We’re in the last reels of a claustrophobically black-and-white world. The film: “Alice Adams,” the director George Stevens’s 1935 adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel. Determined to marry up, Alice (Katharine Hepburn) has invited a potential beau, the well-heeled Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), to her modest home for supper. Also present are Alice’s parents, who appear to be as dingy as the worn paper that covers the walls of the Adamses’ furniture-stuffed rooms.
Desperate to disguise—but how?—her straitened circumstances, Alice tries to dress everything up for Arthur’s delectation. Perfuming her banal chatter with French phrases, Alice makes catty reference to the family’s “domestique,” Malena Burns (Hattie McDaniel), who performs her duties with a kind of narcotized deliberateness. Short and rotund, Malena has dark-black skin that gleams with Vaseline and malice. When Alice’s father—whose starched shirtfront keeps popping open—disgraces himself by dropping a Brussels sprout on the dining-room table, Malena scoops it up with a big spoon and carts it away in an even larger pan.
Before her death, in 1952, at the age of fifty-nine, McDaniel played a hundred or so saucy maids, slaves, and cooks, but her Malena stands apart—even from the role of Mammy, in “Gone with the Wind” (1939), for which she won a best-supporting-actress Oscar. (McDaniel was the first black actress to be so recognized; Whoopi Goldberg, half a century later, was the next.) Malena, with no more than two lines of speech (unlike most blacks in the movies of the era, she says “the” instead of “de”), chewing gum, her maid’s cap drooping, could just as well be one of the peasants at the start of Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”: a little caustic, if not downright sour, dreaming of the land. Malena warns Mrs. Adams that serving a hot meal on such a hot night won’t do; when she announces dinner, it is in a rough, booming voice; she opens the rusty French doors separating the kitchen from the dining room with the force of a graceless military assault. And when, in the middle of the meal, Alice “rings” for Malena, she removes the plates while Mr. Adams is in mid-slurp.
Still, McDaniel wouldn’t have taken kindly to the Brechtian comparison. A creature formed by the mores of Hollywood, McDaniel played by its rules. During the huac years, for example, she and a number of other black actors in the Screen Actors Guild signed a public statement that denounced Communism but stated unequivocally that no black actor would be dumb enough to fall under Communism’s sway. This gesture should be looked at in two ways. As a “race” woman, McDaniel had a certain proprietary interest in the blacks in the movie industry. By the time she signed that affidavit, she had become, for some, a glitzed-out benefactress, offering advice and gifts in equal measure to the less fortunate. On the other hand, McDaniel was a successful actress, who understood that her public image was all-important. She upheld the industry’s values and put on a good clean show, gradually killing off the rebellious Malena character and becoming a near-parody of complacency and sweet agreeableness.
Judging from Jill Watts’s “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood” (Amistad; $27.95), it was a long trek to that Oscar podium. Born in Wichita, Kansas, on June 10, 1893, McDaniel was the youngest of Henry and Susan McDaniel’s ten children. Henry and Susan had both been slaves. (Henry was the property of John McDaniel, a farmer in Lincoln County, Tennessee.) When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, in 1863, Henry, who was around twenty-five, joined Company C, the 12th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, at the Elk River. In the service, McDaniel suffered frostbite in both legs. After a mortar exploded near his head, shattering his jaw, he lost hearing in his right ear and was plagued by headaches and by ringing in both ears for the rest of his life.
With Reconstruction, Southern blacks came to symbolize for many whites a bitter loss of economic power. In an effort to escape the racial epithets, random violence, and low wages, Henry and Susan went to Kansas, a more tolerant state. Eventually, they landed in Wichita, where blacks were able to own small businesses. But Henry’s health problems and lack of money kept the McDaniels moving. In 1898, the family settled in Denver, Colorado, where romantics mined for gold, and sometimes struck it rich.
