Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  The “one-man corporation” was now a thing of the past, along with brotherly love and silent pictures. Now the Micheaux Film Company was a one-man, one-woman corporation, a husband and wife enterprise.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1928–1931 A MIRACLE REBOUND

  In 1928, two Micheauxes would vie for theaters, audiences, and the accolades of the press.

  Despite his bankruptcy, older brother Oscar managed to finish two pictures in the wake of the break-up with his brother. Both were silent: Thirty Years Later, shot in Chicago in late 1927, and The Broken Violin, produced early in 1928 amid the court filings. The first was adapted from the stage, while the latter was another Micheaux original.

  The source for Thirty Years Later was Henry Francis Downing’s play The Racial Tangle, which had been presented in Chicago in 1920 by a touring company of the Lafayette Players. Micheaux couldn’t help but admire the redoubtable life of Downing, a black American whose career included diplomatic service as well as the authorship of poetry, fiction, and plays—much of it preoccupied, like Micheaux’s work, with the topic of “passing.”

  Downing’s cousin had served as president of Liberia, and after the Civil War, Downing himself lived in the African republic for several years. After a posting as U. S. consul to St. Paul de Loanda in Portuguese West Africa, Downing had moved to London; he lived there for two decades, married to a prominent white Englishwoman. While in London, Downing also had written, besides his plays and poetry, a novel called The American Cavalryman, set in Liberia. In the mid-1920s, Downing moved back to the States, and lived in Harlem, near Micheaux.

  Micheaux was friendly with the octogenarian, who remained an outspoken advocate of American support for Liberia.* Micheaux had family ties and political sympathies with the African nation, and after he was done with his adaptation of Downing’s play he thought he might film the author’s Liberian novel.

  The “passing” in Thirty Years Later was done by a man: a rich white man (William Edmondson) posing as a man of color in order to woo a beautiful “race girl” (Ardelle Dabney), only to discover that he is actually the son of his Negro housekeeper, whom he had previously scorned. Advertising a story as “patterned after Alice Rhinelander’s famous case” had worked magic once before, and Micheaux tried it again to boost ticket sales. (Though it was more of a stretch for Thirty Years Later, “the Rhinelander case” was practically a byword in the black press, which referenced the 1924 story with each new headline scandal involving mixed-race romance.)

  The Broken Violin was more intriguing, a melodrama about a gifted young violinist, the daughter of a washerwoman and an abusive, alcoholic father. For this film Micheaux carried over some of the cast members from Thirty Years Later, including Ardelle Dabney, who had been associated with W. E. B. DuBois’s Krigwa Little Theatre movement. The other cast members included the brothers Salem Tutt Whitney and J. Homer Tutt, and Alice B. Russell herself, making her first known appearance in one of her husband’s films.**

  Neither of Micheaux’s 1928 pictures circulated widely, and both are “lost” today. At the time, columnist Obie McCollum of the Afro-American found Thirty Years Later “the best [film] put out by the pioneer” yet, in spite of its catchpenny limitations (“Why does the heroine not ‘sport’ a few more changes of clothing as almost any New York stenographer in real life would?” McCollum complained).

  For every booster like McCollum, though, there was a more dubious critic. And the skeptics had an opportunity to compare the brothers Micheaux in October 1928, when the maiden Dunbar Film Corporation production, The Midnight Ace, held its New York premiere. The story as well as the casting bore Oscar’s influence, though Swan Micheaux neither wrote nor directed. Some sources indicate the director was indeed John Wade; others propose A. B. DeComathiere, who also starred as the “Midnight Ace,” a clever race detective who solves a series of robberies hatched by a criminal mastermind.

  Though The Midnight Ace supplied only “fair” entertainment, as one of the Micheaux skeptics, Sylvester Russell, wrote in the Chicago Defender, “it is a slight improvement on his brother, Oscar.” It’s impossible today to second-guess such judgments, since The Midnight Ace is another “lost” Micheaux film, albeit one of Swan’s. But Swan’s publicity was every bit as grandiose as Oscar’s. Declaring his new company to be fully capitalized, he announced plans to follow up with an ambitious series of motion pictures at a record pace. “Film Corporation To Make Picture Every Six Weeks!” vowed the publicity.

