Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  Preparing for the film, she dieted and took off forty-five pounds, but she was still heavy, weighing about three hundred pounds. During a week of rehearsals, the actors were thrilled to meet her. She might give the film the “moral” and emotional gravitas it would desperately need. Though she rarely socialized publicly, she turned up one evening in late November at Hollywood’s Coconut Grove to see a performance by Carol Channing, who had been an admirer of Waters since the days of As Thousands Cheer. Overtures were apparently made to her about a role in a Broadway-bound drama by a young African American playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun.

  Whatever hopes Ethel or the rest of the cast had for The Sound and the Fury disappeared upon the film’s release in March 1959. A role that might have been ideal for her—producer Wald felt only she could play Dilsey—was underwritten and weakly conceived. The film opened on a strong dramatic note with Waters awakening in the early morning in her cabin and immediately sensing that something is wrong in the Compson household, where she works. As she voices her concern and gives orders to her grandson, she is vivid and vibrant, totally in command of the screen. As she runs from her cabin to the “big house,” she moves, despite her weight, like a girl and is rather charming and endearing. But the writers continue to have her snap out orders and assume control of the household—in a way similar to that of Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind during the sequence when Scarlett O’Hara’s mother first arrives home in the evening. The conception was all wrong for the character Dilsey. Waters, however, anchored the opening ten minutes of the film better than any other actor, and she was fascinating to watch. It almost looked as if The Sound and the Fury might be a halfway decent film. But, for the most part, it was a mangled mess that did no one’s career any good. Waters’ weight also did not go unnoticed. “You know what629?” wrote African American columnist Hazel Washington, who had criticized Waters for this in the past. “Ethel Waters has put on so much weight that I now remember that I was looking at her rather than watching the picture, and somewhere along the line, I missed the clues and punch lines, that might have made for me, at least, an entertaining story.” Moviegoers must have asked themselves what had happened; what torments had driven her to this point. Oddly enough, as before, the excess weight made her all the more compelling. She appeared monumental, towering above what should have been a tragic drama that was now reduced to tepid soap opera. Sadly, The Sound and the Fury was her last important feature film.

  Despite the recommitment to her faith and her protestations that she was at peace, she still ate excessively and too much of the wrong things, and her health continued to decline. With hopes of reviving her career, she returned to New York. Financing had been acquired to mount a new production of yet another one-woman show, An Evening with Ethel Waters, which opened on April 8, 1959. Not much different from its predecessor, At Home with Ethel Waters, the show was also set in a living room, with Reginald Beane accompanying her as she sang one old song after another. But now she was in a small theater off-Broadway, not in a Broadway theater. “While Miss Waters packs630 a lot of charm and is an old hand with both a swivel of the hip and a tear-filled eye, nostalgia was not enough to sustain the evening,” wrote Arthur Gelb in the New York Times. Gelb also characterized her rendition of “Dance Hall Hostess” as “tasteless.” Scheduled to run for four weeks, An Evening with Ethel Waters folded after little more than one week. Its early closing must have alarmed and saddened her. It was her last important show.

  Returning to the West Coast, she performed on the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. A more promising project was her role in “The Big Lie” episode of the TV series Whirlybirds, directed by Robert Altman, but the episode proved another disappointment. She would have one more surprising success on television, but Ethel must have known her career now was almost effectively over. Her depression deepened.

  What was she to do? Where was she to go? Without work, how would she live?

  In January 1960, she returned to her appearances with Graham’s Youth for Christ, performing religious songs to adoring crowds. Other religious groups asked her to appear. Some she accepted. Most she turned down. Her primary focus remained on Graham’s rallies and revivals. Curiously, in late January, she joined such stars as Dorothy Dandridge and Ella Fitzgerald at the Coconut Grove for a tribute to Nat “King” Cole. At this glittering affair, she was a queen, surrounded by showbiz friends, many of whom had admired her from afar. That included Maria and Nat Cole. Having grown up in Chicago, the young Cole had seen her perform at the Regal in 1935.

