My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  Dorothy and I felt a strong mutual attraction, no question about that. But during rehearsals, it became clear that no matter what our feelings might be, a romance between us wasn’t going to happen. Dorothy’s marriage had ended the year before, the latest in a line of abusive relationships for her. She knew how fragile she was. What she needed now was stability—meaning no men, if she could help it, and a fierce focus on getting her career back on track. Already she’d reestablished herself as a singer, with a sold-out gig at La Vie En Rose. Now she wanted to conquer Hollywood. And to take up with me, four years her junior, would lead to nothing but a lot of negative publicity.

  A romance with Dorothy was the last thing I needed, either—my marriage was teetering a bit as Marguerite’s and my political differences grew, though I couldn’t imagine divorce—so I backed off with some relief, if not also keen regrets. In our few scenes together in Bright Road, that hint of unconsummated desire is all too real, made more so by Dorothy’s powerful screen presence. Here was a stunningly gorgeous black woman appearing before the camera not as a maid or a slave but as a teacher! Most of America had never seen a black woman, aside from Lena Horne, look both so beautiful and so dignified.

  As our short, low-budget shoot progressed, I think both of us realized we could help each other. I was the one who’d studied acting seriously; as a hardworking child performer, Dorothy hadn’t had the luxury. From my New School days, I had some cardinal rules of acting to impart. What Dorothy had over me, though, were those years of on-the-road experience. She was a singer, a hoofer, an all-around crowd-pleaser. She’d even done nickelodeon moviettes. All this imbued her with a certain bedrock confidence in her natural abilities, a confidence I didn’t yet feel.

  At the same time, as movie actors, both of us were learning on the job. “Find your light, Mr. Belafonte,” the assistant director would say.

  “Uh, what do you mean? There’s a lot of lights up there.”

  The A.D. would explain how I had to turn my face to a certain light to heighten the contrast between my eye sockets and my cheeks for the camera. When I shot Dorothy a sidelong glance, it was obvious that she had learned that rule already. She never missed her light.

  With romance off the table, Dorothy and I spent our time off-set talking about how it felt to be black actors in a white world. Despite her great beauty and talent, Dorothy’s chances of jumping from this first starring role to another were slim. Those roles just didn’t exist, any more than black male leads did for me. Bright Road might mark our mutual screen debuts, but we sensed its soft little story wouldn’t get us anywhere. All too soon, we’d be out-of-work actors—black actors—again.

  Since I was out on the West Coast already, Jack Rollins lined me up, after Bright Road, with my first Las Vegas gig—at the Thunderbird, a fairly new resort right on the Strip. The Thunderbird was a big-name joint: I would be opening for Henny Youngman, the well-known king of the one-liners. This was a big move up for me, and I felt pretty excited when I saw my name under his on the marquee, topped by a huge, neon-encrusted thunderbird, blowing smoke from below its beak.

  Proudly, Millard Thomas and I strode through the reception area, with its heavily southwestern decor, and presented ourselves at the front desk, along with our other—white—band members, including Tony Scott, who’d brought Fran. The desk clerk looked confused. When we said who we were, he called over a security guard. The person we needed to see, the guard explained sternly, was in an office we could reach by a back door. In the future, Millard and I were not to come through the front door. The hotel was off-limits to us—except, of course, during our shows, but even then, we’d get to the stage by a back door, and leave immediately afterward the same way.

  At the office to which the two of us were led, we learned we’d be staying at a motel some miles away. A “colored” motel. Where was Jack Rollins to scream bloody murder and sort this out? Back in New York, unavoidably detained, he’d informed me, by a case of severe hemorrhoids. I was mad, though in truth there was nothing he could have done; in 1952, Jim Crow was as prevalent in Vegas as it was in the Deep South.

  A taxi took Millard and me far from the Strip to the black section of town, and left us standing with our bags in front of a filthy fleabag motel. The woman behind the front desk was drunk. Weaving a bit, she showed us to a room that smelled of dog urine. “What’s wrong with it?” the woman said when she saw our expressions. “It was good enough for Pearl Bailey’s dog—it’s good enough for you.” Actually, I told her, no, it wasn’t. But the evening was well under way by then, so reluctantly and resentfully, we decided to stay one night. From my ratty bed, I put in a call to my uncle Lenny in New York. “I don’t know if you have any juice this far west,” I said, “but let me tell you what just happened.” Lenny got a little agitated, and said he’d make a call.

