The newlyweds probably indulged in a brief honeymoon, like the just-married couple Carl Mahon and Starr Calloway at the end of Micheaux’s 1932 picture, The Girl from Chicago, who sail to nearby Bermuda.
Though it became the cornerstone of his books and films, Micheaux’s first marriage had proven disastrous. His second union may or may not have been legally formalized. But he couldn’t have acted more wisely in choosing the One True Woman who became the third Mrs. Micheaux.
Got to keep going!
That was Micheaux’s motto. Anything for the sake of his work, his career, his art. Some scholars emphasize the scoundrel side of his character, but at times he suffered more than anyone he disappointed. After his marriage, months passed before Micheaux was able to muster the funds to produce another film. At one point he was down to five cents in his pocket, recalled actress Shingzie Howard, who was still helping out in the Harlem office.
Micheaux was traveling frequently between Chicago and New York in this period, and at a certain point he found himself on a train to New York without enough money for food. Some children a couple of rows away from him had an apple and an orange, and when the train lurched, a piece of fruit fell to the floor and rolled toward Micheaux. He snapped it up when no one was looking; it would be his only nourishment on the trip. “When he got to New York,” recalled Howard, “all he had was a nickel, and he called his wife and she came to the station to get him.”
Micheaux was pitching investment in his future to doctors and lawyers, with one hand; with the other he was borrowing pocket money from friends for daily needs. “He’d borrow from anyone he knew,” the actress recalled. “He’d borrow from me. He had an awful hard time.”
In public Micheaux always seemed a big, cheerful man, made of India rubber. But his good humor was a pose as well as a philosophy, and the strapping physique was deceptive. Because Micheaux never had money to spare, “his eating habits were poor, very poor,” Howard said, and that contributed to chronic health conditions—stomach and digestion troubles, terrible hemorrhoids, lingering attacks of the blues.
Micheaux spent most of late 1926 and early 1927 in Chicago, sequestered at the Alpha Hotel on the South Parkway, where, according to newspaper reports, he was confronted by “pressing business” of an unspecified nature. While there, he put the finishing touches on a fresh script set partly in Chicago’s Black Belt.
It’s ironic that, at this juncture, Micheaux concocted his archetypal fantasy involving a black millionaire—a man who has dared to venture “far from the haunts of his race,” according to publicity synopses, landing in Buenos Aires, where Micheaux himself had visited in his portering days. Land is tamed, fortune acquired. After fifteen years in a foreign land, “his heart anxious and hungry for that most infinite of all things—woman,” the newly wealthy black adventurer returns to America to search for his One True Woman. Unfortunately, the woman he finds, a beautiful cabaret dancer, also happens to be the concubine of an underworld beast known as “The Lizard.”
Micheaux shot the bulk of this production, which could have been titled “The Homesteader Goes to South America,” in and around Chicago early in 1927, staging the musical sequences at the famed Dreamland Gardens on State Street—the dance hall that was home to Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and other stellar performers—and at the Plantation Cafe, where the house band was Dave Peyton’s Orchestra.
The new project would star J. Lawrence Criner, a stalwart character man for the Lafayette Players; Criner often played heavies onstage and in race pictures, but Micheaux cast him against type here as Pelham Guitry, the heroic South American fortune-seeker. Grace Smith, who had made her first appearance for Micheaux in The Spider’s Web, was an all-around entertainer who danced and sang with her own vaudeville act, the Four Buddies; here she’d portray the oppressed cabaret dancer. The villainous Lizard was portrayed by the Venezuela-born Lionel Monagas, who had just scored a career breakthrough as a bellhop falsely accused of raping a white woman in Appearances, a meaty drama that was among the first Broadway plays written by a black playwright.*
Cleo Desmond, William Edmondson, S. T. Jacks, and E. G. Tatum had supporting parts in the picture, which also boasted walk-on appearances by Chicago Defender publisher Robert S. Abbott and his wife, Micheaux acquaintances since his homesteading days. As Micheaux foresaw, the Abbotts’ cameos garnered the film plenty of free publicity in the Defender.
