Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  In October, she returned to the Palace with an act pared down to the essentials. Onstage, there were only Ethel and her accompanist. Afterward there were dates in Manhattan and Brooklyn as well as Newark, New Jersey, and Syracuse, New York, then on to Toronto to appear at the Hippodrome. An offer also came in to head a revue for the Shuberts, but she turned it down because the Keith circuit, which she was already signed to headline, offered consecutive bookings and some much-needed money. So it was on to Keith theaters in Ohio—Youngstown, Cleveland, Dayton, and Akron—and then back to Winnipeg and Calgary in Canada. The tour was long and murder on her vocal cords. She also did a paid endorsement for a skin-lightening cream, which was out of character for a woman so proud of her brown complexion. But she was earning top dollar and loosening herself from Earl’s grip. She was reported to earn over $2,000 a week for the tour.

  At times, she may have had doubts about leaving Dancer, but she was determined to go it alone. No longer were there accounts of forthcoming projects for Waters and Dancer. Instead, Earl was said to be putting together a new Broadway show, but when he spoke about it, not a word was uttered about Ethel. Earl must have told himself it was just one of Ethel’s moods, that nothing would really separate them permanently. He understood her as others had not, had worked night and day for her, had been aware of Ethel Williams as well as other women in her life. And he had not cared. But Ethel remained distant and cold. Then he panicked. When Ethel unexpectedly went to Philadelphia to spend time with her friends, the comedy team Butterbeans and Susie, Earl followed. He confronted her and pleaded with her to let things be as they once were. But she wouldn’t budge. Now Earl Dancer, the most composed of men, saw his world falling apart. On December 1, 1928, it was reported that Dancer, now referred to as “former manager for Ethel Waters” and busy at work on a new play for his old flame, Cora Green, had been taken to the Wiley Wilson Sanitarium on a Sunday morning. Suffering from “la grippe and acute197 tonsillitis,” he had “suddenly turned for the worse on Saturday.” No matter what the stated cause for his hospitalization, Dancer seemed to have had had some type of emotional collapse. He appeared unable to cope with a stark reality. Ethel had dumped him.

  In later years, Waters would always credit Dancer for the shrewd manner in which he helped maneuver her career into a new direction. That she would never denigrate nor dismiss, but in another respect, she wiped Earl Dancer from her official record. She never opened the door again for him, never reconsidered her actions. Eventually, but not immediately, she made it known loud and clear that she had never married him. She didn’t care what the newspapers had once written about the two, didn’t care what impression she had previously given of their relationship. None of that mattered. As always, when there were two sides to a story or an argument, Ethel saw only one: hers.

  The break with Earl may have represented for her a second coming of age. Like other female stars, she had benefited from a strong professional and personal relationship with a man in the world of entertainment—a man who saw himself as her Svengali. Other great stars would also have such professional and personal unions and breakups. In Paris, Baker’s career was guided for a time by Count Giuseppe Pepito Abatino, whom she told the press she had married. Abatino was no more a count than she was, and the two were no more married than were Waters and Dancer, but Abatino put sweat and tears into establishing her as a major European star. Later Lena Horne would have Lennie Hayton, the white composer-arranger at MGM, to help her navigate her way through the internecine intrigues and politics of the studio and the nightclubs. Horne and Hayton actually married. Horne once said that she believed he could take her places where a Negro man could not. Still later Dorothy Dandridge—midway in her career while on her quest for nightclub stardom—had arranger-composer Phil Moore, one of the first Black men to work in MGM’s music department, to help shape her nightclub act, not only working out musical arrangements but advising her on everything else, from costumes to makeup to hairstyles. Moore also fell madly, hopelessly in love with her. Still later, the powerful director Otto Preminger would make it his goal to turn Dandridge into a major movie star. When Dandridge received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her performance in the Preminger-directed Carmen Jones, he prided himself in having guided her to this achievement. And later Diana Ross would capture the eye and the imagination of Motown chief Berry Gordy Jr. All these women, including Ethel, had the talent and drive to rise to the top ranks of stardom without these men, but the partnerships with the men did not hurt the women—or the men. The men saw these women as their creations. But in time, Ethel and the others—with the exception of Horne—grew weary and resentful of the way such men attempted to control them or take credit for their success. Ethel and the others would break loose and remain determined in the future not to answer to anyone, onstage or off, or in the bedroom. All the men—once the women had moved on—appeared rueful (or in the case of Abatino, devastated). It might be fair to say that otherwise their lives, no matter how successful, were never the same. The excitement of seeing a magnificent career blossom and flower was gone. So, too, was the pleasure of basking in the glory of these women. Yet the men would always publicly praise the women—and no doubt they cherished the idea of being part of the women’s success and their legends.