  Brother Oscar, who’d spent much of 1928 in the dumps, followed Swan’s notices in the press, seething with anger and resentment. “I came on with Micheaux after Swan had left,” remembered actor Lorenzo Tucker, “so I don’t really know what went on between them. But there was bad blood, you could tell.”

  No doubt Micheaux was already planning his characteristic revenge—in the form of a new quasi-autobiographical film.

  Tall, handsome Lorenzo Tucker would become Micheaux’s newest on-screen surrogate. Born in Philadelphia, educated at Temple, Tucker had danced in Atlantic City and stinted as a straight man in vaudeville before landing parts with a Lafayette Players touring company. Tucker was at the Dunbar Theatre in Philadelphia in the spring of 1927, trying out for the chorus of Rang Tang, when Micheaux arrived to see Evelyn Preer.

  Tucker, who had never heard of Oscar Micheaux, paid little attention to the big, well-dressed stranger heading toward the back rows where Tucker was seated. “If you passed him [Micheaux] on the street,” Tucker recalled, “you’d say, ‘Look at that big lug!’ He had a very pleasant face and lumbered along because he was a huge man, about 6'3" tall and well over two hundred pounds. He wore a black homburg hat and his overcoat was dragging the ground. Nothing was right. He walked like he had two left feet.”

  Glancing at Tucker as he passed by, the big pleasant-faced man slipped into a seat behind the young actor and tapped him on the shoulder, proffering a business card. “I make movies,” said Micheaux, baring his winning smile. “If you ever want to act in movies, look me up.”

  Tucker wasn’t particularly interested in movies. Vaudeville and road shows paid better, he reckoned. But he didn’t make it into the chorus of Rang Tang, and Micheaux already knew that when they bumped into each other on the street in Harlem, weeks later. Micheaux invited Tucker up to his office, offering him a part in his next film, “The Fool’s Errand,” one of those “ghost films” no one is quite certain ever came to life.

  According to early news items, Micheaux had begun filming “A Fool’s Errand” back in 1923. But the director may have shelved that project: Tucker was certain that “The Fool’s Errand” was restarted, and perhaps even completed, in late 1927 or early 1928, though he couldn’t recall much about the script or circumstances of production. Interviewed for Richard Grupenhoff’s biography, The Black Valentino: The Stage and Screen Career of Lorenzo Tucker, Tucker remembered that Micheaux “had enough capital to finish shooting the film, but his funds ran out while the film was in the middle of postproduction, and he didn’t have enough money to pay the processing lab for its work.” Time passed, and the lab took possession of the print. More time passed, and the lab “decided to edit the film, shoot the title cards, and distribute the completed product themselves…”

  “The Stern Labs called me up,” Tucker continued, “and offered to pay me to come down and write the titles, since I knew what the script was about. So I went to Micheaux to get his permission.”

  Micheaux glared at him. “Hell,” the race-picture pioneer said finally, “I don’t care what they do with it.”

  “Then you don’t mind me doing the titles?” Tucker said.

  “Are they paying you?” asked the ever-practical Micheaux.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” said Micheaux. “Get as much as you can from them.”

  As far as is known, the lab sent the finished reels to South American theaters.

  Be that as it may, Tucker was emceeing a cabaret in Saratoga Spri
ngs in the spring of 1928 when a telegram arrived from Micheaux. “The telegram said something like: ‘Role for you in film. Start next week. Get your suit out of hock,’” the actor told his biographer. “See, those were the days before we had actors’ unions, and we had to provide our own costumes for many of the roles we were cast in. And often between shows we had to hock our suits to get money to live on until our next show.”

  This time, Tucker was going to play a race-picture producer named Winston Le Jaune—Micheaux by another name—in the most brazen installment yet in the director’s ongoing life-on-film.

  The Wages of Sin would open with Le Jaune in mourning at his mother’s gravesite in a small prairie town, vowing to take care of his ne’er-do-well younger brother Jefferson Lee. Le Jaune employs J. Lee and brings him to teeming Chicago, where his brother embezzles company funds and squanders money on alcohol, gambling, and loose women. Though forced to fire his brother—and then to work overtime to resuscitate his business—Winston remembers his pledge to his deceased mother and decides to reconcile with his brother. But even after Winston rehires him, J. Lee nurses a grudge, and schemes to betray and destroy Le Jaune.