“I knew that I could sing and dance,” Hattie McDaniel once recalled. “I was doing it so much that my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop.” As a Christian, Susan disapproved of show business, but Hattie had a champion: her brother Otis, who was twelve years older. Like many black children whose parents had come of age in what James Baldwin called “the old country,” Otis had an immigrant’s grit. A performer and a nascent impresario, he emulated the legendary black entertainer Bert Williams, who was among the first blacks to be featured in white vaudeville. When Williams did the cakewalk, his infectious charm helped make the dance a national fad. (Like the Charleston of the nineteen-twenties, the cakewalk was invented by blacks to parody the white styles of dance.) In 1909, Otis wrote “Champion of the Freedman,” a satire of the Back to Africa Movement and other post-Civil War emigration plans, with Hattie playing the daughter of an investor in an African repatriation scheme who “had more money than sense.” A Colorado reviewer said that the play “drew a good house,” and was performed “to the satisfaction of all present.” Shortly after “Champion of the Freedman” was staged, the fifteen-year-old Hattie quit high school, while Otis and another brother, Sam, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where they established the McDaniel Brothers stock company. Hattie appeared with her brothers’ troupe from time to time but also started to build a reputation on her own, as a “singing-comedienne” who organized minstrels, played Mammy in a head rag, and sang in blackface in front of Denver’s black population at church gatherings, socials, and tent shows. But McDaniel couldn’t make a living just from shucking and jiving, and was forced to work as a domestic.
In the feisty Mammy, McDaniel had an instantly recognizable commodity. But, like many female performers, she needed a man to sell it. In Denver, she met the composer and musician George Morrison, the husband of a friend. Together they formed an act, and, in the summer of 1924, they were booked on the mostly white, second-tier Pantages circuit, touring the Midwest and the West Coast. According to Watts, the act opened with a song from “Pagliacci.” Then McDaniel, introduced as “the female Bert Williams,” came out, and alternated “comedic banter with blues songs and dynamic dance numbers.”
But fame continued to elude McDaniel, and by May of 1925 she was back in Denver, once again supporting herself by fluffing sheets and folding towels. In the ensuing years, she moved to Chicago and continued to go on the road when she could, but the demand for vaudeville was dying. People wanted fantasy on a larger scale: they wanted movies. The Depression was encroaching. McDaniel had been twice married—first to a pianist and next to a laborer and bigamist. Her parents had both died. Meanwhile, her brother Sam was prospering in Los Angeles, having secured work as a featured actor on the “Optimistic Do-Nuts,” a weekly radio revue. (He went on to have a fairly successful movie career as well.) In 1931, Hattie set out for the Coast.
Watts teaches history and film studies at the California State University, San Marcos, and has written biographies of Mae West and Father Divine. Although her treatment of McDaniel’s life is somewhat awkwardly written and academic—more a thesis than a biography—she has done thorough research. (A broader look at blacks in the early days of Hollywood can be found in Thomas Cripps’s masterly 1977 study, “Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942,” and Donald Bogle’s 1973 “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films.”) The most interesting character to emerge from Watts’s investigation of McDaniel’s time in Hollywood is Charles Butler. One of the few blacks working behind the scenes in Hollywood, Butler had been a casting director since 1926, when the Central Casting Corporation—which was overseen by the Motion Pictures Producers Association—hired him to scout for black actors in films. Sometimes, for a crowd scene, he would gather blacks from Central Avenue, in South Central, the black area of Los Angeles where McDaniel settled shortly after her arrival. Black actors grumbled about Butler’s close ties to, and seeming identification with, the white power structure that perpetuated the stereotypes they were forced to play. That didn’t stop McDaniel from presenting herself to Butler as an affable, hardworking younger sister who needed his advice and protection.
McDaniel was a type that Butler could cast: as a servant. (She sometimes added padding, so that she appeared even doughier.) Her starting salary was seven dollars and fifty cents a day, an income that she supplemented with work as a laundress, and, later, with guest appearances on the “Optimistic Do-Nuts.” Soon she was given a radio show of her own, called “Hi Hat Hattie and Her Boys,” where she sang and told jokes. In 1934, John Ford hired McDaniel to play a maid, Dilsey, in a Will Rogers vehicle, “Judge Priest.” She was directed to be sassy, perhaps in an effort to draw out the low-key Rogers. The movie generated McDaniel’s first mainstream press. The gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote, “There is a colored woman, Hattie McDaniel, who sings Negro spirituals as I have seldom heard them sung. Rogers himself joins in and you’ll love it.” By the mid-nineteen-thirties, McDaniel was finally able to support herself solely through her screen work, and it was then that she delivered what is probably her best remembered punch line: “I would rather make seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid than be one.”
