To prepare, we started rehearsing in a small studio above the Lyceum Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street that Jack rented for us. Later, Jack would say he taught me how to move onstage and make contact with audiences, and how to fine-tune my phrasing and diction. “I took him and his folk music, tied them up with a pretty pink ribbon, and made a commercial package of them,” he would tell one interviewer. That’s not the way I remember it; from my years of acting classes, and from my jazz/pop days, I thought I had those bases pretty well covered. But Jack did encourage me to change from those suits I’d worn as a pop singer to a fitted shirt (unbuttoning a critical button or two), tight pants, and a heavy-buckled sailor’s belt. Most important, he did know Max Gordon. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Max knew me, too. “Forget it,” he said when Jack first suggested he audition me for the Vanguard. “I heard him as a pop singer and he doesn’t have it. So what am I supposed to do with him?”
While Jack retired to his customary table at the Sage to restrategize, I took my songs on the road: not for money or fame, but for social causes. Henry Wallace’s loss in 1948 had only strengthened my resolve to make a difference on issues that infuriated me. Thanks to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, unions’ rights to strike were shamefully curbed; I sang in protest against that. Everyone’s rights, not just union members’, were under siege in the deepening Cold War. Already, the Smith Act gave the federal government the power to jail or deport any alien accused of treason—no trial needed. But the McCarran Act of 1950 went further; now the government had carte blanche to prosecute or expel even U.S. citizens deemed “subversive” by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. I sang out against that, too.
To me, a most appalling miscarriage of justice was the arrest and indictment of one of my heroes, W.E.B. Du Bois.
By 1951, Du Bois had lived many lives as an intellectual and civil rights activist. He’d feuded bitterly with the NAACP, resigned from it, and rejoined it, only to be kicked out in 1948. Through these postwar years, he’d drawn ever closer to Paul Robeson, working with him on the Council of African Affairs, an anti-colonialist organization whose roots, in a way, lay back with Marcus Garvey and his vision of a post-colonial black Liberia. In 1950, at the age of eighty-two, Du Bois had run for U.S. Senator from New York on the American Labor party ticket and managed to win some two hundred thousand votes—mine among them. If nothing else, his campaign had kicked sand in the face of the federal government. Now the government had kicked back. The U.S. Justice Department seized on Du Bois’s call for outlawing atomic weapons, declaring it Soviet propaganda, and demanded that he and the members of his Peace Information Center register as “agents of a foreign principal” under the Smith Act. When Du Bois refused, he was indicted by a grand jury, arrested, and put on trial.
At rallies and sing-alongs, I helped raise money for Du Bois’s defense, because the NAACP, and almost every other member of the black elite, had cut him loose, and contributed nothing. That was a lesson I wouldn’t forget: how coldly and firmly the black establishment could excommunicate one of its own. On the opening day of the trial, those of us who came to show our support were stunned to see the elderly Du Bois pulled roughly from a paddy wagon in handcuffs, ankle cuffs, and chains like a prisoner on a southern chain gang. The authorities had done everything possible to denigrate and humiliate this frail figure. Fortunately, the effort backfired when news pictures of Du Bois in chains flashed around the world. Albert Einstein joined an international network of outraged intellectuals in protesting the arrest; this threw the U.S. State Department into confusion. The government had not understood the level of great respect Dr. Du Bois attracted. Within days, the judge threw out the charges.
If the Sage had survived, I might have kept on singing folk songs for fun and social protest as I awaited my big acting break. But it didn’t. A routine check by Con Edison revealed we’d been burning as much gas as the Waldorf-Astoria’s kitchen. Our monthly bills would be far higher now that the meter had been read, and to assure we paid those bills, Con Ed wanted a $500 deposit. That was big money in 1951. Soon after, the IRS weighed in on the subject of back unemployment-insurance taxes—a brand-new concept to us. To our surprise, we owed them. Overwhelmed, we started looking for a buyer. Eight months into our restaurant careers, we hardly expected to sell for a profit. But we did insist that a buyer at least cover our debts—including the loans outstanding from our sympathetic angels. As soon as we found one who agreed to those terms, we handed over the lease.