  The next morning, I dragged Millard back to the Thunderbird, where I demanded to speak to the VP in charge of talent booking. I told him I had some problems with how we’d been treated. “I’d like to either cancel this booking or buy it out,” I told him. The VP, a big bruiser of a guy, gave me a hard-boiled look. “You have a contract here,” he said slowly, “and you’re going to play it. The only way you’re going to leave Vegas and not play it is in a box.”

  I wanted to laugh—it was such B-movie talk. But the VP wasn’t smiling. Would he call on some mob goons to kill me? Maybe not, but they sure might beat us up. I didn’t have the presence of mind to figure the other options. I saw no choice but to head back to that filthy motel and grit out the week as best we could.

  As we stood once more in front of the Thunderbird, under the marquee that no longer filled me with joy, I heard a friendly greeting, and turned to see Pete Kameron, manager of the Weavers, Pete Seeger’s group. Was I glad to see a friendly face. Pete said he’d flown up from L.A. to check out my act—to see, as he put it, where folk music was headed. I told him that at the moment, folk music was headed back to Colored Town and a very bad motel. Pete laughed sympathetically. He knew how Vegas worked. There was, he said, one decent motel on the white side of town that would take us, and so he led us there. Nat King Cole, he told us en route, had found his own way to avoid the filthy motel in the black section when he played the Thunderbird; he’d brought a trailer that he parked out back.

  Half an hour later, a limo pulled up to our new motel, and the driver came looking for us. We were instructed to check out of the motel and to bring our bags back to the Thunderbird. No apologies were made when we arrived, but we were given room keys and told to enjoy our stay compliments of the house. Lenny, it turned out, had gotten through to Shondor Birns, who basically ran Cleveland for the mob. Shondor had called the Thunderbird, and now, miracle of miracles, the management had made an exception to its policy on Negro entertainers. From that moment on, Millard and I got treated with a certain deference: Shondor was a serious player who not only had killers on his payroll but booked a lot of big acts. I was delighted, but I knew the favor would be called in. A few weeks later, I had to fly to Cleveland to play the Alhambra Tavern, Shondor’s place on Euclid Avenue.

  When I walked out on the Thunderbird’s stage that night, I saw a sea of Stetson hats and a lot of sharp-looking women. Vegas in those days drew a very exclusive crowd of western high rollers—all white, of course. I felt I was on another planet. Nervously, I started in on a sea shanty that always worked at the Village Vanguard. “On yonder hill there stands a maiden, / Who she is I do not know …” In about three seconds, the high rollers in the front who’d looked up to hear us turned back to their women and drinks. At the end of that first show, we got barely enough applause to beat it offstage.

  Pete Kameron had caught the show, and came up to my room afterward. “This isn’t my town, Pete,” I told him. “I don’t know how to reach this crowd.” What I really meant was: What the hell was wrong with these people? They had literally turned their backs on me. I was furious.

  Pete let me rant awhile, then held up his ha
nds with a smile. “Okay,” he said. “Okay—they’re jerks. But I have to tell you something. You lost them, Harry. They didn’t lose you. Those people can be had. You just didn’t get them.”

  I instantly understood that Pete was right. I would be forever grateful that he showed up, because the time that we spent together seeking the solution paid off. Together, we started looking at my list of songs, sifting through them, and shifting them around. We thought we found an approach.

  When I walked onstage for the late show that night, I was still steaming mad. I stood at the microphone and scowled out at that sea of Stetsons. This was the loudest, drunkest crowd that I had ever seen. I grabbed the mike and at the top of my lungs screamed:

  “TIMMMMBBER!”

  It was the first line of a Georgia chain-gang song. Again, I screamed,

  TIMBER, TIMBER

  Lord, this timber gotta roll

  I got to pull this timber ’fore the sun go down

  Get it cross that river ’fore the boss comes ’round

  Get it on down that dusty road

  Come on, Jerry, let’s tow this load.

