by Donald Bogle
Ethel was set to star along with Julie Harris and Brandon de Wilde. Cast as her foster brother Honey was James Edwards, the young Black actor who had generated much excitement with his sensitive performance in Home of the Brave. For many, Edwards represented a new style of acting for African American actors in Hollywood. Preceding Sidney Poitier, Edwards, like Brando and Clift, had a brooding and sensitive quality that leading men in movies were generally not encouraged to reveal.
Columbia Pictures, headed by a notoriously ill-tempered Harry Cohn, would release the film. No one had any idea if The Member of the Wedding would make money because it was so offbeat. Then, too, the only name for the marquee was Ethel, “the old nigger woman,” as Zanuck had once so cruelly referred to her. Though Kramer acknowledged that none of his principals “were film stars, their576 performances in the stage version of The Member of the Wedding had made them famous enough that many would have felt cheated had they not been cast again in the film.” He added: “I felt assured of the picture’s quality.” Somehow Ethel would have to regain her strength and be prepared for the cameras.
Rehearsals started on June 9. Once filming began, Ethel was at ease with Harris and de Wilde. For director Zinnemann and writer Anhalt, the problem was opening the drama up, making it cinematic. McCullers’ dialogue could not be scrapped—that was the beauty of the work. So the camera would have to explore the setting itself and the faces of the characters. “The difficulties of directing577 such a film seem obvious,” said Kramer, because it had a “static setting and scarcity of overt action. Zinnemann, however, said that his job was easy. He felt that the three principals interacted so well together, and the blending of their emotions was so powerfully dramatic, that he had only to stand back and let them perform their stage roles. In fact, he did much more than this. Zinnemann brought the entire production to life by using a probing camera that moved in close to study the faces and read the moods of the actors at key moments. He also explored the fascinating details of the old and rather shabby kitchen to create a sense of precise locale.”
Throughout, James Edwards stood in awe of Ethel. Their brief scenes together would be tender and moving, two gifted Black actors, from different generations and vastly different approaches to acting, responding to each other’s rhythms and personal hurts. There would be a sweet sadness in the eyes of both. That alone would be a reason for those interested in evolving images of African Americans in films to see the movie.
Zinnemann liked Waters, but at times it was exasperating to get a “movie” performance out of her. “Ethel was a wonderful578, sad woman,” recalled Zinnemann. “Between scenes, she’d sit in her dressing room and listen to her old records. But she was also a very headstrong lady.” She “clung to the play579, and it was difficult to get her to change or to unlearn some of her lines and stage movements,” said Zinnemann. “She was very amiable, but she did have very crystallized ideas of her own. I remember that on several occasions when she disagreed with the directions I was giving her, she would look up to heaven and say: ‘God is my director.’ You can imagine that it wasn’t easy to find a comeback to that kind of remark.”
Still, through the moody close-ups of his principals, he helped explore their individual characters and also expressed their feelings of isolation and loneliness. When the camera came close for Waters’ soliloquy about Ludie, the man she loved so passionately, and the self-destructive path she set on after losing him, her face was unlike any that Hollywood had ever recorded of an African American performer. Intimate. Warm. Sad. Heartbroken. Passionate. Humane. Zinnemann got inside her heart, her soul. Ethel gave herself to the camera. As with the play, she had no distance between herself and the character. She was Berenice. Ultimately, it would be her greatest screen performance.
