by Donald Bogle
Chapter 26
On Her Own Again
AT THE START OF THE 1970S, Ethel lived on her own on the fifteenth floor of the high-rise Bunker Hill Towers in downtown Los Angeles. There, she had privacy. Her cozy apartment was filled with furniture and possessions from her glory days—a large Victorian sofa, plush armchairs, her baby grand piano, a glass-top coffee table. On the walls was photo after photo of—who else—Ethel. No matter how much her life had changed, she was still a great star who enjoyed seeing reflections of herself. From her living room window she could look down on the Los Angeles Music Center. Not a bad view at all. In all likelihood, the young man was in and out of the apartment, so Croomes believed, but without the knowledge of others—and not for very long. Looking in on Ethel was a young woman named Twila Knaack. Previously a member of the Graham team who had left to study interior design, she was called back to do temporary work for the organization. At Graham’s 1970 Crusade at New York’s Shea Stadium, she and Ethel had run into each other. Now Knaack visited on Saturdays; she helped Ethel with her mail, did some of her shopping, and took her on various errands. Knaack also recalled that she “wasn’t penniless. The Billy Graham Association faithfully supported her, and she had tucked away royalty checks in savings accounts. She used to get so upset at reports that she was broke.”
Though she performed at the Crusades—and despite her comment that her religious work and show business could no longer mix—she still was unable to leave show business behind. Attending parties and gatherings with showbiz friends, she was occasionally spotted at nightclubs too. At such times, the old playful Ethel surfaced. At one club, she was introduced as “Mrs. Ethel Waters644.” Ethel immediately stood up and shouted, “Stop right there. It’s Miss, not Mrs. . . . Don’t ruin my chances.”
She also embarked on some ambitious projects. In the “Mama Cooper” episode of the television series Daniel Boone, she played the title role, that of the long-lost mother of a slave played by Roosevelt Grier. Routine as the drama was, her performance once again was warm and engaging. Shortly afterward, she traveled to Chicago for a major six-week revival of The Member of the Wedding at the Ivanhoe Theatre. Opening on February 19, 1970, the revived play was now twenty years old, and after her heart attack while playing Berenice in Pasadena, many wondered if she had the stamina to perform the role again. So fatigued and lethargic was she that she did very little else during the run of the drama. Usually, she rested in her hotel room until it was time to head to the theater. But the play provided a decent salary, which she could use to pay bills and also add to her nest egg. She knew that inevitably the day might come when she wouldn’t be able to work at all and would need something other than her monthly Social Security check to live on. Her performance won the city’s Jeff Award for Best Visiting Star. When there was an offer to take the revival elsewhere, however, she turned it down.
Returning to Los Angeles, Ethel signed a contract with Harper and Row to write a new book. Working with the writers Eugenia Price and Joyce Blackburn, she set out to complete the story of her life, which would be a record of her recommitment to Christ. Perhaps it might bring the kind of royalties she earned with His Eye Is on the Sparrow. Published in 1972, the book, called To Me It’s Wonderful, was written with sincerity and honesty. She revealed her actual age and was open about her financial problems. But To Me It’s Wonderful lacked the dramatic urgency of her earlier work. Once again, she chose not to discuss certain aspects of her life. She understood she had a new image—a new identity as a very devout woman—to protect.
***
More and more, she was confined to her apartment at the Bunker Hill Towers, venturing forth now only for special occasions. In January 1971, she accepted an invitation by President Richard Nixon to sing at a White House morning prayer service. She had known Nixon since his days as a California congressman—and at one time a fervent anti-communist. He had waged a fierce, ugly campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas for his seat in Congress that liberals never forgot. Admiring his battle against communism, she had visited the Nixon home in California and knew his two daughters, Julie and Tricia. She also had met his mother at the Quaker meeting place that Mrs. Nixon attended. Both Richard and Pat Nixon appeared to genuinely like Ethel, who once again went into her mothering mode, sweet-talking them as well as everyone else in sight. To her, Nixon was her “Dickie Boy645.” His wife, Patricia Nixon, was her “Patty Girl.” On the morning of the White House service, Quaker “minister” T. Eugene Coffin led a prayer. But it was Ethel—dressed in a pink-sequined pillbox hat and a purple dress—whose renditions of three spirituals proved to be the morning’s highlight. Nixon himself recalled that many of the three hundred guests had told him “they had tears in646 their eyes as she sang three solos in the East Room.”
