by Donald Bogle
Despite Ethel’s fears, Minnelli and MGM wanted to keep Waters happy. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg had written a great new number for her, “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.” She’d also sing again “Taking a Chance on Love” as well as the title song. These numbers would take their place in Waters’ repertoire. Minnelli considered Ethel his talisman. Crediting her with helping to make his Broadway directorial debut such a success, he believed she would do the same with his feature film debut.
Archie Savage was hired as a dancer and an assistant dance director. His talent secured him those positions, but surely Minnelli knew that hiring Archie would please and perhaps pacify Ethel. Minnelli and others “appreciate what I have446 mastered in the dance on my first picture assignment,” said Savage. “Monetarily speaking I’m being much underpaid, but if I am a success I will have gained much more than money can buy. This is the sort of thing I have been waiting for all my theatrical life.” Minnelli “has given me wonderful support,” and Savage believed he had “a lot to thank him for.”
Preparing to face the unflinching eye of the camera, Waters was determined to be in shape, especially with the prospect of facing Horne on camera. Greater rivals than in the stage version, the older, heavier Petunia had to fight a younger, slinkier woman for her man Joe. Waters again agonized about her weight. “She is really reducing and you can see the progress as the days drift by,” said Savage. “She is taking treatments from a doctor who is bringing her down. The needles are now taking effect on her nervous condition and she in turn is also feeling the weaking [sic] qualities of the treatments.” Sometimes she felt tired and always she felt nervous and agitated. Her ailments were just beginning and would worsen in the years to come, especially with the onset of menopause.
Uppermost in her mind was the question, how would she fare in her two sequences with Horne? The first, which occurred when she spied Georgia flirting with Joe, was brief. But the second was the climactic nightclub sequence when Petunia and Georgia let the fur fly as they vie for Joe. She was prepared to get through that on her terms.
“When I had to work447 with her,” said Lena Horne, “and even before, I was a little frightened about it because I’d heard she was not comfortable as a person.” Everyone warned her that Ethel was difficult. “Because of her own448 background, Ethel Waters absolutely despised educated or light-complexioned Blacks,” said Horne’s daughter, Gail Buckley. “Miss Waters considered herself, quite rightly, to be an enormous star and regarded Lena as an upstart, and her enemy on every front. Lena herself stood in awe of the Waters reputation.”
Minnelli tried to put Ethel at ease. The costumes were shrewdly designed to make her look less heavy. Only in the form-fitting gown in the nightclub sequence would her weight show. Perhaps filming would progress smoothly without major upsets. But on the day that Ethel reported to MGM’s sound department to record her numbers, which would be played back while she lip-synched in front of the cameras, the first signs of real trouble showed. Once she listened to Horne’s recording of “Honey in the Honeycomb,” which Ethel was to parody in the nightclub sequence, she became openly angry. “Miss Waters did have449 one legitimate complaint against me,” recalled Horne. “She claimed that I had imitated her and that it would be impossible for her now to parody the song. If I had imitated her, it was completely unconscious. She was a great singer, someone to be admired, and of course, some of her style had come into that number. I’d worked hard to get it there so her parody would come off. Still, sometimes it’s hard to see things that way.”
Once Ethel began her on-camera work, other explosions occurred. As with the play, she was perturbed by the treatment of religion. Though everyone learned to stay out of her way, that was not always easy. Sadly, her paranoia had grown, now coupled with new fears about her appearance and the emergence of her various physical ailments, to the point at which she did not always understand how much Minnelli was in her corner. For Waters, Minnelli was part of a conspiracy, along with all the top executives at the studio who had been so damned concerned about lighting and making up Lena. Her “extreme distrust of the450 studio,” said Horne, “had, I heard, already led to many minor incidents in the course of shooting.”
Actor Lennie Bluett recalled that in the middle of a scene, Ethel would “go off on a corner451 of the set and look up and talk to God.” But often “Ethel kept herself in check. She was very much the lady in front of the white folks.” Of those in the cast, recalled Bluett, “I would say that John Bubbles was probably friendly with Ethel because they were old New York people who knew each other. I’m sure Duke Ellington was friendly with her too in a professional kind of way.” The day that Joe Louis visited the set, she was gracious with the champ, as admiring as ever, but Louis also was photographed with Lena Horne. The two had a stormy love affair that was hotly discussed in Black Hollywood. No doubt, Ethel wondered how “my Joe” could lower himself to date Horne.
