by Donald Bogle
Still, Fox remained cautious about the picture. Screenwriter Philip Dunne wrote an article titled “An Approach to Racism530,” in which he stated: “The production of ‘Pinky’ marks another break with the long-standing taboo against films dealing with the problems of racial and religious prejudice. . . . I think it should be understood that the taboo existed, not because Hollywood producers are reactionary or socially illiterate, as some have maintained, but because the production of a controversial film of this nature entails a very real financial risk. A formal or informal boycott by any group or in any area can turn a legitimately anticipated profit into a loss. In this sense, it takes courage on the part of studio management to embark on such a venture.” On the subject of race, Dunne wrote that the film “will present no one point of view as the definitive one. We try to tell a completely personal story. Jeanne Crain, as Pinky, portrays not a race but an individual. The story is Pinky’s, not ours, and while the tragic dilemma of her life is induced by the facts of racial prejudice, the solutions she finds are her own and affect only her.” Dunne’s article was sent to the Negro press. Clearly, the studio did not want a Black backlash.
But whatever compromises were built into the film, Pinky, along with the release of the other “Negro problem” pictures in 1949—Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, and Intruder in the Dust—heralded a new day in Hollywood. The race theme had come front and center. Ethel may have played a servant, but it was no giggling maid. Now the Black character was a troubled motion picture character, who struggled, as exemplified by Pinky herself, to break through the racial barriers and humiliating discrimination that were so much a part of American life. In his essay “The Shadow and the Act,” Ralph Ellison wrote of the “Negro problem” pictures: “And yet, despite the531 absurdities with which these films are laden, they are all worth seeing, and if seen, capable of involving us emotionally. That they do is testimony to the deep centers of American emotion that they touch.”
In the long run, Pinky proved to be a better film than some reviewers indicated. Kazan infused it with feeling for the young woman’s odyssey for self-awareness and racial pride. He also captured some of the slow-moving ambience of life in the South where beneath the placid surface, racism could unexpectedly rear its ugly head. It was also an actor’s film. From his three female leads—Waters, Crain, and Barrymore—he had drawn engrossing performances. Also commendable were the performances of Evelyn Varden, Nina Mae McKinney, Basil Ruysdael, and Frederick O’Neal.
There was much excitement about the film. Smelling a hit, Zanuck set up promotion tours for Jeanne Crain and William Lundigan. Ethel found herself back in demand in a way she could never have anticipated. Twentieth Century Fox set up personal appearances for her—along with the chance for her to pick up some extra cash—at select theaters throughout New York’s five boroughs, where she would perform accompanied by Fletcher Henderson. When Ethel arrived by train in New York from Chicago, Fredi Washington and William Lundigan, along with representatives from Fox and members of the Negro press, were at Grand Central Station to meet her. Fredi Washington cautioned the press and the Fox people: “You never know what532 ‘Mother’ will do. If she’s in one of her good moods she’ll come out smiling. If she isn’t—she might walk right past us and go on about her business.” “So when the train shuttled into the station,” the press reported, “we all stood around nervously.” Once Ethel stepped onto the platform, many must have done a double-take. No matter what her weight or her age or her finances, she looked magnificent, the silver in her hair showing, the face beautifully made up, the smile as warm and entrancing as ever. “Ethel Waters, who has a reputation for emerging into public limelight swathed in a mink but wearing flatheeled shoes, didn’t disappoint us,” one reporter wrote. “There was the fur coat. And there, true to tradition, were the flatties.”
Right away she spotted Washington, still her Lissa. “My child!” she exclaimed as she kissed Fredi on the cheek. “Ethel,” William Lundigan called out. She kissed him too. “All the guys from 20th Century Fox felt it safe to gather around.”
Basking in the attention, she attended a round of parties, receptions, and dinners, many in tribute to her. On September 23, she was the guest of honor at a reception at the Skyline Room at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. Much of Ethel’s old crowd showed up, including Noble Sissle, singer Maxine Sullivan (her reported one-time rival for Mallory’s attentions), and actor Leigh Whipper. For many, the surprise guest was Algretta, then living in New York and possibly a young mother by this time. Also there to greet her was Bill Robinson. It was one of Robinson’s last public appearances. On November 25, he died. He was seventy-one.
