by Ann Hulbert
At first the big albums had resembled a standard record of early milestones, advanced but mostly not outlandish—hesitant steps at about eight months, four recognizable utterances at fourteen months (“Jo,” as she then called her mother, “Daddy,” “God damn,” and “How do”). For the often-absent George, the progress reports were welcome. Back home, he added his own note about the “exceptional sense of humor” of his one-and-a-half-year-old. George had gotten Philippa a blackboard when she turned one, and he and Josephine now joined in her intensive letter-learning games. They kept track of her amusing wordplay: Can you say, Philippa asked, “go crooked to bed”?
George, editing at The Pittsburgh Courier, notified the black press of her early exploits. By the time the mainstream press in the form of Alsop paid a visit to their precocious three-year-old, the fast-growing trove of memorabilia was becoming a more intensely parasitic and proprietary chronicle than any Hollywood fan club could gin up for a star. The scrapbooks, which the Schuylers planned to unveil when she was older, were a record of parental hopes and hubris as much as of Philippa’s own progress. Shortly after inserting the Alsop clipping, Josephine added commentary, diary-style:
Everywhere your Daddy goes people ask about you, having read of you. When I take you to the Library on 145th Street the lady librarian makes a great deal of fuss over you. It is very nice having an accomplished daughter. I glow with pride. If only we can keep this up, darling, maybe you can be a great personality in the world. I hope so.
In the scrapbooks, Josephine was also honest about tactics that she wouldn’t have dreamed of revealing in public. She plainly felt the need to justify them to the older Philippa who would peruse the pages—and also to herself. “You are stubborn and self-willed and want to do things your way,” she wrote in the fall of 1934, describing recent hard spanks. “While I am whipping you, you often put your arms around me and say most plaintively, ‘Oh, Jody, don’t you be bad to me. Oh Jody, please be nice to me.’ ” (Philippa didn’t call her mother by the usual endearments.) Even Josephine half-recognized that her Watsonian rationale failed to add up: “I must teach you to adjust yourself swiftly to new situations (you do this well though) and to forget anger and forgive quickly (this you don’t do).” Blind to her own impulse-control issues, Josephine applied the harsh hand she felt she herself needed, or at any rate desired. “Beat me and then love me,” she had urged George, “and I’ll be as docile as a lamb.”
Betrayal, not beating, turned out to be George’s mode of causing his wife pain, as Josephine discovered before long, but in a 1935 letter he was still in full worship mode. “Your respect for and confidence in and reliance upon me,” he wrote her, were just the sustenance their union was supposed to provide. Philippa was if anything more blessed, George went on, though he was surely aware that Josephine veered between extolling her brilliant black child and fiercely pruning a daughter who mustn’t be spoiled the way she, Josephine, had been. “You and Philippa are growing together like Siamese twins,” he noted, thrilled by the development.
She is going to be a facsimile of you with the exception that she is having a much better start in life. She can become anything under your tutelage. She has already become a wonder. I often speculate on what she will become and what glory she will reflect upon us. It is a wonderful thing to look forward to. I just know she is going to be a marvelously beautiful and intelligent woman. We must do everything to preserve her, like a hothouse flower, for she is a rare and exotic breed. There are few beings like her in the world.
Perhaps George, who generally derided such excessive fussing as white-folk nonsense, was hoping to soften Josephine’s approach. (When he first spanked Philippa, Josephine wrote in the diary, it “almost killed him.”) But he doubtless also knew that his wife wasn’t to be deterred from her mission to turn out a hardy model of hybrid vigor for the world. A year earlier, Josephine had launched Philippa on a new track, eager to deflect suggestions that their preschooler was an overcultivated clone of her bookish parents. (Philippa had been churning out stories, sometimes ten a week, by hand and on the typewriter, which she was learning to use.) Since shortly before Christmas in 1934, Philippa had been very busy at their green upright piano. Josephine had engaged an African American graduate of Juilliard, Arnetta Jones, as her teacher.
