My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  It was in Almanac, though, that I first began straining my voice. In these long-ago days, no one in Broadway shows was miked, and to be heard in the back rows over the orchestra in the pit, you had to project your voice with a lot of power. Classically trained singers knew how to do that from their diaphragms. I didn’t. I just sang as loudly as I could—from my larynx and throat. Pretty soon I strained my vocal cords so badly I lost my voice altogether.

  By then, I’d struck up a friendship with Yul Brynner, starring in The King and I across the street at the St. James Theatre. Yul had problems with laryngitis, too, worse than mine after three years of playing the King of Siam six nights and eight shows a week. When he heard my news, he told me to head straight over to the one guy who could fix me up for that night: Dr. Max Jacobson. So I did. Jacobson proved to be a dashing-looking German, with a skier’s body, a nice accent, and a fancy shirt with one or two buttons unbuttoned and the cuffs rolled up. No doctor’s smock for him. He strapped me down, tilted the examining table so my feet were higher than my head, injected me with the contents of two or three syringes, and had me lie that way for a few minutes so the drugs would filter up faster. After a few minutes he straightened the table, slapped me on the back, and said, “Knock ’em dead.” That night I gave my best performance ever.

  I went back to Dr. Jacobson a few more times during Almanac’s run—not on any regular basis, just when I knew I was about to lose my voice again. His drugs worked every time, but they scared the hell out of me. I knew they were uppers. And while Yul got them every week and seemed just fine, I knew they weren’t for me.

  I stopped going at the end of Almanac’s run, and almost forgot about the strangely debonair Dr. Jacobson until one night six years later, when I got a call from Bobby Kennedy in Puerto Rico, where I was working. “What do you know about this guy Max Jacobson?” I told him of my experience, and warned him to be careful. “Why’re you asking?” I said. That was when I learned that Jacobson was treating President Kennedy, giving him injections as needed for his back pain and exhaustion. Soon Dr. Feelgood, as he came to be known, would be treating everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Truman Capote with the same potent mix of dangerous drugs. I was just grateful I’d had the good sense to stop going. But the throat problems that robbed me of my voice would haunt me again and again, up to the day I stepped away from the world of performing.

  Along with critics’ reviews, Almanac brought scrutiny of a different, disturbing kind. On Broadway and in Hollywood, the witch hunt for communists had reached a fever pitch. Jack Gilford, a wonderful comic I’d shared bills with at the Village Vanguard and Blue Angel, went overnight from a circuit regular to unemployable. One day his phone stopped ringing; he got no more film or TV work for ten years. It was the same for Zero Mostel, the brilliant comic actor whom I’d also shared bills with: suddenly blacklisted, all but unemployed for most of the 1950s. Both went before the House Un-American Activities Committee; both invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to name names. Both were, to me and many in the rest of the entertainment industry, heroes. But they, along with so many others, paid a heavy price.

  I’d come to prominence too late to be included in “Red Channels,” a report issued by the red-baiting publication Counterattack, with its list of 151 entertainers said to be communists, or to be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in its first investigations. But in January 1954, with Almanac packing the house every night, the editors of Counterattack accused me of being a “Communist fronter.” My crimes: entertaining for a union that had ties to the American Communist party; singing for a nonprofit group called the Committee for the Negro in the Arts that accepted funding from the Communist party; sharing a “Freedom Rally” stage with Paul Robeson and other leftists. With that, columnists Walter Winchell and Dorothy Kilgallen took up the cry. Suddenly my whole career seemed to hang in the balance.

  If someone other than Michael Grace had backed Almanac, I might have had to relinquish my role. But Grace, whose Irish family had made a fortune in shipping, told the editors of Counterattack to buzz off. The editors threatened to picket the show, but nothing came of that, and the show went on. In retaliation, they claimed a victory of sorts in their next issue. They falsely wrote, “Belafonte has since approached Counterattack to clarify his stand.” The editors reported that I’d denied entertaining for the union but admitted other “transgressions.” That was an outrageous smear. I approached Michael Grace and asked him for assistance. He gave me the benefit of legal counsel, and they confronted Counterattack. “As far as Counterattack can determine,” the editors primly concluded in a later article, “Belafonte has not supported any fronts since that time.”

  Still, I was now a suspicious character, tainted by the mutterings of these self-appointed judges, who were, in fact, former FBI agents. Or, in the case of Aware, another such publication that questioned my credentials, American Legionnaires from upstate New York who worked as butchers. It was a scary time, in which the slightest whisper of communist sympathies hung in the troubled air. In Hollywood, loyalty lists were going around. I’d been asked to sign one before filming Bright Road, attesting that I was not, nor—as the boilerplate had it—ever had been, a member of the Communist party. Jack Rollins wanted me to sign. Instead, I’d drawn up a letter of my own, saying what I wanted to say—namely, that I’d never done more than exercise my rights of free speech to express my views on political issues. Apparently, that had satisfied the studio, but these public inferences seemed harder to expunge. Winning the Tony, I felt sure, would inoculate me against any more of these slurs. Instead, it did the opposite.

