Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  Twenty-two-year-old Leroy Collins Jr. was attending nearby Roosevelt University on the GI Bill. A varsity football player in high school, Collins had also done a little acting in school and community groups before his army service, and he looked the part: a blend of athlete, soldier, and movie star, tall, well-built, dreamily handsome, with an intelligent face and a warm smile. Collins and his fraternity brothers heard about an all-black movie being shot in Chicago and they went over to the studio where interviews were being held to look for summer jobs as stagehands. Collins was standing in line, hoping for any kind of work, when the assistant director tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him into another room to meet two people.

  Barely into his teens when the director had made his last picture in 1940, Collins had never heard of Oscar Micheaux, had never read his novels or recalled seeing any of his movies. The man he was introduced to was in his sixties, tall, heavyset, and balding, with salt and pepper tufts of hair, dressed in suit and tie. They shook hands. Close by was a lighter-skinned woman in her late fifties, slender, well-dressed, cultivated.

  Micheaux asked Collins a few introductory questions and then briefly outlined the story of the picture—his own life story, he said, fictionalized. Then to his astonishment, Micheaux handed the college student a thick script and asked Collins to read a scene in which he would be playing Martin Eden, the lead character.

  “Just read it in your own style,” the director encouraged him.

  So Collins read a page, as Micheaux stared at him. Then another page. Finally, after a few more, Micheaux glanced over at his wife and said, “I think this is the one.” And Alice B. Russell nodded her approval.

  “You are Martin Eden,” Micheaux explained, “and Martin Eden was me.”

  Micheaux’s assistant director later informed Collins that many people, including prominent professionals, had been auditioned for the lead role, “people like Oscar Brown, a writer, singer, and all-around entertainer,” in Collins’s words. “But I got the part because I looked like Oscar Micheaux wanted me to look.”

  Leroy Collins was Martin Eden: not only in the story, but also in Micheaux’s eyes. The director never addressed the college student as Leroy, or Roy, as his friends called him. Instead Micheaux always called him “Martin,” just as he always called Myra Stanton “Deborah.”

  “Never in his life did he call me by my real name,” Collins marveled years later. “From the first moment he laid eyes on me he didn’t call me anything other than the name of the character in his book.”

  Micheaux, by this point, was walking with a slight limp, using a cane. He took pills at intervals, and once in a while smoked a cigar. But people associated with the director’s last film production don’t remember him having any obvious health concerns. In rehearsals and on the set he radiated strength and authority.

  The same could be said of his methods. Though his budget was as feeble as ever, he was imaginative about making do with what he had. Again and again, surviving eyewitnesses have contradicted the legend that Micheaux was an intentionally cheap, fast, and shoddy director: the mistaken notion that the partial remains of his censored, maltreated films represent a deliberate “style.” When Micheaux found the money and time—and, most important to this last project, the willpower—he worked hard, from read-throughs to “dailies” and retakes.

  In August the cast gathered at the community center, sitting in a circle of chairs in a big room. Besides the principals, there were about twenty other actors with speaking parts, an assemblage that in some ways epitomized Micheaux’s casting over the years. Quite a few were college students from Roosevelt. Micheaux recruited favorites from earlier films, like Edward Fraction from The Symbol of the Unconquered (a quarter of a century ago) to play the old grandfather, and Gladys Williams from The Notorious Elinor Lee; he even flew one veteran character actor in his sixties out from Hollywood. Chicago calypso dancer and choreographer Vernon B. Duncan, the son of the man who had played the Reverend McCracken character in The Homesteader, played one of the unscrupulous lawyers trying to rig the betrayal of Martin Eden.

  Always dressed formally, Micheaux sat to one side during the initial read-throughs, while the actors with the lengthiest dialogue scenes stood up in front. Most of the scenes were overlong, Leroy Collins thought, and talky. The script seemed as long as a telephone book, and Martin Eden was in over 70 percent of the scenes.