A few months later, she returned to the White House for the wedding of President Nixon’s daughter Tricia to Edward Finch Cox, one of the big social events in the nation’s capital. The wedding invitations went to some four hundred guests, including former first lady Mamie Eisenhower; Norman Vincent Peale; Billy and Ruth Graham; Art Linkletter; Red Skelton; Freeman Gosden (co-creator of Amos ’n’ Andy), as well as members of Nixon’s cabinet, and, surprisingly, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, for whom the young bridegroom, Cox, had once worked.
The night before the ceremony, Ethel arrived at the Hotel Madison in Washington, D.C. There, she received a phone call from Ruth Graham, who invited Ethel to join her in her hotel room for dinner. Billy Graham had not yet arrived in Washington. Overjoyed by the invitation, Ethel said, “I hope I didn’t647 hug her too hard, but I was so glad to see her!” The next day she rode with both Grahams to the White House and was photographed arriving for the ceremony, which again gave the impression that she and the Grahams were close personal friends. But the truth was another matter. “That was the closest648 I’d ever felt to Billy and Ruth. The talk Ruthie and I had the night before was beautiful, but walking into the White House between those two precious people was like a long-time dream come true for me. . . . They were like my own children to me as I went with them up those stairs to that wedding. I felt like a million dollars with my babies.” The Grahams did become closer to her later, and Billy Graham would speak of visiting her at times when she was hospitalized.
Much as the whole affair pleased Ethel, public perceptions, especially within a vocal segment of the African American community, were far different. Her appearances at the White House added to the impression that she was cut off from Black America. At a time when the nation had witnessed uprisings and riots in major American cities from Detroit to Newark to Watts to Harlem to her hometown of Philadelphia, the civil rights movement had evolved into the Black Power movement—and among the young, there had increasingly been calls for cultural separatism. In this age of the Afro and the dashiki, of “Say It Loud / I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “Black Is Beautiful,” two separate cultures existed side by side. While there had been criticism of Lyndon Johnson, his Great Society’s War on Poverty had sought to end racial and economic inequities in Black America. Richard Nixon, whether fairly or not, was not viewed as a racially progressive president. At the same time, as the war in Vietnam raged on, the young of America did not view him as progressive either. The question remained, as it had now for years, why had Ethel aligned herself with such conservatives? Photographs that circulated of her laughing with Nixon contributed to her image—for a new generation—as a politically antiquated figure.
The current generation wanted its entertainers committed to political ideologies or ideals, mainly of dissent and revolt, to be in opposition to the established order. Ethel, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey—all of whom were photographed in chummy settings with a smiling Richard Nixon—often found themselves lambasted. Ironically, Ethel had for decades lived a separatist existence. Her closest friends, her husbands and lovers and confidants had usually been African American. Van Vechten had been an exception. But even with this man, known as a Negrophile, it’
s doubtful that Ethel was ever as open as she was with Floretta Howard or even Archie Savage or Mozelle or Joan Croomes. But now here was a woman, who recently had proclaimed that “land, no, she didn’t like white cooking,” immersing herself in a conservative white world—and from the viewpoint of some, a possibly politically bigoted one. Such judgments may be unfair. But in the world of perceptions, Ethel’s “conservative connections” may also have influenced the way in which her early career—as a singer—was analyzed by newer critics, or perhaps, it might be better to say, was ignored. Her stylistic contributions, her voice itself, her ability to tell a story seemed to have been overlooked.
