Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood
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Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520964143 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Stealing the Show
African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood
By Miriam J. Petty
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96414-3
CHAPTER 1
Hattie McDaniel
"Landmark of an Era"
Hattie McDaniel's biggest Hollywood success — her performance in and Oscar for the American epic Gone with the Wind (1939) — occurred at the very end of the 1930s, bringing the decade to a close on a decidedly mixed note with respect to African American performances and presences in Hollywood film. McDaniel's work in Gone with the Wind both catapulted her to fame and simultaneously reinforced her "unfitness" for any other kind of role (not that any other sort was ever offered her). As "Mammy," McDaniel embodied a historical and cultural myth of slavery and its interpersonal racial relations, as well as a contemporary social reality: the post-slavery predominance of domestic work as the way many African American women earned a living. Her win would also set the model for a vexed tradition of Black Academy Awardees whose roles reinforced the parameters of well-worn racialized, gendered, and sexual-cultural stereotypes.
Born in Wichita on June 10, 1893, Hattie McDaniel was the youngest of her parents' seven children. Throughout her young life, her family was serially dogged by poverty. McDaniel's father, Henry, was a disabled veteran of the Civil War, with injuries that made it difficult for him to maintain a paying job. Moreover, the U.S. government refused his repeated applications for a pension for nearly twenty years, despite his military service to the Union Army from 1863 until 1866. The family left Wichita for Denver when Hattie was five years old, but their privations continued. Hattie's mother, Susan McDaniel, also suffered ongoing ill health, such that all of the McDaniel children were needed to work in order to augment the family's income. McDaniel biographer Jill Watts writes that as early as Hattie's toddling years, "her mother took her along to work in white homes. There she learned to cook, clean, tend children, do laundry, and serve meals properly." From Susan McDaniel's perspective, it was likely that "her daughter's life would not be much different from her own ... society would compel Hattie McDaniel to follow her into domestic service someday. It was imperative that little Hattie McDaniel have the proper skills."
Yet Hattie, like her siblings Sam, Otis, and Etta, had a talent for entertaining. A lively dancer, she was also a speaker and a singer with a ringing alto voice. A recitation that she performed at fifteen for an oratorical contest staged by the Women's Christian Temperance Union is often cited as a point of origin for her flair for the dramatic arts. And McDaniel did make her own way onto the minstrel and vaudeville stages before audiences in Denver, both with her family members and as the head of her own all-woman troupe, the McDaniel Sisters Company. Their performances were extremely popular, drawing predominantly African American crowds and receiving positive notices in Denver's Black newspapers. Like her brothers and sisters, McDaniel hoped that entertaining might provide her with an escape from the cycles of poverty and menial work that blighted her childhood and entrapped so many other African Americans. Yet because of her race and her gender, she found that she could not expect steady work as a performer, and always relied upon the domestic work she had been schooled in so young to sustain her when no other options were available. Clearly, she had ample experience to back up the declaration so often attributed to her, about her preference for playing a maid to being a maid. When her performances were left to her own imagination, she crafted other, far different worlds to inhabit and enact. But on Hollywood screens, the distance between "playing" and "being" probably seemed somewhat semantic — other than the substantial difference in pay.
Over the course of her Hollywood career, McDaniel worked to manage the impact and meaning of her star persona in ways that anticipated the struggle for visibility and relevance with which later Black would-be stars would find themselves saddled. Her efforts reflect the complex implications of stealing the show for African American performers and audiences. As a result of her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, McDaniel was caught between competing cultural conversations about Black performers in general, and about African American womanhood in particular. I argue that as GWTW's Mammy, McDaniel created a kind of filmic monument to the mammy figure as glorified by the southern white women who propagated the popular "Lost Cause" ideology of the early twentieth century. Yet in public discourse, McDaniel attempted to reimagine the character along ideological lines that reflected notions of respectability as articulated by African American church- and clubwomen who wanted to claim autonomy over their own lives and public images. For this latter half of the chapter's work, I explicate McDaniel's Gone with the Wind performance in the context of Siegfried Giedion's theories of monumentality as well as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's work on African American clubwomen and the phenomenon she terms "the culture of respectability." Thinking in terms both of how others characterized McDaniel, and of how she attempted to influence such interpretations in the interest of her success and reputation, provides a layered and polyvalent sense of the images and import of Black performers of this era.
