Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  Emery Wimbish, the young librarian from Lincoln University, the African American institution of higher education not far from Philadelphia and Chester, also found the performance a once-in-a-lifetime theater experience. “I remember how she551 sang ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow.’ Time had its effects on her voice. But she put that song across. She made it speak for her and her talent. The entire audience sat silent. It was so moving.”

  Actor Tony Randall commented that Laurette Taylor was the greatest actress he had ever seen, and Ethel was the greatest who was still living. Director James Sheldon, who had first seen her when he was a teenager, had similar feelings about her performances in both Mamba’s Daughters and The Member of the Wedding. “I rank them with Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie. You rank them with those great performances that are incandescent. You’re just lucky to have been there.”

  Standing tall and proud, with an eye patch to cover her bad eye, Berenice was a mythic figure to behold, a symbol of endurance and, well, yes, the indomitability of the human spirit. Though her anxieties were even greater than in Philadelphia, once again Ethel triumphed to thunderous applause.

  Leaving the theater, Ethel attended the cast party at the apartment of producer Stanley Martineau, where, as part of an old theater tradition, everyone waited for early editions of the newspapers to read the reviews. This was the second occasion on which Ethel was remembered to have taken a drink. Sitting on a sofa, she was joined by Carson McCullers, so moved by Waters that she embraced her and briefly sat in her lap. A photograph taken of Ethel with McCullers and Julie Harris would become nationally famous. For better or worse, Ethel looked like a mighty earth mother, strong enough to bear the burdens of the world on her shoulders—or her lap.

  The first review—from the New York Herald Tribune—was not a good one. But the others were raves, especially for Ethel. “Miss Waters gives one552 of those rich and eloquent performances that lay such a deep spell on any audience that sees her,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. In the New York Post, Richard Watts commented: “Ethel Waters, a distinguished553 actress of stature and quality, gives a remarkable performance.” But New York’s Daily News critic John Chapman probably summed it up best: “Miss Waters is giving554 her best performance in the theatre . . . a piece of acting that is loving and lovable and profoundly expert. She is the one who can make Mrs. McCullers’ long pages from a novel come alive. Whenever the author fails to take command of the stage, Miss Waters takes command and it is a pleasure to fall under the spell of her quiet authority.”

  Hers was a towering performance—a fitting tribute to the tragic Sally Anderson. Within eight and a half weeks after the play’s opening, Variety said it had earned back its original $75,000 investment.

  Ethel had come back from the lower depths.

  As theatergoers flocked to see the drama, Ethel again was celebrated, adulated, and adored, but now with a depth of respectability she must have felt her other performances, with the exception of Hagar, had not bestowed on her. And she enjoyed every minute of it. The parties. The tributes in her honor. The requests for her appearances at charity benefits. The press corps that showed up for interviews. The flirtatious encounters—she still knew how to turn it on and turn it off—with younger men and women. The fans and followers, the famous and the infamous, who rushed backstage to see her, praise her, sit at her feet, hear her tell what would soon become an oft-told tale, of her phoenixlike rise from the ashes. Night after night, the dressing room was full. One time it might be Mary McLeod Bethune. Another time it might be former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Langston Hughes recalled the day he went backstage. Ahead of him “were many theatre-goers who did not personally know the star, numbers of them young people who had probably pinched pennies to buy a seat away up in the top balcony. In the backstage crowd there were Negroes and whites. To everyone who came into her dressing room to shake her hand or seek an autograph, Ethel Waters was courteous and friendly. She offered her hand, she smiled, she said a friendly word. There was no quick scrawling of her name with a frown on a program. Ethel Waters projected the same warmth and humanity in her dressing room as she did on the stage.”

  On such occasions, Ethel, always an actress offstage as much as on, was animated and dramatic. One of those coming to her dressing room was that young librarian from Lincoln University, Emery Wimbish. When he told her his background, she said bluntly, “The people at the colleges have never liked me. They never have appreciated my work.” When Wimbish explained that many at Lincoln knew of her talents and respected her achievements, Waters seemed grateful to hear that she had won the approval of some of the dictys. Yet he still was not sure she really believed him.

