Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  The advertising for Micheaux’s fourth film, The Symbol of the Unconquered , featured his name in large type above the title, while promising customers the “annihilation” of “the insidious Ku Klux Klan.”

  Micheaux prided himself on launching newcomers as stars, and for a time in the early 1920s the lovely and charming Shingzie Howard (seen here in a 1928 photograph from the Baltimore Afro-American ) was a low-cost substitute for Evelyn Preer.

  Paul Robeson played dual roles in Body and Soul, but stirred the most excitement—and controversy—as a lying and murdering (false) preacher.

  Robeson also played his own twin, the noble and hardworking brother who is romancing Julia Theresa Russell—another novice actress, and the sister of Micheaux’s future wife, Alice B. Russell.

  Photographs of Alice B. Russell are exceptionally rare; there is no known photo of her with Micheaux. Here she is, ten years after their wedding, in her greatest role in one of her husband’s films: the self-sacrificing seamstress of God’s Stepchildren.

  Micheaux heroes had to be tall, handsome, with strong jaws and virtuous qualities. One of his longest-lasting leading men—perhaps Micheaux’s favorite—was Lorenzo Tucker (seen here in a stage photograph in 1932), who was initially billed as “The Black Valentino.”

  Micheaux’s films drew from his own life experiences, and none was more audacious than 1929’s The Wages of Sin , which dramatized the sins of his brother and the siblings’ bitter breakup as partners. The dapper Lorenzo Tucker played the Micheaux figure, while the more sinister-looking William A. Clayton Jr., seen here seducing Katherine Noisette, played the Swan character.

  Critics pilloried 1931’s A Daughter of the Congo as shoddily made and cartoonish. This lobby card shows a scene with Salem Tutt Whitney (seated) and Lorenzo Tucker.

  The quality of publicity materials improved with infusion of Schiffman-Brecher money. This was one poster for Micheaux’s first “talkie”—and the first full-length sound “race picture”— The Exile.

  Micheaux (at right) plays one of the detectives who, early in the story, arrests the wrong man for the murder at the heart of Lem Hawkins’ Confession.

  A scene that closely followed testimony in the actual Leo Frank case, with lowly worker Alex Lovejoy (left) forced to write confession notes for factory-owner Andrew Bishop.

  Micheaux films sometimes acquired different titles for non-Harlem audiences, and Lem Hawkins’ Confession was known as Murder in Harlem south of the Mason-Dixon Line. This poster features (left to right) the well-known Clarence Brooks, the former Lafayette Player Laura Bowman (the mother who implicates her son as the true villain), and Micheaux’s newest leading lady, the sweetly earnest Dorothy Van Engle. Lem Hawkins himself (billed here as “Alec Lovejoy”) is not pictured.

  In this lobby card from Temptation, Ethel Moses, playing a nude artist’s model, shows the vavoom that brought police out to quell excited moviegoers when she made personal appearances on behalf of the Micheaux film. Risqué nudity spiced up many of his pictures, though he wasn’t always able to sneak these scenes past the censors.

  Lorenzo Tucker (seated) appraising artist’s model Ethel Moses in a scene from Temptation, one of the many Micheaux films “lost” today.

  A poster for Swing , a musical piffle centered, like many Micheaux films of the mid-1930s, on a show full of beautiful chorus girls and revue acts.

  From left: Hazel Diaz, the too-easygoing Carman Newsome, and Ethel Moses in a scene from Micheaux’s 1939 sound version of T. S. Stribling’s anti–Jim Crow novel Birthright.

  One of the last known photographs of Micheaux (seated), surrounded by the staff of Harlem’s M.O.W.M. Bookstore at a spring 1947 autograph party, probably for his final novel, The Masquerade.

  The two Roanoke crowd-pleasers, The Dungeon and The Virgin of Seminole, gave the Micheaux company a temporary injection of cash. Sadly, both Shingzie Howard-William E. Fountaine vehicles are “lost” today.

  The summer of 1922 was hard on the race-picture business. Richard E. Norman, the white producer Micheaux admired, was already thinking, “Negro pictures have lost their novelty.” A flu epidemic kept audiences away from theaters for much of the year, and many theaters shuttered. The flu slump hurt Hollywood too, but the drop in income was devastating to race-picture makers, who depended on a smaller number of constantly floundering theaters.

