From 1969 to 1971 Strode lived in Rome, where he starred in several spaghetti westerns that raised his popularity in Europe, whose people cared little about a person’s race. Strode discovered in Italy that “I could just live completely with white people. I was like a zebra with a bunch of lions, and I went right to the trough with them.” He learned that he could live anywhere in the world. “Race is not a factor in the world market,” he said. “I once played a part of an Irish prize fighter. I’ve done everything but play an Anglo-Saxon. I’d do that if I could. I’d play a Viking with blue contact lens and a blond wig if I could. My dream is to play a Mexican bandit in the international market.”
It was in Europe that Strode said that for the first time he made “real money.” After earning salaries in the low four figures, Strode pulled down as much as $75,000 a picture in Italy. “I’d been in some classic pictures and never made a dime,” Strode commented. “I was never in a position to bargain. Where else was I to go? I was unique doing just what I had been doing: throwing the spear, playing Indians, slanting my eyes, putting on pigtails. They probably thought they were doing me a favor.”
Strode next starred in the British-produced Black Jesus, a 1971 movie that bombed at the box office but earned rave reviews for Strode’s acting. According to Manchel, “For him the picture meant a chance for Americans to see on screen how blacks are willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause.” Black Jesus was a thinly disguised story of the African idealist Patrice Lumumba. The New York Times wrote the following:
Woody Strode? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. “Black Jesus?” No. It was a thrill yesterday to see the name of this exceptionally fine Negro actor elevated to solo star billing, after propping up many a film for years. Sadly, neither this Italian-made picture nor the role itself, primarily a matter of saintly symbolism, is up to him. Mr. Strode, with his keen, lidded eyes and strong, gaunt face, does a perfectly respectable job of portraying an imprisoned, tortured and executed visionary leader in an African country. His gentle spirit of nonviolence and agonized endurance under pressure are painfully real. The rest is not. The film is a shadow play, hardly a movie at all.
Strode made one more Hollywood film before heading back to Italy, The Revengers (also starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, and Susan Hayward). Strode was given top billing, one of the first times he had been given an advertised starring role in an American picture. “That’s how the Italians and ‘Black Jesus’ had inflated my value in this country,” he said.
Strode returned to Italy for two more years, coming home only when John Ford was on his death bed, suffering from cancer. Strode sat by the side of Ford’s bed, holding his hand for six hours before Ford slipped into a coma and died soon after. “He was so tough I didn’t believe he could die,” Strode recalled.
In 1980 Strode’s wife Luana died from complications of Parkinson’s disease after struggling four years with the ailment. She was sixty-four, Strode sixty-six. A year later he noted that he was sixty-seven and “just a kid.” He attributed his good health to eating everything. “I’m a meat eater. I eat like a Mexican—chilies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Two years after his wife’s death Strode married thirty-five year-old Tina Tompson, the daughter of a Las Vegas minister.
Age was catching up with Strode. At age seventy-four he recalled that the last three pictures in which he had acted had been too hard for him. “But I always stay in shape. I don’t go to a job out of shape because the man looks at me and wonders, ‘Can he still do the job?’ My camouflage is close fitting T shirts, and I parade in them like an old race horse. I can still attract attention stepping off a plane anywhere in the world. I can still half-ass fight. I can do all that ballet stuff; the only thing I can’t do is fall off the horses.”
In all Strode acted in fifty-seven movies, three TV movies, and thirteen TV series, including Rawhide (with Clint Eastwood). He acted in films directed by DeMille, Ford, Richard Brooks, Budd Boetticher, and Stanley Kubrick. The San Francisco Chronicle noted after his death in 1994 that Strode was never reduced “to eye-rolling and shuckin’ and jivin’ to make a living in Hollywood. With rare exception he was powerful yet quietly profound. Regardless of his dialog, Strode’s magnificent face always made apparent the brain behind the brawn.”
“You know what they saw in me?” Strode asked.