At the Rivoli Theatre on October 24, the Negro Actors Guild honored Ethel for “dramatic achievement” in Pinky. Serving as master of ceremonies that evening was influential columnist Ed Sullivan, then becoming all the more famous because of his variety show on the new medium, television. Some fifteen hundred people turned up that evening to honor her. Later she joined other performers for the “Night of Stars” benefit on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal. In November, she also christened a health and beauty center in Harlem; a $45,000 building had been purchased by twenty-five Black women; the first salon of its type for African American women in uptown New York. Helping her greet the five hundred invited guests was her new friend Thelma Carpenter. Waters beamed. At a benefit for Freedom House, she sat on the dais with Eleanor Roosevelt and Bernard Baruch.
Had it all really turned around for her? Yet Ethel couldn’t forget the torment of the past years. “People don’t seem to533 associate trouble with me . . . reckon they feel nobody could look so happy and be hiding trouble inside,” she told her new friends, former model Jinx Falkenburg and her husband, Tex McCrary. “But, honey, I’m afraid to cry. If you cry, you have to cry alone . . . and if you cry alone, sometimes you can’t stop. . . . I been through hell for ten years, waiting to come back to New York the right way—but now I’m back. And the same people that shut me out—denied me—I’m proud I can shake their hands—and wish them well. I could have evened up a few scores . . . but now I say God bless ’em all, because God blessed me and brought me back. I say thank you, God.”
On October 19, the Los Angeles Times reported: “Attendance records for a534 picture at popular prices were smashed by ‘Pinky’ during the first week’s run at the Rivoli Theatre in New York.” The next month, the film had its Los Angeles premiere and continued to draw in large audiences. Already there was Oscar talk for Ethel.
Pinky did run into problems in the South. Censors in Marshall, Texas, banned it because of its interracial love theme. It had “depicted a white man535 retaining his love for a woman after learning she was a Negro, depicted a white man kissing and embracing a Negro woman, and included a scene in which two white ruffians assault Pinky after she has told them she was a Negro,” reported the New York Times. When one local exhibitor defied the ban, he was fined $200 for showing it. He fought the fine, and eventually the case went to the Supreme Court, which struck down the censorship ordinance of Marshall. Justice Felix Frankfurter felt “the Marshall city ordinance offended the Constitution’s due process of law clause because of indefiniteness.”
On October 28, rehearsals began for The Member of the Wedding. Yet there remained one important role still not cast, that of the six-year-old John Henry. Someone remembered that actor Fritz de Wilde, who played Frankie’s brother Jarvis, had a son, but de Wilde said his son Brandon was much too young and could not even read. When Clurman and the others talked with the boy, they all agreed that Brandon was perfect. Working with the boy on his lines, Fritz de Wilde dropped out of the role of Jarvis and became the production’s stage manager.
Now it was a real company as cast and crew prepared for the out-of-town tryout at Philadelphia’s Walnut Theatre on December 22. The real problem, though, was Ethel, who at first could not adjust to Clurman’s direction. “His way of telling536 you when you are good is to say nothing,” she said. Later
she came to respect him greatly. Mystified by Ethel and unable to figure out how to get her to perform as directed, Clurman described her as a “strange person537.” Directing her, he said, was like “training a bear538.” She found it hard to coordinate her dialogue with her movements. “We had trouble, but it wasn’t that she made trouble,” said Clurman. “She had a great546 deal of difficulty in remembering lines, and when she remembered lines, she forgot the business.” Cast and crew were amused to see Brandon de Wilde, who learned his dialogue quickly, prompt her, feeding her the lines to come. Ethel herself was amused and charmed by the boy—at first. But when the prompting continued, she firmly told the boy, “Now, honey, I don’t539 want you to bother me any more.” The child shut up.