  Now, though, she wanted to avail herself of the new window of opportunities. Striking up negotiations were executives from ABC-TV, the budding medium that she had worked on during 1939. As television sets were starting to appear in more and more American homes, as the entire family gathered round the set for entertainment, much as they had done with radio, plans were being laid to bring the show Beulah to the small screen. Beulah—the story of a Negro maid working contentedly for a white family, the Hendersons—was already a hit on radio. Originally, Beulah was a supporting character on radio’s Fibber McGee and Molly. Then there was a spin-off revolving around Beulah, which starred a white actor, Marlin Hurt, as Beulah. When Hurt died, another white actor, Bob Corley, assumed the role. Finally, Hattie McDaniel played the part on the radio show. ABC planned to continue with McDaniel on radio on the West Coast while Ethel, if she agreed, would shoot it at a studio in the Bronx. She was intrigued by the prospect.

  But most promising of all the offers and proposals was the prospect of telling her life story in a book. One night, as Mary McLeod Bethune sat in her dressing room, a journalist named Charles Samuels came backstage. Samuels, who had been reading about Waters’ life over the years, felt hers was a powerful narrative, an inspirational story of a woman who through drive, talent, and a belief in God had pulled herself up and out from an experience that would have destroyed others. Again, Ethel was intrigued.

  Now that the member of the Wedding was an established hit, Whitehead and the other producers were informed that Ethel had to have more money. After all, she was the only name in the production. People were coming to see her. Carson McCullers was opposed to such a pay hike, which would cut into her profits, but Ethel reportedly would not back down. The producers knew they needed her. Who else could play the role? It was the same predicament the producers of As Thousands Cheer had found themselves in. In later years, such actresses as Claudia McNeil, Pearl Bailey, and Theresa Merritt would all try their hand at Berenice, but no one was ever able to give the character the dimensions and mythic power of Waters. Eventually, Ethel got the raise. She also agreed to stay in the play until July 1, 1951.

  But what of Ethel away from the footlights, the private Ethel? As the great lady of theater, now practically a national institution, had she forsaken her former personal peccadilloes? Had she put aside any notions of romance? Apparently not. Whatever their relationship, she and the young singer Thelma Carpenter still spent time together—and were still talked about. Whenever Carpenter saw the older Ethel, there were stars in her eyes. Aside from Carpenter’s appearance at events featuring Ethel, the two also enjoyed quiet, cozy evenings together and dreamy dinners at Red Randolph’s Shalimar restaurant on Seventh Avenue, which the press described as “their regular dinner spot555.” Perhaps Ethel, sometimes lonely and blue, simply enjoyed the company. Interestingly enough, during this time, there was no new talk of a new “husband,” but within a short period of time, Ethel would show that she had not lost her interest in younger men.

  The benefits and the honors continued. In late February, nominations for the 1949 Academy Awards were announced. Neither Pinky nor Kazan was nominated, but the principal actresses were all singled out. Jeanne Crain was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress. Both Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters were nominated fo
r Best Supporting Actress. This marked only the second time in Hollywood history that an African American performer had been up for the award; in 1939, Hattie McDaniel was nominated, and won, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind. In 1949, Celeste Holm and Elsa Lanchester, both in Come to the Stable, and Mercedes McCambridge in All the King’s Men, were also among the nominees for Best Supporting Actress. Ultimately, McCambridge won, but Pinky became Twentieth Century Fox’s top-grossing film of 1949.

  The Member of the Wedding was named Best Play by the New York Drama Critics and later received the Donaldson Award for Best Play of the season. Nominated for Best Actress, Ethel lost to Shirley Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba. Still, at this time in entertainment history, nominations for African Americans were almost tantamount to winning. To raise funds for the NAACP, Ethel and Todd Duncan, then on Broadway in the apartheid musical drama Lost in the Stars, were guests of honor at a dinner sponsored by a group of prominent women.