  “There are about 354 Negro theatres in the United States (many now closed) scattered over 28 states,” Norman estimated in a January 1922 letter. “Eighty five per cent of these theatres (showing race films) have an average seating capacity of but 250.”

  Between censorship fees and the “graft” customarily handed over to censors and theater-owners, the costs of doing business on the race-picture circuit had risen prohibitively. In Chicago, O. C. Hammond was breaking up his chain, which had been a safe haven for Micheaux pictures. Some of the theaters were sold to independent management, and the biggest and best theater in the city’s Black Belt, the elite Vendome, announced a policy of booking only “high-class” Hollywood fare. Hollywood movies with marquee names “pack them in,” according to Norman, who was having the same problems in Chicago as Micheaux, “and the reason is that these pictures have ran for months at downtown white theatres and the negros [sic] are crazy to see what the white people are crazy over, and as the pictures have been well advertised before, they do business.”

  Micheaux told Norman, “Chicago is a dead one [as a market] and we will have to pass it up for the present.”

  Norman struck out for nearby Gary, Indiana, a predominantly white city. He tried to fast-talk his way into a mixed theater called the Broadway, which “was not a negro theater and there is no negro theater there [in Gary],” according to Norman, from a letter sent to his brother. The Broadway “had tried a couple of Michaux’s [sic] films to attract negros and they did not go over. They cater to less than 3% negros.”

  Another negative factor was the “opposition and petty jealousy among the Negro theaters,” in Norman’s words, which further hindered prospects. The all-black theaters competed fiercely for the first bookings of new race pictures, and tended to punish distributors, declining parallel or second runs, if another area theater was favored for a given film’s premiere. Norman estimated that such rivalries had the effect of limiting his first-run playing field to 86 of the existing 354 Negro theatres.

  The exhibitors made exorbitant demands, but they had the upper hand. Micheaux closed with an exhibitor on The Dungeon for two hundred dollars for rights to all showings in both Kansas Citys (Missouri and Kansas), Norman wrote disbelievingly to his brother, and then Micheaux agreed to stand “half of censorship” costs besides.

  “It is a hard proposition to book these birds here,” Norman wrote in September 1922. “I am good and tired of Kansas City. I certainly walked my feet off and spent half my time riding the street cars keeping appointments that the exhibitors did not keep, and then when I got rentals—it was another thing to get the dates so arranged as to play all at one time and it took me a good two days to do that. Business is bad with these fellows and they certainly sing the Blues. I fought from two to four hours on every contract and then had to go back a couple of times and fight all over again. I got the films censored in both Kansas Citys without a cut and it cost $38.”

  Continuing on to Omaha, Nebraska, Norman bumped into Swan Micheaux, Oscar’s younger brother, who was tracing the same route with much the same disheartening results. “He was playing The Dungeon on per cent and not doing much,” Norman wrote to his own brother, adding, “Omaha is on the bum.”

  Inevitably, such helter-skelter business arrangements, built on a quicksand of handshake agreements, shoestring finances, and precarious logistics, were constantly going awry. Micheaux’s P. T. Barnum-like side was not above big talk and broken promises, but some mishaps were inadvertent, and they affected Micheaux’s reputation as well as his resources. The relentless D. Ireland Thomas extended his public criticism of Micheaux to busine
ss matters, suggesting in one Chicago Defender column that Swan “not make another bad deal in New Orleans, like he did the last time he was there, with a certain theater.” Then, donning his exhibitor’s hat, he chastised Micheaux’s Roanoke office, which after making extravagant promises to his Charleston theater, “slipped up again. No advertising matter except 2,000 heralds and you want me to pay big rental and play the picture. Wake up and do as you agreed to.”

  From his perch in Omaha, George P. Johnson tried to rally Micheaux, Richard Norman, and other struggling race-picture producers into forming a national organization to distribute all their films. “One good releasing organization can release all Negro films at greater returns and cheaper cost than any single firm can release his own productions,” Johnson argued in a letter. But periodic attempts to organize just such a race-picture alliance were doomed by the fragile economics, the complicated logistics, and the intense rivalries.

