Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  To others, however, Schiffman was no saint. By 1931 he was already a controversial power broker in Harlem—regarded by his detractors as a tough, cheap son of a bitch, a cutthroat who delighted in putting rival theaters out of business and blacklisting entertainers who accepted gigs from competitors. Record producer John Hammond, who knew Schiffman well from their mutual dealings with musicians, recalled Schiffman “talking about Negroes and using the word shvartzer,” a Yiddish pejorative.*

  Micheaux eschewed pejoratives, but he harbored ambiguous feelings about Jews and a suspicious attitude toward Jewish producers of black stage shows and race pictures. But he had dealt with Jewish theater owners throughout much of his career, and was open-minded when it came to taking money from willing backers. And he was a magician with money.

  Wags on Harlem streets gave the partnership long odds, and the wags were right.

  What happened next can be pieced together from court records and newspaper items. The Exile may have been a hit in Harlem theaters, but the picture (especially the dancers’ skimpily costumed scenes) rang the usual censorship alarm bells, and the returns were slow from outside New York. Still, Micheaux had a line of credit from his well-heeled partners, and he was the new Fayette Pictures man on the road dunning theaters. He’d been skilled at knockdowns since his Pullman porter days, and for years he’d been juggling banks, lawyers, and debts in cities all over the country. It would take Schiffman at least a year to realize all the ways in which his money could be magicked.

  During which time, incredibly, Micheaux would squeeze out five more productions.

  The coming of sound offered many filmmakers an excuse to revisit their hits or favorite stories from the silent era, to remake and tinker with cherished ideas. What was true of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and nearly every important Hollywood director was also true of Micheaux. Remaking a silent picture took less time and money than creating an entirely new film, since the story was already largely conceptualized, a basic script in hand. Micheaux’s first “talkie” was The Homesteader redux. Now, after The Exile, he’d remake The House Behind the Cedars.

  Never mind the minor detail that Micheaux had never made that last rights payment to Charles W. Chesnutt for his 1926 version. This time, instead of using Chesnutt’s title, he would simply lift a different title from another source: Veiled Aristocrats, a 1923 “passing” novel by Milwaukee author Gertrude Sanborn, another story of interracial romance set partly in Chicago’s Black Belt.

  Never mind that Micheaux had no marquee name to play Rena, the young “bright mulatto” whose life takes a fateful turn when her brother persuades her to “pass” for white. Shingzie Howard, who had portrayed Rena in Micheaux’s silent version, had starred in a couple of race pictures for other producers before quitting to become a schoolteacher. His latest “virgin star,” Nora Newsome, had been excoriated by critics for her weak performance in The Exile and never acted in another motion picture. Micheaux may have thought wistfully of Evelyn Preer, but the actress was far away in Los Angeles, pregnant with her first child. So while in Chicago for screenings of The Exile in mid-1931, the director attended a talent parade at the Regal Theatre on the South Side, and from the contestants chose Lucille Lewis as the next Rena.

  He cast Lorenzo Tucker as Rena’s brother John, and Laura Bowman as Mrs. Walden, Rena’s mother. Carl Mahon, who had acquitted himself admirably in The Exile, would play Frank, the childhood friend in love with Rena. Lawrence Chenault would play the white judge and benefactor of the family; nightclub singer-dancer Barrington Guy would portray Rena’s white suitor.

  Frank Schiffman couldn’t have been pleased with Micheaux’s new project. Fayette Pictures had pledged to make Northern Black Belt stories. But the Fayette banner didn’t last much beyond the first Brecher-Schiffman-Micheaux production, and Schiffman himself was swiftly sidelined: One “A. Burton Russell,” also known as Mrs. Micheaux, would be credited as the producer of Veiled Aristocrats.* If Schiffman wanted to cut studio costs on a production for which he had little enthusiasm, Micheaux would find ways to cope: the “house behind the cedars” of the remake was actually the Homestead on Greenwood Avenue in Montclair, where Micheaux did most of the filming in the summer of 1931.