  In the summer of 1928, even as Swan was planning the premiere of The Midnight Ace, Micheaux was busy filming this scenario attacking his brother. There was no ambiguity about Micheaux’s casting: William A. Clayton Jr., whose glowering face and piercing eyes had typed him as a villain ever since his noteworthy debut in the race picture A Prince of His Race, would portray J. Lee, the Swan Micheaux figure. The employee torn between two brothers would be played by Baltimore actress Katherine Noisette, who had captivated Chicago when touring with a Lafayette Players troupe. Also in the cast were Ardelle Dabney and Alice B. Russell.

  On the set, Micheaux radiated an intense focus. He “reminded me of a symphony orchestra leader,” Tucker recollected. “He could get down behind the camera, or on the side, and it was like the director with his baton. Every moment of the action [he’d follow] with his body; he would wring and twist, and naturally when there was sound he couldn’t talk, make [a] sound; he would just be ready to burst. He would just…Ooo…he’d look at you; if it was anger [he wanted], like my god, [you’d think] I’d better give this guy a [good] job!”

  The Wages of Sin was rushed into theaters in February 1929, just in time to take the edge off Swan’s plaudits. And Oscar’s version of the split with his brother made for a fascinating, passionate film that drew reviews as glowing as any he had earned since The House Behind the Cedars. “One of the best to be shown here in a long time,” said the Pittsburgh Courier, “well worth seeing.” “An interesting and dramatic story,” echoed the New York Amsterdam News, “one of the finest pieces of work ever produced by the colored motion picture makers.”

  One can only guess at how truthful The Wages of Sin was in its blanket condemnation of Swan. Autobiography, for Micheaux, had become an increasingly crafty, nearly indivisible blend of fact, fiction, and public relations.

  Micheaux’s brother did not respond in kind. In fact, Swan Micheaux never produced another picture after The Midnight Ace. All the publicity for Swan’s Dunbar Film Corporation had been so much grandstanding. The “Picture Every Six Weeks” never happened. As Micheaux well knew, producing a race picture was a snap compared to booking one into theaters, circulating several prints around the nation, sidestepping censors and critics, and crossing one’s fingers for profits.

  “Any time any other company would start up—like the Goldbergs, which was a white company—he would laugh,” remembered Tucker.

  “He’d say, ‘Well, they’re spending too much money.’ He knew to the penny how much to spend on a production, because he knew what he could get back.”

  The bad blood between brothers was permanent. Micheaux never again mentioned Swan by name. He dedicated later novels to his wife, his mother-in-law, his sisters, practically every family member except Swan, who disappeared as a character in his stories and films. With The Wages of Sin, Swan Micheaux was erased from his older brother’s life.

  In like fashion, Swan erased himself from the race-picture field soon thereafter, returning home to Great Bend, Kansas. His wife left Swan after their daughter came of legal age, and he briefly returned to Harlem in the early 1940s, earning a living as a carpenter and odd jobs man. Some unconfirmed reports suggest that a house fire may have ravaged him financially. He ended up back in Kansas, doing house and lawn work. He drank to excess. Declared mentally incompetent, Micheaux’s younger brother was in and out of state institutions before his death in 1975.

  Swan Micheaux was a quitter. Not his brother Oscar.

  Censors dogged his heels. Films were abandoned in labs and theaters. Checks bounced.

  Got to keep going!

  In at least one city, Baltimore, Micheaux’s check-kiting caught up with him; Micheaux was served with papers, his print of Thirty Years Later confiscated by authorities until the penalties were paid.

  Despite his constant problems, Micheaux fed sunbeams to the press. When Chappy Gardner of the Pittsburgh Courier found him at his favorite Harlem eatery, Tabb’s, after the New Year, “the pioneer of Negro films” insisted that “in every city where they are shown crowded houses greet” his films. Micheaux was busy directing his latest project, featuring “the best actors and some of the prettiest and brainiest of our feminine kind,” wrote Gardner.