  Micheaux would volunteer little suggestions. “Speak up.” Or: “Try reading it a different way.” Though he was addressing a room full of amateurs, he rarely expounded on acting; instead he offered valuable camera-specific tips, such as never to look directly at the lens. “He wanted to get it down to a fine point before you got in costume,” recollected Collins, “because he was spending a great deal of his own fortune to do this movie.”

  Mrs. Micheaux was at all the rehearsals, reading her own part or holding the master script. The couple had silent ways of communicating. As the actors spoke their parts, Mrs. Micheaux made sure they were tracking her husband’s written lines, and quietly consulted with her husband about necessary small changes.

  The script was a strange mix, mingling some archaic language (as though it were recycled from silent-era intertitles), with modern slang and innuendo. Micheaux was still willing to test the censors, with lines like “How’s your hammer hanging?” and “You might be able to ‘make’ her,” that the local authorities in some parts of the country were bound to notice. But he bowed to postwar sensibilities by stopping short of using the n-word, long a point of pride in his populist approach. The word had been conspicuous in the novel on which the script was based, but whenever the film’s characters started to utter the slur, they were inevitably cut off in mid-syllable.

  The time frame of the story was curiously jumbled. At one point, for instance, the self-referential Micheaux couldn’t resist having Martin Eden mail a copy of The Case of Mrs. Wingate—a book Micheaux published thirty years after his homesteading—to his neighbors.

  If the director was anxious about spending so much of his own money, he didn’t show it during the three or four weeks set aside for rehearsal before the actual filming. If the actors became comfortable with their parts, then the production would go more smoothly and Micheaux would save on film stock and studio time. The crew was small, but Micheaux had his bases covered. He even sprang for costume fittings and makeup artists. All the actors except Leroy Collins wore makeup. “He stipulated that at no time was I ever to use any makeup,” Collins said. “I guess he wanted me to look more rugged, like he was as a young person.”

  The all-white crew was paid union scale. But the cast of mostly young amateur unknowns felt grateful for their decent compensation. Their checks were handed over to them on time, weekly, by Micheaux himself.

  After rehearsals had run their course, the cast moved into the Twenty-ninth Street studio for two or three weeks of interior photography. His spirits lifted by the work, Micheaux scurried around, scrutinizing the set and lighting. He gave exacting instructions to the cameraman, sometimes peering through the lens himself. He blocked the actors’ movements, and perched on a stool to watch intently as the scenes unfolded.

  There was no money in the budget for the elaborate musical sequences of old, but then again, Micheaux was no longer the nightclub aficionado he once had been. Yet Micheaux did find a way to weave favorite music into the story, using the jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which he whistled to work, recurrently in the background of several scenes.

  Micheaux’s directing style was courtly, though he could be gruff and blustery with some of the amateurs, the men more than the women. “He never shouted at me, not once,” recalled Collins. “He was gentle with me, and the leading ladies, and two or three other ladies. I think he was quite the guy with the ladies, at one time.” He was also gracious with Jesse Johnson, one of Collins’s fraternity brothers, who played a small part as Martin Eden’s white homesteader friend. At a certain point, Johnson got up the courage
to ask Micheaux for additional work as a “a go-fer on a part time basis,” carrying klieg lights and other equipment during the filming. Johnson was trying to pay for night school. Micheaux said sure. “Three or four hours a day,” recalled Johnson gratefully. “Twenty five bucks a week. Back in 1947, without a part-time job, that was a fortune. I did that until they wrapped up the movie.”

  One performer who got under Micheaux’s skin was Yvonne Machen, whose temperament mirrored the character she was playing. Machen was a spitfire, always challenging Micheaux, wanting to try scenes her way. He’d shout at Machen worse than he shouted at the men, and she’d shout back.

  Another actor who got on his nerves was Harris Gaines, who was playing Doctor Lee, the McCracken-devil incarnate. Gaines had grandiose show business aspirations, and in his death scene Micheaux thought he was dragging things out, hamming it up. The angry director kept yelling at him, “C’mon, you black Barrymore, die!”