Once the sequence with Lena started shooting, everyone noticed that Ethel became more aggressively agitated. “Minnelli would be on his knees adjusting the creases of that white satin dress that Lena wore. He wanted everything in place,” said Bluett. “It was very tense with Ethel, and the fact that she was once young and beautiful like Lena, and Lena was stealing her thunder. And I guess she was a very, very bitter woman. I think she felt that she was the star of the thing but she really wasn’t the star of the film—and Ethel said that in various ways quietly to people that she knew well. She told her friends that Lena could not sing.”
Still, no one was prepared for her outright hostility toward Horne.
“Ethel was religious, yes. But she would call Lena every name, like ‘bitch’ or whatever. I remember Ethel going off into the corner many many times and she’d be mumbling ‘mother fucker’ and she would be looking up at the sky and talking to Jesus . . . hoping maybe a light would fall on Lena but wanting the Lord to forgive her [for such thoughts].” Joan Croomes, who was a dancer in the film, remembered that Ethel spoke in her low rough-sounding voice as she used dialogue from the film to address Horne before the cameras started rolling. “ ‘Georgia, ain’t it time452 for your cooch dance?’ And that’s the way she said it, only nastier,” said Croomes. “She just hated her. I mean, she acted like she just hated the woman. And everyone would say, ‘Poor Lena.’ ” But, as Croomes noted, “Poor Lena wasn’t so poor because she did all right.” For her part, said Bluett, “Lena wasn’t paying attention to how evil Ethel was.”
“I was kind of453 a bulwark between them because I loved Lena and I loved Ethel,” said Minnelli, “but Ethel didn’t like Lena at all. It always seemed so ridiculous to me, because Ethel was such a great artist. In New York it was her show, but now it was divided—there was a new element of the beautiful colored girl.”
What compounded the Waters-Horne tensions was an accident that occurred shortly before their big scene together with the “Honey in the Honeycomb” number. While rehearsing a dance with Rochester, Horne slipped and chipped a tiny bone in her ankle. Hearing the crack, said Horne, Rochester joked that “Ethel had put a hex454 on me.” A cast was put on her foot, and the nightclub scene had to be restaged. Now Horne would be filmed sitting on the bar as she performed the number.
“Be real small455,” Minnelli advised Lena. “You can never be stronger than Ethel. Just be vulnerable and coquettish.” At one point, Horne’s Georgia, being cute and adorable, says of Petunia, “She’s just jealous ’cause she ain’t got what I got.” Immediately thereafter, Waters, obviously relishing her own dialogue, put her hands on her massive hips and said: “I’ve got everything you’ve got and a whole lot more.” At another point when Georgia said, “I’m just speaking my mind,” a commanding Ethel responded, “And I ain’t heard a sound.” The off-camera tensions ultimately made the sequence stronger, funnier, more dramatic, with bite and vigor, thanks, of course, to Waters. But in her debut role, Lena Horne was no slouch. Hers was an adroit and very charming performance. When Ethel had to dance to
show she was just as sexy as Horne’s Georgia, Waters went to town in a dance number with John Bubbles that would delight audiences for decades to come. “Ethel would get up and do her thing. When she would get out there, baby, she would outdance Lena,” said Croomes. “And she was much older, of course. But she could outdance her. I mean, she could kick high. You talk about a high kicker. She had long legs.”
Still, despite her “bitch” and “mother fucker” mumblings, Waters basically kept her temper in check—until someone in the cast offered Lena a pillow for her injured foot. That enraged Waters. “Miss Waters started to456 blow like a hurricane,” recalled Horne. “She flew into a457 semicoherent diatribe that began with attacks on Lena and wound up with a vilification of ‘Hollywood Jews,’ ” said Gail Buckley. “It was an all-encompassing458 outburst, touching everyone and everything that got in its way,” recalled Horne. “Though I (or my ankle) may have been the immediate cause of it, it was actually directed at everything that made her life miserable, the whole system that had held her back and exploited her.”