That was evident in 1973 when Columbia reissued a remarkable two-record set of her early recordings—from 1925 to 1934—titled Ethel Waters’ Greatest Years. Clearly, it was an attempt to reestablish her for a new generation. Critic John S. Wilson commented:
Amidst the recent flurry649 of interest in Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith the third basic voice in the jazz-blues-pop panorama of the twenties and thirties has been almost overlooked. Maybe it’s because Ethel Waters is known too well now as an actress. Or maybe it’s because her important days in the jazz and pop, if not the blues, fields were too long ago (although, in actuality, no longer ago than Bessie Smith’s). For whatever reason, in the current discovery of such seminal singers as Miss Smith and Miss Holiday, Miss Waters’s contributions have received relatively little credit. This set not only emphasizes Miss Waters’s early jazz relationships, but also traces the changes in her style of singing (along with her type of accompaniment) and gives a revealing glimpse of the foundation she provided for innumerable later singers by setting a standard with songs, new at the time, that have since become everyday favorites.
Music promoter and producer George Wein believed that Waters’ temperament had driven many to ignore her. “Perhaps this was the650 main reason why her place in the history of jazz singing has been so sadly overlooked—she had few friends to help perpetuate her memory,” said Wein. He believed her time with Billy Graham “was a much needed solace for her, and when I met Reverend Graham . . . I thanked him for giving her that precious opportunity.”
In late 1972, she briefly entered a convalescent home. Soon afterward she was diagnosed with cataracts and entered Presbyterian Hospital for surgery on one of her eyes. Young Twila Knaack sought to keep Waters’ condition private, and fortunately, the news did not hit the press. Once Ethel recovered, she still did not seem able to sit still for long. To the surprise of those aware of her illness, she agreed to appear in the “Run, Carol, Run” episode of the television series Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. Cast once more as a loving elderly woman, known as Aunt Harriet, she acted with series star Arthur Hill, young actor Lee Majors, Keenan Wynn, and her Pinky costar Jeanne Crain. It proved to be her last television role. She also appeared in 1972 on the Johnny Carson–hosted Sun City Scandals. It was rather touching to see how the hip Carson seemed delighted to be with her.
Then came a special invitation. Since the early 1960s, a young woman named Ruth Tabron, from Chester, Pennsylvania, had dreamed of having an Ethel Waters day. “I had been a fan of hers since I was nine or ten years old,” said Tabron. But until now she had been unable to reach Ethel. At first Ethel balked at participating in such an event, but after much persistence and cajoling by Tabron, she consented. On a Friday, she arrived in New York, where she stopped over at the St. Regis Hotel. The next day she arrived in the city of her birth. Though there were still so many painful memories, she served as the grand marshal of a twenty-four-car motorcade that made its way from the foot of the Delaware River, about two blocks from Ethel’s birthplace, through Chester. Officially, it was a Law Day Parade, sponsored by the Delaware County Bar Association, but Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp had proclaimed that Saturday as Ethel Waters Day throughout the state. An estimated forty-five thousand people, Black and white, turned out to see her. “Ethel, we love you651!” they shouted and screamed.
That night a dinner was given in her honor. Among those present was actress Julie Harris. “It’s hard to say652 what I really feel in my heart. I love you475, Ethel,” said Harris. “I love you with all my heart. I thank God for you. I feel I belong to you.” A special citation from President Nixon was read by Ruth Tabron. Telegrams of congratulations had come from California governor Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham as well as from others around the country. “This child is really the reason I’m here. She’s been hounding me for three years!” Ethel told the dinner guests, referring to Tabron. “Love begets love. I felt it here today. All those beautiful little children, their eager little faces. I felt love here today. That’s God’s love. We need that to dispel hate.” Later she said, “Everyone was just wonderful to me. I even gave a concert at the Schwartz Athletic Center and Julie came to visit with us.”
“She was very happy653,” said Tabron. “Afterward she cried and said it was one of the most beautiful things that had ever happened to her.” The attorney William Archibald Jr., who had been instrumental in organizing the trip, said that afterward he kept in touch with her. “She called me ‘soul brother,’ ” he said. “We had a great time. She had a tremendous sense of humor.”
With this return to Chester, perhaps something had come full circle for Ethel.
There were greater concerns now about Ethel’s health. Perhaps there were fears that death might come at any time. Perhaps there was just a strong desire to show appreciation and love for her work with the Crusade, which she now had performed with for fifteen years. Whatever the reasons, Billy Graham mounted a star-studded testimonial for Ethel. Engraved invitations were sent out for the event to be held at Los Angeles’ Century Plaza Hotel on October 6, 1972.