  Ethel was a free woman. Now no one, other than herself, would ever decide what path her career should take. She might talk things over with Pearl Wright. But Pearl understood you could advise Ethel, if she seemed receptive, but you could never tell her anything.

  Though hardly known for acting rashly or impulsively, within the next year or so Ethel Waters would announce she had married and become the mother to a young girl. And the career that so dominated her every moment would briefly carry her to Hollywood, that place with all the sunshine and the idea of new promise and potential. Then, finally, she would head to Europe.

  Chapter 6

  Stretching Boundaries: Hollywood and Europe

  BACK ON TOUR AT THE START OF 1929, Waters hit the Orpheum theaters on the West Coast with an itinerary that took her to Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, and then on to Los Angeles. Nonstop, hectic, and maddening as ever, the tour nonetheless invigorated her. She still loved performing for that vast audience out there in the dark, still loved the feedback, the energy, the applause and approval.

  Her life had undergone two significant changes. Her hopes for motherhood were realized when she “adopted” a little girl named Algretta Holmes. One of Ethel’s friends from the early days at Edmond’s, Mozelle Holmes, had given birth to a daughter and was living in Detroit. During an engagement in the city, Ethel met and was enchanted by the little girl. Seeing that Mozelle had hit hard times, Ethel must have felt her friend’s living situation was not a healthy one in which to raise a child. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten, she made an indirect reference to Mozelle possibly being a prostitute. What Ethel was not saying was that Mozelle might possibly have been her lover at one time. For years, theirs would be a fairly tangled, complicated relationship. Ethel asked Mozelle to let her care for the girl and Mozelle agreed. No lawyers were consulted. No formal papers were signed. If Algretta ever wanted to return to her mother, Ethel and Mozelle agreed that the girl could do so. Ethel was overjoyed, but Ethel being Ethel, she didn’t feel there was any great need to explain how she had suddenly become a mother. And show business being show business, there were raised eyebrows and rumors. Was this child the result of a secret liaison? Could it be a daughter by Dancer? Eventually, Ethel explained that her daughter was adopted but went into almost no details. By her own account, Ethel admitted to being a strict disciplinarian, who would “whip” the child, much as Ethel might be pained to do so. After a whipping, Ethel insisted that Algretta apologize for having upset her. Of course, this was the way Ethel had been reared. Nonetheless, she also showered the girl with affection and attention.

  The other significant change was the new man in her life, a sporting fellow named Clyde Edward Matthews. Ethel
once said she had met him in Akron, Ohio; another time, she said it was Cleveland. They probably got together in mid-July 1928, when she finally separated from Dancer—and when she may have needed some cheering up—although columnist Sidney Skolsky said that she had known Matthews “for eight years before198 she gave him a tumble.” Regardless of where or when they actually met, she got to know him in Philadelphia. “They decided to become friends—then lovers,” said Skolsky. “Marriage came later,” said Ethel. “I didn’t want to take any chances. I wanted to make sure I liked him.”

  A good dresser and a good talker, Matthews was “a handsome devil, with a courtly air, a real charmer,” she recalled. He was also a ladies’ man, who was proud of his sexual prowess and liked to refer to himself as The Lover. He expected Ethel to do the same. Though stories still circulated of Waters’ eye for women, and though women were still often in and out of her New York apartment and special women friends were a part of her traveling companies, she seemed to feel more comfortable when there was a man in her life: someone who could walk into a restaurant with her and tell the head waiter the table they should have; someone who would compliment her on her looks; someone who could drive her automobile for her; someone who could push aside anyone who hassled or annoyed her.

