Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

To many, Ethel seemed shockingly out of touch at a time when the civil rights movement was on the rise. In 1955, Black Americans had rallied around the Montgomery bus boycott, which catapulted Rosa Parks to national prominence, a seamstress who had refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white. The young minister Martin Luther King Jr. had launched a massive protest around the incident in December 1955. Sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations were about to explode around the country. Schools would be integrated amidst angry outcries, insults, and violence from whites. Three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, would be murdered. At precisely this time, Ethel appeared to be critical of the very organization that had for decades fought for equal rights. Ethel’s strange comments made her seem like someone living in a very distant past.

  Following articles in the Negro press on the Wallace interview, angry letters from readers—at this time and in the months and immediate years to follow—were sent to publications about Ethel. “Although she’s in a601 position to do much for better race relations,” wrote one reader, “she showed a stupid lack of knowledge of the struggle for justice and equality such as is being waged by the Reverend Martin Luther King and others who represent the new type of Negro in America today.” “Things must be getting602 pretty bad when Louis Armstrong starts complaining and protesting,” commented another letter writer. “Let us hope the racial situation doesn’t get bad enough to make Ethel Waters start complaining. Things will really be bad then.” Another letter writer commented: “Ethel Waters—still great603 in our book as an actress and a singer despite the thinning voice—but is an awful bore on the race relations subject. She’s talking more these days than ever before on what the Negro ought to do. If she would only keep to the things she does so well and not try to out talk or outthink the NAACP, she could grow old gracefully.” Another referred to her as “Mrs. Uncle Tom604.” Having long admired Ethel, actress Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary on Broadway and in the film South Pacific, also spoke out. “One of the greatest605 women on earth and should have been one of the greatest actresses was Ethel Waters—but she missed the boat,” said Hall. “People get tied up with fear and they go off the deep end and don’t know how to get back.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum, galvanizing young and older generations, Black entertainers were expected to be a part of the new movement, to speak out against inequities and injustices. Where was Ethel Waters’ mind? What was she thinking?

  In the midst of this, no one seemed to recall that Ethel Waters had once prided herself on being a race woman, that she had done countless fundraising benefits for the NAACP and other social and political organizations. Publicly, she rarely voiced her anger toward whites, especially those in show business, but backstage she made it apparent that no one dared mess with her. Never had she trusted ofays, or as she had told Elia Kazan, “any fucking white man.” Never had she really cared to socialize with whites, with the exception of Van Vechten or someone like the most Negro white man she had ever met, Harold Arlen. Ethel, the old outspoken fighter, seemed nowhere in sight. Perhaps her comments in the Wallace interview could be attributed to her anger with the NAACP’s executive secretary, Walter White.

  Perhaps her reasoning was clouded by her fears about her health and her unending financial problems, which had escalated to the point where she must not have known if she could survive. Then a story made headlines.

  “Broke—But All Ethel Waters Wants Is a Job,” read the banner in the New York Post on January 2, 1957.

  “ ‘Stormy Weather ’ Has Waters Singing ‘Blues,’ ” read the banner in the January 3, 1957, issue of the New York Journal-American.

  “Ethel Waters Sings the Blues over Finances,” was the headline in the January 3, 1957, edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  Sitting in her room at New York’s Empire Hotel on West 63rd Street, Ethel had met with reporters and made startling revelations about her finances. Her comments were so personal that many found them embarrassing for a woman of her position to make. “I am unemployed606,” she told the press. “I don’t have a quarter to my name.

  “No, don’t say I’m destitute, for I’m not. I couldn’t be living in this hotel room if I were. I’m not going on relief.

  “How will I manage? The good Lord takes care of me. Always has. I guess it’s because I don’t plague him.

  “They are trying to put me down as a has-been. What rot, I’m anything but, even if I was sixty on my last birthday.

  “Only trouble is, some folks have seven or eight jobs, and some don’t have any. Something will come up. It better. It has to.