  Micheaux’s silent film script was hastily rewritten, substituting dialogue for intertitles. Although some in the ensemble, like Lucille Lewis, were amateurs, even the professionals were flustered by how fast Micheaux worked once he had a semblance of financing. “Sometimes we would get on the set and Micheaux would hand out scenes that he had written only the night before,” Tucker recalled, “so we had to memorize it quickly.” And of course there was never time or money for “cue cards,” which Hollywood actors took for granted.

  Tucker and Micheaux didn’t always get along. At times his mentor treated him in a fatherly fashion, but when they were with others on the set Micheaux would sting Tucker, calling him derisive nicknames like “Big Boy” or “Useless.” Like one of Micheaux’s later actors, Carman Newsome, Tucker was handsome enough, but Micheaux sometimes found his performances lacking, especially in the strong jaw and backbone department. “When you finished you’d think he’d say to you, ‘That was wonderful,’” said Tucker. “Never. He’d look at you and say, ‘Huumpf! You hammed that one up for me.’”

  With the silent era over and Rudolph Valentino long dead, Micheaux had to update his promotional strategies: Now Tucker would be billed as “The Colored John Gilbert.” At times the actor felt exploited. “I can remember going up to his apartment to see if he [Micheaux] had any work for me,” Tucker reminisced in the Grupenhoff biography. “He showed me his next script. ‘My name’s not in the cast,’ I said. ‘I know,’ he replied, and said nothing more. Later, when I got up to leave, he said, ‘Take a script on the way out—you’re playing the lead.’ That way he always had me at his mercy. ‘I made more money with you as my leading man than anybody else,’ he once told me, but that’s as far as he would go. He always paid me on time, and he even loaned me money at times, but he would never let me get too big.”

  In any event, Micheaux’s leads during the sound era were sometimes upstaged by the musical acts he shoehorned into the films. The singers and dancers were intended to leaven the drama, but they sometimes took over like houseguests who refused to leave, proving more engaging than the main story. One highlight of Veiled Aristocrats was an extended sequence at Rena’s brother’s house, when the homeowner’s absence affords the maid, the cook, and the chauffeur an opportunity to break out in a little scat singing and tap dancing. (The full orchestra of The Exile was reduced here to a quintet for one party scene, and solo piano to accompany the servants).

  Fayette Pictures’ “larger and more expensive scale” of production swiftly went the way of the company name. Only a deformed version of Veiled Aristocrats survives today, but the indoor scenery is spartan, with the actors statically posed around sofas or pianos in sparsely decorated rooms. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who began his career as a lowly film processing assistant on a Micheaux project in Chicago in the late 1930s, marveled at the man’s expedience in such circumstances.

  “I remember the exact expression he used, because I say it sometimes to myself nowadays, when people in show business are trying to do something cheap,” Wexler recalled. “He’d say, ‘Okay, boys, change the pictures on the walls!’ Then they’d leave the lighting the way it was and move some of the furniture around—maybe put a piece of plastic on a chair or sofa to make it look different from the other apartment—while a guy changed the pictures.

  “I remember [thinking], ‘Gee, this is really low-budget.’”

  As was true of many early Hollywood talkies, the acting in Veiled Aristocrats ranged wildly. Laura Bowman declaimed to the rafters; Lucille Lewis floundered about with no discernible technique. Yet the outdoor scenes had an arresting beauty, the well-knit story still carried a wallop, and, as contemporary critic Richard Corliss has written, “there’s truth, power, and hurt�
��a hint of Emily Dickinson with a case of the emotional vapors—in Rena’s big speech about passing for white while with her fiancé and his friends.” Writing in the Chicago Defender in 1931, Barbara Llorayne saw the same virtues in the picture, hailing Veiled Aristocrats as “far better than many [films] we have been asked to view and review the past season.”

  Charles W. Chesnutt’s daughter viewed the unauthorized remake at a Washington, D.C., theater in April 1932. “Rena, her brother, and Miss Molly took their parts very well,” Mrs. Ethel Williams reported in a letter to her father. “It was not artistic, like the story, however. Your beautiful English and the soul of the tale were lacking. It was a speaking movie, and the actors’ voices were all harsh, as they probably are naturally. It was not so bad,” she added, “when you consider the handicaps colored actors have.”

