by Donald Bogle
Of Clara Smith, he wrote that she was “a crude purveyor of the pseudo-folksongs of her race. She employs, however, more nuances of expression than Bessie. Her voice flutters agonizingly between tones. Music critics would say that she sings off the key. What she really does, of course, is to sing quarter tones. Thus she is justifiably billed as the ‘World’s greatest moaner.’ She appears to be more of an artist than Bessie, but I suspect that this apparent artistry is spontaneous and uncalculated.”
But Van Vechten’s greatest praise was reserved for Ethel, whose subtlety, clarity, and sophistication were, for him, beyond compare. He called her the best of the blues singers, even though he realized she was not quite a blues singer in the classic sense. “In fact, to my mind, as an artist, Miss Waters is superior to any other woman stage singer of her race. She refines her comedy, refines her pathos, refines even her obscenities. She is such an expert mistress of her effects that she is obliged to expend very little effort to get over a line, a song, or even a dance,” he wrote. “Some of her songs she croons; she never shouts. Her methods are precisely opposed to those of the crude coon shouters, to those of the authentic Blues singer, and yet, not for once, does she lose the veridical Negro atmosphere. Her voice and her gestures are essentially Negro, but they have been thought out and restrained, not prettified, but stylized. Ethel Waters can be languorous or emotional or gay, according of the mood of her song, but she is always the artistic interpreter of the many-talented race of which she is such a conspicuous member.”
For later generations, Van Vechten’s language would smack of a certain condescension and at times a cultural misreading—indeed a fundamental cultural bias—of who the women were and what they represented. Still, he was introducing the cultural elite as well as mainstream America to remarkable talents, and he was demanding that that mainstream reconsider its definitions of popular music and popular art. “When Mr. Van Vechten134,” said James Weldon Johnson, “by his article in Vanity Fair and other publications, and by his personal efforts, was doing so much to focus public attention upon the recent literary and artistic emergence of the Negro and upon the individual artists, he did not neglect the singers of this important and not fully evaluated genre of Negro folk-singers.” Johnson also commented: “It was Carl Van Vechten who first pointed out that the blues-singers were artists.”
Like any star, Waters had a healthy ego, and surely she loved reading Van Vechten’s comments. But, still, she showed no great interest in meeting him. Van Vechten, however, kept pushing. Finally, upon being introduced to him, a cordial Ethel maintained a very obvious distance. Carl Van Vechten’s style may have struck her as perhaps too precious, too artsy, too prissy. Here was a man whose letters were typed on lavender or canary yellow or raspberry stationery. Here was a man who dressed like a dandy in bowler hats and fine tailored jackets and suits with colorful and flashy handkerchiefs in his lapel pockets. That was when he was being sedate. On one occasion, he arrived at a party decked out in “red and gold Oriental135 robes looking like the Dowager Empress of China, gone slightly berserk.” Literary critic Alfred Kazin said that Van Vechten “thrived on his own136 affectations.” If he was bisexual or gay, that meant nothing to Waters. If anything, that, as well as his style of dress, would simply have amused her and made him interesting. But affectations and prissiness were not her style, nor that of the people she chose to be around.
Still, Van Vechten appeared drawn to her far more than many of the other Black artists with whom he hobnobbed. Oddly enough, it looked as if he wanted her approval. And he continued his attempts to ingratiate himself and to have her become a part of his social world. Like Earl Dancer, he put up with her initial standoffishness and her basic rejection. Apparently, he was respectful, even admiring, of her hauteur and her refusal to fall at his feet. Whenever she appeared in Harlem, he went to see her and kept up his pursuit. Eventually, it paid off. “Occasionally, she came to137 our apartment for dinner or a party,” said Van Vechten. “When I got there627 , 138,” said Ethel, “it was filled with beautiful things—paintings, rare old books, sculptures, and antiques. But none of those things meant a damn thing to me. They still don’t. Nothing in my life has geared me to like or appreciate works of art.” Ethel even hated the food that was served. “It was rich white folks’ food, and they started off with borsch. Cold borsch! That is nothing but soap and clabber,” she said. “I don’t eat caviar139 when I go to white folks houses just because it is the correct thing to do. Caviar to me is, and will always remain, just a lot of buck shot on bread. I’m strictly against colored artists getting high hat—or against any artist forgetting that first of all he’s a child of God.” In some respects—with her bluntly expressed opinions—Ethel must have seemed like the dinner guest from hell.
Yet Van Vechten may have detected a side of Ethel that few understood. Despite her outspokenness, she also had a reserve, especially during these years when attending social affairs. Part of it may have been her perpetual insecurities about her lack of a formal education. “I’ve seen a lot140 of Ethel & taken her around a lot,” Van Vechten once wrote Langston Hughes. “She is very human when you know her—but very shy & on the whole doesn’t trust either jigs or ofays. So, quite inconsistently, tells them both what’s on her mind.” The writer Geraldyn Dismond observed: “Her innate shyness and141 reserve have often been misinterpreted for snobbishness, but she is unaffected, simple, and generous to a fault.”