For Ethel, there was the added pressure of performing in Philadelphia. While Hagar in Mamba’s Daughters had been her labor of love for Momweeze, her character Berenice, much like her Dicey in Pinky, would be her attempt to express some of the pain and wisdom of her grandmother, Sally Anderson. She was determined not to fail, yet as she prepared to travel to Philadelphia, there were so many problems—and memories. The entire cast and crew was aware of her inability to get the dialogue right, which simply added to her tensions. Her stomach bothered her, she also had cramps, and she was also conscious of yet another weight gain. Audiences would be startled, even shocked, to see that she now weighed about three hundred pounds.
Yet Ethel brought something else to the play that no one had expected. There were different versions of how this “something” came to be. There was a Russian lullaby in the original script. According to one version of the story, during a meeting with producer Whitehead and Julie Harris, Ethel asked Whitehead if she could instead perform the song her grandmother had often sung, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Its lyrics were simple but haunting:
So why should I feel discouraged
Why should the shadows come,
Why should my heart be lonely
Away from heaven and home,
When Jesus is my portion?
My constant friend is he.
. . . .
I sing because I’m happy,
I sing because I’m free.
For His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.
That day she performed it just for Whitehead and Harris. Afterward Harris cried. In another version of the story, Carson McCullers asked Ethel if she knew a song to sing to the children. “I sang it for540 Carson and when I finished, she got in my lap and cried just like Frankie does in the play,” said Ethel. Regardless, Harold Clurman didn’t like the original ending of the second act. Ultimately, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” would prove perfect for closing that act, and no theatergoer would ever forget it. “The hymn brought more541 God into the show,” said Ethel.
After seeing Ethel and Harris in a run-through, Clurman’s wife, actress and acting coach Stella Adler, liked it so much that she invested in it without telling him. Other investors included the wives of Robert Whitehead and Oliver Rea as well as set designer Lester Polakov. Television director James Sheldon recalled that one of the young women who did casting for Whitehead “put a package of542 people together, and for 50 bucks each, we were investors.” That investment paid off, said Sheldon. “I must have made $1,200.” It cost $75,000 to mount the show.
The week before the play’s Philadelphia debut, the cast and crew boarded special cars on a train that carried them and the sets to the city. A contingent of Carson McCullers’ friends traveled from New York to see the play on its opening night. Coming up from Key West, Florida, was McCullers’ close friend Tennessee Williams, the most talked about American playwright of the postwar era. A highly nervous McCullers was distraught. She didn’t know what would happen with her drama. Everyone noted the cold and gray weather, which for theater folk was not a good sign. It would be harder to warm the audience up.
At the Walnut Theatre, as Ethel prepared to go onstage, “she was being cued in the dressing room through the first night,” said Harold Clurman. “You’re only nervous, Ethel,” he gently said. “You’ll be wonderful tonight—just don’t you worry about a thing.”
“You’re very reassuring, Mr. Clurman,” she told him, “but I’m not reassured.”
She explained to Clurman her long-held belief that the responsibility was always greater for a Negro actor than for a white performer. She still believed that she represented a race of people that could not endure a failure.
What she didn’t tell Clurman that night was something else she was aware of that simply added to the pressure. “All the play is543, is a narration, and there’s not a moment onstage when the play carries itself,” said Ethel. “My part isn’t written as the starring role. I knew it when I took it. But I had to make it that way or get out.”
Before going onstage, she performed her dressing room ritual, saying her prayers, placing her faith in God. “I got on my544 knees and told Him, ‘God, you know this means everything to me.’ ” Then, when she was braced with the determination to play Berenice exactly as she felt the part, something else occurred that drew out her warmth and helped her momentarily push her fears aside. “In Philadelphia, where we545 opened,” recalled Julie Harris, “that first night we assembled on the stage—places, please!—and heard the suppressed roar of the audience from behind the curtain. Brandon looked astonished and then troubled as it dawned on him that all those people would be watching the play, and the tears started falling down his cheeks. Fritz walked onstage from the wings to comfort him. Ethel put her arms around him. We all said he would be O.K.”