At her apartment in the Bunker Hill Towers, Ethel spent days preparing for the evening. There was much discussion with Twila Knaack about the dress she would wear. Knaack and a friend had shopped around the city, but the only store that carried clothes large enough to fit Ethel was Lane Bryant’s in Beverly Hills. Once Knaack had selected what she believed was a lovely pink dress, she called to tell Ethel the news. She remembered that an incensed Ethel informed her, “Pink is not 654my color, and besides what are you doing at Lane Bryant’s. That’s a store for fat people.” In the end, Ethel wore a dress that had been designed for her in the 1940s.
On October 6, Ethel arrived at the Century Plaza radiant and aglow. The host for the ceremony was television personality Hugh Downs, and among the nine hundred guests were such old-guard Hollywood stars as Bob Hope, Randolph Scott, the Gene Autrys, Robert and Rosemary Stack, Mrs. Clark Gable, Robert Young, and Joanne Carson. Singer Billy Daniels also performed. A special surprise guest was Tricia Nixon. During the evening’s proceedings, Ethel was in true form. Twila Knaack recalled that Graham told the audience, “She made it in655 show business when it was difficult for a Black actress to make it.”
“She stopped him short656,” recalled Knaack. “I cringed. I knew what was coming.”
“Please, not the word ‘Black,’ ” said Ethel. “I’m a Negress and proud of it.” But the Los Angeles Times also quoted her as saying, “It was hard for657 everyone.” Of course, that statement, in the eyes of some Black Americans, appeared to minimize the struggles of African Americans.
And once again, Ethel appeared moved by the presence of Julie Harris. Of the many friends from Waters’ years in show business, Harris was among the most caring and affectionate. In July, news that Brandon de Wilde—John Henry in The Member of the Wedding—had been killed at age thirty in a traffic accident left Ethel stunned and saddened. In the middle of a rainstorm, he was driving his van when it collided with a truck on the side of the road. “I remember when we closed after our long Broadway run and tour,” Ethel recalled. “We all cried, Julie, Brandon, and I. Holding Brandon on my lap, I sang to him and told him that he could keep his John Henry glasses. He didn’t want to give them up. All those long months together, the three of us were a family and he was the heart of us. Hi
s death was a terrible shock to us all.” Now Ethel and Harris maintained the bond that had been created more than twenty years earlier.
That evening, Billy Graham presented Ethel with an engraved silver tray. It read: With Love and Appreciation for 15 Years of Singing in Our Crusades. Two weeks later, said Knaack, Ethel gave the tray to her. “You’ll get more use658 out of it than I will,” Ethel told her. “But don’t let anyone from the team know I gave it to you!”
As 1972 closed, another award was bestowed on Ethel, this one from the NAACP, which, despite her past statement about not being a member of the organization, honored her with its Image Award for her blues, gospel, stage, and pulpit performances.
The tribute and testimonial proved well timed because now she found herself more confined than ever to the apartment. She made a trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she had a second cataract operation. Recuperating, she sat daily in front of her small television set and near her radio. Sometimes both were turned on at the same time. In July 1975, she attended an event at the Variety Club of Southern California, where a minibus was presented to a home for needy and handicapped boys in her honor. Then in May 1976, she accepted an invitation to attend a benefit at the Pacific Cinerama Dome of That’s Entertainment Part 2, a compilation film of some of the great musical sequences from MGM movies. Included was a clip of Ethel in Cabin in the Sky. Surrounded by such stars as Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Kathryn Grayson, Johnny Weissmuller, Marge Champion, and Margaret O’Brien, she was frail, weak, and often in pain, but she graciously greeted old friends and acquaintances. For these old-timers from the Golden Age not only of Hollywood musicals but of Broadway as well, there was the recognition that she was one of the giants of American musical history. Helping to promote That’s Entertainment Part 2, she also appeared on The Mike Douglas Show, which was taped on the MGM lot. The studio could not have been more pleased.
