I was on a roll now, booked into one top-tier joint after another with hardly a break. After the Riviera, I came back down to L.A. to play the Cocoanut Grove, staying, when I did, as a houseguest of Richard and Ruth Conte at their Coldwater Canyon home. The rest of Jay Richard Kennedy’s clients came around, too—Charlie Chaplin and Robert Ryan and director Tony Mann—all singing Kennedy’s praises. In a year or so, when I learned what Kennedy’s game really was, they would be furious with me for exposing him.
Then it was on to the Venetian Room in San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where I broke Lena Horne’s attendance record; back to the Waldorf’s Empire Room in New York, where I broke Frank Sinatra’s attendance record; and on to the Palmer House in Chicago, where 1,100 guests were turned away from my sold-out opening show. I was thrilled. But baffled. What combination of good luck and timing had lifted me up like this? How long would it be before that upward draft subsided and let me down?
By now, I had Muriel Abbott on my side—she could read the numbers as well as anyone—but not, initially, the Chicago Empire Room’s maître d’ and manager, Fritz Hagner. On that sold-out opening night in Chicago, I got the call in my suite that the show was due to start; the tables were filled and the orchestra was waiting for me. So I strolled through the hotel’s regal lobby and headed up the great staircase that led into the Empire Room. Hagner saw me approaching. Apparently he didn’t recognize me. “Where are you going?” he demanded. I realized he had no idea who I was.
“Into the club,” I said casually, indicating the velvet-framed doorway behind him.
“No, you’re not,” Hagner snapped.
Hagner was speaking in code, but it was clear to both of us what he meant. No blacks allowed. At least, no black paying customers. Inside, I could hear the band playing my thirty-two-bar intro. What could I do with this moment? I wondered.
Without another word, I strolled back down the stairs and sat on one of the tufted velvet sofas in the lobby. Up in the ballroom, the band played that thirty-two-bar intro again and again. Several minutes passed; then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Muriel Abbott rush frantically past, on up the stairs. Tensely she conferred with Hagner. Where was the star act? Hagner shrugged. Then she turned and saw me down on the tufted sofa. She rushed over to me, astounded. “You’re on—don’t you know that?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But that ass won’t let me in.”
Muriel just wilted. Even she was mortified. She led me up the stairs herself. If looks could have killed, she would have finished off Hagner right there. Nodding coolly, I glided past him and went in to do my show. I didn’t have any trouble from him again.
One night during that run, though, I did have a table of hecklers. Chicago was a big cattle town; this was a table of good ole boy cowboys in ten-gallon hats. They started by heckling the black waiters, who had to wear foppish Louis XIV–style uniforms with red jackets and white tufted shirts, pantaloons, and gold-buckled black shoes. “Hey, boy,” they addressed the waiters. “More Champagne, boy.” Then they started in on me. “Sing ‘Melancholy Baby,’ ” one of them drunkenly shouted out. I looked for some posse of bouncers to come hustle this guy out, but no one materialized; at about $1,000 per table in front, you could buy yourself a lot of indulgence from the management. Instead, I caught the eye of the top waiter. He held up his hand as if to say, “I’ll take care of this.”
Next thing I knew, the unruly table was being served a free round of drinks. The head waiter stood beside the worst of them—the “Melancholy Baby” guy—as if awaiting his next command. In about a minute, the big cowboy slumped over, out cold. The waiters had slipped him a Mickey. With the greatest solicitude, a group of those uniformed waiters carried the drugged cowboy out of the room. For years afterward, whenever I played the Empire Room in Chicago, black waiters would sidle up to me and ask with a grin, “Remember that night with ‘Melancholy Baby’?”
To my tour of top venues, I added one more that December that had special resonance for me. For the first time since I’d played Martha Raye’s Five O’Clock Club, exactly five years before, I went back to Miami. Miami was still a Jim Crow town with Negro curfews, but the entertainment scene had changed considerably. Fashionable hotels had black entertainers as a matter of course, and provided sanctuaries of Jim Crow–free treatment. At the new Eden Roc, I inaugurated the Café Pompeii, and overnight put it on the club-circuit map.
I was rehearsing in the hotel’s new theater—setting my lighting cues, working with the band—when a familiar figure emerged from the darkness of the outer orchestra. A cigarette holder dangled from one hand; the other held a half-empty martini glass. He might have been a cruise-ship director, with his ascot and double-breasted blazer. He was, in fact, America’s best-loved comic, Jackie Gleason. The Eden Roc had promised him more than top money to be its reigning act. He would be the hotel’s theatrical czar, deciding which other comics and acts would be hired, and weighing in with advice as needed. Gleason toddled up to the foot of the stage and cleared his throat. He had some advice for me: I should start out with the June Taylor Dancers, he told me, because they were his dancers and they were damned good. They would become the club’s signature.