McDaniel was the Mammy everyone could love. And as she flourished she returned the affection. She bought a grand house in West Adams—the singer Lena Horne recalled that it had “the best of everything”—and, at Christmas, filled it with gifts for poor black children. (She never had any children of her own.) She also took out ads in white publications, counting her blessings. Her good will toward the industry culminated in her Oscar for the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind.” George Cukor, the film’s first director, hadn’t wanted to cast her. Like Susan Myrick, a journalist and close friend of Mitchell’s, whom the film’s producer, David Selznick, had hired as a consultant on Southern culture and practices, Cukor believed that McDaniel lacked dignity. But Selznick prevailed, and McDaniel got the part.
Unlike the disgruntled New York-trained actress Butterfly McQueen, who also appeared in “Gone with the Wind,” McDaniel courted Myrick. (McQueen once recalled in an interview that McDaniel told her she would never make it in Hollywood because she complained too much.) Myrick subsequently wrote of McDaniel in her column for the Macon Telegraph, “She says Yassum and No’m to me in a way that makes me mighty homesick for my Mary Brown back in Macon.” McDaniel endeared herself to Clark Gable by enduring his practical jokes with a smile.
McDaniel managed to make Mammy a character and a characterization: she was a portrait of a time long past. It was not an image that appealed to everyone. When the film was released, Walter White, then the head of the N.A.A.C.P., protested its depiction of black life in the antebellum South. As a black, McDaniel was not allowed to attend the première, in Atlanta, though Martin Luther King, Jr., who was then nine years old, did. He was in the all-black chorus that sang in the movie theatre before the lights went down and the curtains went up on Tara.
Nonetheless, McDaniel accepted the Oscar tearfully, on behalf of herself and her “race,” and set about to honor her newly signed contract with Selznick. Even as a celebrated actress, she was offered few meaningful roles; frustrated, she insisted on making personal appearances in Los Angeles theatres frequented by whites. In the shows she devised, she would don her Mammy costume, and sing “My Mammy,” a song that Al Jolson had made famous. It was how she survived. In the 1985 documentary “Brown Sugar,” Lena Horne recalls that when she arrived in Hollywood (she had a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that specified she’d never play a maid) “the one person who was wonderful to me was Miss Hattie McDaniel, the great, great black star. . . . She said to me, ‘I have worn two hats because I have a family who I have taken care of very beautifully.’ And she said, ‘I’m a fine black Mammy, but I am Hattie McDaniel in my house. . . .You’ve got two babies, and you gotta work.’ She said, ‘Just do what you have to do.’”
Often, for McDaniel, this meant alienating the black community. In 1946, she appeared as Aunt Tempy in Disney’s partially animated feature “Song of the South.” Even after Emancipation, Aunt Tempy, like the other slaves, is content to stay on the plantation. White said that the film was “a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.” Some black theatres refused to show it. Writing in the Times, the film critic Bosley Crowther addressed Walt Disney directly: “The master and slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn . . . one might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. . . . Put down that mint julep, Mr. Disney. It doesn’t become your youthful face.” Despite the negative criticism, McDaniel defended the film. “The story of Uncle Remus . . . is a warm, moving tale of the creative genius of the Negro slave who brought understanding and happiness into the lives of all those he met,” she said to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “To the entire countryside he stood for wisdom, kindness, and faith. He understood human nature, whether shrouded in a white or black skin.”
Toward the end of her life, McDaniel told a white journalist, “Well, I’ve played everything but the harp.” Nearly broke because of her largesse, she had to move out of her house. (She had been left by her third husband, a dodgy businessman, in 1945, and by her fourth, an interior designer who was probably gay, a few years after that.) Ill with breast cancer, but still uncomplaining, she retired to the industry-supported Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. She was the first black to be so honored. ♦