  “They’re trying to say I’m trapped like Joe Louis, but I never made a million dollars the way he did. All I need is a job—that’s all—and I’d get in the clear. I can eat. I can pay my hotel bill.”

  Compelling as her comments were, they had also been contradictory. But she looked as if she were unable to stop talking. It was similar to her stream-of-consciousness monologue after the opening of Mamba’s Daughters.

  “It’s true. I’m completely607 busted and I owe back income tax, but it’s nothing that a little work won’t clear,” she said. “I’m in debt to the government. I owed about $25,000, but I’ve whittled it down to about $15,000. My home is being used for classes for slightly retarded children. I think it’s the human thing to do for the darling little children. It’s not rented. I just let a woman use it to teach the children.”

  “I fell behind on paying [taxes] on my royalties from the book because I wasn’t working steady. I guess it has happened to many people. It’s nothing to be alarmed about. All I need is work.”

  “Baby, I still think this is a wonderful country. Aside from the government, I don’t owe a soul. I’m sure work will be coming along soon. When you have faith, the day never is dark. I’m not going around belly-aching. I still sleep nights, and I don’t have to take any pills. I know the Lord will provide for me. He has taken care of me all my life.”

  The press had a good story and ran with it in the days that followed. Ethel was not hesitant to keep talking. “People called me up608 breathless to pay my hotel bills,” she told one reporter. “I’m afraid they’ll start coming up to me soon to ask me: ‘Where’s your cup?’ But the Lord keeps me independent. I have been meeting my hotel obligations. Otherwise I’ve been broke for so long. I’m reconciled to it. Just call me the happy pauper.”

  She also informed the press of her expenses. “I have to earn609 $850 a month to keep up with my demands. I have a home in California and my mother lives in Philadelphia. I’m living in New York now because I have to be on the ground in case a job shows up.” But she wanted the press to know that there were some things she would not sink to, such as letting Twentieth Century Fox do a movie version of His Eye Is on the Sparrow.

  It was all a deliciously mournful saga that newspaper readers and television viewers were fascinated by, especially on January 9, when Ethel appeared on the television quiz show Break the $250,000 Bank.

  Originally, contestants on the show—everyday Joes and Josephines, who were selected from the studio audience—had to answer questions in a category of their choosing. In this early reality show, the rest of the in-studio audience—as well as millions at home—might bite their nails in sympathy as a contestant struggled to come up with the right answer. Some contestants came on the show to raise funds for their families. Others—the victims of hard times—wanted to use their winnings for a fresh start. By the time Ethel appeared on the show, its format had changed. Now “experts” were brought in to answer the questions. They stood in a box called the “Hall of Knowledge” and could be assisted by family members seated in the audience. Of course, the very idea that Ethel Waters had fallen so low that she had to resort to a quiz show for money was almost inconceivable.

  On the night of her appearance, viewers held their breath at a real-life spectacle that was partly sad, partly frightening, partly surreal entertainment. A nation was watching one of its greatest stars—a w
oman larger than life in her talent, her personality, her aspirations, now, ironically, in her physical presence. Yet Ethel never failed to surprise. On-screen, she looked like a beloved grandmother. With the camera on her, her warmth showed, and her powerful presence enabled her to own the screen and audience.

  Answering “several questions in her selected category of music, principally religious hymns and songs,” during her first week on the show, she won $5,000. On her next appearance the following week, she won another $5,000. By her third week, the show, for some mysterious reason, had changed its title to Hold That Tune. That evening, though, Ethel lost. Still, she had walked away with $10,000, and the appearance on the quiz show invigorated her and outweighed any feelings of humiliation that she might have had. Mostly, she was relieved—at times even overjoyed—at having the earnings she had won. She also struck up a friendship with another contestant, a young African American woman from Philadelphia named Sue Smith McDonald. The two would remain friends to the end of Ethel’s life and Ethel would sometimes visit McDonald’s home in Philadelphia.