As he spoke, I looked at him as if he were a Martian. I said nothing in reply. Finally he stopped and glared. “You get it?” he said. By now it was clear to everyone onstage that the Eden Roc’s theatrical czar was sozzled. That, I would learn, was his normal state. “Actually, no,” I said coolly, “I don’t get it. We’ll do our act our way, thanks.” Gleason was furious, but there wasn’t anything he could do. The hotel wasn’t going to fire me. For starters, I had a play-or-pay contract. And the last thing the new Eden Roc needed was a nationwide story that it had fired a top black American entertainer—at the say-so of Jackie Gleason. What I couldn’t figure out about Gleason was: Where was the guy we all loved in The Honeymooners? Where was Ralph Kramden?
Overnight, Cafe Pompeii became a glittering new fixture on the national nightclub circuit, and I took to coming back every December for a one- or two-week engagement. I’d just checked in the following year—1956—when I got a call from a local publicist asking if I might consider singing the national anthem in a few days’ time at the annual North-South All-Star football game. The game was being sponsored by the Shriners, the national fraternity of good fellows who all just happened to be white.
“The Shriners?” I echoed.
Yes, the publicist said. I’d heard that right. The Shriners would be thrilled if I agreed to sing.
Okay, I said. I’m in.
The next day, the publicist called back. He was terribly embarrassed, but there’d been a mix-up. Another singer had been asked to sing first; no one had let the publicist know. He was so sorry for the confusion.
I had a pretty good hunch that the only mix-up was one of race: The publicist had acted on his own, then proudly gone to the Shriners with his coup, only to learn that the Shriners didn’t want a black man singing the national anthem at their football game. I told the publicist as much, and then I said, “Either you get that mix-up sorted out, or this story’s going to find its way to the press.”
Somehow, the mix-up got unmixed, and I sang at the start of the game to a packed stadium. I made sure, when I did, that I was standing beside the American flag to which everyone was paying respect. That way, when the Shriners rode by afterward, they had no choice but to salute the flag—and me.
Home in the new year of 1956 was a grim and dreary place. I’d acknowledged that the writer of those letters from Italy was still in my life, and if I didn’t come right out and say that Julie had begun flying over to join me now and again on the road, Marguerite had to suspect as much, given how often I was gone. I don’t think Marguerite still loved me, any more than I loved her, but she did enjoy her new social status as Mrs. Harry Belafonte. Pictures of us together accompanied profiles of me in Look, Ebony, The Saturday Evening Post. Even Marguerite’s mother could see that this onetime no-acco
unt had made something astounding of himself. Not just a singer and actor, but a rising black star. And not just a rising black star, but one with a mission: to tear down racial barriers wherever he saw them. Marguerite admired that. She felt no more a part of my world than she had before; she rarely felt at ease with any of my friends. But she knew she was on the victory train, with money and fame coming in, and she wasn’t in a rush to get off at the next station.
Day by day now, that train was picking up speed. A new and slightly alarming title was about to be coined for me: America’s Negro matinee idol. Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway were the great jazz bandleaders; Sammy Davis, Jr., had emerged as the ultimate entertainer; and Sidney, my friendly rival, was Hollywood’s first black leading man. But I stood now on a platform all my own. Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine were matinee idols, too, both hugely popular crooners and show-biz smooth. I wasn’t like that. I let my passions show. And my audiences, who were nearly all white, and mostly female, responded. In some instances with more than casual reserve.
I thought a lot about why that was, of course. I knew now, in a way I certainly hadn’t as a child, or even as a teenager, that I was blessed with good looks. And for white audiences, I carried a reassuring presence, enhanced by my Caribbean diction. Black, but … not too black. Years later, in a New Yorker profile of me, the professor and author Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would write, “Brown up Tab Hunter and you could hardly tell him from Harry Belafonte.” Just as important, perhaps more so, I was a black entertainer who engaged the crowd without reference to color at all. In its own subliminal way, that sent a powerful message. No shucking and jiving here, no ole black Sam. Everything about the way I comported myself onstage made clear that I assumed my audiences and I were equals. So they reacted in kind. Which freed the women to regard me the way they did their white matinee idols, as a singer they could fantasize about getting to know—at least on their island vacations.
A decade or more before—certainly before the war—even northern audiences would have bridled at a black entertainer who acted like that. Uppity was the word that would have formed in their minds, even if they didn’t quite say it. No longer. All over America, but especially in New York and California, a new generation was rising up against prejudice and segregation, and my timing, not just personally but historically, was fortuitous. Folk songs were anthems of the dispossessed, rallying cries for justice, and when white audiences listened to this black singer bring them to life, they were doing more than enjoying the tunes, or the way I sang them, or even the sex appeal I brought to the mix. If you liked Harry Belafonte, you were making a political statement, and that felt good, the way it felt good to listen to Paul Robeson, and hear what he had to say. If you were a white Belafonte fan, you felt even better. You were connecting with your better angels, reaching across the racial divide. Consciously or not, you were casting your vote for equality, and for a phrase about to hit the mainstream: civil rights.
