The Black Bruins

by James W. Johnson

  In 1999 Bartlett represented Jackie Robinson as the grand marshal at the Tournament of Roses parade. He called it one of the greatest moments in his life. “That was so special and fantastic,” he said. “What an honor to be able to represent my friend, and to do so while riding down the streets of my hometown.” Bartlett said he had Robinson’s widow, Rachel, to thank for being named marshal. She recognized that Bartlett and Robinson had grown up together and had starred on the athletic field as well. “And I think Rachel was thanking me, since I was the one who first introduced Jackie to Rachel when we were all attending UCLA.” Said his son Bob, a former mayor of Monrovia, “He absolutely loved being grand marshal. I don’t think there was a bigger highlight in his life.”

  Bartlett also was chosen as one of Pasadena City College’s seventy-five distinguished alumni during the college’s seventy-fifth anniversary. In addition, he was a pioneering member of the Pasadena City College Foundation board. He was active in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the American Legion. He also served on the UCLA Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholarship Selection Committee.

  Bartlett was a past president and member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission for twenty-seven years, the longest-serving member of the commission. He was commended for being an “advocate for civil and human rights, no matter the race, gender, or religion.” When he retired, he was appointed an honorary member of the commission. In 1993 his alma mater, UCLA, presented him with its prestigious Community Service Award. In 1987 Pasadena City College honored him with its Presidential Award for his support and his bringing recognition to the school. “I’ve received so much from [the college] and this surrounding area,” he said, “that I feel privileged to be in a position to give something back.” Said his son Bob, “My dad was always striving for a perfect world. He’d always say, ‘You never lose, you just run out of time. You keep playing until the end.’” Bartlett was married four times, twice divorced and twice widowed. He died of complications of outpatient surgery in Lynwood, California, at the age of eighty-eight in 2008.

  22

  Movie Star in the Making

  “I was strictly a mechanic. They told me what to do and I did it, took the money, and got out of there.”

  —Woody Strode

  When Woody Strode returned from Canada, he went into wrestling full time. Strode had to learn how to perform—that is, act in the ring. He didn’t hit the big time until he let his opponent throw him out of the ring or he landed with his feet first when he was body slammed. When he became a headliner, he said, “I would walk into the ring like I was going on stage to perform Hamlet.” He wrestled the likes of the immensely popular Gorgeous George, who Strode said was actually not “gorgeous” but a “block of granite” with long, flowing blond curls. George Raymond Wagner was his real name, but he changed it to Gorgeous George. He once said, “I do not think I’m gorgeous, but what is my opinion against millions of others?”

  Professional wrestling was the number 1 show on television in the late 1940s and 1950s. George, Strode said, “became a master at antagonizing the crowd. That was the key to success in the wrestling business. And that’s how the greatest villain in wrestling history was born.” Strode wrestled George several times, with George winning most of the matches. “He won. Of course, I knew in advance who was going to win—the box office. Everybody made money when they wrestled Gorgeous George.” Strode said the fans came to see George, not him. “It was like dancing, and he was leading. You had to allow him to perform.”

  When wrestling in Dallas, Texas, Strode remembered going into the ring with a referee who had a pistol and a blackjack in his pocket. Strode asked him what was going on. The referee told him that there had been a race riot at the arena a week before. “There I was stripped naked except for my white shorts and shoes, standing out there like a neon sign,” Strode recalled. He told his opponent, “Listen you son of a bitch. We’re going to wrestle from the floor.” No way, Strode said, was he going to give fans a clear shot at him. Fans had never seen a white man wrestle a black man before. By the time Strode was finished wrestling, he had entered the ring in Canada, the Midwest, the South, and Hawaii.

  On May 20, 1950, Strode was honored at a dinner sponsored by the First Thought, Last Word program, which brought together influential community members from the media and entertainment industry to discuss pertinent business issues and provide learning and networking opportunities with industry peers. It was held at the Olympic Auditorium, where Strode had often wrestled, and it was attended by a galaxy of sports stars and sports-minded people, including Kenny Washington, Tom Harmon, Rams assistant coach Red Hickey, journalist Halley Harding, and state athletic commissioner Norman O. Houston. Strode received a trophy presented by Lieutenant Governor Goodwin Knight.