They saw what I had, and they pulled it out of me. They didn’t see a black man. They gave me the part because I was the man. . . . It wasn’t a black thing. You had to have the ability to sit on the horse and not be doubled, do the little bit of fighting that I had to do in it, and get off the screen, and hold up the part. Make it believable. And every time they selected me, [it] was because I could make a part believable, whether I starred in it or not. This is the most important thing when your star is there, the character actor has got to be believable. Otherwise the whole picture is weakened.
Toward the end of his life Strode was being honored for his long service in the entertainment business. He received the Cauliflower Alley Club’s Iron Mike Mazurki Award, wrestling’s top honor in 1992, the first year it was given. He also was inducted into the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame in 1992. He was inducted posthumously into the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame in 2012–13.
Strode died on December 31, 1994, at eighty-eight after suffering from lung cancer for two years. He was buried with full military honors at the national cemetery in Riverside, California. His achievements inspired California Assembly member Cheryl Brown in 2015 to campaign for his inclusion into the California Hall of Fame. It honors those “who embody California’s innovative spirit and have made their mark on history.” Backers include Clint Eastwood and Kirk Douglas.
23
A Promotion Earned
[Robinson] was the only player I ever saw who could completely turn a game around by himself.”
—Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner
Jackie and Rachel Robinson left Montreal in 1946, he to go on a barnstorming trip and she to stay with her mother in California, awaiting the birth of their first child. They still had not been told whether Jackie was moving up to Brooklyn in the spring.
Robinson’s barnstorming trip proved disastrous as most of the $3,500 in checks he received for playing bounced. The Robinsons were low on cash. When Jackie arrived in Los Angeles, he decided to play pro basketball for $50 a game for the Los Angeles Red Devils. He joined two other black players on the team, which won eight of its first nine games. One white player, Irv Noren, had played at Pasadena Junior College and in the Major Leagues for eleven years. He was almost six years younger than Robinson and signed with the Dodgers the same year as Robinson, although he never played for Brooklyn.
Robinson averaged just fewer than ten points a game. “But scoring is the least of the dusky marvel’s accomplishments,” the Chicago Defender wrote. “A lightning dribbler and glue-fingered ball handler, his terrific speed makes it impossible for one man to hold him in check.” Robinson’s last game came January 3, 1947, after seven games. The Red Devils had won six. His departure may have coincided with Branch Rickey’s visit to Los Angeles for a series of baseball meetings. Conjecture was that Rickey urged him to halt his play.
If Robinson had wanted to pursue pro basketball, he would have had to wait two more years, when the barrier was broken in 1948 in the pre-NBA years by the Dayton Rens of the National Basketball League. The NBA was integrated in 1950. But Robinson couldn’t have predicted that. Over the years pro basketball officials tried to get Robinson to switch sports. Abe Saperstein of the Harlem Globetrotters offered Robinson $10,000 to play with the team at a time when the Major League minimum for rookies was $5,000. Robinson turned him down. Robinson also got a pro basketball offer from the Canton Cushites, an all-black team that featured future Pro Football Hall of Fame member Marion Motley, who along with Washington and Strode broke the NFL color barrier, and Larry Doby, who would become the second African American in Major League Baseball and the first i
n the American League. Robinson declined that offer too.
Robinson’s fate with the Dodgers was in limbo. Nine of the top ten hitters in the International League in 1946 had been called up, and Robinson was still waiting to hear. Rickey was in no hurry. “I have made every move with great deliberation,” he told a reporter. “If Robinson merits being with the Dodgers, I’d prefer to have the players want him, rather than force him on the players. I want Robinson to have the fairest chance in the world without the slightest bit of prejudice.”