  But the saga had not ended. Having second thoughts about her earlier statements to the press, she granted an exclusive interview to Evelyn Cunningham of the Pittsburgh Courier in which she branded all the stories about her finances—and the people who spread them—as “lies and liars610.” Other stars, such as Joe Louis and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, had recently filed for bankruptcy, but under no circumstances did Ethel want to be lumped into the same category. Insisting that “things aren’t all bad for me” and that “false impressions have gotten about,” she announced she had rejected “propaganda plays—offered by left-wing elements.” “Certain Communist elements have been trying to break down my spirit for the last four years,” she said. “They’ve wanted to do just what is being done to me now. They’ve shown me no dignity or respect.” Some job offers “would have turned your stomach,” she told Cunningham. “Negroes would have been mad at me for life. I am not going to sacrifice my principles, my integrity and the way I feel about God to make money.”

  For many readers, Ethel Waters looked as if she might be losing her marbles! Others took her statements about communists seriously. Yet what drove Ethel to such conclusions remained unclear.

  Still, others urged her to get a grip and pull herself together, starting with her looks. “Why has Ethel Waters611 allowed herself to look so old?” asked African American columnist Hazel Washington. “She isn’t that far gone . . . her face is sweet as ever, but she has taken on an ‘old look’! Please reduce, Ethel, it will do wonders for you.”

  ***

  In late March 1957, she performed in a one-woman show called Musical Memories with Ethel Waters at New York’s West Side Young Men’s Christian Association. She announced she was performing for charity, but for many, the question was: Why on earth was Ethel Waters entertaining at a YMCA? The next month she performed The Member of the Wedding at the Suburban Playhouse in West Orange, New Jersey. There was talk of her playing the grandmother in a new Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg Broadway musical, Jamaica, but when Lena Horne was cast in the lead, whatever consideration Ethel might have given the show now went out the window. At one point, there was talk of her playing the grandmother of W. C. Handy in the Black-cast film St. Louis Blues. For whatever reasons, it never happened. At another time, she was set to do a new play, Solitaire Lady, in summer stock but she backed out. She remained difficult, if not impossible, to deal with. Two booking agencies were said to have “blackballed her due to612 personal differences.” In the Chicago Defender, Langston Hughes, still a fan of hers, wrote sympathetically about her fundamental kindness and lack of pretense. “I wish some of613 our younger stars who are brusque and unfriendly to admirers,” wrote Hughes, “would learn to behave as Ethel Waters did when she was riding the Broadway wave at its crest.”

  More embittered than ever, unhappy, restless, lonely, even bewildered because she was cut off from the one thing that had always enabled her to hold herself together—work, the chance to win approval from audiences, those “wonderful people out there in the dark,” as Norma Desmond said—she found refuge listening to the radio in her room at the Empire Hotel. But always she was faced with her own discontent, her own impenetrable sadness. Her days were long, her nights longer. At times, her thoughts must have gone back to the early days of her career, the glory years in the late 1920s and 1930s, her passionate relationships. Yet she did not want to live in the past. Nor did she care to spend her time reflecting on it. There had to be a way out.