  One bright spot: Over the summer of 1922 Micheaux was able to make good on his third and fourth rights payments to author Charles W. Chesnutt. The fifth and final hundred dollars was still outstanding. But Chesnutt remained faithful, and by early October 1922, having polished the scenario during his trips to line up showings of The Dungeon, Micheaux finally called action on his adaptation of The House Behind the Cedars.

  From Roanoke, where he would shoot the bulk of the picture, Micheaux wrote to inform the author of details of the final script. The novel’s end, with Rena dying a pathetic death, had been changed as Micheaux envisioned. Now “the young white lover reaches the house in time to see her [Rena] coming down the steps of the house behind the cedars on the arm of Frank Fuller, evidently at the end of the wedding,” as Chesnutt later summarized it.

  More surprising, Micheaux had changed the famous story’s Reconstruction-era setting. The realities of the race-picture business persuaded Micheaux to set the story in “the present day, which was not as difficult as it might seem,” as Micheaux informed Chesnutt. “The point being that it is an intricate task, not to say a most expensive one, to film periods gone by.”

  He wouldn’t be able to construct vintage interiors in a studio, Micheaux explained, nor traipse around the South snapping footage of buildings that accorded with the period. “We are not financially able to do that,” Micheaux said. Though he had pulled together the funding for this major production—setting aside pivotal interiors, and the expensive storm sequence that climaxed the story, for studio manufacture later in New York—he was still scrimping. “In the meantime, I cannot pay that [final $100] note,” he told Chesnutt.

  From the very beginning of his correspondence with Chesnutt, Micheaux had talked about advertising his film as “Oscar Micheaux Presents The House Behind the Cedars, A Story of the South by Charles W. Chesnutt, featuring Evelyn Preer.” At the moment, however, his originally intended leading lady had decided that she favored the stage over film, and Micheaux was unable to offer Preer a competing salary.

  So for the part of Rena, the “bright mulatto” who is encouraged by her brother to “pass,” Micheaux turned to his protégée, Shingzie Howard, who had blossomed in The Dungeon and The Virgin of Seminole. This would be Howard’s most demanding role yet. The sly, adaptable Lawrence Chenault would play her “passing” brother, while Andrew Bishop was imported from New York to play “white” (as he often did onstage), the Southern aristocrat who doesn’t fathom Rena’s true race. The suave Bishop, who had developed from an engaging juvenile to a compelling leading man for the Lafayette Players, often boasted of never darkening his skin with makeup. Later in his career, in fact, he would be passed over by Hollywood as “too white” for their trivial Negro parts, a common tragedy among the race-picture actors whom studios decided couldn’t “pass for black.”

  The Roanoke troupe had grown close-knit, almost like a family, and they were full of affection for their father-figure boss, who could be a tough taskmaster. Sometimes Micheaux had a sunny disposition, but he was also capable of tyrannizing them; he inspired his crew but also amused them. He had “great big hands,” recalled Howard, always gesturing vividly when giving directions. He would even “show you how to walk, and he was pigeon-toed and couldn’t walk himself,” the actress recalled. “We’d go into hysterics behind his back.” The director made them perform scenes “over and over again” if he wasn’t satisfied. “He was patient with us,” Howard said, “and we were long-suffering with him.”

  The film’s four-week shooting schedule was slightly longer than usual, but by Thanksgiving, incredibly, Micheaux had finished his third production of 1922, all shot largely in Roanoke. Chesnutt wrote letters pleading for his final hundred dollars. Ever optimistic about getting his pictures into white theaters, Micheaux tried to mollify Chesnutt with his vow to get The House Behind the Cedars “distributed by one of the large white distributing concerns.”

  Yet his company was still scrounging. Micheaux had more than one picture hovering in the laboratory, he had stacks of unpaid bills, and he intended to put extra time into the editing of the story he had adopted as his own favorite child. Two years would elapse before The House Behind the Cedars was ready for release.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1923–1924 THE PALE OF THE LAW

  Micheaux was averaging two pictures a year, censors and critics—never mind profits—be damned. Hollywood directors, by comparison, were fast and fortunate if they could make two a year, and they had all the luxuries of time and money that came with studio overheads and guarantees from banks and theaters.