To ensure that Robinson would avoid the racism during spring training that he had come under in the spring of 1946, Rickey decided to work out the Royals and the Dodgers away from the South. The Dodgers prepared for the season with seven games against Montreal in Havana and three in Panama, finishing up with three exhibition games against the New York Yankees in Ebbets Field. Even in Havana, however, Robinson and three other black players were relegated to a third-tier hotel that had no restaurant. One of the players, a future Dodger star, Don Newcombe, called the hotel a place only a cockroach could love. The food in Havana restaurants was abysmal, and Robinson became ill, probably with colitis, which caused him to miss games. The black players were about to complain to Rickey about the accommodations when they discovered he had placed them there to avoid problems with the white players, who were ensconced in a luxury hotel.
Before Rickey made a decision on Robinson’s future, he wanted to take strides to make the path smoother. He met with black leaders in Brooklyn out of concern that the black community might go overboard in welcoming Robinson as he broke the color barrier. He also was concerned that white fans might stay away from the ballpark if blacks became too rowdy in celebrating their new hero. Some black leaders felt insulted by Rickey’s concerns, but most agreed to try to keep blacks under control. One slogan they adopted was “Don’t spoil Jackie’s chances.”
An informal poll of reporters covering spring training thought that Robinson would not be in the starting lineup. They reasoned that there was no place for Robinson to play because Pee Wee Reese was a fixture at shortstop and Eddie Stanky was holding down second base.
After leaving Havana, Robinson was asked to play first base, an indication that he was too good to keep out of the lineup. Like most athletic endeavors in which Robinson competed, his moving into a new position proved no problem. But he wasn’t happy about it. He wondered whether Rickey was trying to undermine his chances of playing in the big leagues, at least that year. Robinson felt he was under enough stress without learning a new position. Rickey, however, had greater concerns. Stanky may have been the best second baseman in the league. In addition, Rickey didn’t want it to look as if a black man was taking a white man’s job. He also thought that Robinson stood less chance of being intentionally spiked at first base than at second.
Rickey told Robinson that he had to prove his worth to the Dodgers during a series of upcoming exhibition games:
I want you to be a whirling demon against the Dodgers. I want you to concentrate, to hit that ball, to get on base by any means necessary. I want you to run wild, to steal the pants off them, to be the most conspicuous player on the field—but conspicuous only because of the kind of baseball you’re playing. Not only will you impress the Dodger players, but the stories that the newspapermen send back to the Brooklyn and New York newspapers will help create demand on the part of the fans that you be brought up to the majors.
In the seven games he played Robinson batted .625 and stole seven bases. Still no word.
If Robinson was anxious over the decision, he didn’t let on. He told white sportswriters that he wanted to play for the Dodgers only if the players wanted him. “I wouldn’t want to feel that I was doing anything that would keep them from winning,” he said. And that was indeed a problem. A New York Sun reporter wrote, “The only thing keeping Robinson off the Dodgers now plainly is the attitude of the players.” Another reporter wrote for the New York Post that “among the majority of Dodgers there is a positive feeling of antipathy towards Robinson as a possible teammate.”
Unbeknown to any of the Dodger coaches or brass, several players were passing around a petition to protest playing with a black man. Leading the uprising among the Southerners were Dixie Walker, who was Brooklyn’s best player; Kirby Higbe, the Dodgers’ best pitcher; Bobby Bragan, a third-string catcher (he later became the manager of three Major League teams, all of which had black players, including Roberto Clemente, Larry Doby, and Hank Aaron); and pitcher Hugh Casey. A Northerner, outfield Carl Furillo, also joined the protest. Team captain Pee Wee Reese, who grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, refused to sign the petition, even though Robinson might be trying to take his job. “If he’s man enough to take my job, he deserves it,” Reese said. Reese’s friends in Kentucky told him that a “good Southern boy” should refrain from playing with a black player. Reese decided they were wrong and remarked that there was “room enough in baseball for both of us.” Apparently Higbe had had a few too many beers when he agreed to sign the petition and began to feel uncomfortable with the protest. He leaked word of the petition to Dodger officials. Said Reese: “You can hate a man for many reasons. Color is not one of them.”