Still, Van Vechten and his wife Fania continued to go out of their way to gain Waters’ trust. “At any rate, it142 was not too long before we became great friends,” said Van Vechten. At his apartment, she met leading artists of the period: Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson, and important critics and social movers. Through him, she was introduced to some of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. She was on friendly terms with Langston Hughes, and one of her treasured possessions was a signed copy of his first book, Weary Blues. In turn, those who met her were often fascinated by her—and in awe of her talent and her growing fame. When Hughes traveled by train through Central Asia, he carried with him a Victrola and the records of Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong. When he worked on his autobiography The Big Sea, he kept a copy of a Van Vechten photograph of Ethel in front of him.
Also fascinated, perhaps even smitten by, Ethel was Zora Neale Hurston. “She came to me143 across the footlights. Not the artist alone, but the person,” said Hurston, “and I wanted to know her very much. I was too timid to go backstage and haunt her, so I just wrote her letters and she just plain ignored me. But I kept right on. I sensed a great humanness and depth about her soul and I wanted to know someone like that.” Finally, Van Vechten “gave a dinner for me. A great many celebrities were there, including Sinclair Lewis, Dwight Fiske, Anna Mae [sic] Wong, Blanche Knopf,” Hurston recalled. “Carl whispered to me that Ethel Waters was coming later.” Hurston and Waters talked and “got on very well. I found what I suspected, was true. Ethel Waters is a very shy person. It had not been her intention to ignore me. She had felt that I belonged to another world and had no need of her. She thought that I had been merely curious. She laughed at her error and said, ‘And here you are just like me all the time.’ She got warm and friendly, and we went on from there.” When she was about to leave at the end of the evening, Waters “got her wraps, and said, ‘Come on, Zora, let’s go uptown.’ I went along with her, her husband, and Faithful Lashley, a young woman spiritual singer from somewhere in Mississippi, whom Ethel has taken under wing.”
Once she got to know Waters better, Hurston observed that she was “one of the strangest144 bundles of people I have ever met. You can just see the different folks wrapped up in her if you associate with her long. Just like watching an open fire—the color and shape of her personality is never the same twice. She has extraordinary talents which her lack of formal education prevents her from displaying.” Hurston added, “Her struggle for adequate expression throws her into moods at times.”
***
In 1926, Ethel’s act had changed in one crucial respect. Earl was now her full-time manager-producer and obviously the man in charge. Often overbearing and dictatorial, he insisted that all offers for her services had to come by him. Yet Ethel never meekly took a backseat to Dancer. And she never backed off from a fight with him, especially if Earl was caught paying too much attention to one showgirl or another.
Nonetheless, the show was always the main thing for her. She still wrote material, staged numbers, and maintained a very active role in most production decisions. Nothing of importance got by without her approval as they crisscrossed the country on the Keith and TOBA circuits. Together she and Dancer meticulously built up a company of top-flight singers, dancers, and comics. The two created tab shows, which were short or tabloid productions of revue-style entertainment. Dancer’s goal was to whip such a show into shape for Broadway. In March, Ethel headlined a revue called New Vanities that seemed to have possibilities. At Pittsburgh’s Elmore Theatre, the show caused a near-riot as hundreds clamored “for admission to the147 theater, blocked traffic the entire length of the block, and caused a hurry call for the police in order to check the rush and half the fist-fights. . . . Night after night, people had been turned away.”
The Negro press considered the show “one of the most286 spicy and risqué ever to appear in the city.” Much criticism centered on the near nudity in the show, with its “high-toned group of scantily clad chorus girls, wriggling their bodies in their own interpretation of the latest in dance hits, and holding rather suggestive poses for more than a minute in the full glare of the spotlight.” Ethel too was criticized when she “sent her audiences into convulsions of mirth by rather pointed allusions to Earl Dancer, the dapper manager of the show.”
On the road, New Vanities had other problems. When it played TOBA’s Bijou Theatre in Nashville, white patrons in the city demanded seats, and a special midnight performance was scheduled. But Black patrons were enraged that priority seating was given to whites, reported the Negro press, on “the main floor—and148 this, too, in a strictly colored theatre! Negroes who resented being seated in the gallery were forced to purchase box seats at enormous prices, and to this humiliation was added the presence of policemen who insulted race patrons who attempted to purchase seats. The situation is unprecedented here and is rendered the more embarrassing in that Negroes are barred from all white theatres except one. In this theatre race patrons are forced to gain entrance through a dark unsanitary gallery, on uncomfortable wooden benches.” The Negro press also said it deplored “this injustice and suggests that Miss Waters and future actors prevent such occurrence by refusing to play under such humiliating terms.” Segregated seating in cities would dog Negro productions for years to come. Frankly, much as Ethel was angered by the segregation, she found herself contractually unable to do anything about it. In the end, thoughts of developing the show for New York vanished.