Columbia University’s Child Development Institute had noted, shortly before Philippa turned three, that “she excels chiefly in her capacity for sustained attention and ability to concentrate during prolonged periods.” At the piano, as at her chalkboard, Philippa took off. Within a year, she had begun composing short pieces, too, telling stories in rhythms and notes. When she hurried up to the apartment one day to write “Men at Work” after watching a WPA construction project on the sidewalk, she didn’t shy away from boldly dissonant tones. Not long before she turned five, Philippa was the youngest of seven winners in her first music competition, sponsored by the National Guild of Piano Teachers. She pulled off four required pieces with impressive agility for her age. She also performed five that she had written, and the judges discovered a gift that had eluded the NYU assessors who had recently tested her IQ at 180: perfect pitch. (Philippa’s favorite song was her “Cockroach Ballet,” about roaches feasting and then suffering a near massacre, with a few survivors celebrating.) Scores of her songs, printed up in a booklet by her parents, were unearthed in 2011 by the musician John McLaughlin Williams. He made an informal recording, pleased to discover signs of real growth in work that he felt surely reflected some exposure to contemporary music.
Philippa, with Jones as her teacher, now had a nonparental mentor. Josephine meanwhile was assuming the role of manager as she sought out musical venues to showcase Philippa’s striking talents. The relationship that evolved between mother and daughter, though, was the opposite of Shirley and Gertrude’s mutually confidence-boosting alliance. Perhaps emboldened by working with Jones, Philippa pushed her mother to “make a better rule about whipping me.” Please, she urged as they wrote up resolutions on New Year’s in 1936, “teach me some other way….It doesn’t make me want to follow the rules. It makes me think you can’t love me as much as you say you do.” Josephine, taking her cue from her daughter, devised new rules: deny pleasures (toys, meals) rather than inflict pain, all the while applying ever greater pressure to perform.
The new disciplinary regime hardly reassured Philippa, who was in turn discovering how to unnerve her mother. “You nearly scared me to death,” Josephine scrawled next to a newspaper clipping about a recital in the spring of 1938. Philippa, not yet seven, was by then in school part-time but practicing and performing more and more (on amateur radio hours, too)—not to mention being a star participant in the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts annual notebook contests. (One of her commentaries on the season’s series, thirty-six pages long and illustrated, won her a special prize at Carnegie Hall.) The May evening of that particular recital, Philippa was evidently exhausted. Josephine, who recorded the drama in the scrapbook, described her saying, just before going on stage, “ ‘Jody, I want to do this but I don’t believe I can make it’ and smiling brightly.” Josephine took it from there:
“Good heavens! Why not?” “Well,” still brightly, “I just don’t feel like I can make it.” “Look here!” I said sternly, “You have to make it. Of course, you can! Go on out there and show ’em!” You were a trooper! You showed ’em! You signed programs till your hands were weary. Next day I said to you: Don’t ever tell me you can’t make a thing again. You can make anything you prepare for. The time to think of that is weeks before and by more practice, which determines everything.
Philippa began to make a habit of balking as concerts approached, and a frantic Josephine recruited George to weigh in by mail. A girl looking for some unconditional love from her adored father wasn’t going to find much in his chiding vote of confidence:
You can do anything if you try hard enough and do as Jodie and Miss Jones say. I am very proud of you, darlin
g, and I know that some day you will be a great person, especially if you will take advice without resentment or irritation. Practice makes perfect. You know that.
“Love was the thing that freed me from nagging uncertainty, allowing me to do my job better than the next kid,” Shirley wrote in her memoir, evoking a child who felt bolstered even as she was buffeted by film industry demands. Philippa had a mother who was running the show and who felt she couldn’t afford New Deal–style solicitude, or the pretense of it. No child welfare inspectors, waving labor regulations, were going to pay surprise visits to their Harlem apartment. Still, Josephine wanted to explain the relentless promotion and performance, and practice, in the scrapbook that Philippa would ultimately read. “I realize, darling, that these contests are often stupid and I know many educators disapprove of them,” she began. “But here is why I persist”:
1. George and Jody have nothing to give you save opportunity. And because we have refused to be conventional in our way of life, opportunity will not come to us unsought. We must seek the best for you, go out and get it or it will pass us by. We, and especially you, are a challenge to the set notions of America on race. These prejudices, erected to justify a diabolical system of exploitation of man by his fellow man, will not easily give way. Only genius will break them down, and that you have. So I take you about as much for the education of America as for the education of Philippa.