  In the early part of the year, she recorded an album of spirituals for a Christian recording company, but on May 25, she had problems breathing. Feeling that she was coming down with a cold, Ethel visited her doctor. During a routine examination, he grew alarmed and asked her to agree to an immediate full examination at a hospital. There, she was put into a wheelchair, taken to a private room, and given oxygen. Afterward, a heart specialist arrived, examined her thoroughly, and informed her she had congestive heart failure and hypertension. For eleven days, she was kept under oxygen. After twenty-three days, she was released from the hospital and taken home by ambulance.

  A long road to recovery followed. ‘I weighed 340 pounds631 when I entered the hospital,” she said. “I was so big that when I traveled on the plane the only seats I would fit in were the first-class ones. And I used every bit of the safety belt.” She was also diagnosed with diabetes. Under her doctor’s advice, she dieted, losing some ninety-five pounds. But it was a constant effort to keep the weight down. She rested and read. For a time, she rarely left the house. In late May, Eddie Mallory, having suffered a heart attack, died at the age of fifty-four. After he and Ethel had broken up, his career continued but slowed down. In 1952, he divorced Marion Robinson and married a woman named Dollie Thomas. Leaving show business, he became a salesman for an automobile dealership in New York. The fact that there had never been any resolution between the two, no classic reunion in which they might have come to terms with each other and all the things that had gone wrong with their relationship must have troubled her; the fact that she had outlived her “Pretty Eddie” must have saddened her.

  “I found it harder and harder to handle myself,” Waters said. “I was ill—too sick to work.” When her physician told her she “absolutely could not live alone,” she made a new living arrangement. A couple—Elwood and Donna Wilson—who were affiliated with the Crusades moved into her home with their two sons. Finally, she sold the house on Hobart, which brought her some much-needed income. Many of her possessions were sold, although there were some items she could not part with. But once she paid the IRS and cleared other debts, little was left. Priding herself on always having a small nest egg, she held onto $7,500. Still, the constant stress and fears about her financial state worsened her condition.

  In December 1960, Ethel moved with the Wilsons into a home in Pasadena. She insisted on paying them something each month. Now she lived primarily on a Social Security check in the amount of $119 a month. One of the few possessions she took with her from Hobart was a portrait of her painted by an Italian artist over thirty years earlier.

  In late June 1961, the news of her physical condition—and her dire financial straits—hit the public. Dave Garroway spoke of her illness. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Mirror rushed to interview her. For a woman who had been so private in the early part of her life, she was once again surprisingly open about her finances. Broke for the past five years, she said, she had nonetheless turned down work. “They don’t like it632 when you tell the truth about them, so they stopped sending scripts to me and then the agents stopped trying to get work for me. They’ll tell you that I ‘retired,’ but any retiring that was done wasn’t voluntary.” She added, “I had a nice home and big cars, and everything that money could buy. But, Lord, was I lonely. I used that money wrong. I tried to buy friends. I sold everything I owned to pay off that bill [to the IRS]. I sold my
house, my car, and everything else. But I paid ’em. I don’t owe a cent to anyone. Oh, precious, if half of the people that owed me money would pay it back, I’d be a rich woman again.” Yet she had no regrets. “I’ve made fortunes in my day, but until now I’ve never found real peace and happiness. Money has never been a god to me,” she told reporters.

  The pictures accompanying the articles were of a white-haired, heavy yet frail-looking woman who was clearly down on her luck. Afterward there was an outpouring of sympathy. Thousands of letters were sent to her. Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff sent her money. Ethel was reminded of the statement that Van Vechten had made years earlier, that she never asked anyone for anything and that she had never thanked anyone either. Now she wanted him to know how thankful she was for all he had done.

  But why had she agreed to such interviews? Why had she put herself in this position that many saw as a form of public humiliation? Was it yet another role for her to play? Was it her way of dealing with her heartache by acting as if it were a performance that might end later in the evening? Were there other factors that she did not reveal to the press or perhaps even to the family she stayed with?