  But for Ethel, the excitement was tempered by the pressures of mounting financial difficulties. The IRS still pursued her for back taxes. She took up residence at the St. Moritz Hotel in midtown Manhattan, which proved costly. Her home in Los Angeles incurred monthly expenses. So did a staff to answer letters, field interview requests, return phone calls, and run errands. She continued to support Momweeze in Philadelphia. And Ethel still felt compelled to look and live like a star. Clothes, furs, jewels were all expensive. Money came in—and went right back out. With all this in mind, she accepted two of the new projects dangled before her. First, she signed a contract with Doubleday to write her autobiography, with the help of journalist Charles Samuels. The book would have to be done quickly because Doubleday wanted it out by year’s end. Overseeing the book would be Kenneth McCormick, one of publishing’s most gifted and successful editors. The second commitment was to star in ABC’s television version of Beulah.

  Beulah went into production in the summer of 1950. The ABC contract stipulated that Ethel had to remain in New York and could not travel while the program was in production. As on radio, TV’s Beulah recounted the domestic exploits of the maid Beulah—in service to the white family the Hendersons. The episodes were—at best—lightweight. Usually, the Hendersons had some problem that Beulah resolved. Much of her life was spent catering to their needs, pleasing them, advising them, joking and laughing and loving them. Typical was an episode in which Beulah, who is planning a trip to Birmingham to celebrate her Aunt Lucinda’s seventy-fifth birthday, changes her plans because dear little Donnie Henderson has been hurt. Could America have asked for a more caring, devoted domestic? The program did create some semblance of a Negro community for Beulah, the idea that there was some kind of life for her apart from her white employers. On the series, there was Bill Jackson, an often likable but lazy beau who halfway courts Beulah. There was also her friend Oriole, another domestic in the neighborhood, whose ditzy comments and antics were always good for a laugh. Working with her were Butterfly McQueen as Oriole, Percy “Bud” Harris as Bill Jackson, and William Post Jr., Ginger Jones, and Clifford Sales, respectively, playing the Hendersons and their son Donnie. Obviously, the series reverberated with stereotypes.

  The same year that Beulah premiered on TV, The Hazel Scott Show aired briefly. This fifteen-minute musical variety show featured pianist Hazel Scott, an immensely sophisticated woman who played both classical music and boogie-woogie, sometimes turning the classics into boogie-woogie. When she sat at the piano, she maintained her composure and poise; when she sang, she clearly owed some of her singing style to Ethel. Although Scott’s show was a summer series, there was reason to believe it would become a regular feature on TV. But then Scott was called to testify before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. In her testimony, she blasted the committee for being un-American, carrying out anticommunist witch hunts and ruining careers as it did so. Subsequently, Scott’s show was dropped, probably because of her testimony, according to her son, Adam Clayton Powell III, and others. Thus, an image of a sophisticated African American woman on the weekly prime-time schedule went by the wayside, while Beulah proved successful with viewers. The great irony was that Ethel, who had been so forward-looking in the early part of her career, now seemed to be stepping backward.

  The schedule was grueling. Nightly, she performed as Berenice, then met with friends and acquaintances in her dressing room, had a bite to eat, and headed back to the midtown hotel where she resided. Daily, except on Wednesdays when she had matinee performances, she was up at seven in the morning, spent an hour being driven to a studio in the Bronx, where Beulah was rehearsed and shot from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Then she was transported to the Empire Theatre—an hour’s ride—for the evening performance of The Member of the Wedding. During her lunch and dinner breaks, she would rest. For four months, she also devoted several hours a day, five days a week, to work on her autobiography. “Every day but matinee556 days and Sundays—from the 10th of January, 1950 to last July 11th, I’d dictate four hours to Charles Samuels,” said Ethel. On Sundays, she relaxed. No phone calls. No interviews. She had to rest her voice; so she rarely spoke much. Then, too, there was the psychological transition of playing such vastly different characters. “All day long I’m557 Beulah—a happy-go-lucky domestic with a talent for saying clever things,” she said. “Then two hours after I finish being a kitchen queen, I take on a serious dramatic role in the theater.” Surprisingly, Ethel didn’t present any major problems for the producers. She was glad to have the work in this new medium.