  Such tense moments were sometimes broken up by Micheaux’s chauffeur, Obie, who was always hanging about. Although he didn’t have any official status on the production, Obie wasn’t shy about offering his own opinions, at times even disagreeing audibly with his boss. “Obie, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” they heard Micheaux snap back, to their amusement. “Aw, shut up, Obie!”

  As she always had, Alice B. Russell did her share, watching over the script during scenes, taking her husband aside for whispered words, making suggestions and solving small problems. Micheaux pieced off the tricky emotional scenes to his wife, for extra rehearsal. One of them was a big moment between Collins and Myra Stanton, when the two are drawn closer and closer—while reciting the Lord’s Prayer—until their characters finally kiss. Flustered, Stanton kept forgetting the words to the prayer, screwing up the take. “Damn it, Deborah!” Micheaux swore, calling her by her character’s name.

  The young leads weren’t sure how real the kiss should be. Mrs. Micheaux took additional time with them, showing them how screen actors “phony-kiss” with their lips to the side, so that the camera angle makes it look real. “She was quite dynamic” and helpful, Jesse Johnson recalled, from watching the rehearsals.

  The worst sin for any Micheaux actor was to deviate from the dialogue in the master script. Micheaux wanted each and every word he had written clearly enunciated, and if the words weren’t registered he’d call for retakes.

  Again, the sole exception was Collins. Though dramatically untrained, Collins felt “pretty much natural in the part.” Still, at times he would say to himself, “I can’t talk that way. It’s not me.” And then he would improvise a few words, change the dialogue a little, trying for a more organic quality. He was the one actor Micheaux never interrupted or chastised. Collins could tinker, “but he didn’t let the others improvise” any lines.

  “The dialogue just didn’t come natural to a lot of the characters,” Collins mused. “It was like someone saying, ‘Here is my philosophy, here is how I feel, and I’m going to say it all through this character, all at once, right now.’ I had taken speech classes, and I had some success at speechmaking, and even I knew that the dialogue could be improved.”

  The cast and crew gathered every night after filming to watch the previous day’s rushes. Micheaux had to be satisfied before they could move on. “If he saw something there he didn’t care for, we’d reshoot it,” said Collins. “It could be reshot the next day, while the costumes and actors were still there.”

  A seventy-page “dialogue sheet” of Micheaux’s script for The Betrayal survives in the New York state archives. Scene by scene, it was the old familiar story he’d already told in several books and films—ending, as in The Wind from Nowhere, with the homesteader, the mixed-race Scottish girl, and Martin Eden’s rescued baby all returning to the Rosebud just in time to save their land. (For movie purposes, this involved a frantic train ride, a speeding car trip, and a perilous trip across a cloudburst-swollen river on horseback.) They arrive to discover that mineral riches have been found on their claim, guaranteeing a future of wealth and happiness—the fairy-tale ending Micheaux had sought all his life.

  Of course Micheaux wasn’t going to do any filming in Hollywood; that was merely hooey for the press. Nor was there enough budget for any trip to South Dakota. Micheaux used farms in southern Wisconsin and fields in Michigan to simulate the Rosebud, with Leroy Collins plowing like a madman, or riding a horse in full cowboy regalia.

  They’d be driving along a country road, a convoy of open-topped cars with Micheaux and the cameraman in the lead, looking for a farmhouse for an establishing shot. Suddenly Micheaux would order Obie to pull over, gesturing at a picturesque house over on a slight rise. All the other cars would swing over to the side of the road, while Micheaux hopped out, telling the cameraman where to set up. The curious residents of the farm would trickle onto the porch, or peer through their windows at the strange sight of the cars, the camera, and the tall, husky, white-haired black man standing in front of their home and stabbing his finger in their direction. Without so much as a hello, Micheaux would wave angrily and shout: “Get out of the way of the shot!”

  And then the farm folk’d skedaddle. “He could put the scare into people,” Collins recalled.