But once Columbia’s chief Harry Cohn saw the completed picture, he hit the roof. What kind of picture was this? “Zinnemann was praised for580 his work by many critics, but not by Harry Cohn,” said Kramer. After “screenwriter Dan Taradash turned in his script for From Here to Eternity, he suggested Zinnemann as the director. Cohn erupted at the sound of Zinnemann’s name. ‘I won’t let that son of a bitch on the lot,’ he shouted. ‘He’s the bastard who directed The Member of the Wedding.’ ”
Otherwise the reactions were quite different. Before the film’s release, there was an immediate buzz. James Edwards exuberantly predicted that Ethel might walk off with an Oscar. Others felt the same way. “There are two glorious581 performances in ‘Member of the Wedding,’ ” said Hedda Hopper, “those given by Ethel Waters and Julie Harris. I’m sure both will be nominated.” “Miss Waters, that dramatic582 queen of them all, got the prized top billing in the credit sheets,” wrote Black columnist Harry Levett, “and on the main title curtain. So watch for a new episode in racial and movie history, when a Negro woman star, heads a white cast.” Levett also predicted, “I’ll bet a dollar to a thin dimwit that it gets an ‘Oscar.’ ”
The film opened on Christmas Day at Los Angeles’ Beverly-Canon Theatre and shortly afterward at New York’s Sutton Theatre. “Miss Waters is one of our finest artists, Black or white; it is she who keeps the play solidly planted on the ground,” wrote Philip K. Scheuer in the Los Angeles Times. “Ethel Waters’ performance of584 the mammy,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “glows with a warmth of personality and understanding that transmit a wonderful incidental concept of the pathos of the transient nurse.”
But for mainstream audiences, The Member of the Wedding looked more like a European art house film than a Hollywood production. Critic Pauline Kael believed it was “a remarkable film585,” which indeed it is. “The Carson McCullers dialogue is one of the high points of literacy in American films—sharp and full of wit, yet lyrical,” said Kael. “Fred Zinnemann’s direction respects Carson McCullers’ intensity and humor.” But The Member of the Wedding “failed commercially, perhaps for want of a conventional ‘story’; it is said that in some towns viewers didn’t understand the material and, for most of the film, thought that Frankie was a boy. The movie company then cut a crucial 20-minute segment (which included Ethel Waters’ finest scene) and tossed the film into the lower half of double bills.” Carson McCullers herself was stunned when she slipped into a small theater in Macon, Georgia, and discovered Ethel’s scene in which she sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” was no longer there. She “never recovered from the586 shock,” said Rex Reed. Cutting Waters’ great soliloquy had been the cruelest blow of all. It also revealed the cynicism of the studio and exhibitors. A rare film examination of the inner torments of a Black woman was expendable; it meant next to nothing to them.
Publicist Orin Borsten recalled that Harry Cohn at Columbia, seeing the great reviews, thought some profit might be earned if the film garnered some awards. But if Waters and Julie Harris were both nominated for Best Actress, they might cancel each other out. Waters had received top billing; therefore she could not be nominated in the Supporting Actress category. “The studio587,” said Borsten, “decided that it would push Harris, not Waters. I was the one who had to tell Ethel Waters.” He remembered talking to her in a dressing room at a club. He approached her gingerly and with sadness, knowing what a disappointment it would be to her. “I kept saying, ‘They’ve got a lot of chutzpah to do this. Just real chutzpah. But they’re not going to push for you to be nominated.” Waters looked at him intently. “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about with all this chutzpah business,” Waters told him bluntly. “But they’ve got a lot of fucking nerve!” In the end, the Oscar nominees for Best Actress of 1952 were Harris in The Member of the Wedding, Shirley Booth in the movie version of Come Back, Little Sheba, Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, Bette Davis in The Star, and Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart. Shirley Booth won the award. With all due respect to those nominated actresses and with the possible exception of Harris, none of their performances in those particular films would ever match Ethel’s. To be overlooked for Oscar consideration had to be one of
her greatest professional disappointments.
Another dry season began. In November, she returned to New York to open at the Chicago. Also on the bill were Dizzy Gillespie and his band. In December, she performed at the posh La Vie en Rose in New York. In February, she flew to Las Vegas to perform at the Desert Inn Resort. A new generation of slinky goddesses were playing at the hip clubs and gambling casinos of Vegas. How could she compete with these younger women in the steamy, sexed-up atmosphere of nightspots?