  Glasses stopped tinkling; conversations quieted. I sang with all the fury I felt, and all the frustration and grim determination that Jerry the mule surely felt too. The crowd grew silent, for in this moment all the hurt, frustration, and burden of race that I had known bonded itself into this taut knot of defiance, nuclear in its power. Millard had never played better. He hung with every note and bent with me on every verse. In the end, even the waitresses stopped in their tracks and the maître d’ stopped seating guests.

  From then on, I made that opening my signature. The brisk walk to the mike, the stern expression, no word of greeting. And then bam—into that fierce first song of social protest, either “Jerry” or perhaps “John Henry.” I’d hold that mood through the second song, probably the third, still with no word of greeting, definitely no smile. By now I would feel the crowd growing tense. When at last I switched to an upbeat song—and flashed them a first grin—I could hear the collective sigh as they settled back in their seats with a truly physical sense of relief. For the rest of the act, I could be as light and jokey as I wanted to be. They were mine.

  On my third day in Vegas, still simmering from the way Millard and I had been treated, I saw a way to exact a little revenge. Late that morning, I put on my bathing suit, slung a towel over my shoulder, and knocked on Tony and Fran Scott’s door.

  “How about a swim?” I asked them.

  They looked at each other and grinned. They knew exactly what I was proposing. “Why not?”

  As we walked out to the oval-shaped pool, all eyes were on us. I let Tony and Fran settle on a couple of pool chairs and walked alone, slowly, to the diving board at the far end. As I did, the half dozen or so swimmers—all white, of course—began climbing out with furtive looks over their shoulders. The white sunbathers on pool chairs just stared. So did a number of heavyset white men on balconies above, who seemed to appear at the same time as if the word had gone out telepathically: nigger at the pool. Like the sunbathers, they just stared as I walked to the end of the diving board and for a long moment tested its flex. Then I dove in.

  Incredibly, the water did not turn black. I did a couple of laps, swimming slowly, and then climbed up the deep-end ladder. As I did, a boy of about twelve approached me. He gave me a long, inscrutable look. I gazed back with a bit of a smile. Finally he spoke.

  “Mr. Belafonte,” he said, “may I get your autograph?” And from his pocket he took out a pad and pen.

  With that, other kids began coming over, too, followed by their camera-wielding parents. “Mr. Belafonte, can I get a picture of you with my children?” As I signed the autographs and posed for the cameras, I snuck a look up at the balconies. One by one, the heavyset men were vanishing, in silence. The fans around me were responding to my new fame as a Vegas entertainer, not to the fact that I’d just become the first black ever to swim in the Thunderbird’s pool. That they’d already decided my swim was insignificant—that was its significance. And that no one from the front desk came out to stop me, or mentioned it for the rest of my stay—that was my private act of revenge against their bullheaded prejudice. Not just to break their Jim Crow rules, but to take it a step further, to make them change as well.

  Each next stage of my success, I was starting to see, came with its own new barriers of color. And the pain and anger I felt when I ran up against those barriers never lessened—never lessened at all. Years later, when the Thunderbird reached the end of its commercial life and was detonated in front of a crowd with seven hundred pounds of explosives, I thought: I would have loved to press that button.

  7

  Tony Scott threw a wonderful party that Christmas at his loft on Jones Street. He had his flute out—Tony played it as well as he did the clarinet—and with someone else at the stand-up piano, Marlon Brando and I slapped away at the congas, one drum for each of us. We played with a lot of soul, if not as much skill as we would have liked.

  I loved being back among my downtown friends, a world away from Las Vegas. I loved their keen wit, their hipness, their sense of fun. Yet I appreciated what Vegas had done for me, too. Days after my return, I had played a big, cavernous room out in Queens called the Boulevard, where no one felt obliged to be polite. As I walked onstage, true to form, everyone kept talking, so I reached into my attitude bag and put my new Vegas thing into motion. “Timmmmbbber.” Billboard, in its review of the show, declared I was becoming “the top folk singer in the business … the huge mob rocked with him with such zest that it took on an almost hysterical frenzy.”