  Strode’s fortunes soon changed again when a Hollywood theatrical agent watched him wrestle on television. He saw Strode’s statuesque body and his acting ability and thought he would be a good candidate for the movies. “You have a look I think I could sell,” said the agent, Sid Gold. “Would you be interested in making some money?” He didn’t have to ask twice. “And slowly, Strode said, “[I] fell into the acting business. After a certain point, I realized I could make a living at it, and I never looked back.” Gold lined Strode up with a job in the TV show Ramar of the Jungle, in which he played an African native. “With me, all they had to do was give me a loin cloth and put a spear in my hand.” He ended up doing nine Ramar shows. Next he appeared with Johnny Weissmuller in the TV series Jungle Jim.

  Next came an offer of a role in RKO’s Androcles and the Lion, in which Strode was dressed as the lion for $500 a week for eight weeks. Afterward he was bragging to stuntmen that he had earned such a big amount for doing so little. One stuntman told him the job was worth $2,500 a week, and the stuntmen wouldn’t take the job for anything less. Soon after, Strode hit the big time when he was offered a role in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments alongside Charlton Heston. He played the king of Ethiopia, a job that lasted a week. Just when he thought he was through, he was asked to appear as a slave in the movie, but DeMille warned him, “Son, don’t you ever tell anyone you got two roles in my picture.” Strode ended up with fifteen weeks of work.

  Another change was in the works. In 1958 Strode was offered a role in Tarzan’s Fight for Life, for which he was asked to shave his head. Strode was still wrestling, and he wanted to have “beautiful hair and locks and [look] as good as I could.” Strode told the producers, “You got to be crazy.” They offered him $500 a week for eight weeks. Again he told the producer he was crazy, but “then I asked where the pluckers were.” Strode was so embarrassed about being bald that he wore a hat. “I looked like a robot. All my bone structure was sticking out. My cheek bones were jumping off my face. But everybody said, ‘Magnificent.’ And when I went to interview for my next picture, Pork Chop Hill [starring Gregory Peck] with director Lewis Milestone, he said, ‘The bald head’s perfect.’” Strode rarely let his hair grow out again.

  Strode’s next big role was in Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, a role that earned him a Golden Globe nomination in 1960. Strode called his seven-minute fight sequence in the film “probably my most famous moment on the screen.” Movie buffs still remember that scene years later. It may have been the most famous fight in film history up to that point. In that segment after his battle with Douglas, Strode had to scale a twelve-foot-high wall to kill the emperor (played by Laurence Olivier). “I would have lost that role if I hadn’t been in shape, and if I hadn’t had a lot of experience as a wrestler,” he said. “It took skill to do that fight scene without actually hurting myself or hurting Douglas.” Strode was forty-five years old at the time, and “I was about the only actor in the world who could do that stunt.” Peter Ustinov, who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor in the film, called Strode “frightfully athletic” because he could throw the twenty-five pound trident in the fight scene.

  “For the first five or six y
ears I was acting, I never saw my motion pictures,” Strode recalled. “I wouldn’t go to the theater. I was embarrassed. I was in a glamorous business, and I wasn’t prepared to be glamorous. I had more of the Joe Louis attitude, and I was confident I had the ability to do anything asked of me.”

  Spartacus was followed by The Last Voyage (with Robert Stack) and the leading role in Sergeant Rutledge. All four pictures were released in 1960. Strode was now a recognized figure on the silver screen.