  While appearing in Africana, Ethel had already become involved with a young man, whom she later caught cheating on her: He had driven her Locomobile for a date with another woman. When she caught up with the two in the young woman’s apartment, she forcefully threw him against the wall. She then turned to the young woman, who was clearly frightened. “I don’t intend to beat you up—today,” she told her. “But I’ll get you some other time when I’m more in the mood.” Ironically, the Locomobile he had driven was a present from Earl. In later years when Waters spoke of the incident, she never publicly named the man. It might well have been Earl Dancer himself, and the young woman may have been the chorus girl Billy Cain.

  Once she had Earl out of her life, she flirted with the men who came on to her, but none seemed as in control and reliable as Matthews. And control, whether her own or someone else’s, would always be something Ethel respected. Early in their relationship Matthews, who was very free with money, urged her to depend on him if she were ever in need of a loan. Short on cash, she accepted. “I was somewhat leery about him and didn’t want to get involved or obligated,” she recalled. Yet cautious as she was, she let her guard down and did the wholly unexpected. “He said I was a real tonic for him and when he asked me to marry him, I consented.” What Clyde Edward Matthews actually did for a living—where all his money came from—was open to speculation, but in time he was known to handle Ethel’s “business affairs.” In a short time, he was traveling with her and helping to manage her career.

  In early February, she arrived in Los Angeles for her appearance at the city’s Orpheum Theatre. She was now a grand star accompanied by her entourage: Eddie Matthews, little Algretta, Pearl Wright, the female cornetist Dijau Jones, with whom Ethel had developed a friendship, and in all likelihood her personal maid, Bessie Whitman.

  As she settled into Los Angeles, Ethel realized that the movie capital was in the midst of a technical revolution that had taken off just two years earlier. In 1927, Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson had performed the songs “Blue Skies” and “Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye” and then, in full blackface, had swung his arms and performed the song “Mammy.” Though this was not the birth of sound in the movies—there had been experiments with it for several years, including a 1923 DeForest Phonofilm short in which Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle had performed—The Jazz Singer marked the mass movie audience’s full enthusiastic acceptance of the new medium. Around the country, people flocked to see it, and eventually all the movie studios had to construct huge sound stages for their new features. The talkies had arrived. Though there were uncertainties and confusion about the new medium, the studios nonetheless aggressively began their search for sound projects. Already aware of the success of Negro recording stars, some filmmakers thought that sound was the perfect medium for African Americans. There were even rumors that the Negro voice recorded better than a white one. In Los Angeles, studio scouts, who had long gone to the nightclubs that lined Central Avenue in the Negro part of town, were on the lookout for talent. But attention was also focused on those Black stars in the clubs and theaters in New York. In New York, blues singer Bessie Smith was snapped up by Vitaphone to star in the short St. Louis Blues. Duke Ellington—with his orchestra—and Fredi Washington starred in the short Black and Tan Fantasy.

  In Los Angeles, new sound films with African Americans went into production. At the low-budget Christie Studios, Black writer and later director Spencer Williams worked on a series of quickly made, short Black films. At Fox Studios, plans were made for a Black-cast feature film, Hearts in Dixie, which starred Clarence Muse, LA glamour girl Mildred Washington, Clifford Ingram, and a lanky newcomer named Stepin Fetchit, who had already worked in silents. At MGM, Texas-born King Vidor, a major director, fought with the studio to let him do an all-colored talking film that would sensitively and entertainingly focus on African American life and culture, especially the Black religious experience, as Vidor saw it. When the executives expressed doubts that such a movie could make money, Vidor put up his own salary to film Hallelujah. In New York, he found stage actor Daniel Haynes and a sexy sixteen-year-old kewpie doll of a newcomer named Nina Mae McKinney, then a chorus girl in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1928. Having gathered his cast, he went on location to Tennessee—the Memphis area—and Arkansas to shoot exteriors for the film. Interior scenes were filmed at MGM in Culver City.