The Couple’s Collaborative Efforts centered on one of their most ambitious projects, a show titled Miss Calico, which they also created in 1926 with the young writer Donald Heywood. Partly a reworking of other shows they’d performed and partly a loose satire of David Belasco’s Broadway hit Lulu Belle, about the rise of a mulatto in Parisian society, the musical played the Alhambra in Harlem and later moved to Pittsburgh where it was praised for its entertainment value but again criticized for its “smut.” Still, Ethel traveled with Miss Calico to Chicago for a December opening at the Princess Theatre. Included in the large cast were comic Alex Lovejoy, the Taskiana Four quartet, a new child star called Little Kid Lips Jr., as well as the standard lineup of chorus girls, comics, singers, and musicians. Pearl would be at the piano.
Owned by the Shubert brothers, the Princess marked a transition up from the kind of vaudeville house Ethel had previously played in Chicago to first-class theater. Dancer had ingeniously worked out a deal with the Shuberts in which he signed a $3,500 guarantee for the use of their theater. Whether the house was packed or empty, the Shuberts would get their money. The budget would be tight for Dancer, but he was confident he could pull it off, and if he had a hit, the profits could be huge. But mainly, Dancer envisioned taking Ethel to Broadway in Miss Calico. In a sense, Chicago was a tryout city.
The venture started off well. Miss Calico wowed patrons and critics alike. “This class of performance149, which appeals to all classes of white people, even if only to the higher grade of colored people,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier, “is all and is what is desired to make of Miss Waters what she is now proving, that she and her company [are] a box office attraction.”
In her shows and revues, there were always acts in which she performed some of her hit songs, whether the music really fit into the storylines or not. Audiences expected such interludes, even demanded them. By now, the song that audiences everywhere most wanted to hear was the indolently raunchy “Shake That Thing.” There were probably times when she didn’t even want to think about “Shake That Thing,” let alone sing it, but Ethel had to oblige the masses in Chicago and other cities. For Ethel, the question had to be when she might be able to perform another type of material, the kind of experimentation pulled off with “Eli Eli.” Still, the results were always the same. “Miss Waters created a furor150 when she sang ‘Shake That Thing,’ by request,” wrote one critic, “but the public must know that she put it over artistically clean and unadulterated.”
Miss Calico looked like a hit for Dancer. But his $3,500 deal backfired. The costs for the cast, crew, costumes, sets, and musicians drained his financial resources, and Dancer had trouble meeting his payroll. Problems with the musicians’ and carpenters’ unions, which were almost exclusively white, sprang up. A major complaint was that Pearl Wright was not a member of the musicians’ union. Dancer hammered out an agreement. Then the carpenters’ union insisted on being paid, and the actors, whose salaries were on hold, demanded back pay. An important comedian became fed up and walked out of the show. Afterward things fell apart.
Already, Ethel had been in too many productions that ran out of money, when she had not been paid. Always she identified with her fellow entertainers in need of that paycheck. To see them denied—or “cheated of”—their salaries, rankled her in the worst way. Backstage and at her hotel, Ethel and Dancer apparently fought constantly. Finally, she told him she would not continue in the show. With the actors and crew hounding him and the unions refusing to budge—and now with Ethel’s decision—Dancer was up against a wall. All came crashing down on New Year’s Eve 1926, precisely when a packed house at the Princess sat waiting for Miss Calico to begin. “In consequence of the151 revolt,” wrote the Courier, “Mr. Dancer was obliged to appear and announce to the large audience that Miss Waters was ill and their money would be refunded.” Miss Calico closed.
The Negro press supported Ethel and sharply criticized the unions, the Shubert organization, the inherent racial tensions backstage, and also Dancer’s inexperience in
mounting such a sprawling vehicle. “While there was more152 than one cause, the demand of the union head was the first step toward disaster,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier. “Had these men accepted of the half loaf instead of the white man’s authority, the actors would have given in and the show which was already billed for the next week in the Sunday papers, would have continued on.” The paper added: “But if in the question of far-sighted diplomacy Earl Dancer had been able to adjust all the differences in the trying hour of success in spite of the heavy overhead . . . with determination not to give up and by keeping the entire company intact, Ethel Waters would have landed high and dry on Broadway.”
The Mess at the Princess marked a serious fracture in the Waters-Dancer relationship, yet Dancer still talked about Broadway. In the meantime, Ethel and Dancer knew she had to keep working. By mid-January, she opened at Chicago’s Café de Paris and was a smash.
But by now, both were sensitive to criticism. While the two were still in Chicago, an African American critic, the blues singer James Gentry, known as “Gentle Jimmy,” wrote that Ethel’s bawdy material was a kiss of death for the image change she hoped to effect. Waters’ handlers were “probably deluding themselves153,” Gentry commented, “with the confidence that she can put through a purifying process that is not clean. The sooner they quit fooling themselves, the better it is going to be for themselves and for her. Vulgarity is just vulgarity and as expressed by a performer with the talent Miss Waters has, it is accentuated rather than diminished . . . [and] will have the effect of making her notorious on our stage. . . . The way is open to be known and remembered as a great artist. If she prefers not to be, more popularity and money, too, awaits her in the trail of Josephine Baker whose vulgarities have set the Parisian mob howling.”