“You could hear a459 pin drop,” said Gail Buckley. “Everyone stood rooted in silence while Ethel’s eruption shook the soundstage. She went on and on.” Word reached the front office. No doubt even Louis B. Mayer heard of the explosion. Producer Arthur Freed, MGM executive Eddie Mannix, and Ethel’s agent at William Morris all arrived on the set. “She was still more or less raving when Vincente dismissed the company,” said Buckley. “Lena was shaking.” “We had to shut460 down the set for the rest of the day,” recalled Horne.
The next day the cast returned. The scene was rehearsed again, then shot. “We finished it without speaking,” said Horne. “The silence was not sullen. It was just that there was nothing to say after that, nothing that could make things right between us.”
The news spread throughout the town. “Ethel Waters is being461 accused of being temperamental out on the ‘Cabin in the Sky’ set at M.G.M. But it isn’t that; the hard work and long hours, more exacting than stage work, are putting her through a hard order,” wrote the columnist Harry Levette.
But no matter how delicately the press might write of the incident, everyone knew that Ethel had lost control, the very thing she had prized most about herself. In the midst of her past tirades, the fact that she had always held herself together made her anger all the more chilling. But the pressures had built horribly for her—her need to prove herself in this medium; her determination to shine in an industry that preferred its glittering youthful surfaces; her anxieties over the questions about images of African Americans in movies, notably Tales of Manhattan; her frustration at dealing with other changes in her body. To be fair to Waters, no one else recalled a comment about another ethnic group. For her, the enemy was the dreaded ofay, and many of her friends and associates throughout her show business career were Jewish. Something, which would remain unknown, had sparked her comment that day. Though she might never admit it, she would long agonize over this day at MGM.
“Just a line from462 your nervous friend,” she wrote Carl Van Vechten and his wife Fania in October. “I’m sure if you were here with me you would understand what I’m going thru.”
Waters always believed that “there was so much463 snarling and scrapping” that she didn’t know how the picture was completed. Of course, never did she say nor did she admit that most of the snarling and scrapping was initiated by her. For a woman who in so many other respects was charitable and generous, for a woman who held such strong beliefs in Christian doctrine and philosophy, her behavior as it pertained to her career and her work was often mean-spirited—and in the case of Lena Horne, frankly appalling. Horne represented to the older Waters a new generation that threatened to usurp her position in entertainment. In less than ten years, Horne would find herself in a professional situation similar to Waters’ as the press created a rivalry between herself and the younger Dorothy Dandridge. But Horne would handle the situation with more grace and less apparent anxiety.
Ironically, Ethel’s fierce struggle to survive, even when it sprang from her paranoia rather than her circumstances, proved fascinating. It was a larger-than-life grandeur that drew both fear and awe from those who witnessed it—and which oddly and paradoxically enough seemed rather heroic. She had been born a fighter, with an emotional depth that those around her lacked. Ironically again, just as she had drawn a degree of sympathy and understanding from women such as Alberta Hunter and Maude Russell, she elicited the same from Minnelli and Lena Horne, who clearly understood the effects of Waters’ childhood and early show business years on her disposition and outlook. “She had a very hard time464 coming up,” said Horne, “and that leaves a blot on you.” Nonetheless, Waters’ actions on the set of Cabin in the Sky clearly damaged her chances in the film capital. “I won all my465 battles on the picture,” said Waters. “But like many other performers, I was to discover that winning arguments in Hollywood is costly. Six years were to pass before I could get another movie job.”
Chapter 19
Aftermath
CABIN IN THE SKY WRAPPED on October 24, with retakes until October 28.
At first, life for Waters went on as if nothing monumental had occurred. On the Sunday afternoon of October 25, she hosted a tea for California’s governor, Culbert L. Olson, at her home. It was a sign that she was fully a part of the prestigious West Coast entertainment and social scene. She also received word of her future inclusion in a new edition of Who’s Who in America. Clearly impressed, she asked Van Vechten to help her gather information about her career for the publication. The personal details, especially regarding her “marriages,” she could supply.