  The Hollywood studios would soon hire Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong for musical spots in the respective feature films, the 1930 Amos and Andy haunted house movie Check and Double Check and 1931’s The Ex-Flame. Armstrong received no billing and the film was later lost to future generations. But before those films and before a long line of extraordinary Black musical talents worked in the movies, Hollywood turned its sights to Ethel. Though Daniel Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney proved to be terrific in Hallelujah, neither had been director King Vidor’s first choice. “I wanted Robeson for199 the male lead, and I wanted Ethel Waters for the female lead,” said Vidor. Unknown to Ethel, Vidor’s aides had searched for her in New York. “The talent man Vidor200 sent East to wave money bags at me,” said Ethel, “was stalled on the job by colored theatrical people unfriendly to me. He reported that he was unable to find me. But I never was so small and inconspicuous that picture people can’t locate me, particularly when the price is right.” Had the brown-skinned Ethel played the fiery, glamorous lead in Hallelujah, Black Hollywood movie history might have taken a different course. Instead the light-skinned McKinney became the first of Hollywood’s mulatto-style Black leading ladies—and its first Black movie love goddess.

  Though King Vidor had missed locating Ethel, studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck did not. Both Ethel and the Los Angeles Orpheum Theatre caught the eye of people in the motion picture industry. Designed by G. Albert Lansburgh, located at 824 South Broadway, the recently built (1926) theater was the fourth and final home of the Orpheum circuit in the City of Angels and was considered almost the last word in West Coast swanky extravagance. Architect Lansburgh had sought to create a theater like the Paris Opéra. Entering the Orpheum, patrons marveled at the deluxe details of the house. Doors were polished brass. There were silk wall panels, brocade drapes, marble pilasters, and dazzling large chandeliers. In 1928, a thirteen-rank, three-manual Wurlitzer organ—with metal and wood pipes that could “simulate more than 1400 orchestral sounds”—was installed. This new Orpheum would showcase such stars as Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Will Rogers, Jack Benny, and later Lena Horne. Ethel could not have asked for a grander house, and the Orpheum could not have asked for a grander star. “Crowds from all over201 the city caused a sell-out of the house every night,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier. Immediately, she became
the talk of the town—in both LA’s Black East Side and in the mansions of Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

  In her dressing room at the Orpheum, Ethel was visited by songwriter Harry Akst. By now, the two were old acquaintances, if not old friends. Akst had written her hit “Dinah.” Working with Grant Clarke, Akst was composing the music for a new movie, Broadway or Bust, which would be retitled On with the Show. A backstage love story with plenty of musical numbers, On with the Show was to be one of Warner Bros.’ big pictures, to be filmed not only in sound but in color, something altogether revolutionary for Hollywood at the time. Warner’s head of production, Darryl F. Zanuck, wanted Ethel for the picture, not for a role but in musical sequences in which she would perform two new songs by Akst and Clarke. One was a lively number called “Birmingham Bertha”; the other, a moody song of love gone wrong called “Am I Blue?” Hedging his bets that the former would be the big hit, Akst wanted Ethel to look over the material and see what she thought. With her in the dressing room was Pearl, who would be of great help obviously because Ethel still couldn’t read music. “I just match the202 words to the music and keep in time,” she often said. Ethel and Pearl worked together to arrange the material to conform to Ethel’s style.

  When an appointment was set up for Ethel to meet Zanuck, Akst took her to Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. With her height and hauteur and her eye for fetching clothes, she carried herself in a queenly manner, and as she was ushered into Zanuck’s office, she knew how to make an entrance. There Zanuck listened to her rendition of “Am I Blue?” Immediately, he was ready to make a deal. The studio would need her for two weeks. Considered a tough negotiator, Zanuck appeared both impressed and charmed by her, especially in light of their discussions about her salary. She explained that she was currently being paid $1,250 a week. Because she would have to break her commitment at the Orpheum for more than two weeks in order to do the film while in Los Angeles, she asked for a four-week guarantee at $1,250 a week. “You drive a pretty203 good bargain for yourself,” Zanuck said, but he agreed to her terms. What she hadn’t told him was that Pearl Wright was scheduled to have surgery while in Los Angeles; Ethel might have wanted to break her Orpheum commitment anyway.