  The press coverage, however, did put her back on the radar of various producers. An offer came in for a special appearance in a musical, Rhapsody in Rhythm, but Ethel appeared not even to have seriously considered it. Another offer came for a role in an episode of the television series Route 66. “My agent called one633 day,” she recalled, “and said, ‘How you feel, doll?’ ” When she responded that she felt fine, “He said he’d like me to go with him the next day to an interview.” Route 66 producer Herbert Leonard and writer Leonard Freeman wanted to take a meeting with her. Somehow she summoned up her strength and put on that radiant Waters smile. “The following day we went to the office of these darling children,” she said. By now, she called just about anyone younger than her, her child. She was, in turn, to be called Mom. “They took one look at me and were they shocked. I guess they were expecting an old creature, but I walked in, all sweetness and light, maybe with even a little sex appeal!” said Waters. With even a little sex appeal. “They told me about the play and it sounded wonderful. It was a part I could do without too much strain. And I was impressed with the fact that these children had so much respect for my beliefs.”

  Route 66 focused on the experiences of two vastly different young men as they traveled through the country in a snazzy Corvette. Tod Stiles, played by Martin Milner, came from a wealthy background, while Buz Murdock, played by George Maharis, had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen. Though the two pursued adventure, they were also searching for meaning in life. With such heroes and such a theme, Route 66 was a rather offbeat television series with heroes who, in many respects, represented the disaffiliated and disengaged members of a new generation. The series connected to the young of the early 1960s, the very same generation that would soon express itself in the hippie or counterculture movement as well as the antiwar movement. Ethel’s episode was called “Good Night, Sweet Blues.”

  It wasn’t hard to understand why this episode of Route 66—with its outsider heroes and its particular storyline—appealed to Ethel. It focused on the plight of a bedridden dying blues singer named Jennie whose last wish is be reunited with her former band for one last jam session. Traveling long and far to reunite the band, Tod and Buz witness the sad course of the lives of some of the men. One former band member is in jail. Another makes a living by shining shoes. Another has died, leaving behind an embittered son. Yet another has become a successful attorney. By focusing on the jazz musicians, the episode was acknowledging the importance of jazz in America’s cultural history while also examining the frustrations and sacrifices of some of the nation’s great musical artists. Directed by Jack Smight and written by Will Lorin, the episode had a stellar cast that included Juano Hernandez, Frederick O’Neal, actress Billie Allen, and young Bill Gunn, who had appeared with Ethel in West Berlin and The Sound and the Fury and who later wrote the screenplay for the film The Landlord and directed the film Ganga and Hess. Also cast were such jazz musicians as Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Jo Jones. Even at this point in her life, when she sang mostly with the nonjazz sounds of the Graham team, Ethel still appreciated the kind of top-notch musicians she had performed with and demanded earlier in her career. In turn, the musicians realized that she had opened the door for many, that in essence, she was the mother of them all.

  Shot in about seven or eight days, Route 66’s various episodes were filmed on location. For “Good Night, Sweet Blues,” actor George Maharis recalled, the cast and crew traveled to Pittsburgh. That gave Ethel the opportunity to perform in the city with the Crusade. She was also able to visit Momweeze, whose health continued to deteriorate. Marharis remembered that before filming, “I didn’t know a634 lot about Ethel Waters. The thing I knew her for was The Member of the Wedding on Broadway. I didn’t know her as a jazz singer. I didn’t know she had started that way.” On the set, “I never saw any outburst,” he said. “She was willing to do everything asked of her and she was very sweet. She was very cooperative and mellow. But it was difficult for her because of her weight and her age. She told me when she was a young woman, she weighed ninety-eight pounds. How is it that this frame is holding all that weight? she asked.”

  He remembered, “There was somebody there to assist her. She had trouble getting around. In many cases, we had to do things slowly because she couldn’t move rapidly. She told me she was close to four hundred pounds. I’m pretty sure she had somebody who was helping her. She arrived with a friend. When lunch came, people would bring the food to her as opposed to going to where the rest of the cast and crew ate. But she was very sweet. You didn’t mind doing things for her. She had little sweet pet names for everybody like ‘child’ or ‘sweetheart.’ And she really liked everybody on the set. She had that wonderful smile with that gap in her teeth.”

  Maharis believed there may have been “changes in the script once she decided to do the episode. Most of the time, because the scripts were written in California, they would fly them out to us on location. And we’d have to adjust them to the locality we were in. But I’m not sure many changes were made on location for her. The director was always open to suggestions because you only run through once. So a lot of times if there were things that she felt worked for her, she’d say it the way she felt. Everything was done in one or two takes.”

