In search of answers, I started seeing a New York psychotherapist, as often as five times a week when I was in town. I hoped I’d embarked on a useful journey of self-discovery. Instead, as I would later learn, I’d stumbled into the start of a dark political thriller, my own version of The Manchurian Candidate.
Back in the summer of 1954, I’d gone up for a weekend gig to the Lake Tarleton Club, a WASPy resort set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I sang in the evenings; during the day, guests could listen to various speakers between rounds of golf or sets of tennis. I had the days free, so I wandered in to hear the remarks of a New York psychotherapist named Janet Alterman Kennedy. Psychotherapy, especially Freudian analysis, had been embraced by most of the artists I knew; talk of blocks and breakthroughs was as much in the air at Greenwich Village parties as politics and cigarette smoke. I was under a huge amount of stress by then, and Janet spoke with an empathy and insight I found quite moving. She also mentioned that she treated a lot of Negro patients: Janet was white, so that intrigued me.
That evening, she came to hear me perform and wandered backstage afterward. With her was her husband, Jay Richard Kennedy, who told me with soulful eyes how powerfully my rendition of “John Henry” had struck him, as both a devotee of folk music and an Irish bard of sorts. Kennedy was a stockbroker as well as an author, he explained; he had a speaker’s slot to discuss his new best-selling novel, an inside-Hollywood tale called Prince Bart.
I’d forgotten all about the Kennedys until they showed up backstage at one of the first New York performances of 3 for Tonight. They gushed with praise, not just in general terms—by now, I was pretty impervious to that—but in a thoughtful way that put 3 for Tonight into perspective as a race-barrier-breaking production. Over drinks at an after-theater haunt, Jay Richard told stories of riding the railroads as a hobo in his youth, of working as a longshoreman, wrangler, bricklayer, and farmer. He’d even had a go of it as a nightclub singer, he said, before reinventing himself as a novelist and screenwriter. There was no questioning his success; in addition to Prince Bart, he’d written the screenplay for I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a film just out about singer Lillian Roth’s long struggle with alcoholism. Along the way, he said, he’d espoused the same left-wing political ideals that I had, and joined similar groups, though in Chicago, not New York. As for Janet, she was affiliated with the psychiatric clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where she had a practice that served a largely black, working-class community. I needed someone I could talk to—about everything—and Janet seemed so wise and empathetic. I asked her if she would give me a consultation. Janet said she’d be delighted. She soon became my analyst.
In our first sessions, Janet explained the basic principles of analysis. She kept pounding on trust and transference, how a patient digs deeper and deeper into his past until the therapist becomes for him a stand-in for the loved ones or authority figures that have had such an imprint on his life. Soon I was dredging up those painful memories of my mother and father, telling her everything and weeping on her couch. The connection grew stronger when we saw each other socially, which was more and more often. If any of my friends suggested to me at the time that socializing with your therapist was not what Freud had had in mind, I must have waved them off.
Janet had broken one cardinal rule of analysis; she was about to break another. But she did have years of experience, and where she led me was clearly where I had to go: from my parents … to Marguerite … to the casual flings I’d begun to have whenever I went on the road. I didn’t need to seek out these lovers, I explained; they came to me, before or after my shows, making their hopes all too clear. But why, Janet asked, did I never say no? And what in these trysts was I hoping to find? I laughed. Wasn’t the answer obvious? Sex with new partners? Yet as I recounted one after another of these brief relationships, I realized all had left me deeply disappointed. Why? All roads, of course, led back to my mother. I’d tried so hard to please her, hoping I could do enough, hoping that at last she’d love me unconditionally. I’d failed, then reenacted this hopeless drama with Marguerite, only to fall short in her eyes, too. Just as I’d become a success, Marguerite had pulled away—scared by my politics, sure the FBI must be right to think I was a communist conspirator. Neither my mother nor Marguerite, in other words, had loved me unconditionally. With this pattern set, I’d ventured off to seek that absolute, unconditional love in each next intimacy. As soon as I sensed my next lover wasn’t capable of it, I’d start backing off. Often I’d see that my stardom was what had drawn them to me. They had no idea who I was beneath my stage persona; they hadn’t even thought to look. That was all I needed in order to leave.