Though the main photography was finished by spring, theaters wouldn’t get the new Micheaux offering until Thanksgiving 1927. The intervening six months were consumed by a “seven-thousand mile trip by auto through the South,” according to the Defender, where Micheaux “lined up the bookings of his films for the coming season.” Winding up his trip in Chicago, where he showed local theater owners his first new picture since Body and Soul, Micheaux paid another ceremonial visit to the Defender offices. “The motion picture magnate was somewhat gleeful over the outlook for the coming season with his master photoplays,” reported the paper in September 1927.
But the filmmaker’s gleeful public façade was as far a cry from his fragile reality as the final title he chose for his latest film: The Millionaire. By the end of 1927, Micheaux was practically drowning in debt.
Three unrelated factors had converged to threaten Micheaux’s future in film.
The first was the October 10, 1927, premiere of a motion picture Micheaux had nothing to do with. Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length “talkie,” was the opening shot of a show business revolution, as Micheaux would have appreciated instantly. (He knew the lead actor, the blackface performer Al Jolson, from his own theatergoing.) The Jazz Singer was a milestone “fraught with tremendous significance,” as Robert Sherwood proclaimed in Life. “The end of the silent drama is in sight.” And with it, no doubt, the end of silent race pictures.
Micheaux, who had to finagle bookings in the best of times, now had to scurry around frantically to get his silent pictures into theaters before they switched over entirely to sound. Silent films were not yet dead in the fall of 1927, but they had received a terminal prognosis with only months to live. Micheaux’s old pictures, which he constantly (and profitably) recycled to black theaters, were about to lose all their future value.
The second circumstance also involved Hollywood and black faces.
Although Evelyn Preer long had a career independent of Micheaux, in recent months she had taken steps that would finally put her beyond his reach for good. After finishing The Spider’s Web, the multitalented actress had been cast by David Belasco in his extravagant production of Lulu Belle, a much-ballyhooed play about “colored life” that opened on Broadway early in 1926 and then ran for a year. Preer was acclaimed for her featured role but also for understudying the lead, Lenore Ulric. Following that triumph, Preer joined her husband Edward Thompson (a fellow Lulu Belle alumnus) in another smash hit, the musical revue Rang Tang.
Preer’s first loyalty was to the stage. In early 1928, when she learned that Robert Levy was organizing a company of veteran Lafayette Players to go to Los Angeles, Preer and her husband were among the first to volunteer for the adventure. Others heading west included Cleo Desmond, J. Lawrence Criner, Laura Bowman and her husband Sidney Kirkpatrick. All the “new” West Coast Lafayette Players had appeared in “old” Micheaux films.
The Players took up residence in the new Lincoln Theatre on Central Avenue in Los Angeles in April 1928, opening with a production of Rain. Preer starred in the part Jeanne Eagles had immortalized on Broadway. “It was the dawn of a new day for the Negro in Hollywood,” Ina Duncan, the famous musical revue dancer, told the black press. The West Coast Lafayette Players became an instant sensation: Charles Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Harold Lloyd, and other Hollywood worthies were spotted among the capacity crowds who came to cheer the performances and line up backstage afterward to congratulate the troupe. And before long the Players’ dressing-rooms were thronged with casting agents from the major Hollywood st
udios.
Sleepy Hollywood was slowly waking up to black America. When an actor whose name was known to black audiences played even a minuscule role in a major studio production, no matter how caricatured the part—even a maid or shoeshine “boy”—black fans streamed to white theaters in Northern cities, and the sub-run theaters dotting black neighborhoods further augmented the studio’s box office. Character parts that didn’t rub up against the tender sensibilities of Southern whites were becoming more common, almost fashionable in Hollywood.
Micheaux couldn’t compete with the Hollywood offers, which were lavish by his standards and which came in urgent telegrams accompanied by travel vouchers. Ida Anderson, who had performed in A Son of Satan for Micheaux, wrote to the white race-picture producer Richard E. Norman in 1923, declining a role in one of his planned productions. Anderson was currently receiving forty dollars per day, “including concessions,” from the Lasky and Selznick studios, she told Norman. “If you could get $45 or $50 a day [in race pictures] you were getting big money!” recalled actor Leigh Whipper, who appeared in films directed by Micheaux. “We used to go over to Fort Lee, N.J. and work there for $5 and $10 a day.” Lawrence Chenault, who often starred for Micheaux, received $75 to $125 a week.