  In 1923, another rough year for race pictures, Micheaux would make another two pictures.

  Or three. Maybe four.

  One of the riddles of his career is the number of projects Micheaux announced to the press, whose titles he emblazoned on his company stationery, whose casts included actors who later remembered participating in the filming—movies that left behind a paper trail suggesting that the finished product was licensed for exhibition by one state or another—even though no clear proof exists that some of the films were ever exhibited, or even completed.

  Micheaux may have made as many as four films in Roanoke in 1923. Billboard (which intermittently touched on black show business), the Chicago Defender, and New York Age all reported on the filming of a picture called “Jasper Landry’s Will,” said to star Shingzie Howard and William E. Fountaine, early in 1923. Yet no researcher has found a single subsequent review or advertisement for the film.

  “A Fool’s Errand” was another of these shadowy films, this one based on an anonymously published 1879 bestseller. The author, later revealed as Albion W. Tourgee, a Northerner of French ancestry, had drawn on his experiences in the South after the Civil War for a quasi-autobiographical novel, which wove together tract and melodrama into a story that excoriated racial intolerance in the South and the failure of Reconstruction. Micheaux was said to have begun filming “A Fool’s Errand” shortly after completing “Jasper Landry’s Will,” in Roanoke, Norfolk, and Nassau in the Bahamas.

  Or perhaps “A Fool’s Errand” was not based on Albion W. Tourgee’s novel. Perhaps it was an original by Micheaux, as he hinted later, using the title as the novel his alter ego Sidney Wyeth writes in Lem Hawkins’ Confession. Scholars love this aspect of Micheaux films: the teasing self-references and autobiographical allusions.

  Were “Jasper Landry’s Will” and “A Fool’s Errand” simply exaggerated public relations? Or were these genuine Micheaux productions, started and then shut down for lack of funds? Were they abandoned for laboratory costs? Seized by creditors? Spliced together with other unfinished films to create patchwork new ones?

  The scholars and educators who formed the Oscar Micheaux Society in 1993 have coined a term for these projects: “ghost films,” a subcategory of the “lost” films because they led a phantom existence.

  There were also bonafide Micheaux films about ghosts.

  Micheaux was in New York for much of the winter of 1922–1923, trying to straighten out his fin
ances, and he had time to catch up with the hit shows, including the rollicking musical Shuffle Along (of 1921), written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, with lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Miller and Lyles were among the onstage entertainers, as was Paul Robeson briefly. The multifaceted Miller and Lyles were longtime performers who once wrote plays for the Pekin Stock Company in Chicago; over years of incessant touring, they had perfected a host of blackface routines that sold out theaters. While “their comedy was invariably stereotypical,” in the words of black show business historian Bernard L. Peterson Jr., it also commented wickedly on the stereotypes.

  Shuffle Along delighted Micheaux so much that he vowed to shoehorn elements of it into his next project: a haunted-house comedy in the tradition of certain Hollywood films that mingled spooky hijinks with singing-dancing numbers. “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” was announced as the first in “a series” of four planned Micheaux productions, according to company publicity. “On August 1 a big white association will begin the handling of their product,” according to Billboard, and “the premiere of the ‘Ghost’ will be in a Broadway theater.”

  “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” concerned the spirit of a murder victim that was said to inhabit an old haunted house, and a black man who is trapped inside that house by an evil hooded organization, led by a vicious mulatto. The mulatto and his hooded followers convene a wild conclave on the premises, amusing themselves at their terrified prisoner’s expense. The mulatto’s goal is to instigate a race riot.

  By late March, Micheaux was shooting initial sequences for this fascinating-sounding project in places around New York, including establishing footage at a suitably creepy, two-hundred-year-old mansion in Clason’s Point. The musical routines were filmed inside the rented space of a Warner Brothers studio in the Bronx. Micheaux veterans Andrew Bishop (prisoner of the haunted house), Shingzie Howard (his sweetheart), and Lawrence Chenault (villainous mulatto) were joined by Miller, Lyles, and the Shuffle Along chorus.