  When Strode returned home from filming The Last Voyage in Japan, he was summoned to be reunited with famed movie director John Ford, whom he had met in Hawaii when he played football there. Ford wanted Strode to portray Sergeant Rutledge, who was a Buffalo Soldier, one in a troop of all black soldiers. Ford told Strode that he wanted to produce a movie that showed how blacks had helped build the American West. “Way before anybody started to march or decided to do anything, he [Ford] just did it on his own,” Strode said. “And they weren’t ready for ‘Sergeant Rutledge.’” In the film, set in the 1860s, Rutledge was accused of murdering his post commander and raping and killing his daughter. “The sergeant would have been a cinch to die in that generation,” Strode said. But he was exonerated. Ford’s studio, Warner Brothers, wanted Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier to play Rutledge, but Ford insisted on Strode. “They aren’t tough enough,” Ford argued. But Ford didn’t think Strode looked black enough. Strode admitted he looked too Indian. Ford ordered Strode to take his hat off in the hot Arizona sun “so I could get as dark as possible.” “I never did get black enough, but I did get a nice dark, dark, dark.”

  Ford was famous for insulting his actors as a way of motivation. (John Wayne used to take a great deal of abuse from Ford.) Strode was no exception. Ford laced racial epithets on him while shooting Sergeant Rutledge, though Strode treated them as a motivational technique. The movie became Strode’s favorite because he thought he had finally arrived as an actor. But it was a disappointment at the box office, particularly in the South. Ford was somewhat discouraged. “I can’t just make black pictures,” he told Strode. “Do you have any Indian in you?” Ford told Strode he thought the actor should have received an Academy Award nomination for his role in the movie, but Strode said awards meant nothing to him. “All I want to know is that the next time they need somebody, they’d go to get Woody because he’s a good worker,” Strode said. “He knows how to do the stuff we need.”

  Ebony, a magazine predominantly for black readers, was touting Strode as the next big movie star right up there with Belafonte and Poitier. It called Strode the “most promising of them all, the fastest rusher toward the wonderful state of stardom.” Sergeant Rutledge was the start of a long and warm relationship between Ford and Strode. The actor was one of the few people in Ford’s life who was allowed to call him “Papa.” It turned into a father-and-son relationship, particularly after Ford almost died and Strode spent four months in his house, sleeping on a mat in the director’s room while he recovered. “He treated me like a son,” Strode stated. “I had a certain amount of crudeness that went back a hundred years, and that’s what he liked.”

  Ford’s biographer Joseph McBride wrote that Strode “was the last great love of John Ford’s life.” Ford and Strode worked together on two more films, Two Rode Together (starring Richard Widmark and Jimmy Stewart) and Who Shot Liberty Valance? (featuring John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Stewart). Strode played a subservient role as Wayne’s right-hand man. In the movie Strode accompanies Wayne into a saloon where Wayne orders a drink. The bartender serves it up and tells Strode that he cannot serve him a drink because he is a Negro. Strode says he understands and stands alongside Wayne while he drinks.

  It turned out Strode wasn’t through with wrestling. In 1962 a promoter offered him $2,500 for five nights to get into the ring again. He couldn’t turn it down. “That was almost twice what I was making in the movies, so I had to accept.” But at age forty-eight he couldn’t do it any more, particularly against the likes of Bobo Brazil, a 300-pound, 6-foot-7 black wrestler.

  In a movie with Charlton Heston, Major Dundee, Strode played a soldier who was to polish a white officer’s shoes. Heston had a hard time calling him a “nigger.” Director Sam Peckinpah told Strode, “You’ve got to shine this white officer’s shoes and he’s got to call you a nigger. But the problem I’m having is that you aren’t really a Negro. You’re a mongrel.” Strode said that was Peckinpah’s way of telling him he wasn’t dark enough for the role. Strode responded, “Mr. Peckinpah, after four hundred years we’re either half-white or half-Indian. That’s the American Negro. We have no control over that.”

  Strode said that after Peckinpah called him a mongrel, he was insulted and was going to quit making movies. When he told his agent, Sid Gold, his plans, Gold dragged him into his office and growled, “You don’t have the guts to stick it out.” Then Strode received a call from Columbia Pictures producer Mike Frankovich, who had played football at UCLA in the seasons just before Strode. Frankovich got him to agree to play a Chinese in the movie Genghis Khan (with Omar Sharif). He was made to look Chinese, with slanted eyes and a long pigtail. One Chinese who was working on the film noted, “Woody, you look more Chinese than we do.”