“Do you know why588 I’m back muscling at night clubs?” she said to a young interviewer for Down Beat. “It’s because I want children like you to hear me and remember what you heard. People of my generation remember, but those of the second and third generations have heard bits and snatches of what I started from a whole lot of other singers. Now I want to go the rounds once more and have them hear the original.” She also explained: “The funny thing about me going back to the nightclubs is when I come in to meet the owner the first day of the engagement, I look like something the Salvation Army’s brought. And I can see he’s dragged. He’s probably thinking: ‘Well, I guess I have to take her from the office to get [Nat] King Cole. And he introduces me sort of apologetically to the audience. Well, in the cool of the evening, when I’ve stepped down, my, how he’s changed.” She wanted it known that she still could put a song across. On the club scene, Ethel looked tired, worn, passé—an overweight, middle-aged, if not elderly, woman singing songs from another age. In truth, she really didn’t want to be anywhere near the clubs, and certainly not in the casinos. But she needed the work.
In March, when she played Storyville in Boston, music producer George Wein recalled that his experience with “the majestic589 Ethel Waters” was not friendly. “I had heard rumors about Miss Waters,” said Wein, “but this didn’t prevent me from presenting her in Boston. On Miss Waters’ first night in Storyville, I welcomed her warmly and asked if there was anything I could do for her.”
Ethel responded: “I will let you know, Mr. Wein.”
“Please call me ‘George,’ ” said Wein, who was then twenty-six years old.
“I will call you ‘Mister Wein,’ ” said Ethel.
Wein recalled: “She was advising me, in no uncertain terms, that we were not yet acquainted. To her, I was not a friend or an appreciative fan but the man running the club.” After all these years, Ethel still could not trust the club managers, owners, and producers. Reginald Beane had come to the engagement to accompany Ethel. But she “used the house rhythm section. Yet she all but ignored Jo Jones and John Field, as if they weren’t sharing the same stage.” Nightly, Wein watched as she asked the audience to give “a round of applause for one who so richly deserves it, our pianist, Mister Reginald Beane.” Nothing was said about the great musician Jo Jones. When Wein asked Jones “how he felt about not being introduced,” Jones said: “Ah, you don’t understand Miss Waters.”
“By this time,” recalled Wein, “her career was finished. She didn’t make things any easier. When she arrived in Boston, she was invited to a reception on Beacon Hill—a group of people who appreciated her artistry had organized a party in her honor. Inexplicably, she had declined the invitation—an insult that her admirers repaid by assiduously avoiding her performance.” Wein added: “She was so miserable that she just lashed out at everyone around her.”
She could feel much slipping away from her. In 1951, Fletcher Henderson had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him paralyzed and a shell of his old self. The thought of never performing with him again, despite their battles, must have saddened her. In late December 1952, Fletcher Henderson had another stroke and died at Harlem Hospital at age fifty-five.
In May 1953, she learned that the Empire Theatre in New York—the scene of her triumphs in Mamba’s Daughters and The Member of the Wedding—was now sixty years old and about to be demolished. It was a potent sign for Ethel that must have frightened and depressed her. At a ceremony to celebrate the theater’s history, she joined a cavalcade of stars, directors, writers, and producers. In attendance were such luminaries as Cornelia Otis Skinner, Shirley Booth, Howard Lindsay, Brandon de Wilde, Thomas Mitchell, Maureen Stapleton, Ilka Chase, and Jessie Royce Landis. Actors performed scenes from their past work at the theater. It was a glorious yet melancholy evening, with every artist at his best. When Ethel rose, the anticipation and admiration were palpable. Her weight made it hard to walk onstage. Her breathing was labored. Yet she summoned up her energy and took her place onstage and spoke with eloquence. Age was robbing her of her strength but not her power or grandeur. Henry Hewes of the Saturday Review remembered:
Ethel Waters, who through590 sheer faith projects more of herself across the footlights than any actress on our stage today, seemed to be saying, ‘In spite of all your compliments, I’ve had only two dramatic triumphs in my career and they were both here at this theatre.’ The applause was so tremendous after her reprise from ‘Mamba’s Daughters’ that she consented to an unprogrammed encore. . . . As she sang . . . “His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me,” Miss Waters soothed the condemned building with the serenity of her personal acceptance of physical mortality. . . .
Miss Waters’ performance was the most moving.