  For a spell, she toyed with the idea of moving to Englewood, New Jersey. Mozelle had presented her with an appealing proposition. Their relationship had remained complicated and stormy. Mozelle continued to be in and out of Ethel’s life. At one point, Ethel apparently put Mozelle on her payroll to perform general chores. But she also referred to her as a snake who could not be trusted. Still, the women stayed in communication with one another. Now working as a domestic in New Jersey, Mozelle hoped to buy a home in Englewood with a female friend. To raise money for the down payment, Mozelle had asked Ethel for a loan. Or Ethel could buy herself an interest in the home. With some of her winnings from the quiz show or from the sale of her house in California, Ethel thought a home in Englewood might offer her relief from life at the Empire Hotel. There she paid $225 a month for her two-room suite. Yet there were always hassles at the Empire, she confided to Floretta Howard. She didn’t like having to tip bellhops whenever they ran errands for her. She didn’t like not being able to use her air conditioner at the hotel—and having to suffer through the stifling heat. She didn’t like having to board buses to get around town. Often she felt—rightly so—that passengers stared and whispered about her, the great star using public transportation. Nor did she like the neighborhood around the Empire. Constantly, there were the sounds of sirens and fire engines outside. That neighborhood on the Upper West Side would later undergo a great transformation when it became the site of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. But at this point, Ethel just wanted to get out. Because she still needed a New York base in case there was work for her, she considered maintaining a small residence somewhere else in the city. But she also envisioned spending leisurely, hassle-free time in Englewood. She even wanted Floretta Howard to return east where she too could reside with Ethel in Englewood. Ultimately, that did not pan out. But she prayed for a dramatic change in her life.

  Chapter 24

  A New Day

  RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS CAN PUZZLE everyone except the converted. What causes someone to immerse him or herself in a fervor of religious faith almost to the exclusion of everything else—every other interest, every other ideal, every other aspiration, every other relationship? What drives someone to cut off ties with the past, in a sense to strip oneself clear of it, to start anew? Perhaps Ethel’s disappointments, her frustrations, her fears, or her anger with the way people and events in her life had turned out drove her to her stance. Perhaps she sought redemption. Perhaps she sought solace and security. Perhaps she sought escape from the other “real” world. Regardless, Ethel could believe now only in her personal idea of her Lord. What she needed was a new pathway to him, a new messenger with whom she shared beliefs, aspirations, sentiments. That messenger turned out to be a young, charismatic evangelist from North Carolina named Billy Graham.

  Ethel met him through the radio at the Empire Hotel. Nightly, as she turned her radio dial, feverishly trying to find something to take her mind off herself, nothing seemed to please her more than a good, fiercely old-school preacher with a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But she soon discovered Graham on the airwaves. He was then an evangelist rising in popularity around the country. Not the kind of preacher Ethel had searched for, but a new-style man of God with a passionately delivered message and an engaging personality. From the moment she heard him, she sat transfixed.

  Born Franklin William Graham in 1918 on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham grew up a Presbyterian; he studied first
at Bob Jones College (later University) in Cleveland, Tennessee, then transferred to the Florida Bible Institute, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in theology. In 1943, he earned another bachelor’s degree with a major in anthropology from Wheaton College in Illinois. At Wheaton, he met an attractive, engaging young woman, Ruth Bell, who had been born in China, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Her father was also a surgeon. Graham always said it was love at first sight. As their relationship became serious, Ruth Graham wrote: “If I marry Bill, I must marry him with my eyes open. He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord’s work. After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights, and his forever I will slip into the background.” She added: “In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill’s.” Married in August 1943, the two, in many respects, were an ideal couple, both with strong religious convictions, both energetic and ambitious in spreading the word of the Lord. Eventually, Ruth Graham would author or coauthor fourteen books. For a time, they lived in a log cabin that was designed by Ruth, in Montreat, North Carolina. They had five children. Graham also served as the pastor of the Village Church in Western Springs, Illinois. In 1947, he became president of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  A turning point in his early professional life occurred through a friend in Chicago, who had a radio show called Songs in the Night. No longer able to finance the show, the friend asked Graham to take over. With support from his parishioners, Graham turned the show around, bringing in new listeners and spreading his ministry further. Aware that the Christian movement must communicate with a new generation, he founded Youth for Christ, and in 1949, he gave a series of revival meetings in Los Angeles that was originally set for three weeks, then extended to eight. Graham had mastered a new style for reaching the people. His venues were huge arenas—tents, stadiums, whatever could accommodate a large crowd. His choir would number some five thousand people. Those coming to the revivals and rallies could speak with counselors about their faith. With his matinee-idol good looks and well-attired in attractive suits and ties, he now was onstage with a broader audience.