  As Strode was obtaining better and better roles in movies, he was seeing a brighter future for African American actors. In an interview with the Chicago Defender Strode remarked, “Negro actors, in traditional or non-traditional movie roles, can become better actors, because as a minority, we can reach back into our mental file cards, and come up with joy, sadness, hope, and every other emotion needed for an acting role.”

  Strode decided in 1966 to head up an independent production of the Buffalo Soldiers, to be called The Saga of the Tenth Cavalry, in hopes of spurring more integration in movies. “The film will show the world that the American Negro did a lot more than toil in the cotton fields,” Strode said. He hired forty urban black actors for the roles. But the film was never made, and Strode became somewhat disillusioned with Hollywood. The recreated Tenth Cavalry unit, however, appeared in several parades, state fairs, and television shows—including a full 1966 episode of High Chaparral.

  One of Strode’s most popular movies was The Professionals (featuring Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Burt Lancaster), about an oil tycoon who hires four “professionals” to rescue his kidnapped wife in Mexico. Strode was delighted to receive top billing over Lancaster, following Marvin and Ryan, though Lancaster reportedly earned $350,000 while Strode took home $20,000. Strode was thrilled with his role. “I was a million to one shot, getting this role,” he noted. “There’s a tremendous cast all around me, and I’m very thankful for it. I’m hungry looking and maybe this paid off for me.”

  Once on the movie set, as the story goes, Strode and Lancaster, who had a reputation as a very physically strong man, often undertook contests of strength, which Strode won, allegedly sending Lancaster into despondency. Frank O’Rourke, who wrote a book about the movie in 1987 noted, “These men [Marvin, Lancaster, Ryan, and Strode] were innocent of prejudice, not because they were morally pure, or because prejudice did not exist in their world, but they lived in and with the peoples of that world in a natural way, so intent on the spending of their lives under any and all conditions that they had no time for the useless idiocy of weighing the comparative value of one man’s skin against another’s on the bigot’s scale. They lived with people, not beside them.”

  Strode was feeling the heat from the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s into the 1970s. Some African Americans thought he should be more outspoken for equal rights for blacks, but Strode would have no part of it. He said he was not a black actor or a white actor, just a cowboy trying to make a living. He seemed oblivious to the struggle against racism. At one point in 1972 he exclaimed, “I’m tired of this black, black, black business. Me, I don’t care. If the money is right, I’ll play Mickey Mouse.” That didn’t go over well with the most militant black activists. What Strode was really trying to do was end
prejudice by setting an example of succeeding in his chosen field.

  Strode found difficulty with some of the tactics of civil rights activists . “Most of my life people have been trying to get me to sign up with the various black groups, including militants,” Strode observed. “Not me. I’m sick of talking about race in this country. I don’t want anybody calling me ‘brother’ either. I live my own life. I go my way and nobody stops me. Color means nothing to me, my children or neighbors. I’m no Uncle Tom. I’m me.”

  Frank Manchel in his book Every Step a Struggle accused the author of Strode’s memoir of the oversimplification “of Strode’s confusion, anger, and ostracism by a younger generation of black progressives.” Manchel wrote that it was “disappointing that there is no thoughtful analysis of the culture shock that [Strode] experienced from the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles or his professional crisis during the changing racial scene in California.” Regarding the Mickey Mouse quote, Manchel added, “It was not that Strode was a mercenary; rather, he believed the way to break down prejudice was to demonstrate your ability and not depend upon someone’s else’s good will.”

  Strode’s disenchantment with the sixties’ generation of activists was one of the reasons he decided to turn down roles in “blacksploitation” movies and go to Europe to chase fame and fortune. Said his nephew Tollie Strode Jr., “He could have gone the way of Super Fly. He could have played pimps, hustlers, and shoot ’em up roles. He chose the path of honorable roles.”