Onstage, something miraculous happened. “She had a great deal of trouble getting it all together,” said Clurman. “But when she got it all together, she was wonderful.” Ethel remembered her lines, and she, Harris, and de Wilde worked beautifully together. “Miss Waters, Brandon, and547 I became one person—all of us in the play really,” said Harris. Though the play was some four hours long, and would later be cut, that night the audience sat mesmerized.
Backstage, an enthralled Tennessee Williams asked for Ethel’s autograph. But she said she wanted his. No, he wanted hers. Finally, Ethel told the playwright, “Honey, I’m not from548 the South, but I can keep this up as long as you can.”
“ ‘The Member of the Wedding’ could very likely be that play you wait for all season; the one play that suddenly lights up the theater with a dramatic impact that makes the previous offerings, no matter how well written and acted, seem on the frail side,” wrote the critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Ethel Waters is a549 constant delight as she tries, out of ripe worldliness of her experience, to bring some common sense into the emotionalism of her young charge.”
Relieved that she had gotten through opening night, that she had done Sally well, Ethel grew more confident. Yet she was never at ease. She still had to face the audiences and the critics in New York.
On January 6, 1950, Ethel and company opened in The Member of the Wedding at the Empire Theatre, the very house where Mamba’s Daughters had its New York premiere. Surely, there were many memories as she walked through the stage door entrance. Eleven years earlier she had to prove herself as a dramatic actress in this same theater. Now she had to do the same all over. Perhaps the theater itself was a sign of good fortune to come.
Though theatergoers may have felt like Harold Clurman when he first read McCullers’ script—that it wasn’t a play at all—they settled into its rhythm and responded to the poignant characters onstage. With the advent of the 1950s, the oncoming Eisenhower era, and the cold war—a time when the nation, as if afraid of its own shadow, feared communism and valued conformity—the three primary characters were distinct nonconformists, each a touching individualist finding unity in the presence of the others. Holding it all together was Waters’ Berenice. In many respects, the character grew out of a long-held national dream, that of finding safety in the arms of a large, dark Black woman willing to comfort and nurture. Putting her own concerns and anxieties
aside, Berenice, the nourisher, who is shown providing comfort in the kitchen of the Addams household, was partly a mammy conception, just as Dicey had been. Yet McCullers had offered something else about the character that lifted her out of the old timeworn stereotype. The character was not devoid of sexuality. The character T. T. Williams was Berenice’s minister boyfriend. In her sweeping monologue, Berenice had talked of her past loves and mistakes and clearly revealed herself as having a life apart from those she served. In a sequence with her foster brother, Honey, a tormented young musician, unable to adjust to the culture of the apartheid South, she revealed family ties and an awareness of the pressures a Black man must endure.
In the hands of another actress, Berenice might still have been flat and emotionally uninvolving, but Ethel lifted the entire production up. Her warmth, her fundamental sense of right and wrong, her refusal to play nice with Frankie, her common sense, the suggestion of another past that the play may not have known anything about, were used by Ethel to create a full-dimensional, highly moving character. Despite the weight gain and the perceptions about heavier women, Ethel still had a sexual component to her personality. Clurman had also been wise to close the play with Ethel alone onstage. John Henry had died. Frankie had taken the crucial steps toward womanhood. Her foster brother Honey had been arrested. Berenice might have felt sad and lonely, but she would endure.
Martha Orrick, then a young actress, eager to see as much theater as possible and learn as much about acting technique as she could, found Waters stunning. “I was just saturating550 myself with theater then,” Orrick recalled. “I remember that Ethel Waters was just weary. And these little children had no one else but her. I remember thinking—I know something about what this play is because when my brother and I spent time in Virginia as children, there was a woman who cooked and cleaned for my grandmother. We spent a lot of time with her. I thought about the relationship of this Black woman who the kids related to—but you don’t know what she’s thinking. I thought that was what Ethel Waters did in The Member of the Wedding. When she sang ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow,’ it was like time stopped. It came from outside that play. It was just breathtaking. That’s the part I remember best. The other people were acting but she brought reality to it.”