  Still, Chesnutt was incensed. If the Micheaux company had produced a talking remake of The House Behind the Cedars—without clearance, credit, or compensation—that was “rank plagiarism, and they would be liable in a civil action,” the author replied to his daughter, “if I had the money to bring one, and they had anything which I could collect.”

  But Chesnutt had neither the means nor the opportunity: Broke and in frail health, he died later in 1932.

  After finishing Veiled Aristocrats, Micheaux waited about five minutes before embarking on his next production. Schiffman’s money burned a hole in his pocket. For the next year his speed would be frenetic.

  The next was another “ghost film,” this one even sporting a ghost in its title. The Phantom of Kenwood was a perfect-murder mystery starring Frank Wilson, a sometime Lafayette Player and a well-known writer and director of Harlem plays; Babe Townsend, another Lafayette member who had triumphed as Mephisto in the company’s production of Goethe’s Faust; and Bee Freeman, the contralto whose first break had been in Shuffle Along (in which her signature tune was Sissle and Blake’s “If You’ve Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin, You’ve Never Been Vamped at All”). The Phantom of Kenwood was certainly produced; it was screened once or twice for the press, then disappeared like the ghost film it was.

  After another five-minute break came Harlem After Midnight (a story “built around Negro gangsters who kidnap a wealthy Jew,” as one review put it), starring Lorenzo Tucker, Lawrence Chenault, A. B. DeComathiere, and, again, Bee Freeman. There was also a pretty newcomer (Dorothy Van Engle) and a savvy old-timer (Rex Ingram from Green Pastures). Micheaux himself played “a clever sleuth” who “breaks up the racket.” Harlem After Midnight was definitely filmed, circulated to some black theaters, reviewed in a few places, then “lost,” probably left behind at the last Midwest theater where it was booked.

  The third quickie of 1931–1932 (the only one of the three that survives) was the big-city anthology Ten Minutes to Live, whose title was drawn from the second of two or three stories interwoven by a motif of vengeance.*

  The main character in the first story is a screen producer named Marshall, who visits a cabaret called “The Lybia,” scouting talent for his next movie. An obvious Micheaux surrogate (even his name “sounds somewhat like Micheaux,” as J. Ronald Green has noted), Marshall admires one young performer and offers her a plum part in his next picture. The job “doesn’t pay much,” he admits, only $3.50 a day—art imitating life—but is she interested? “How would I like to go to heaven without dying?” she replies, batting her eyelashes. “You don’t realize how happy this makes me.”

  The first story’s in-joke playfulness is continued when Alice B. Russell shows up at The Lybia, portraying a hate-driven woman determined to kill the louse who long ago spurned and murdered her best friend. Nightclubs would become the hub of all the plotlines in Micheaux’s sound pictures, and soon enough The Lybia welcomes another stranger, a young woman sitting nervously at a table with her boyfriend. The woman is delivered an anonymous note, warning her that she has only “ten minutes to live.” Then, out of the blue, comes a title card. “What mystery here?” it asks. “Why has this beautiful girl been put on the spot? Let’s go back…”

  Yes, a title card: Long after switching to sound, Micheaux made use of intertitles as an inexpensive way to bridge continuity gaps (and censors’ excisions), even to save money on sound recording. In Ten Minutes to Live, for example, the nervous young woman is being stalked by a felon who happens to be deaf and dumb—a character who scribbles his words, allowing Micheaux to limit his dialogue to intertitles!

  While the woman awaits her fate at The Lybia, the vengeful felon breaks into the house where she has been staying (lingering on the porch steps, the camera catches the house number “55”—The Homestead in Montclair). That is when the ex-con learns (preposterously, from a telegram sent by his mother: an excuse for another intertitle) that he is being surrounded by police. The felon looks out the window to see if the bad news is true. There, glaring back at him, is none other than the hatted Oscar Micheaux, once again playing a detective. Ten Minutes to Live was a Micheaux “home movie” in every sense, with A. Burton Russell once more listed as producer.