  The more freewheeling scenes were out of doors. If the actresses and romantic touches were more Alice B. Russell’s bailiwick, Micheaux handled the manlier scenes himself. One time, Jesse Johnson was playing a scene where he plunges into a fistfight with another white homesteader who makes prejudicial comments about Martin Eden. Johnson was supposed to slug the other actor hard enough to knock him to the ground. The two amateur actors tried faking it one way, then another and another. “We faked it and faked it and faked it,” Johnson recalled.

  “Aw, it looks phony!” Micheaux shouted at the young actor. “Go on, hit him, Johnson!”

  “I can’t, Mr. Micheaux,” Johnson apologized.

  “Well, you’re not faking it too well,” Micheaux complained, not unkindly. “At least fake it better!”

  So the director himself stepped in and showed Johnson how to punch and feint more credibly. “We finally did it to his liking,” Johnson recalled. “We did it a half dozen times, trying it until he liked it.”

  The scene where the preacher’s daughter Linda (Verlie Cowan) stumbles out into traffic and is run down by an automobile was a rare stunt job for Obie, Micheaux’s chauffeur. With the cast and crew lined up to watch from the sidelines, Micheaux took his time setting up the important shot, advising his chauffeur where to aim and angle the car—Micheaux’s own black limousine—for the maximum visual effect. Obie got behind the wheel, Micheaux called action, and the car shot forward like a missile, so fast that everyone had to leap out of the way.

  “The car missed her, but it was very close,” Myra Stanton remembered, laughing. “Mr. Micheaux had a fit. ‘You almost hit Linda! We almost had a fatal accident with that gal!’ He was so angry with Obie.”

  Micheaux splurged for wind machines for the signature sequence in the film, where Martin Eden, living forlornly on his homestead, is suddenly attacked by “the wind from nowhere.” Huge fans were set up to blow great gusts of air against Collins, pushing him back, impeding his progress—just as nature and society had always tried to keep Micheaux from achieving his life’s goals. To Collins it seemed an extremely realistic and effective scene, with the tornadolike wind whirling him about and slamming him repeatedly to the ground.

  Most of the photography was done in the month of September, inside of three weeks. Micheaux left Chicago soon thereafter, taking the footage with him. Most of the crew and cast never laid eyes on him again.

  Even so, there was a footnote: Despite all the read-throughs, the rehearsals, dailies, and retakes, this was Micheaux’s last chance to tell his life story, and he was determined to get it right. Late in the fall he sent orders from his New Jersey editing room: The race-picture pioneer wasn’t satisfied with the coverage. He needed more retakes. He sent pages of instructi
ons to his assistant director, who took the cameraman and some of the actors out and supervised a little reshooting.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1947–1951 AHEAD OF TIME

  Back east by November 1947, Micheaux launched into postproduction. He would take as much care with the editing and polishing in Fort Lee as he had with the preproduction in Chicago. After three months of cutting and splicing, Micheaux had The Betrayal down to twenty-four reels, or just over three and a half hours. Declaring a temporary halt, he called in some favors and loans before continuing. After “days of virtual amputation,” in his words, he had a release version ready—at three hours and fifteen minutes.

  He still had to raise five hundred dollars to “start matching the negative so he can get a print for screening” to stimulate booking contracts, according to his wife, Alice B. Russell. In the meantime, he mocked up “some of his advertising matter,” in the words of Mrs. Micheaux, who sent the “Program” to a sister-in-law in Great Bend, Kansas. “So you can see, dear,” her accompanying letter said, “he is doing a big job and he is doing it alone. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  But finances weren’t the only reason that the postproduction bogged down. Micheaux himself was physically spent.

  “Dad has arthritis all over his body,” Mrs. Micheaux wrote to her sister-in-law. “I have to help him put on his clothes and take them off. And I have to help him take a bath. His hands are slightly swollen, and he can’t grip or hold anything tightly, but as I said, he keeps on working. It is better for him to keep busy as long as he can, because he is so restless he couldn’t stand not being able to go where he wanted to go.”