; Ethel’s accompanist, Reginald Beane; choir director Eva Jessye; and Harold Gumm and his partner, William Goldie, and their wives. About a thousand people actually viewed the presentation.
Performing with Ethel were Fredi Washington, Georgette Harvey, and Willie Bryant. No one knew what to expect. The lights were so hot that the crew wore straw hats. But Ethel and her castmates quickly adjusted to this historic moment. “Miss Waters’ performance was390 glowingly simple and sincere and raised the sketch to an affecting emotional pitch,” wrote Variety. “To put over that kind of inner-felt underplaying was a demonstration of visio’s possibilities as well as thrilling performance.”
That evening when the program’s announcer asked Ethel which was the great love of her life, singing or acting, she replied that acting was a lifelong ambition. Should it further develop, television might be the medium that afforded her the opportunity to act.
Afterward, the Negro press, excited by the possibilities of television, asked: “Will the fate of the colored artists be the same in television as it is now in radio? Or will it be a new day for the Race. Another item not to be overlooked is how he will be portrayed in television. Will he be made to cut up and act like a fool or shall he portray himself as he is in every day life.” Those were prophetic words: as television developed, those very issues pertaining to Black images would be as hotly debated on the small tube as in the theater and the movies.
In late June, Ethel returned to the fairgrounds. There, she and eleven other Black women, including sculptor Augusta Savage, educator Dorothy Height, writer Jessie Fauset, and child prodigy Philippa Schuyler, were honored in the National Advisory Committee building at the World’s Fair as among the foremost women in their fields.
With the close of Mamba’s Daughters, Ethel knew she was back where she always found herself: what would she do next? Talk came of a show with long-standing nemesis Bill Robinson. The two “had been approached—separately391—on the possibilities of such a production.” When the two had danced together at an event, it looked as if their feud was over. This was pure wishful thinking. For his part, Bojangles’ silent rivalry with her was as strong as ever. If she had won acclaim for a dramatic role, why couldn’t he do the same? The Negro press reported that he was “shopping for a serious392 drama in which he will test his dramatic ability. . . . There are those who believe the well-known feud between the dancer and Ethel Waters is the reason for the play.” For Ethel, he would always be one evil old coot. There were also reports that DuBose and Dorothy Heyward would write a new Broadway play for her. In the end, nothing materialized. An offer came for A Midnight Summer’s Dream, a musical comedy, but Ethel turned it down.
On August 15, she was again with Eddie in the recording studio for six new numbers f
or the Blue Bird label: “Old Man Harlem,” a Hoagy Carmichael-Rudy Vallee song; Carmichael’s “Bread and Gravy”; “Down in My Soul,” a P. Grainger song; “Push Out,” cowritten by Lovejoy and Reed; “Georgia on My Mind,” a Hoagy Carmichael–Stuart Gorrell number; and “Stop Myself from Worryin’ over You,” composed by Ethel and her accompanist Reginald Beane. Backing Ethel on these recordings was a fine group of musicians: Eddie on trumpet, Benny Carter on alto sax, T. Glenn on trombone, C. McCord on clarinet, D. Barker on guitar, and Milt Hinton on bass. On September 22, she recorded “Baby, What Else Can I Do?” and “I Just Got a Letter,” with Mallory on trumpet, Benny Carter on clarinet, Gavin Bushell on alto sax, Reginald Beane on piano, and Charles Turner on bass.
On all these songs, her voice was as fine and clear as ever and she still had the ability to draw listeners in, as if they could become a part of the festivities or the emotion. On “Georgia,” she sang about a lovely lady without suggesting, as in the later Ray Charles version, that she might be singing about the state of Georgia. “Bread and Gravy” probably had the most traction, a playful tale of a woman pleased with the relationship in her life. Yet the most telling was the number she wrote with Beane, “Stop Myself from Worryin’ over You.” Here a very assured Ethel sang of a relationship that could drive a woman mad with frustration. But there was none of the sweet, mournful quality of “Am I Blue?” and “Stormy Weather.” Well-performed as the songs were, none became the big hits of her past music. Clearly, her focus was now on acting. Still, there was no such thing ever as a bad Ethel Waters recording. Once she was by that mike, she was always eager to get at the dramatic core of the song and ready to give the song something. Though there were rising new singing stars, British critic Baron Christy Kirland named Ella Fitzgerald, Maxine Sullivan, and Ethel Waters as the top female singers of the day.