Performance and ability are at the center of what stealing the show has traditionally meant for actors of stage and screen. Indeed, among Gone with the Wind's talented and celebrated cast, the bar for what constituted a credible performance was significantly elevated, and McDaniel's own initiative and agency were evident throughout the film's production. David O. Selznick's perfectionistic tweaking of the script and incessant last-minute changes gave performers like McDaniel far more latitude to improvise and self-direct. The film's on-set historian, Wilbur Kurtz, recalled McDaniel's dramatic independence and autonomy in the face of such continuous alterations, noting that "Selznick could hand her a part of the script and count on her to know exactly what to do with it. ... She even threw in certain business without any direction from the script or from the director." Turning specifically to the very last scene featuring Mammy in GWTW, I argue that as McDaniel's Mammy ushers Melanie up an ornate flight of stairs to intervene with Rhett and Scarlett after their daughter Bonnie has died, she performs her role with a degree of power and finesse that intersects with the myth of the mammy figure and the diegesis of GWTW itself to create a dynamic, medium-specific mammy monument.
A MONUMENTAL PERFORMANCE
Up the Stairs with Mammy
The palatial staircase of Scarlett and Rhett's Atlanta home is the site of a handful of pivotal moments in GWTW. This is the staircase up which an angry Rhett carries Scarlett to their bedroom, for a rape scene that occurs offscreen. When Scarlett becomes pregnant from the rape, she inadvertently tumbles down this same staircase, miscarrying the pregnancy, just after Rhett has made an ugly joke about her "having an accident." Yet when viewers refer to GWTW's "staircase scene," more often than not they are referencing a scene that takes place a scant twenty minutes before the end of the film, which features neither Scarlett nor Rhett, but instead Mammy and Melanie Wilkes. It is a scene that takes place directly after Scarlett and Rhett's only daughter, Bonnie, has been killed in a riding accident. Mammy has asked Melanie for her help, and as they climb the stairs from the foyer to the living rooms upstairs, Mammy relates to Melanie the tragic aftermath of Bonnie's death, stressing its impact upon "Mister Rhett." For contemporary viewers and critics, the staircase scene was the clear standout of McDaniel's work on GWTW. Margaret Mitchell herself was quoted in the Atlanta Constitution declaring that "the scene in which Mammy walked up the stairs with Melanie after Bonnie's death was one of the finest I ever saw." When she wrote a personal note to McDaniel nearly two years later, she admitted that "I do not weep easily but now I have wept five times at seeing you and Miss de Havilland go up the long stairs." Hollywood columnist Jimmie Fidler's oft-reprinted lament about the limits that race placed upon McDaniel's future prospects referenced this sequence. Similarly Variety's reviewer asserted that as she climbed the stairs with de Havilland, McDaniel "contributed the most moving scene in the film." In the Los Angeles Times, film critic Edwin Schallert declared that this scene especially made "a deep impress." GWTW producer David O. Selznick concurred, calling McDaniel's Mammy "one of the great supporting performances of all time," and pronouncing the staircase sequence "easily the high emotional point of the film."
For an understanding of the power of McDaniel's performance in this sequence, it is important to consider that the staircase scene joins together three elements: a powerful watershed moment of the film's narrative, a formal and performative tour de force from McDaniel, and a central American symbol of race, class and gender — Mammy — through which Black women's bodies and lives had been consistently objectified and obfuscated. In the pages that follow, I argue that all three of these elements converge to give the staircase scene its potency, and to make it an essential part of McDaniel's filmic mammy monument.
As Selznick's comment suggests, Mammy and Melanie meet at a crucial narrative juncture — an expositional moment in which we learn of the depth of Rhett Butler's devastation at losing his daughter, Bonnie, and the shattering effect that the child's death has had upon Scarlett and Rhett's already estranged relationship. As Mammy remarks, "It like to turn my blood cold, the things they say to one another." This scene also provides the occasion for us to learn of Melanie's own grave illness. Though Mammy successfully importunes her to intervene with the grief-crazed Rhett, Melanie subsequently emerges from his room-turned-sepulcher, ashen-faced and thoroughly drained from her efforts at convincing him to allow Bonnie's funeral to take place. When she faints away at Mammy's feet, Melanie's death is effectively foreshadowed, especially given Mammy's declaration to Melanie — meant as praise — that "the angel flies on your side, Miss Mellie." This four-minute exchange between Mammy and Melanie sets the stage for the story of Gone with the Wind to slide from denouement to conclusion. The tragedy of Bonnie's death will in short order give way to a succession of others: Melanie's death, the death of Scarlett's dream that Ashley ever really loved her — or anyone but Melanie — and finally, the death of Scarlett and Rhett's marriage, complete with Rhett's abandonment of Scarlett and his now-famous declaration that he does not "give a damn" about her any longer. The plot of the film turns heavily on this mournful exchange, which communicates the calamity of Bonnie's death and heralds the losses to follow.