The team was in Panama when the Dodgers’ bantam rooster manager, Leo Durocher, got wind of the protest. Durocher called a late-night team meeting during which he laid into his players. “I don’t care if this guy is white, black, green, or has stripes like a fucking zebra,” he bellowed at his players. “If I say he plays, he plays. He can put an awful lot of fucking money in our pockets. Take your petition and shove it up your ass. This guy can take us to the World Series, and so far we haven’t won dick.” Rickey also called the dissenting players into his office and told them straight on that if any one of them objected to playing with a black man, he would be traded. He told Furillo that if he didn’t want to play with Robinson, he could “go back to pounding railroad ties in Pennsylvania.” Furillo chose playing. Durocher knew Robinson’s value to the team. He later remarked, “You want a guy that comes to play. But [Robinson] didn’t just come to play. He came to beat you. He came to stuff the damn bat right up your ass.”
While Rickey was preparing to announce that Robinson would be joining the Dodgers, he received a shock when Commissioner Chandler announced that Durocher, one of Robinson’s biggest boosters, was being suspended for a year for hanging around with gamblers and other “unsavory” characters. While the suspension left Rickey without a manager, he also realized the hubbub over Durocher would take some of the attention away from Robinson.
The announcement about Robinson’s promotion came in the middle of an exhibition game between the Dodgers and Montreal in Ebbets Field, which was packed with thousands of African Americans. Outside the ballpark vendors sold souvenirs that said, “I’m for Robinson.”
Still the move created a furor. No sooner had Robinson’s promotion to the Dodgers become public than hate mail and threats began pouring in. “Get out of the game or be killed,” threatened one. Another claimed, “Get out or your wife will die.”
24
Blending In
“When they start talking about me . . . as a Negro, they are certainly not intending to flatter me, but they are patting me on the back, as far as I’m concerned.”
—Jackie Robinson
The Dodgers were facing a number of questions about their chances for the upcoming season, none bigger than what to do about Robinson. His fate “is as easy to handle as a fistful of fish hooks,” wrote Arthur Daley in the New York Times. That was soon to be resolved.
The twenty-eight year-old rookie would be playing first base for the improving Dodgers. Robinson’s teammates were comprised 60 percent of Southerners. The New York Times ran a photo of Robinson with two Dodgers on either side of him. Only one was a player; the rest were coaches. Robinson can be seen smiling at interim manager Clyde Sukeforth. The lone player was 6-foot-6 Howie “Stretch” Schultz, who lost his first base job to Robinson.
I
n his first game at first base, an exhibition, Robinson was hitless but drove in three runs and played flawlessly in the field. The Dodgers won 14–6. The next day Robinson drove in the Dodgers’ only run with a single in an 8–1 Yankee victory. Robinson singled in the third game, a loss to the Yankees 10–9. Those were the only two hits he managed during the three-game series. The series drew almost eighty thousand fans, an all-time exhibition high, thanks in part to the large turnout of black fans.
Robinson was unsure what to expect once the season began. He vowed to keep his promise to Rickey by turning the other cheek to any racial baiting he might receive. The atmosphere had been somewhat defused by the three preceding games against the Yankees. If anything, his regular-season debut was almost anticlimactic. Rickey’s charge now was to find a manager to take over the season in the wake of Durocher’s suspension. Two games into the season, both of which the Dodgers won under Sukeforth, Rickey summoned Burt Shotton, a sixty-two-year-old retired manager from Florida, to take the Dodgers’ reins.
Shotton was perfect for the job, although he was in direct contrast to Durocher. His character and integrity were beyond reproach. His calm demeanor fit well considering the upheaval going on in the organization and on the field. Said Reese about Shotton, “I know where he is. . . . He is in the dugout in full charge. The fans may not see him, but we see him. We know he is there.” As for Robinson’s presence on the team, Red Barber, the Dodgers’ radio announcer, noted that Shotton “saw to it that serious internal trouble didn’t break loose.”
The Black Bruins Page 21