The Sage had given all of us a lot of fun, but it had soaked up all my savings, much to Marguerite’s alarm. So when Jack Rollins suggested we plead my case once more with Max Gordon, I was all in.
Max was a short fellow with a monklike tonsure and the gruff, blunt manner of a little Napoleon. Jack convinced him I had a whole new act—new songs, new outfit, new stage persona (all, of course, thanks to Jack, as Jack saw it). “Okay,” Max said, “two songs. That’s it.” My audition would serve as an opening act for the jazz and blues singer Maxine Sullivan: My only accompaniment would be Craig Work. In a picture in DownBeat published a few weeks after our Vanguard debut, Craig and I make a sweet, smiling duo, still not quite able to grasp the scope of our success.
I felt humbled and more than a little nervous, on that night in October 1951, to walk out onto the Vanguard’s tiny stage, to be standing on the same boards that Leadbelly, Josh White, and Woody Guthrie, among others, had worn smooth before me. Happily, Tony Scott and his soon-to-be wife had worked hard to pack the room with friends, sending out hundreds of postcards in advance of the show, and I felt the warmth of the crowd as soon as the spotlight hit me.
I knew encore applause when I heard it, and I heard it at the end of my two songs. Grinning at each other, Craig and I came back to do one more. This time, when we left the stage, Max Gordon was waiting with a very severe look in the minuscule back space outside his cellar office. “When I tell you two songs,” he said, “I mean two songs!” I knew instantly that we were in full-throttle negotiation for the gig. Max didn’t waste words: If our act had failed to impress him, he wouldn’t have emerged from his office at all. And Jack wouldn’t be standing beside him with as happy a look as one could hope for.
Max signed me up to a standard two-week engagement at $70 a week. In that sense, I was right back where I’d started at the Royal Roost. Only the vibe this time was even better. I opened on October 26, 1951, as one of several acts. By the second week, there were lines around the block, Max had extended my contract, and my pay was up to $225. I was hot! One indication of how crazy it got was the write-up on me each week by Rogers E. M. Whitaker, the witty writer for The New Yorker magazine’s “Goings on About Town.” The first week, he announced, a bit dismissively, “Harry Belafonte, now a folk minstrel, making his debut in his new calling.” The next week he noted, with more respect, “Harry Belafonte in his new role as folk singer.” The next week: “A new and better Harry Belafonte, singing folk songs from everywhere.” The week after that: “Harry Belafonte has turned folk singer, a very good idea indeed.” And by early December: “One of the season’s catches—Harry Belafonte!”
What I suspected was that audiences liked not only my voice and my presence, but also the global range of the material, from the American chain-gang songs like “Tol’ My Captain,” “Jerry,” “Another Man Done Gone” to “Oh No, John,” an English ballad, to “Merci Bon Dieu,” a Haitian folk song, to the American ballad “Shenandoah,” and back to “Mo Mary,” an Irish standard, even “Hava Nageela,” the Hebrew anthem. Different voices, but a shared humanity; this was my platform, my authenticity, my politics. My song.
Those two weeks stretched to more than three months. That cramped little basement room was packed every night. One night I saw a familiar, broad-shouldered figure looking up at me from a table near the stage; Paul Robeson had come to check me out. When the set ended, he came to congratulate me, nearly filling the backstage space with his formidable presence. He asked me where I’d found my songs, an
d I told him about going to the Library of Congress. “Oh—the Alan Lomax stuff,” he said, nodding. I confided that for all the applause out there, I still wasn’t sure I had any right to be singing these songs; that whole question of authenticity still haunted me. Paul put one of his ham-size hands on my shoulder. “You’re on a big path,” he said. “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.”