Most of these women, I acknowledged to Janet, were white. At the venues I played, almost everyone was white—not many blacks could afford the freight—so I’d fooled myself into thinking there wasn’t anything notable about this. In fact, the taboo of mixed-race romance intrigued me, as it did so many. On a deeper level, my sexual desire for white women was linked, I began to see, with that underlying anger that never quite went away. The white world had done its best to deny me every chance. What better way, now that I’d triumphed despite it, to exact my revenge? What irked white men more than anything else? Seeing white women choose black men over them!
None of these casual lovers ever felt that anger emanating from me. Nor were any made to feel a target of racial revenge. I was never unkind. If anything, they felt sorry for me, at how trapped I seemed to be by my turbulent emotions. The more sensitive among them sensed my doubts, and asked what they could do to dispel them. To which I would say, quite honestly, “I don’t know.” And then I’d retreat—it was always I who backed off first. Over time, analysis would help me understand that pattern, how those deep, subconscious yearnings and fears manifested themselves. By then, Janet Kennedy—and Jay Richard Kennedy—would be long gone from my life.
All that digging soon brought me to my anxieties about money. No matter how much of it came my way, I felt I might lose it all and be dirt poor again. I started griping about Jack Rollins, my manager ever since that breakthrough audition at the Village Vanguard in late 1951. At the start of that ride, Jack had been a great help and a great comfort. He believed in me, he gave me good advice, he’d gotten me the Vanguard and the clubs that followed. But as I’d risen into the big leagues, Jack had panicked. Vegas was a mystery to him. So was Hollywood. He was basically in over his head. That was why I’d signed on with Freddie Fields of MCA, with Lew Wasserman at the company’s helm, to handle my movie and television work. I’d kept Jack on for clubs, but now that I was getting booked in rooms like the Cocoanut Grove, he was outmatched on that front, too. Janet listened, and then made a suggestion. Her husband, in addition to stock-picking and writing, handled the finances of some of Hollywood’s best-known actors of the day: Richard Conte, for one, Gene Kelly and Robert Ryan and others. Why not see if he could help me, too?
One day that May, I went down to Jay’s Wall Street office to discuss the idea. The office was very impressive. Jay worked on his own, but he clearly had lots of contacts in high places. Framed pictures on the walls showed a factory in the Midwest that had made ball bearings for the armed forces during World War II. Jay said he’d run that factory. He’d even advised President Roosevelt directly, and come to know members of his cabinet. Though he also admitted, with a chuckle, that before the war his biggest customer had been the mob, which used his ball bearings for slot machines. Jay seemed to have a finger in every pot—Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, Vegas—and that, he said, gave him enormous power to protect me from my fear of losing all my money as quickly as I’d earned it. Eagerly, I put him in charge of my finances, and gave him power of attorney.
The Kennedys lived at 25 Beekman Place, in an apartment spacious enough for Janet to have her office there. Somehow, my therapy sessions always seemed to be scheduled at the end of the day. We would emerge to find Jay mixing drinks for the three of us. Stay for dinner, the Kennedys w
ould urge, and so I would. Sometimes one of Jay’s friends or clients, just in from Hollywood, would be there; I remember Gene Kelly one night, director Anthony Mann another. More often, though, it was just the three of us, and in those cozy, familylike evenings, the transference—for that’s what it surely was—became so powerful and transformational that I began regarding the Kennedys as my surrogate parents. Before I even recognized it, in some strange and insidious way, I was calling them Mom and Dad.
Soon, with a little coaxing from Jay and Janet, I made Jay not just my financial adviser, but my personal manager as well, displacing Jack Rollins. Rollins was furious. To anyone who would listen, including gossip columnists, he began spewing an angry story of treachery and betrayal on my part. Without him, he’d say, I would have gone nowhere, yet now I’d cut him loose. The Kennedys, he felt, were as much to blame as me. They’d poisoned my mind. That summer, he filed a $150,000 breach-of-contract suit against both Kennedys, accusing them of turning me against him and signing me on as a client while my contract with Rollins was still in effect. The suit was groundless; my contract with Rollins had expired. Yet there was, I have to admit in retrospect, some truth in what he’d charged. The Kennedys found fertile ground to move Jack out of my life, and not until another year had passed would I discover why they’d done it.