2. Aside from all this, it is good training in social conduct for you. You learn to meet new people in a friendly, charming fashion, to do your part under all circumstances….
4. Finally, I heartily wish my parents had given me the kind of help I’m giving you. As I look back, I see how I longed to be important, to be taken seriously, to be given a way of life, pointed a road that was interesting. Instead, I was given money, social position and treated like a baby. I loathed it.
Her manifesto was far more forthright than Fox Film’s pseudo-child-friendly contract, and deeply unsettling. Josephine didn’t shrink from exposing the instrumental zeal behind elevating a child as an emissary of anything—whether racial enlightenment or uplifting (and lucrative) entertainment or a parent’s thwarted dreams. In Josephine’s case, all three were at stake. She didn’t invoke the familiar defense of child-star labor either—that it was easy and educationally approved. She knew that a biracial girl couldn’t win over a wary public with mere bubbly spirits. And lurking in Josephine’s insistence on taking a hardworking child seriously was in fact a respect that Shirley, for one, yearned for.
Yet the effect, all but inevitable, was to erode Philippa’s sense of autonomy. Not that the wider world could tell. At seven, Philippa thrived as she took composition and singing classes at the esteemed Convent Music School not far from their Harlem apartment. She also started spending several hours a day in fourth grade, the only black child at the Annunciation School, on the same campus grounds. (“If I just wanted to play games I could go to the park,” Philippa had said in choosing it over a progressive school for the gifted. “But I want to learn something every day.”) Assessing her “social relationships,” her glowing school report described a “sunny, attractive child” who was “very mature…quite a favorite in the group.” On the “mental hygiene” front, she was judged “fully secure in her home relationship, perfectly confident in her contacts with her child world.” The faculty wished that Philippa could spend more time there.
PHILIPPA SCHUYLER Credit 7
The school’s view was based, of course, on very partial exposure—which was precisely the problem. Ceding control of Philippa’s training and development to other formative figures threatened Josephine’s sense of importance and the Schuylers’ project. A succession of piano teachers counseled against so much concertizing so soon, only to be fired or to quit when Josephine flouted them. So again and again Philippa lost her chance to forge a trusting bond with a teacher and to discover for herself, as Shirley had, the rewards of discipline and a sense of independence. Arnetta Jones was no Bill Robinson. But she and the other young women teachers whom Josephine lined up were impressive.
More important, they were dedicated to a child who was, as one of them put it, “just the most delicious thing” and “musically…like a sponge,” with a phenomenal memory and extraordinarily strong, supple hands. Philippa adored them, too—yet “nagging uncertainty,” in Shirley’s words, undermined her. Josephine pushed; Philippa’s audiences applauded; her teachers pushed back, eager to help her improve not just perform. Defensive about being corrected and desperate for unqualified allegiance, Philippa tested her teachers, not just her mother. With a dramatic flair she had picked up from Josephine, one day she accused a favorite teacher of not loving her (after some criticism of her playing). Philippa then rushed out, threatening to throw herself off the roof. Josephine rolled her eyes at what she said were mere antics. The teacher resigned on the spot.
Yet in the prescribed “friendly, charming fashion,” Philippa continued to do her part in the world. Now almost nine, she played on “Philippa Schuyler Day” in June 1940 at the World’s Fair in New York, which Josephine lobbied to have inserted into a packed schedule of specially dedicated days. (Bill Robinson was the only other black American so honored.) That same month, the Chicago-based Quiz Kids radio show debuted, and she was invited to “out quiz” the brainy young contestants, submitting questions. When The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell interviewed Philippa for a profile later that summer, he was captivated by her beauty and childish, riddle-telling verve. Her parents unobtrusively gave him a look at the scrapbooks they had been keeping, where he read of her incessant curiosity. “If there’s any pushing done,” Josephine told Mitchell as he left the apartment, “she’s the one that does it.”