A Mamba’s daughters tour was set up with most of the original cast. Georgia Burke replaced Georgette Harvey, and choreographer Elida Webb now traveled with Ethel, functioning much as Pearl Wright had, as an all-around girl Friday. Reginald Beane remained in New York, where he had won a role in William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life, which he later repeated in the movie version. And Eddie Mallory also remained in New York.
The first stop, in October, was Chicago’s Grand Opera House, where she received twenty curtain calls on opening night. “Ethel Waters was doing393 something to humble, inarticulate human nature that nobody of her race—or of mine, for that matter—ever had done in my presence on the stage before. She was being a tragedy queen without any of the pomps and tearfalls that commonly exalt tragic queenship,” wrote Ashton Stevens, the critic who had helped put Ethel on the map so many years earlier.
When she attended the usual run of parties and benefits, she was often accompanied by a friend, Juliette Boykin. At a benefit at Chicago’s Savoy Ballroom, she ran into Joe Louis. Yet observers everywhere realized that Ethel, even after her nightly performances, remained consumed with Hagar. At a tea one afternoon where Ethel, actress Georgia Burke, and J. Rosamond Johnson were honored guests of the women’s division of Chicago’s Urban League, Ethel surprised the group when she unexpectedly took center stage, sang, and performed sequences from Mamba’s Daughters. At another gathering for the sorority Sigma Gamma Rho, she told the crowd that it was God who had blessed her with success. “I had to overcome394 many problems before I was given this role, and I am grateful that the serious side of me has been demonstrated. I always wanted to do dramatics.” In November, the company traveled to St. Louis, and later to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Boston. In Cincinnati, Mayor James Garfield Stewart threw a party in honor of the cast and spent much of the time seated next to Ethel.
In January, Mamba’s Daughters opened at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. For Ethel, it meant bringing Hagar back to the place where she had begun, to the origin of so much of Momweeze’s heartache and pain. Here, too, her beloved grandmother, Sally Anderson, who had never seen Ethel’s success, had lived and suffered. Memories now were even more painful for Ethel. Only a few weeks earlier, while still in Detroit, Ethel received news that threw her into a tailspin: Momweeze was living with her sister Vi in the home that Ethel rented for her on Catherine Street in Philadelphia. One evening some neighbors were sitting on the stoop and a frazzled Momweeze had asked them to leave. When they refused, she threw hot coffee on them. The authorities were contacted, and the disoriented and emotionally fragile Louise was admitted to the Philadelphia General Hospital. In Ethel’s mind, it was a hospital for paupers and the abandoned. “For what was the395 money I was making if Momweeze could be hustled off like that, without a coat, to be thrown into some dirty, overcrowded ward?”
In a panic, Ethel made arrangements for a quick trip to Philadelphia. Flights were being canceled because of poor weather conditions, but finally a desperate Ethel was able to board a mail plane to New York. From there, she took a train to Philadelphia. Once she arrived at the hospital, she was shocked to see how thin and drawn her mother appeared. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days, which was partially true: Ethel learned that Vi had advised her mother not to touch the hospital food and instead, had eaten the meals herself.
When Ethel consulted her mother’s physician, she learned of plans to send her to the state’s mental institution in Norristown. “I tried to be396 calm. I tried not to cry,” Waters recalled. “But the savage irony burned into my soul. Each night for a year many hundreds of white men and women had been acclaiming me for portraying my mother on the stage. These white people had sobbed and suffered with Hagar, who to me was the replica of my mother. . . . And there was the original of my stage portrait, thin, wasted, unfed.”