Not long after 3 for Tonight bowed, I got a call from one Claude Philippe, a Frenchman who’d come over to work for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Claude wanted to have me do a late show at the Waldorf after I got offstage each night. When I heard that, I had to laugh. “Claude,” I said, “you must have just come from France.”
Everyone in the entertainment world knew the Waldorf had a Jim Crow policy: no black entertainers allowed. You could play in the orchestra if you were black, or maybe work as a substitute waiter, but not take the stage. Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole—none of the major black stars had played the Waldorf, not once. The strict keeper of this policy was Muriel Abbott, a powerful executive in Conrad Hilton’s hotel empire, which included the Waldorf in New York and the Palmer House in Chicago. “But, Harry,” Philippe explained, “Muriel eez in Chicago … et nous sommes ici.”
Abbott booked all the acts for the Waldorf’s fabled Empire Room in New York from her Palmer House office in Chicago. But Claude, as the hotel’s new vice president of food and beverage, had authority over the rest of the hotel’s dining spaces, including the Starlight Roof, which had been used simply as a banquet room. Claude’s plan was to turn the Starlight Roof into a new supper club. And for its debut, he had a daring idea: He said he’d book a regular act for the early show, then slide me in for the late show. Audiences would feel they were getting something special, columnists would write it up as news, the Waldorf would make money, and an important color barrier would be broken, which for Claude, God bless him, was as much a reason to do this as it was for me.
Claude kept the show a secret until the week before I opened, on June 1, 1955. Then he took out major ads in all the papers. Now, in addition to cabaret singer Felicia Sanders, the Starlight was offering … me. Abbott was furious, but she knew the Frenchman had outfoxed her; she couldn’t stop the show without causing a scandal. What she could and did do, even after the show was a hit, was start lobbying her superiors to have Claude fired. But with several months left on his contract, Claude took his revenge by hiring all the service staff of color he could: blacks, Hispanics, Asians. And these were union jobs—no one, not even Muriel Abbott, could fire those new waiters without cause.
At the next quarterly accounting, Conrad Hilton’s bookkeepers noted something very unusual: Room service revenues had gone up 30 percent. Those new waiters, knowing how lucky they were to land those jobs, had hustled that room-service food up to the rooms piping hot, and guests had ordered that much more. The Starlight Roof’s revenues had gone way up, too. Somewhere in corporate offices above Muriel Abbott’s little preserve, decisions were made. Claude was kept on, and, despite Abbott’s indignation, I was booked that September into the Empire Room downstairs, and then, directly from there, into the Empire Room at the Palmer House—the first of what would be years of engagements at both. It had taken a secretly liberal Frenchman to test the Waldorf’s color barrier, but what broke it was the jingle. In the end, profit always trumps prejudice.
Claude was right about the columnists; they did take note of the Starlight Roof show, none more flatteringly than Dorothy Kilgallen of Hearst’s New York Journal-American. On her nighttime beat, Kilgallen was both powerful and feared. Just when you thought her column was all fluff, she’d come in with some zinger. She’d taken on Frank Sinatra more than once. Back when I was in Almanac and drawing the heat of those “Red Channels” editors, she’d piled on by implying that Marlon Brando and I were gay and had had trysts on Fire Island! I’d responded as I had with Ed Sullivan, by meeting with her face-to-face, at her Upper East Side apartment. “Does it mean nothing to you that you’ve reported something completely untrue?” I asked her. “And that this miscarriage of truth has confused and upset my family? But beyond that, what makes you write nasty slurs about someone you haven’t even met?” We cleared the air soon enough, and to Kilgallen’s credit, she didn’t hold a grudge. Far from it—she invited me to write a guest column for her that June, the first of several, about my experiences of doing 3 for Tonight in the South. Later, when she became a regular on What’s My Line?, I went on as the celebrity guest one time, and she guessed who I was. “That’s my love, Harry!” she exclaimed. So we were cool.