Max Gordon agreed. From the Vanguard, he moved me uptown, without a break, to the Blue Angel, the fancier after-theater club on East Fifty-fifth Street that he owned with a tall, French, very gay partner named Herbert Jacoby. Jacoby manned the front door with a rapier-like wit. “I’m Richard Townsend,” a pushy customer would say. “I have a reservation.” Jacoby would look coolly down his nose at the man. “You’re Richard Townsend?” Yes, the man would say, yes! Jacoby would nod. “My condolences.” At first, Elsa Lanchester headlined the bill, but as one month at the Blue Angel stretched to two, Max and Herbert made me the draw. By now, I had a record deal—and my first Hollywood screen test. All that in these short few months.
On April 3, 1952, the day after my last show at the Blue Angel, I made my first 78 RPM single for RCA Victor, at a New York recording studio, backed by an eighteen-piece orchestra. My contract was small; RCA committed to a few singles, and one album, with almost no money up front. At two and a half cents per song for each record sold, I’d have to sell a hundred thousand copies of a two-sided single record to net $5,000! But I could choose my songs from my growing repertoire of international folk songs. I might even get to include a composition or two of my own. This was heady stuff.
For my first single, I chose the folk classic “A Rovin’ ” and a new folk ballad called “Chimney Smoke”—both of them crowd-pleasers in my act. I waited for that single to shoot to the top, but I waited in vain; it sold far fewer copies than my debut on Roost Records three years before.
On my next trip to the studio, I tried a new tack: calypso. The sound and rhythm of calypso were imprinted on me from my years in Jamaica, and at the Library of Congress I’d found all sorts of great calypso songs—some traditional, some new. If I could lay claim to any kind of music, surely calypso was it. A song called “Man Smart (Woman Smarter)” had wowed the club crowds with its West Indian feminist message, and soon audiences were singing along with every calypso song I added to my repertoire. But on vinyl, with a protest song called “Did You Hear About Jerry” on the B side, it went nowhere.
When I did no better on a third single with two of the folk songs my new audiences loved best—“Scarlet Ribbons” and “Shenandoah”—I started wondering if maybe the record business wasn’t for me, or I for it. My live act worked as well as it did, I knew, because I acted it. When I tore into a song like “John Henry” onstage, I was an actor as much as a singer—an actor who happened to sing—using my whole body to convey the song’s power. How could a record capture that?
Gratefully, I plunged into a tour of top out-of-town clubs to do more of what I did best. The one I remember most vividly is the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. Missouri was a redneck state, and the Chase was its capital’s imperial white hotel. Blacks weren’t even allowed in to see my show. I was supposed to be grateful the hotel gave me a room; apparently, that was a first. In fact, it was a fairly small room that the hotel had me share with my new guitarist, Millard Thomas. Soon after our gig at the Vanguard, Craig Work had been drafted and sent off to Korea; he would come back from the Korean War to a high-achieving career as a NASA engineer. Craig had put me on to one of his music students. Millard was a fine guitarist and an easygoing guy who would work with me for years. He did have a few vices, however—cigarettes, alcohol, and a spliff when he could get them—and they could lead to consequences.
Late in the afternoon, Millard set a bath running and smoked a cigarette as he waited for the tub to fill; Millard smoked a lot. I lay down to take a nap. I awoke to the smell of smoke. The room was ablaze! Millard had fallen asleep, too, and his cigarette had lit his sheets on fire. When I leaped up to try to douse the fire with my bedcovers, I found myself standing in three inches of water; the tub had overflowed. I just pulled Millard’s sheets to the floor and drowned the fire. How gloriously convenient.
“Damn it, Millard,” I said. “Here we are the first niggers in the hotel, and we not only burn down the man’s house but turn it into a goddamn Noah’s Ark.” We called the black desk clerk downstairs, and he swung into action. In three or four minutes, black maids and housemen were opening windows, changing the linens, and mopping up water. Our presence, not only as the hotel’s first black room guests but as its star headliner, was a source of such pride and importance to the black staff that they let us know they’d do anything to keep this disgrace from being discovered by our white overseers. By the time Millard and I came back from our performance that night, the only trace of our debacle was the slightest hint of cigarette smoke, mingling with the strong scent of air freshener in our little room.