And Hollywood’s terms rose steeply with sound. The studios began producing a flurry of “talkies” targeting black audiences, often singing-and-dancing “short subjects” designed to precede the major attraction. The studios sought out “fresh” black faces they could claim as their own discoveries—preferably stage-trained actors, because it was thought that “types” recruited from the street or the lot “cannot remember the lines and are subject to mike-fright,” according to one skeptical fan-magazine article on the new “ebony heroes,” penned by a self-described white “daughter of Dixie.”
The West Coast Lafayette Players were well positioned to satisfy this sudden craving. Yet Hollywood relegated many of even the most schooled black thespians to “Negro dialect” humor, or background singing in nightclub scenes. The Christie Film Company offered Preer and Thompson a thousand dollars a week for a series of shorts based on the Old South stories of Octavus Roy Cohen, a story writer for the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other magazines. Lafayette Players like Laura Bowman and Sidney Kirkpatrick also found steady employment in studio music departments, singing in Bebe Daniels and Amos ’n’ Andy vehicles.
Although Cohen’s Negroes were meant to be sympathetic, they were invariably uncouth and prone to dumb comedy. And the skin of the first lady of race cinema had to be “darkened beyond the duskiness of her natural make-up” for the series, according to a 1929 article in Motion Picture Classic. (“When she spoke off-stage, her voice was as cultured as Jeanne Eagles’s and bore none of the dialect she had affected before the microphone,” reported the magazine.) The Christie comedies, according to Preer’s daughter, Sister Francesca Thompson, “might be considered throw-backs to the minstrel style or the ‘coon shows’ of the nineteenth century.”
Indeed, Preer “broke her contract” with Christie after only three such pictures, according to Thompson, “refusing to continue to wear blackface makeup, or to speak in the fractured English required.” Over time Preer would play other small parts at nearly every major studio. The lucrative Hollywood moonlighting permitted the actress to continue onstage at the Lincoln Theatre on Central Avenue, performing everything from Shakespeare to Gilbert and Sullivan.
One thing was certain: Evelyn Preer had starred in her last Oscar Micheaux picture. She had been Micheaux’s favorite leading lady, his greatest star, his only guaranteed box-office draw. And, as it turned out, she was irreplaceable.
Micheaux’s growing conflict with his brother Swan was his third problem, and just as irreparable.
Like his brother, Swan Micheaux had a taste for fame. His earliest press notices, written when he first joined the Chicago office, portrayed Swan not as a junior officer, but as a take-charge business executive who was destined to play a key creative role in the company. Swan supplied a publicity photo of himself to newspapers and posed for advertisements for Carter’s Little Liver Pills. He dabbled in real estate. He gave only occasional interviews, but he was as garrulous and glib as his brother, and the press found him quotable. “The [race-picture] game is too fast for slow thinkers,” he told one reporter. “There must be quick action regardless of cost, all hours working hours, every day a working day.”
When Micheaux brought Swan to New York in 1926, he was hoping to rein in the crooked salesmen and booking foul-ups. It is hard to know how many of these persistent problems could be fairly blamed on Swan, or whether Micheaux was growing paranoid and looking for a scapegoat. But Micheaux thought Swan was incompetent or dishonest or both, whereas Swan thought he was underpaid and deserved greater opportunity.
The tension between the brothers was aggravated after Micheaux’s marriage to Alice B. Russell. The new couple took bigger living quarters on Morningside Avenue and Mrs. Micheaux joined the business, now headquartered in the modern Harlem Center building at 135th and Seventh Avenue. Swiftly, she became the conduit of all important financial (and, soon enough, creative) decisions. Furious, Swan stormed out of the office in the winter of 1926–1927, temporarily accepting a post as manager of the New York branch of the Agfa Raw Film Company.