But there was another bitter fact that Waters had to deal with. The doctor knew that her mother was frustrated but not mentally unbalanced, that she had instead withdrawn from the harsh realities around her. Pleading that her mother be permitted to return home, she promised to provide round-the-clock care. In a week’s time, Momweeze was back home with Genevieve.
Now as Mamba’s Daughters played the Forrest Theatre, Ethel’s emotions were at a fever pitch. But she performed each night without an emotional collapse of her own.
***
New problems surfaced as Mamba’s Daughters prepared for its opening at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. Ethel received a wire informing her that Black picket lines were scheduled to march around the theater—and also at the Keith movie house where the film Abe Lincoln in Illinois was scheduled to open. The protest was against the theaters’ refusal to admit African Americans. It was a cruel irony that the theater management would admit only white patrons to see a play that dealt so ardently with Black women. Nor would African American moviegoers be allowed to see a movie that focused on the president who had abolished slavery. Even more ironic was the fact that segregated theaters still existed in the nation’s capital. A few months earlier, Black groups in Washington had also threatened to boycott The Hot Mikado starring Bill Robinson for the same reason. Leaders of the protest contacted Ethel, once again assuming that she had control of the contractual agreements for the houses where the play was performed. Ethel showed the wire to Fredi Washington, and the entire cast was also informed of the proposed protest. As the executive secretary of the Negro Actors Guild, Fredi responded:
Your telegram addressed to397 Ethel Waters concerning picket activities of your committee was duly referred to me. The entire company agrees wholeheartedly that the segregation which exists in the Nation’s capital is a condition of which we are shamed and feel should be fought until improved. Our management sought to have the ban at the National Theatre lifted during our engagement, because they know it is an injustice to our people and because Southern towns such as St. Louis and Cincinnati agreed to admit our people. Though we are justifiably indignant, we must realize that we are bound by contractual commitments. To refuse to play the date would automatically cancel the remainder of our tour. In view of the above fact, to picket Negro shows would
seem to defeat a forceful argument. This same propaganda should be carried on during the presentation of white companies. In this way you might eliminate the stigma permanently.
Perhaps Washington’s ability to write a letter that concisely stated the company’s dilemma was yet another reason why Ethel respected the actress. Ethel knew that she herself could not have drafted such a response. In the end, the protesters agreed not to picket the play, but the picketers did line the block around the theater on the opening night of the film Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Admirable as Ethel had been in handling the situation, backstage she was as hellish as ever and “reached the non-speaking point.” Ethel was still Ethel.
But there were some bright spots amid Ethel’s various storms. For one, there were plans to have the play return for an encore engagement in New York in the spring. The second cause for jubilation was that while on a break, Ethel made a special trip back to New York to attend the Joe Louis bout with Arturo Godoy. Afterward she celebrated the champ’s victory at the NAACP’s party at the Golden Gate ballroom. The joke was that if only Joe had been in Mamba’s Daughters, maybe then the cast would have had some relief from their high-flying star. Then the play moved on to Toronto.
A couple of offers came in. One was for a musical comedy called Darn That Dream, written by comedian Eddie Cantor, who wanted Ethel and Paul Robeson for the leads. If Robeson couldn’t do it, Cantor considered costarring—in burnt cork—opposite Ethel. Fortunately, nothing came of the play. Producers Vinton Freedley and Al Lewis also hoped to interest her in a musical fantasy by Lynn Root called Little Joe, the tale of a hapless fellow in and out of trouble but forever loved by his faithful religious wife who prays up a storm hoping to get her reformed husband into heaven. Because Little Joe was centered on a male lead, she could not see herself doing the show, but the producers wanted her badly enough to consider altering the play. Ethel could play the lead, as a heroine going through the same dim antics originally intended for the hero. That idea did not appeal to her either. But the producers informed Harold Gumm that they would rethink the play once again and get a writer to rework it. Ethel’s response was to let them keep working. She still wasn’t interested.