  That was When Men Betray, made in New York in early 1929, with a cast recycled from The Wages of Sin: Lorenzo Tucker, William A. Clayton Jr., Katherine Noisette, Alice B. Russell. Even the story sounded vaguely similar: two Chicago brothers, one a cad, fall in love with the same sweet girl; the young innocent chooses the cad, who deserts her on her wedding night, leaving her desperate and vulnerable to misfortune.

  It would be Micheaux’s last pure silent film. And what little is known about When Men Betray comes, not surprisingly, from the censors. The Pennsylvania State Board complained about Noisette’s “nude form from waist up, after she has removed [her] pajama jacket,” the unsavory character of a “deacon,” and “close-up and near views” of two actresses clawing at each other’s faces (the old, crowd-pleasing “catfight”). Micheaux agreed to make changes, but the print was seized and Micheaux fined after When Men Betray was discovered in theaters with an inauthentic Pennsylvania seal.

  The mask he offered to the public might have been cheer and confidence. But Lorenzo Tucker also noticed how badly Micheaux suffered from the stress and strain. More than once, Tucker watched as the filmmaker stretched out on a couch, right in the middle of photographing a scene, sometimes lying there even while calling the camera takes. Among other ailments, he was beleaguered by chronic stomach pain. While on the set, Micheaux would swallow handfuls of raw starch from an Argo box, “keep tossing it in his mouth as if it were peanuts,” Tucker recalled.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tucker asked him once.

  “Oh, don’t bother me,” the director replied. “Nervous indigestion. You make me nervous!”

  “Everybody made him nervous,” Tucker concluded.

  His money problems forced Micheaux to make films even faster, in the late 1920s, cutting back on multiple takes and rehearsal time. Tucker recalled pleading with the director for more rehearsal. “You young actors!” Micheaux would shout at him. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. What’s the matter, Tucker, you can talk, can’t you? And you can walk, can’t you? Well, then, let’s shoot the scene!”

  No matter how fast he churned out the pictures, there were never enough bookings. And Micheaux no longer had any sales force, only himself. True, his wife was able to help with practically everything else. Alice B. Russell was the perfect complement to Micheaux: A discerning reader, she listened to his stories as they evolved and edited his scripts. Well-organized, already acting as de facto producer of his films, she assisted her husband in every possible way on the set and whispered to the actors after he was done shouting. She was taking more significant acting roles. A n
atural diplomat, she could represent his films to censors, especially in all-important New York State.

  But Micheaux knew best how to sell his pictures, and when he was on the road the finances were in suspense.

  By mid-1929, only about 3,500 of the nation’s twenty thousand movie theaters were wired for synchronized sound, but those 3,500 were doing about 75 percent of the box office.

  Sound was the trend, and all the black theaters were mad to catch up. No race-picture producer had yet made an “all-talking” picture. Micheaux was the leading candidate, but he was daunted by the risk and expense. Quite apart from the costs, which he would have to shoulder alone, he faced all the transitional difficulties that Hollywood took years to solve: coping with an adjusted acting style that relied more heavily on dialogue; retreating indoors to controlled soundstages (Micheaux had always relished exteriors); restraining his camerawork, as his newly paralyzed actors hovered near the dangling overhead microphones.

  In the chaotic wake of The Jazz Singer, Micheaux lit upon the same temporary solution as his Hollywood counterparts: His next two pictures would be “part-talkies,” with a few musical numbers spicing up the mainly silent stories.

  Both would star Lorenzo Tucker. Micheaux was determined to build up Tucker into “The Colored Valentino.” The mystique of Hollywood’s dark romantic idol, who had died abruptly in 1926, was still strong.

  Like other Micheaux regulars, Tucker was expected to make personal appearances at big-city premieres as part of his contract, with Micheaux paying train fare and other expenses. Often Tucker was sent to his own hometown of Philadelphia, where he’d take the stage to address the crowds and sign autographs before showings. Micheaux took a fatherly interest in the younger man, reminding him to visit his mother while he was in town. And if Micheaux was in Philadelphia without Tucker, he’d stop by and greet Tucker’s mother, telling her, “Don’t worry, I’m looking after him. He’s doing well.”