Some work trickled in. Sometimes she performed at intimate gatherings. “Whenever she would perform591 at these soirees,” remembered Leslie Uggams, “she would invite my mother and me, and we would go. It would be just a small group of people. And she’d sing at the piano. I don’t remember it being a huge crowd. I just remember her at a piano singing.” For Uggams, those were lovely memories.
Producers Richard Barr and Charles Bowden wanted to get her back on Broadway in a one-woman show. It would just be Ethel singing her hits as well as some religious songs, talking, reminiscing, joking—the whole Waters package on beautiful display, with Reginald Beane at the piano. The rehearsals proved physically agonizing. Often it was hard for her to stand. First, there was a tryout at the Sea Cliff Summer Theatre in Sea Cliff, Long Island. “Stormy Weather.” “Sleepy Time Down South.” “Am I Blue?” “Heat Wave.” The famous songs were all there. But now, as everyone at the Empire Theatre engagement could attest to, she was an all the more compelling and moving presence. Despite her breathing problems and the fact that her voice was not the instrument it once had been, she knew how to compensate for what she had lost. Critic Whitney Bolton wrote that “[nothing this season] ever592 will top that magnificent talent, Ethel Waters.”
Afterward Barr and Bowden titled the show At Home with Ethel Waters and took it to Broadway for a limited six-week engagement. Oliver Smith designed a set that looked like a living room, helping to create the feeling of intimacy that Ethel herself always projected. On September 22, 1953, At Home with Ethel Waters opened at the 48th Street Theatre. Again the reviews were glowing. “No matter that the593 years have lightened her hair and erased her waistline,” wrote critic Walter Kerr. “No matter that the voice is reedy where it used to be magically mellow. No matter that the scenery around her strongly suggests its summer stock origins, or that the costumes she is wrapped in are just this side of dreadful. Ethel Waters is her own woman, she knows exactly what she can do, and she does it with joyous command. She stands in the fear of the Lord and of nobody else.”
Sadly, At Home with Ethel Waters closed after three weeks—just days before a citywide celebration of her talents. New York’s Mayor Vincent Impellitteri proclaimed October 16 “Ethel Waters Day.” Members of the Negro Actors Guild turned up as part of the salute to her. Pictures were taken of her with the mayor and Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Ethel smiled and beamed, was gracious and charming, but inside she asked herself what lay ahead.
Nonetheless, a sign of her enduring fame was an interview on January 8, 1954, by Edward R. Murrow on CBS’s popular television show Person to Person. Only the most prominent, the most discussed, the most fascinating were interviewed by Murrow, who sat in the studio in a comfortable chair, often with cigarette in
hand, while the celebrity was shown in his or her home. It was a live broadcast that took days of preparations, with CBS crews at the celebrity’s home, laying cable lines, checking on light sources. Be it Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd or Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall or then senator John F. Kennedy or Fidel Castro or anthropologist Margaret Mead or John Steinbeck, the Murrow interviews were highly prestigious. Ethel was interviewed at a home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn where she was temporarily residing. She occupied the second floor of a redbrick house, which, as Murrow pointed out, was next door to a private school and across the street from a Baptist church. Once Murrow had introduced her, Ethel entered the room where the cameras were set up. “I’m here,” she said, “all two hundred and fifty-three pounds of me.”
She was in a reflective mood and clearly felt she was down on her luck. “What do you do for relaxation?” he asked. “Well, there’s two kinds of relaxation,” she answered. “There’s a compulsory relaxation. And then there’s a voluntary relaxation. Right now I’m on the compulsory one. So while I’m waiting for the phone to ring for me to get some employment while I’m in between dates, I just waste away my time reminiscing.” As for her singing style, she told him, “I don’t call myself a singer. All I do is recite musically. I try to paint a musical picture. And if it gets across, then I’m grateful because the story is important and the message it gives.”
At one point, she played one of her old records for Murrow—“I Got Rhythm” with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. She listened intently, told Murrow, “Get this chorus,” and then sang to the record. She couldn’t resist telling Murrow, “I was doing some of the things they call theirselves creating today.” No matter what, she could still communicate a pure joy in singing, in entertaining. She also discussed her childhood and the nuns who had been so kind to her.