  By now, Ed Sullivan had established a new tradition: The Tony Award winners went on his Sunday-night television show to perform. The musicals were his big prize. He got an extravagant crowd-pleaser for free, since the musicals’ producers transported their sets from Broadway to the Sullivan show’s stage. The actors got to promote their shows, and stirred additional excitement by sitting in the audience when they weren’t performing. And America got to sample the new season’s shows and decide what they hoped to see on their next trip to New York. Unfortunately, my Broadway agent informed me, I would not be joining the program. I was blacklisted.

  Jack was still my manager, mostly for club gigs, but as my star had risen, he’d seemed more and more out of his league, so I’d turned to Freddie Fields, the well-known MCA agent, to handle Hollywood and Broadway work. It was to his New York office that I went to declare that whoever had put me on the blacklist was wrong. Fields listened soberly. Then he pulled open a desk drawer that contained some special phone. He dialed, waited a second, and said, “Harry Belafonte.” After a moment, he hung up and slid the phone drawer shut. “You’re on the list,” he confirmed quietly. He said he’d work on it, and I left. Later that day, Fields called with more news. “Ed Sullivan wants to see you,” he said. “That’s all I know about it.”

  All-powerful as Sullivan was in the new age of television, going to see him was like paying a visit to the Wizard of Oz. At Delmonico’s, the Park Avenue hotel where he lived, an elevator man took me up, the two of us riding in silence. I had the sense I wasn’t the first entertainer to make this trip; Sullivan was known to be closely allied with Ted Kirkpatrick, the editor of Counterattack, and to vet prospective television guests with him. Sullivan opened his own door and welcomed me affably, almost a different person from the old stone face he projected on Sunday nights.

  “I see we have a problem here,” Sullivan began when we were seated in his sunken living room, “and I’m just trying to find a way to fix it. It’s my understanding that you are caught up in a political net, but … there are some serious allegations.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  Sullivan opened a dossier and started reading down a list of progressive rallies and events I’d attended over the last several years. Then he handed it to me. “How do you respond to all of these?”

  This was a crucible for me. A decision had to
be made, a decision that would follow me for the rest of my days. “Mr. Sullivan,” I said, “not only are all the allegations on your list as you have described them, but there are many more that haven’t been included.” I took a deep breath. “But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about what the list really is—and who I am.”

  With that, I told Sullivan a bit about my background, what growing up poor and black in Harlem was like, how I’d enlisted in the navy to serve my country, only to be segregated during that service, and how I’d begun to see that all over the country, black men were being abused by racist forces. “Seems to me that if you’d come from Ireland,” I told the TV host with Irish roots, “and awakened each day to find another Irishman hanged, and you had no power to stop those killings, you’d speak out in every way you could.” Sullivan nodded solemnly, but said nothing.

  “I’m not a communist,” I went on. “But I don’t need to admit that. And if someone else were to ask me, I’d just say it’s none of your business. I don’t think the onus is on me—I think it’s on you, to explain why you feel you need to judge in this cruel and unfair way the artists you have on your show. As for me, I have a choice: stop speaking out against racism and other issues I feel strongly about, which I won’t do, or accept the consequences. I’m prepared to do that.”

  He nodded. “Hmm, thank you for coming,” he said. And I left.

  That afternoon my agent called again. “You’re on the Sullivan show,” he said.

  So I performed after all, and my appearance did give me a boost. But in these treacherous times, going on the show made me an object of new suspicions—from my friends and colleagues. What had I done, blacklist victims wondered, to make myself acceptable to Ed Sullivan? Obviously I must have signed whatever loyalty statement he’d put in front of me, and confessed whatever sins I was accused of, to be cleansed of the communist taint. Maybe I’d even named names.

  One day not long after, I went uptown with Bill Attaway to Sidney Poitier’s new restaurant, Ribs in the Ruff. At the counter, as we walked in, sat a black actor/singer I knew. When he saw me, he shot me what seemed a dirty look. As Bill and I slid into a small booth, the guy kept glaring at me, until finally he slammed the counter, picked up a knife, and came at me. “You son of a bitch,” he shouted. Bill and Sidney blocked him, but they couldn’t stop his tirade. “For thirty pieces of silver you fucking sold us out.”

  I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how devastating the effects of the blacklist had been in the black community. In all the literature I’ve read since then about that terrible time, no account has focused on the disproportionate number of black artists accused of communist sympathies, starting with Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Canada Lee, but including virtually all members of the American Negro Theatre, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, and more. This was no coincidence—far from it. The witch hunters were racists, working two campaigns as one. And how naturally, how inexorably, those campaigns fitted together! After all, hadn’t Stalin said that blacks and whites were equal? And hadn’t Robeson welcomed those words? So didn’t that make all blacks, by definition, communists? It certainly left nearly all black artists blacklisted. As for the few exempted, they had to contend with a taint just as hard to erase: the suspicions of their friends and colleagues that they’d ratted to save their careers. The only mitigating factor was that as common practice Hollywood hired so few of them, most didn’t even know they were blacklisted.