But immediately following the movie shoot, she also had to refocus on personal and professional matters that had often worn her down during the past few months. She realized her high lifestyle was draining her, and the monthly bills had piled up. Never one to think much about money, Ethel knew she now had to. She contacted the real estate agent who had sold her two apartment buildings in New York and told him to put them up for sale. Having argued with Harold Gumm about a number of projects, from Hit the Deck to movie work, she apparently decided to terminate their professional ties. All this proved time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. Her resentments and anger as well as her fears were getting the best of her. If she was ever close to emotional collapse, it was at this time.
On November 23, she responded to correspondence from a testy Van Vechten, who was annoyed that she had not answered one of his letters. Preoccupied with the film, she had asked Savage to write Van Vechten. But no letter had gone out. Waters wanted Van Vechten to know why he had not heard from her as well as to understand the pressures she was then living with.
Dear Carlo466,
You letter just received and I’m answering at once as I am more than upset. To tell you that I’m not going Hollywood is not enough. To tell you that I’m going crazy is. Carl, darling, I’m serious and telling the truth when I say that I’ve been through Hell ever since August and at this time I feel that I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was very unhappy during the entire eight weeks of the filming of “Cabin.” During that time I was also having Lawyer trouble and Property trouble plus a daily fight for that which I considered was due me at the studio. . . .
In addition to all of this I am trying to sell my property in New York and that has had me constantly on the go letters back and forth. You see it has been a constant drain on my pocket book as every clear dime seem needed for this deficit or that. And the [witch] I had was robbing me right and left because I wasn’t a business woman.
Since this break was in the air I have had to (for the past three weeks) go over papers concerning the matter and plus the daily task of running to the lawyer here signing this paper and that. It was so bad that I found myself just standing not knowing whether I was coming or going.
That is why I have asked Archie to please at least do the important things like writing you and I also asked him to express my than
ks and appreciation for your great kindness which he did not do. Yet until I received your letter I thought sure that it was well taken care of. . . .
Carl darling I can only say that you’ll never know how your honest letter hurt me and how helpless I feel in not being able to do a thing about the situation as it now stands, other than ask your forgiveness. And if there is anything that I can do to assure yours and my friends that my heart bleeds for the wrong I have cause YOU Carl MY BEST FRIEND, please don’t hesitate in letting me know. Altho I have never found you unsympathetic I have always had the feeling you don’t care to listen to worrisome problems from others. So in offering you these schoolgirl apologies I also ask that you overlook my having to bring them out.
In early December, she attended a preview of Cabin in the Sky. “I personally think that467 it is fairly good,” she told Van Vechten, but the studio was “still undecided as to what they will leave in and what they will take out.” She also let him know she was feeling better. “Things have sort of calmed down now. . . . I am in a much clearer mind. You see I have gotten rid at last of the law office and I have had an offer for the property. God is still with me.”
In late September, Tales of Manhattan had finally opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which was as prestigious a theater booking as Hollywood could hope for. Mainstream reviewers liked the picture. But criticism from the African American community continued. In early November, Cairo also opened in New York. Reviewers tended to like Ethel but felt the film was a tired spoof that failed. Within the Negro community, there were still grumblings that the great Black actress of the theater was playing a maid. Yet there was a belief that the very fact that Waters and others, like actor Rex Ingram, were working might ultimately signal changes in Hollywood for Black performers. Other films either released or scheduled for release that raised such hopes were John Huston’s In This Our Life in which Black actor Ernest Anderson played a bright young man wrongly accused of a hit-and-run accident; Casablanca in which Dooley Wilson performed “As Time Goes By,” the song that became an anthem for young lovers during the war years; The Ox-Bow Incident, which focused on the lynching of three innocent white men, with Black actor Leigh Whipper serving as a sort of symbolic conscience as he sang “You’ve Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley”; Crash Dive, in which Ben Carter played actual Black World War II hero Dorie Miller; and Mission to Moscow, in which Leigh Whipper was cast as Haile Selassie. In none of these features did the Black actors have a starring role, but a point was being made. Black characters were now depicted with a degree of dignity and without the dimwitted servant antics.