  A. B. DeComathiere made his final appearance for Micheaux in the film, playing Marshall, the producer. Lawrence Chenault sat at a table in the nightclub throughout the story, observing the action and commenting drolly; it would be his last Micheaux production, too. The sinister-looking William A. Clayton Jr., from the silent-era Micheaux pictures The Broken Violin, The Wages of Sin, and When Men Betray, played the embittered felon.

  Donald Heywood, uncredited, emceed and orchestrated the nightclub numbers, which included Ralph Brown, the tap-dancing soloist for Cab Calloway’s orchestra; this was the first of Brown’s fiery tap exhibitions in several Micheaux pictures of the 1930s. If the chorus line looked a little weary, perhaps it was because the dancers were working second shift after their regular stint at Connie’s Inn. “We’d make these scenes at night,” recalled Lorenzo Tucker. “After they [the dancers] finished work and the cabaret closed, he would have a bus to bring them all to the set.”

  If Micheaux had one inarguable genius, it was for using the world around him as his rent-free set. He’d put cameras across from police stations as the cops came off duty, and photograph his uniformed actors walking in and out of the station doors. “In railroad stations he had a trick that I’m telling you was terrific,” recalled Tucker. “He would have the cameraman set up in a telephone booth, and coming off the train or going on the train he got his crowds.” Impromptu, the director also used to steal “a lot of scenes in Bronx Park,” according to the actor, “and the police would come and run Mr. Micheaux out of there.”

  The “stolen” footage was the highlight of Ten Minutes to Live. In one sequence the endangered ingenue (Willor Lee Guilford) arrives at an eerily deserted Grand Central Station, hails a cab, and rides through city streets on a drawn-out taxi ride that is part newsreel, part Alice through the looking glass. There is no dialogue, only Micheaux’s pictorial travelogue and a soundtrack punctuated by the “intrusive blare of car horns,” in the words of J. Ronald Green, and a “surrealistically serene music track that modulates into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”

  In the early talkie days, there was a distinct changing of the guard among Micheaux’s regular actors. Lorenzo Tucker had come to feel frustrated with Micheaux; the jobs were erratic, his parts in some films like Ten Minutes to Live trivial. The new, fair-haired kid was a handsome West Indian, Carl Mahon, who got all the hand-holding scenes with the girl with “ten minutes to live.”

  Another newcomer was Carlton Moss, from Newark, New Jersey. A theater graduate of Morgan College, Moss was a smart, ambitious young man already carving out a reputation for himself in radio and theater circles. Alice B. Russell, who knew the Moss family, arranged for him to audition for a small acting role in The Phantom of Kenwood. “Displaying an attitude of a man who puts great dependence on his wife’s opinions,” Moss remembered, “Micheaux looked me up and down and nodded his approval.” The race-picture pioneer took the young man under his
wing, even taking him along to New York City’s downtown film laboratories, where Moss was acutely aware that they were the only black people in the building. Still, Moss was impressed by how Micheaux commanded respect when he walked into the labs. Everyone snapped to attention, watching him with respect and none of the usual side-of-the-mouth racism.

  Moss admired Micheaux, but not his movies—at least not the ones Moss himself acted in, which were made during this hectic period. He thought one of the films’ problems was the white cameramen Micheaux hired at the lowest available rates, cameramen who were “declassed, meaning nobody else wanted them,” who had contempt for the stories they were filming, and who started drinking in the afternoons and lost discipline.

  Micheaux was feeling challenged by the new generation; youngsters like Moss didn’t really appreciate his stature, kowtow to his wishes, or accept his long experience as wisdom. Moss had written some radio scripts, but when he told Micheaux that he wanted to write film scripts, Micheaux “made it clear that he wrote his own scripts and wasn’t interested in what anyone else wrote.” He was “in absolute control of every facet of his productions,” Moss recalled, and “would not listen to any suggestions or changes from anyone, except Mrs. Micheaux.”

  To Moss, Micheaux’s scripts seemed prolix, the language frequently tangled, or ungrammatical. But only Alice B. Russell dared criticize her husband’s scenarios. “She’d edit [the scripts] by being in the rehearsal,” recalled Moss, “and [while] we’re playing the scene [she’d say], ‘Dad, I think it’d be proper to say…’”