  There was a lot to be happy about, and almost everyone at Tony’s party was happy for me, except perhaps one guest: Marguerite. The whole scene put her off. Too much smoke, too many downtown bohemian types—losers in Marguerite’s book. She looked down on the show business crowd, and, even more painfully for me, she had little regard for my choice of intellectual company—Robeson, Du Bois, Killens; anything to do with the left brought out her discontent. I didn’t know where to take our relationship. At one point during Tony’s party, I looked up from my conga drum to seek her out, and saw her sitting by a window, alone. When I looked up again, she was gone.

  For some time to come, Marguerite and I would keep trying to resuscitate our marriage, but more out of guilt than anything else, at least on my part. I was no longer the lost and confused young man, and Marguerite didn’t know what to do with the more self-assured public figure I was becoming. Always opposites, we’d now become opposites apart, and both of us, I think, sensed that the more touring I did from now on, the better.

  In a blur of club dates around the country the next year, one that stands out in memory was a return engagement at the Black Orchid in Chicago in March 1953—not so much because of the venue as because I followed Josh White. More than one critic had pronounced me “the new Josh White,” which doubtless irked him as much as it did me. Josh had a powerful repertoire, his songs were beautifully styled, and, most important, he had more of that stuff I kept trying to stir up for myself: authenticity. He’d grown up in the segregated South. He’d played with Leadbelly and shared a Broadway stage with Paul Robeson. With Josh’s songs still echoing in the Black Orchid’s supper club room, I gave it all I had, and Chicago gave all that and more back to me, its critics declaring that I had a force and style all my own.

  And yet for all the praise heaped on me, the “authenticity” issue kept popping up, and I felt I had to put it to rest. That same month, I became the first black to play the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles. The owner was a rabid anti-communist, with a son who worked for Senator Joe McCarthy. How did I get and keep the gig, considering our very different politics? The power of the jingle! “West coast audiences have been packing the big Cocoanut Grove,” Time magazine reported, “and have accepted Harry Belafonte, 26, as a folk singer to be ranked with Josh White and Burl Ives.” I was playing even larger venues, too, open-air amphit
heaters like Lewisohn Stadium (capacity 27,000) in upper Manhattan and the Carter Barron in Washington, D.C., to crowds of four thousand a night. I was challenging the whole concept of what a folksinger could be and do. Potshots were inevitable. DownBeat’s was typical: “Belafonte is synthetic in folk singing,” one of its critics wrote. “His roots are not in regional soil, as … Leadbelly’s [are] in Texas. Belafonte is a native New Yorker, the possessor of a not-large but extremely flexible voice and a flair for theatre … a guy who collaborates with others to revamp different folk tunes.”

  So according to DownBeat, no one could sing songs that weren’t from his home state! Recklessly breaking this law, I took another stab at a calypso song that spring, recording “Matilda,” about an unfaithful woman. It would become one of my best known.

  At about this time, John Murray Anderson came to hear me at the Village Vanguard and announced he wanted me to star in his latest Broadway revue. I jumped at the chance. The Canadian-born Anderson was a legend. He’d started in vaudeville, gone on to produce the Ziegfeld Follies along with Billy Rose’s revues, done movies, and even overseen the Ringling Brothers circus. An effervescent figure, always just in from Paris and making an entrance with two or three theatrical grand dames, Anderson had an air of infallibility about him. “I’ve selected you to be in my revue. That means you’re with the best there is!” He called it John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and I was thrilled to be in it.

  In typical revue fashion, Almanac had only the sketchiest of story lines to justify its songs and dance numbers when it bowed December 10, 1953, at the Imperial Theatre. I sang three songs: “Acorn in the Meadow,” by the show’s musical directors, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross; “Hold ’Em Joe,” an old calypso song; and one that Millard and I had written together, “Mark Twain,” about the Mississippi riverboat captains whose custom of gauging the depths with weighted lines had given Samuel Clemens his pen name. A seasoned cast, including Polly Bergen, Hermione Gingold, Billy De Wolfe, and Orson Bean, did the rest. But I got more than my share of notice. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times singled out my performance of “Mark Twain,” declaring that my “expository style as a singer and actor makes it the Almanac’s high point in theatrical artistry.” The New York Post noted that “Mark Twain” routinely stopped the show. I went on to earn a Tony Award as Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Almanac, a dream come true.