  “She seemed to have more of an affinity with the musicians than with the actors,” said Maharis. “There was something you could tell was a connection—much much more. You could feel it. She would perk up when the musicians came around as opposed to when the actors were around. These musicians had great respect for her, and vice versa. It wasn’t like people who didn’t know each other having to act together. Instead it was like people who had been away from one another for a long time.”

  In one sequence, Ethel had to sing. “Her singing was almost like her speaking voice,” said Maharis. “I thought to myself she’s not really singing. She’s talking. It wasn’t like sustained singing. It wasn’t a voice like Nancy Wilson. She was half-speaking, half-singing. She was talking with a little hum in her voice. I remember when she was doing it, I thought that was almost conversational.” That was perhaps his fondest memory of the episode. “When she was singing, for me it was like looking in on a portion of her life that I knew nothing about. So when she sang, I could understand what she was communicating. It was like a walk back in history. A walk into a generation I had no communication with. That was really special for me to experience.”

  Still, Ethel had problems with her voice. Marni Nixon, then a young singer who later acquired a large following after it was revealed that she dubbed the singing voices of such stars as Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn in the respective films The King and I and My Fair Lady, recalled that she was hired to dub portions of Waters’ singing voice—in a new version of Waters’ old hit “I’m Coming, Virginia.” It was for a sequence in the
drama in which one of Ethel’s character’s old records is heard playing.

  “She was supposed to be635 singing [on the recording],” recalled Nixon. “I had to imitate her recording, and for some reason, they couldn’t just play the recording and she couldn’t mouth to her previous recording. There was some legal reason why they couldn’t do it.”

  In Los Angeles, “They called me in because she could no longer sing it the way she sang it because her voice was much lower.”

  Nixon recalled that she probably knew of the session about “a week beforehand. And then I tried to get hold of her. I don’t think I had that recording and they wanted me to imitate her phrasing and everything. They didn’t tell me that she actually was going to be there, which was really supposed to be a help to me, and probably it was. But she couldn’t demonstrate to me how it should be different. She was probably thinking, ‘Oh, what’s this little wasp doing—trying to be Black.’ I don’t know what she was thinking. But she certainly didn’t reveal that. She was such a gracious lady. I was struggling so much to do it. I just felt so embarrassed.”

  And what about Ethel’s notorious temperament and impatience? Fortunately, said Nixon, “I didn’t remember the information that she was supposed to have any temperament. Nobody had told me that, to warn me or anything. And she certainly didn’t reveal it.” That day an older, wearier Ethel simply tried to be helpful. No doubt she was troubled that her voice was no longer the instrument it had once been. “She’d sort of nod her head during rehearsal or would stop. And I would say, ‘Is this better?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ That’s all it was. I was just impressed.”

  Obviously, there had been warm, tender moments for her during the filming; this clearly showed in the finished product, which aired on October 6, 1961. When she first appears, she has fallen ill in her car. Tod and Buz offer her help. “Are you in pain?” they ask. “It’s gone away,” Ethel’s Jennie replies after taking her medicine. “How about you? Yours gone?” she asks perceptively. Upon later learning that the young men are jazz aficionados, Waters delivers a line she no doubt deemed perfect for her: “Could be the good Lord had in mind for us to meet today.” Once one of the young men says, “We’re sort of looking for a place where we fit,” Ethel explains that she knows what they mean. After the reunion of the band for their last jam session, Ethel’s Jennie, on her deathbed, says: “Thanks, Lord. . . . God bless you, Buz. And you too, Tod. And thank you, dear Lord.” Such dialogue had to have been written in the initial draft of the script to play on Ethel’s public image—and her intense beliefs. After all, this was the woman who had first turned down The Member of the Wedding because there was no God in the play. Still, perhaps only Ethel Waters could have delivered such lines with a conviction and sweetly sorrowful warmth that made the dialogue utterly convincing and moving. Ethel walked off with an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Single Performance by a Lead Actress. “It was a heartbreaker636,” said Hedda Hopper, “and should have won her an Emmy.” The award went to Julie Harris for Victoria Regina on Hallmark Hall of Fame. Afterward Alan J. Pakula and Robert Mulligan reportedly wanted Ethel for a role in To Kill a Mockingbird, but for whatever reasons, she did not appear in the film.