When Josephine and George shared the scrapbooks with Philippa on her thirteenth birthday, she confronted fourteen portfolio-size folders that revealed her whole life to have been their scripted project. The timing couldn’t have been worse, struggling as she already was to find her voice and place. She and her mother were just back from a “sabbatical” in Mexico. There Philippa had tackled her first orchestral composition, Josephine’s new gambit for public attention. The piece, Manhattan Nocturne, was full of homesickness, the work of a girl who was feeling unmoored. Her mother had intimated that her beloved father, who had stayed behind to take care of the cats, was an unfaithful husband. En route to Mexico, Josephine hadn’t taken Philippa with her to visit her family in Texas; her exile from that clan was clear. The scrapbooks exiled her from her own life. In the nightmares Philippa kept having, she yearned for suicide. She felt that she was no one, and she had nowhere to turn for solace. She had been left stranded without intimates—except for one, the mother who was sure that she had made Philippa into Someone.
In her loneliness, Philippa drove herself ever harder, reared to “do her part under all circumstances.” The daunting obstacles that face any adolescent in the merciless world of concert performance were compounded for her. Now she recognized the “vicious barriers of prejudice” she was up against. “It was a ruthless shock to me that, at first, made the walls of my self-confidence crumble,” she wrote later. “It horrified, humiliated me.” The creative spur of turning to composition proved fruitful. Still, she suffered corrosive anxiety. She was newly aware “of the weighty importance of each concert.”
The performance of her Manhattan Nocturne at a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert in 1945 was greeted as a remarkable composing debut, “truly poetic, the expression of genuine feeling, a gentle, soft beauty and imagination,” one reviewer wrote. For Philippa, almost fourteen, it was an ordeal that stirred up all “the uncertainties, confusion, anger, months of revision, hundreds of wee morning hours spent laboriously copying out scores and parts.” The next year, shortly before she was to appear with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium as the soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto in G and as the composer of the Rumpelstiltskin scherzo from her Fairy Tale Symphony, a new work, she told an int
erviewer: “I have to work now so that when I get older I’ll be able to enjoy life really then.” Her scherzo betrayed none of her travails. It was “expertly written,” The New York Times judged, “with a broad melodic core that has genuine charm.”
Philippa didn’t let up on the work, and as she approached sixteen after a run of spectacular success, she seemed to relax. She even went on a few dates. Radiating beauty, she conveyed enjoyment and confidence as she talked to the press. Her Manhattan Nocturne and Rumpelstiltskin had won prizes and received premier exposure—played by the Boston Pops, and the Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, along with the New York Philharmonic. Praise from the composer and discerning critic Virgil Thomson was just the kind that a maturing prodigy wants to hear. “She plays music, not Philippa Schuyler, even when she performs her own compositions,” he wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. “And she gets inside any piece with conviction.” He saw a “real gift for…saying things with music” in her Fairy Tale Symphony, which he found as interesting as the symphonies Mozart wrote at thirteen.
Philippa’s rebound didn’t last. In 1948 Josephine struggled to line up mostly black sponsors, hoping in vain for mixed audiences for the national tour she was busy arranging. “Do you know how many blacks took piano lessons because of Philippa?” the sociologist Hylan Lewis later said. Crossover allure, though, proved elusive. Josephine was also very worried about money, not just for Philippa’s lessons but for the managerial salary she had been drawing for years. “You can make anything you prepare for” was a maternal mantra that gave Philippa plenty of room to torture her mother and herself. “She sits all day at the piano, won’t eat,” Josephine wrote George from the road. “Says she is too busy, or it makes her tired or sick to eat. She plays the scales over and over….I am really low in spirit. There is no satisfaction in this for me when she is so cold and demanding, so irritable and exacting.”