  An indelible impression was left on future singer and star Leslie Uggams, who as a little girl made a guest appearance on Beulah. Her aunt Eloise Uggams and her cousin Avis Andrews had worked with Ethel in the theater, and young Leslie, who was taken by her mother each day to the studio, also had nothing but pleasant memories of Ethel. “When I worked with558 her on Beulah, my parents were just Wow!” Uggams recalled. “She was very nice and so accessible to my mother and me, and she took a liking to me. She invited my mother and me to see The Member of the Wedding. In looking back at seeing her in the play, the fact that I wasn’t fidgeting or getting bored proved how incredible she was. I sat there spellbound. I was moved by everything she did. I just thought she was amazing. Even at age six, I knew I was seeing something wondrous on the stage.”

  Throughout her Beulah days, Ethel had to recall the experiences on her short-lived radio series of the 1930s, which had been run off the air. But now she entered American homes without sponsor problems. The show premiered on October 3, 1950, airing thereafter on Tuesday evenings from 7:30 to 8:00 p.m.

  Television reviewers, however, were critical of the show’s images. In the New York Herald Tribune, John Crosby wrote that it presented “the candy-coated stereotype559 of Negro life under the beneficent protection of the white man.” He took particular umbrage at the depiction of Beulah’s beau Bill who “is a composite of all the Bills that have been celebrated as good-for-nothings since the song of that name. He talks big, is everlastingly jobless, tries to fix things and generally messes everything up beautifully.” Crosby added: “I didn’t know whether we will forgive this sort of stereotyping on television nearly as readily as we did on radio.” Even harsher were critics in the Negro press. The Pittsburgh Courier wrote that the show “defiles and desecrates colored560 people. The dread and despised stereotype—that of colored people presenting themselves as buffoons, slavish menials and ne’er-do-wells.” The paper’s other comment no doubt rankled Ethel to the bone: “Lena Horne, likewise, has refused to lend her talents in roles that will reflect upon her people. In the opinion of this reporter, Miss Waters deserves condemnation.” “What’s uplifting or educational561 in ‘The Beulah Show’?” asked a writer in New York’s Amsterdam News. “NOTHING. It is obnoxious and downright disgraceful.”

  Among the cast, there were complaints. Actor Percy “Bud” Harris grew dissatisfied with his character Bill. “The writers562,” he said, “are sending scripts that re
quire Bill Jackson, Beulah’s boyfriend, to eat chicken, use dialect, fight and do things that are really degrading to my race. This I refuse to do.” Finally, he left the series, replaced by Ethel’s old Cabin in the Sky stage costar Dooley Wilson. Publicly, Ethel was mum on the subject of the show’s controversy, but on set, she was keenly aware of problems. Leslie Uggams recalled an incident Waters spoke out about. “They wanted my hair to be in pickaninny braids,” said Uggams. They weren’t going to budge about the matter until Ethel stepped forward and told them, “That ain’t going to happen. You see how her hair is. You leave it like that.”

  Yet she was angry with the critics, especially the African American ones, who she believed should be supportive of Negro talent—and who should understand the importance of the fact that this was the only television program starring Black performers. “I like being Beulah563—she says such clever things,” she told the press. “I keep appropriating her comments for my private life.”

  Certainly, she knew the character had none of the range or depth of Berenice or Dicey. She wouldn’t even have mentioned Hagar in the same breath. Still, she made the best of what she had to work with. Throughout, Waters herself exuded a warmth and sensitivity that brought human dimensions to the role. She could never play it as a crude stereotype. Yet likable as she was, she never committed to the character as she did to Berenice. Basically, she kept everything on the surface without any signs of anger or discontent. Beulah appeared to find a Black audience, eager as always for some form of representation, especially on this new medium. It was never as outlandishly typed (or as outlandishly funny) as TV’s Amos ’n’ Andy, which, following its success on radio, debuted the next season on television on CBS. Still, Waters understood she was above the role. After a year and a half, she withdrew from the show. According to the Black weekly magazine Jet, she had left the “white folks kitchen comedy role.” Hattie McDaniel was set to become TV’s Beulah but took ill after filming several episodes. She died in 1952. Louise Beavers assumed the role, but she too was said to grow weary of Beulah’s tired antics. The series ran for three seasons in total. Beulah, however, left Waters resentful. What was she expected to do? As Kazan had said at the completion of Pinky: “There weren’t many parts waiting for an old Black woman.” Ethel was now fifty-five.