There can be no doubting that McDaniel recognized how significant this scene was to the film's narrative, and that she especially understood it as Mammy's most important dramatic moment. She spent most of the day of filming and the day before repeatedly rehearsing it offstage, while the crew set up the intricate crane and lighting. McDaniel uses this very key, solemn, legato walking scene to showcase her nuanced, powerful acting. As she invites Melanie into the house, cloaked from its doorsills in blue mourning for the much-loved Bonnie Blue Butler, Mammy herself becomes a physical and performative symbol of grief. She is fully costumed in jet black clothing from head to toe, with her dark face shining beneath the black headtie that neatly caps her head. When she is fully lit, her image nevertheless gives the effect of being cast in heavy shadow. Even the handkerchief that Mammy carries is an exceptionally large black piece of cloth that she fretfully presses to her face to staunch her tears. The monochromatic, dark visual of Mammy's image is strongly contrasted by Melanie's white skin and by the long ivory lace scarf that Melanie wears draped over the front of her dark dress.
McDaniel also makes Mammy's voice tremulous, faltering and more treble than usual, not the gruff alto shout she has used to chasten and order the residents of Tara in past encounters. Even as she ages through the latter part of the film, Mammy's voice maintains its authority and grandiosity, for instance, when she proclaims the "happy day" of Bonnie's birth. By contrast, in this scene McDaniel adds a sense of both strain and restraint to her voice, which wavers as she begins to explain why she has called for Melanie's help. This tense quality underscores Mammy's anxiety about revealing intimacies about "her" family. The bitter recriminations that have raged between Rhett and Scarlett since Bonnie's death are shameful, yet Mammy is determined to share them with Melanie, the only person decent and trustworthy enough to hear them without judgment, and with the capacity to soften both Rhett and Scarlett's hearts.
McDaniel's labored tread on the staircase also reminds us of Mammy's advanced age, and of the heavy burden that she carries in this final act of supporting "her" family. McDaniel charges her voice with emotion, emphasizing particular words with adjustments of volume, pitch, and intensity. For instance, when Mammy recounts that "when Dr. Meade say her [Bonnie's] neck broke, Mr. Rhett grab his gun, and run out there and shoot that po' pony," McDaniel stifles a sob, her voice raising in pitch and breaking somewhat on the word "broke." She manages the same effect on the word "shoot," and stresses "po' pony" as though to emphasize Mammy's empathy for both the animal as an innocent casualty of the tragedy, and for the anguish behind Rhett's senseless lashing out. Melanie attempts to check the torrent of terrible revelations midway through the sequence, saying softly, "Stop, Mammy. Don't tell me any more." McDaniel pauses at length, punctuating the beat with choked sobs; Mammy is seemingly resigned to tell as she must, in this effort to restore some semblance of sanity and decency to the household. As they near the top of the stairs, and the terrible height of her story, McDaniel delivers her lines breathlessly — perhaps Mammy is winded from the long walk up, but also fighting her own distress and horror at what has taken place. "And then this evening," she gasps raggedly, in a voice uncharacteristically high and tremulous, "Miss Scarlett, she shout through the door, and she say the funeral set for tomorrow morning. And he says 'You try that, and I kills you tomorrow.'" As she reports this, McDaniel effects a subtly accurate imitation of the voice of Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Even through her mandated use of Hollywoodized Black dialect, her appropriation of Gable's manner and intonation is evident and adds an element of pathos and gloom that communicates the seriousness of the situation and of Butler's very real threat. She repeats the same action with Vivian Leigh/Scarlett's voice in this sequence, when she tells Melanie that Scarlett has called Rhett a murderer, demanding, "You gimme my baby what you kilt!"
Charlene Regester has perceptively observed that as Mammy, McDaniel "articulates multiple voices" in GWTW. Yet ironically, McDaniel's understated appropriation of these voices reinforces Mammy's narrative function as a medium, a channel through which the concerns and interest of the family for which she works are delivered. This function is not solely or even primarily due to the expository nature of this sequence; indeed, this channeling is Mammy's role throughout the film, a role sometimes characterized as the film's "Greek chorus," or even, as Regester argues, as a ventriloquist for Scarlett's "conscience."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stealing the Show by Miriam J. Petty. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Stealing the Show ... or the Shoat?,
1. Hattie McDaniel: "Landmark of an Era",
2. Bill Robinson and Black Children's Spectatorship: "Every Kid in Colored America Is His Pal",
3. Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington: Delilah, Peola, and the Perfect Double Act,
4. Lincoln Perry's "Problematic Stardom": Stepin Fetchit Steals the Shoat,
Conclusion: "Time Now to Stop, Actors",
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,