  I was grateful, in a way, to that actor at Ribs in the Ruff. At least he’d hurled his doubts right at me, giving me a chance to say, in no uncertain terms, that I hadn’t sold anyone out, hadn’t named any names, hadn’t acknowledged any “crimes,” and hadn’t signed any loyalty oaths. But how to defend against those who nursed their suspicions in silence? For guidance on that, I paid a visit to Robeson. He smiled when I told him the Ribs in the Ruff story and admitted that he, too, had wondered what I’d done to sanitize myself for the Sullivan show. “So you can put my doubts to rest,” he said, “and maybe even those of that actor. But you can’t defend yourself to each and every person. All you can do is follow your truth, know who you are, and get on with it.”

  That was easy enough to do with colleagues, harder when the taint of suspicion seeped into my home.

  Not long before Almanac opened, I’d moved my family out of West 156th Street and into a real house. True, it was a two-family attached house in East Elmhurst, a working-class neighborhood in Queens within earshot of LaGuardia Airport. But it stood on a clean, leafy, safe street where Adrienne could play and make friends. White friends, for East Elmhurst was, in fact, a white neighborhood. We’d picked it because it lay outside the city and seemed less restricted than other neighborhoods we could afford. Which was to say that when I’d offered to buy the house, the white owner had sold it to me. When we moved in—the first black family on the block—I fixed up the basement as a playroom for Adrienne, complete with play kitchen, and put a swing set in the backyard. Soon all the neighborhood kids were coming over to play. One day after they left, Adrienne solemnly told her mother we had to move. Why? Marguerite asked. “Because there are niggeroos moving into the neighborhood!”

  That was all the prejudice we encountered. But one day in early 1954, while I was out of town, Marguerite opened the door to two badge-flashing agents of the FBI. Stunned, she ushered them in, and listened, with her mother beside her, as the agents explained they were investigating me because of my associations with known communists, people whose mission was to overthrow the government of the United States. Who, exactly, had Marguerite and her mother seen in my company, and what, exactly, had we discussed?

  Thoroughly rattled, Marguerite said it was no secret that I knew Paul Robeson and Dr. Du Bois, but other than that, she had no idea who they might mean. As soon as the agents departed, Marguerite called me in hysterical tears. I tried to explain that the visit was obviously just a fishing expedition; if the agents had been on the trail of any particular suspects, they would have asked about them. But Marguerite couldn’t seem to take that in. If I was on the FBI’s list, there must be some reason. Surely, agents of the federal government would not spend such time and resources tracking a folksinger if there wasn’t something to the story. The point of the visit, I felt sure, was to scare us and sow distrust between us, and in that, the agents succeeded. Marguerite never quite trusted me again.

  Marguerite was right about one thing: The federal government was certainly tracking me. Not long after the agents’ visit, I was auditing a lecture at the Dramatic Workshop downtown when a Miss Scotti of the House Un-American Activities Committee approached me. She was wearing, rather incongruously for a government lawyer, a stylish hat and veil. In an empty classroom, she made her pitch. “We have reason to believe that you’re being used by elements in this country that do not have any concern for the welfare of our nation,” she said in a soothing, sympathetic voice. “We’re sure you’re not one of those elements, but we do fear you’re being used. And we’d like to help you.”

  “In what way,” I asked, “am I being used?”

  Miss Scotti took out a list of meetings where I’d been spotted—pretty much the same list Ed Sullivan had handed me. But there was a new transgression. “We know,” she said, “that you objected fiercely to the Rosenberg sentence.”

  I felt the sickening sensation that so many before me in the blacklist era had felt: the realization a friend had betrayed me. Dotts Johnson.

  The previous June, I’d been downtown doing the rounds—visiting publishing companies to get the rights to songs, putting my act together—when a fellow black actor waved to me from the wheel of his fancy new car. Dotts Johnson had made a name for himself in Italy after the war, getting cast in one of Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist films, Paisan, as a black G.I. chasing a street urchin in Naples who steals his shoes. Back in the States, he’d acquired another t in his name and landed a small role in Sidney Poitier’s breakout film, No Way Out
. He and Sidney had grown so close that Dotts served as Sidney’s best man at his wedding in April 1951. For a while there, Sidney’s new Hollywood fame had put a little distance between the two of us, though before long, Sidney had gone back to working as a dishwasher; that was how bleak the prospects were for a black movie actor in the early 1950s. Perhaps not coincidentally, our close friendship had resumed.

  Dotts offered me a ride uptown, and I slid in. It was a balmy day, so he rolled down the windows. As we set off, breaking news came over the radio: The U.S. Supreme Court had just vacated Justice William O. Douglas’s stay of execution for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They would be executed later that day: June 19, 1953. In a rage, I pounded the passenger door. Some days later, I ran into Dotts again. “You and your goddamn politics,” he said. What did he mean, I asked. “You hit my car door so hard that the window cracked, and I have to go get it fixed.” Whatever the repair cost was, it was a lot, so I told him I’d pay him in bits and pieces. And I did, but clearly he hadn’t forgotten the incident.

  “We’d just like you to be a friendly witness,” Miss Scotti suggested.

  I told her I refused to be a friendly witness or any other kind. As soon as I could, I sought out Robeson again and told him the story. “Are you really sure it was him?” Robeson asked.

  “We were the only ones in the car.”