When Millard and I got home to New York, it was to a rousing return engagement at the Village Vanguard. “Belafonte has emerged as one of the outstanding practitioners in the folk singing field … causing something of a sensation,” Variety declared. “If the customers had their way, the tall, handsome lad would be vocalizing all night.”
Even if I never had a hit record, I knew I was on the map now.
The screen test was for a small role in an MGM movie to be called Bright Road, the story of a troubled student in a southern black school and the teacher who reached out to help him. One reason I landed the test was that Hollywood had so few black actors my age. There were plenty of old ones to play butlers and chauffeurs, but the young ones, like me, stayed in New York, not even bothering to try our luck in the movies. Sidney Poitier was an exception, his star rising fast, but for that very reason, he hadn’t even been asked to read for the role; it was too small for him.
In its own modest way, Bright Road would break a color barrier. The story didn’t explore racial issues; it just told a human story with characters who happened to be black. A West Indian teacher named Mary Elizabeth Vroman had written the story on which the script was based. My luck held when I read scenes with the actress whom MGM had cast as the teacher. No one could mistake the chemistry between us. In very short order, I got the part, and so I had the chance to observe, at close range, the actress Dorothy Dandridge, a future legend, in her first starring role.
When I flew out west for the film’s nineteen-day shoot in August 1952, I had a place to stay; Shelley Winters had called her boyfriend, actor Farley Granger, who offered me the guest room of his Coldwater Canyon home. Farley had had a great triumph the year before, starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Unfortunately, it would mark his career peak; a rift with Samuel Goldwyn, and two or three box-office bombs, would hurt him badly. I found him a sweet, gracious fellow, though somewhat depressed. In fact, he’d struggled with his sexuality, and sometime after his romance with Winters would acknowledge he was bisexual, taking a male partner for the last half of his life. Decorous as he was, he made no overtures to me. During that brief stay at his house, though, I did have a very unnerving experience.
One night after dinner, I went walking up Coldwater Canyon. Within minutes, a police car pulled up. I was told, in no uncertain terms, to put my hands on the car and spread my legs. “Why you out here walking, boy?” one of the cops demanded.
I said I was out in L.A. making a movie for MGM.
The other cop said, “So, you’re a movie star?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it that.”
“What kind of crazy-ass story is this nigger telling?” one of the cops said to the other.
The cops ordered me into the car, took me down to the Beverly Hills police station, and charged me with illegal loitering. When I asked to make a phone call, the police just laughed. In due time, they told me, in due time. Two hours later, Farley became alarmed enough to call the police and report my disappearance. When he
learned where I was, he called someone at MGM, who must have called MGM’s lawyers, because suddenly the presiding officers came in looking very embarrassed and released me. Most of L.A.’s cops in that postwar era, I later learned, were former U.S. military who’d enjoyed their training time in California so much that they’d come back to the area to live and had joined the city’s growing police force. A lot of them had come from the South, and their ingrained prejudice had been deepened by their war years in the Pacific theater, where the prevailing ethos was that the only good Asians were dead ones. They felt the same way about blacks.
Bright Road was made on the quick and cheap on MGM’s lot by Gerald Mayer, a nephew of studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Apparently Louis didn’t want anyone assuming Gerald was getting an easy ride; he forced him to direct so many B movies that Gerald had become known as MGM’s “Keeper of the B’s,” and Bright Road was one of them. For me, at age twenty-five, Bright Road was just a fun first stab at acting in films. For Dorothy Dandridge, who was then twenty-nine, it meant much more.
In her childhood, Dorothy had toured the country as one of the three singing Dandridge sisters (though only one was her sister; the other was a stand-in). As a teenager, she’d won a few small movie roles—one in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races—and shown enormous promise. Then, at twenty, she’d married Harold Nicholas, of the dancing Nicholas Brothers, and put her career on hold. Now the stormy nine-year marriage had ended, and Dorothy badly wanted the stardom she felt she’d deferred.
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