In late 1927 the acrimony between the brothers accelerated and broke out into the public forum. Micheaux had just returned from another extended stay in Chicago, where he had finished editing The Millionaire and then quickly shot another film, Thirty Years Later. That October, eager to get The Millionaire approved by the New York State censors, Micheaux consented to numerous cuts in every reel of the nine-reeler, except for reels 7 and 8—mainly offensive intertitles, or scenes of drinking, gambling, violence, or sexy dancing. In early December, however, inspectors got a tip to visit the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, where The Millionaire was being shown—in a mint print, without any of the censors’ deletions.
Curiously, the theater manager, Peter Eckert, worked for Micheaux on the side; his name even appears on the documents submitting The Millionaire for censorship review. When the print was seized, Eckert was fined; he responded by suing Micheaux, claiming that he’d been duped into showing an uncensored print.
In a fury, Micheaux fired off a letter to the censors. Insisting that his company had been made “the victim of an organized effort to get possession of and to exploit our films”—not just The Millionaire, but “at least one print of all the pictures we make”—Micheaux fingered the man he maintained was the real culprit. “This plot was engineered and has been directed by the former General Manager of the concern, whose name you may observe at the bottom of this page”—Micheaux could not bring himself to identify his own brother, still conspicuous on the letterhead. Swan had been aided by “the trickery of his associates,” Eckert and others among them. Having secured “temporary possession” of the original print of The Millionaire, they were circulating it to New York theaters without the stipulated cuts, or Micheaux’s approval.
At the moment, his younger brother was hiding out somewhere in New York. “Although I have a summons out and papers to haul him into Court,” Micheaux added bitterly, “we cannot lay hands on him.”
The only legal papers that survive this imbroglio indicate that Micheaux lost the Eckert case, with the court levying damages of $331.66 against him. Eckert then bought the print of The Millionaire at public auction for two hundred dollars.
If Swan was indeed hiding out in Harlem, he didn’t stay concealed for very long. Within three months he had organized his own Dunbar Film Corporation, opening offices on Lenox Avenue not far from those of his more famous brother. Swan “is not connected with his brother Oscar Micheaux,” the press accounts stated plainly, “any more.” By the end of April, Swan had actually produced his first race picture, The Midnight Ace; its actors—A. B. DeComathiere, William Edmondson, and “discovery” Mable Kelly (Miss Lincoln of the Howard–Lincoln 1927 football ri
valry)—were recruited directly from the cast of Thirty Years Later.
Besides stealing his brother’s actors, Swan successfully rallied Micheaux’s remaining staff against him. By then, Micheaux’s employees had lost all hope of obtaining the back wages their boss owed them. Peter Eckert was the president of the Dunbar Film Corporation; as the secretary and treasurer Swan secured Bertha Elwald, formerly Micheaux’s secretary. And John Wade, Micheaux’s onetime Man Friday on the road, was director of the new company’s first film.
The coming of sound, the desertion of Evelyn Preer and other Lafayette Players, and the nasty bust-up with his brother—all of this combined to overwhelm Micheaux. No wonder, on February 8, 1928, the race-picture pioneer filed for bankruptcy, a voluntary maneuver intended to protect his meager assets while staving off collapse.
The filing in New York’s Seventh District Court demonstrated just how undercapitalized Micheaux’s corporation was, after a decade of scrimping and scraping. The bankruptcy papers listed the acknowledged assets of the corporation at $1,400, with liabilities at $7,837. The worst liabilities, according to published records, were “to cover securities to creditors,” $2,930; “to unsecured credit given,” $1,600; “to wages,” $1,125.
The news flashed across the nation in headlines in black newspapers. “Despite the filing of bankruptcy proceedings,” reported Baltimore’s Afro-American, “Mr. Micheaux is busy seeking bookings for films at present, and it is felt by those who are acquainted with the workings of the defunct corporation that the promoter has been able to retain his hold on many of the numerous productions set on celluloid.” The newspaper announced that Alice B. Russell had been appointed the new general manager of the corporation, and “now controls many of the reels” of past and forthcoming Micheaux pictures.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 28