My co-stars in 3 for Tonight, it turned out, were the ones displeased with me. All through our national tour, the Champions and I had gotten on wonderfully well. Those warm feelings had cooled a bit after the New York critics singled me out. But then a misunderstanding had arisen for which Paul Gregory was squarely to blame. Fearing the play might not last long on Broadway, Gregory had made a deal with CBS to buy it as a television special—it was to air June 22—and advised my agent that he could go ahead and quietly book me into a high-paying Las Vegas gig after that. When, to Gregory’s surprise, 3 for Tonight became a solid Broadway hit, the Champions thought they had a longtime run on their hands. They were appalled—and angry—to learn that the play would have to close because I had prior commitments. In those days, you didn’t do that. You didn’t leave a play for some selfish reason and go book a gig that would pay you more money while putting the play and the careers of fellow artists in jeopardy. So there was this undercurrent of fierce anger, which Gower finally explained to me. I sat them down to tell them exactly what Gregory had told me, and when I did, the whole company severed relations with him. Marge and Gower and I stayed friends, but not without some distance for a while.
Fortunately, the TV special helped ease those bruised feelings. It was a huge hit—“one of the most exciting and beguiling evenings of the season,” as The New York Times put it. So was our one-night finale, the next week, at the Greek Theatre, the open-air amphitheater in Los Angeles that held nearly four thousand people and was sold out. With that last performance, we had, in a sense, come full circle with 3 for Tonight, performing just a few miles from the Claremont theater where we’d started the previous fall. Despite its Jim Crow moments, I had nothing but gratitude for the experience. 3 for Tonight had been more than a cheerful song-and-dance revue. It had put us—the Champions, me, our backup singers and musicians—on a town-by-town tour in the grand old theatrical tradition, rolling across the heartland in our Greyhound bus, taking in the whole patchwork of America at a time when its regions were so much more distinctive from one another than they are today. It was an experience I’d always treasure, and never have again.
Unquestionably, too, the relentless pace of that tour made us stronger as performers. I felt readier to sing in larger venues—ready now, too, to absorb whatever further success fate chose to heap on me. As for the Champions, they would go from triumph to triumph—from starring in a television sitcom about themselves to Gower’s stri
ng of Broadway hit musicals as director and choreographer (Bye Bye Birdie; Carnival!; Hello, Dolly; I Do! I Do!) before the long dry spell of flops that devastated him and ended their marriage. And then, in one of Broadway’s most poignant true-life stories, Gower would try for musical success one more time with a show called 42nd Street, only to die of cancer on opening night, August 25, 1980, thus deprived of seeing the musical go on to a fabled run as one of the best-loved Broadway hits ever. On her own, Marge would establish a new career as a prominent dance teacher in New York, where she still lives, dancing every day, vigorous, fit, and as beautiful as ever—at ninety-two.
This time, when I came to Vegas, I rode right by the Thunderbird—noting that it looked a little shabbier than it had three years before—and went on to the new Riviera.
The Riviera had just opened in April, with Liberace as its inaugural act. Its Miami backers were mobbed up, of course, though they included Harpo and Gummo Marx at the outset. To their credit, the owners hadn’t wanted the Riviera to look like the other eight gambling resorts on the Strip. No glorified motor-court design for them. Instead, they made the Riviera Las Vegas’s first high-rise resort, with a ten-thousand-square-foot casino. In so doing, they brought on the start of a new and far more glamorous era: the glory days of Vegas.
For the next decade or so, Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack played the Sands (which acquired a tower of its own). But the Riviera was my place—until Caesars Palace went up and all of us decamped there—and I made sure I played it on my terms. Mr. Belafonte and his accompanist would be guaranteed a suite of their choice at the Riviera, my contract stated. They would be guaranteed access at all times to any and all public spaces at the resort, including the outdoor pool. They would in no way be discriminated against by any staff member of the hotel. On and on the contract went, until Millard Thomas started to laugh. “During Mr. Belafonte’s stay at the Riviera, no cloud shall pass over his head …” Damn right! I hadn’t forgotten my treatment at the Thunderbird, not one aspect of it. Nothing like that would ever happen again.
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