9
One day in the spring of 1956, I picked up the phone to hear a courtly southern voice. “You don’t know me, Mr. Belafonte, but my name is Martin Luther King, Jr.”
I took a beat. “Oh, I know you,” I said. “Everybody knows you.”
Four months into the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, King was doing better than he could have imagined—but not well enough. Back in December he had been a promising but little-known preacher at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, all of twenty-six, newly married with a baby, when Rosa Parks entered history by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider. In part because he was too new to Montgomery to have any political enemies, he’d found himself elected head of the group running the bus boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association. Overnight, his brilliance as an orator had electrified the city and helped keep the boycott alive. Since then, his home had been bombed, he’d been arrested—twice—and he’d become a national figure. Meanwhile, the boycott wore on. It wouldn’t end until December, after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that segregation on Montgomery’s buses was unconstitutional. King needed to keep the boycotters’ spirits up, and he needed money. For that, he was coming up to New York on a fundraising swing. Would I meet him, he asked, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, after he spoke to a gathering of fellow clergy he was hoping to recruit for his mission?
I came, but not without misgivings. The leading Negro ministers I’d known had abandoned Du Bois and Robeson in their hours of need. Still, I was most curious to meet this new prophet. No one else quite like him had appeared in my lifetime, with the exception of Gandhi. Would he live up to the hype? He did. Certainly I knew that whatever King wanted from me would probably involve writing a check. His sermon from the pulpit of that Harlem church rocked me. This King, whoever he was, was most impressive. He might be young—two years younger than I was—but he was fully loaded and ready. At no time in his sermon did he attack the congregation or the church. Yet he made very clear that his northern brethren were failing to do their part. What does the scripture tell us to do, he asked, when we’re denied justice? And, given what it tells us, he said, what do we do when a preacher in my position is accused of being a provocateur rather than a defender of the righteous word? You do more than you’re doing right now was the unmistakable message.
When I met him afterward in a reception room, I was struck by his sense of calm. He stood surrounded by at least two hundred well-wishers, yet he seemed unaffected by the crowd, at peace with himself, as if he were standing alone. Finally he broke through the greeters and came over to me. He was shorter and stockier than I’d expected. I felt an unmistakable edge of excitement meeting him. “I’m so delighted you were able to find the time to meet,” he said, looking up at me. “I can’t tell you what it will mean to me and the movement if I can even just make you aware of what we’re trying to do.”
King motioned me to follow him downstairs. The church basement was used as a Sunday-school classroom; it had a blackboard and folding table and a dozen or so straight-backed wooden chairs. We pulled chairs up to the table, and a photographer took a few pictures. Then King gently ushered the photographer out and closed the door behind him, and it was just the two of us.
We got right into a very easy place. I made him feel comfortable; he certainly fascinated me. Above all I was taken by his humility. It wasn’t false humility; I knew the difference. Nor was it humility in the service of charm. This man was both determined to do what he saw as his mission—and truly overwhelmed by it. “I need your help,” he told me more than once. “I have no idea where this movement is going.”
I asked King why he’d gotten involved in the first place. In his soft, fervent voice, he began to talk about the poor, and his deep commitment to alleviating their plight. But he didn’t just talk—he listened, too. Our conversation was so intense—so very intense—that I had no idea, when we stood up, that three hours had passed. All I knew was that here was the real deal, a leader both inspired and daunted by the burden he’d taken on. “I’m called upon to do things I cannot do,” he said, “and yet I cannot dismiss the calling. So how do I do this?”
I said I’d help him any way I could. And for the next twelve years, that’s what I did. I started by making my own contributions to the Montgomery Improvement Association—sums that paid for gas for the cars that took bus-boycotters to work every day, and food for those who’d lost their jobs. I wasn’t the only one writing significant checks, but I was a member of a fairly select club. At the same time, I started organizing house parties to raise sums from larger groups. Would the boycott have endured without that money? I can’t answer that. But I’m proud of the fact that I definitely played a part in keeping it going. And not long after the boycott, I produced a fundraising concert at Madison Square Garden to keep the Montgomery Improvement Association afloat. I sang, and so did my Vegas compatriot Frank Sinatra.
I gave a lot, but I got a lot back. I’d worked hard for various causes, but in a scattershot way. Everything Martin did, I saw,
served a higher purpose: to bring change by nonviolence, using the methods espoused by Mahatma Gandhi. That fascinated me. I felt him pulling me up to that higher plane of social protest. I wasn’t nonviolent by nature—or if I was, growing up on Harlem’s streets had knocked it out of me—so for some time, I would view nonviolence more as a shrewd organizing tactic than anything else. As I got to know Martin better, and saw non-violence put to the test, I would come to appreciate its spiritual and emotional value. I’d find I wanted to live by those values myself, both to help the movement and to wash away my personal anger. For Martin, the tenets of nonviolence aligned with his deep religious faith—and that I would struggle with, for, unlike Martin, I questioned the honesty of the church and the existence of God. We’d talk a lot about that. But for now, a whole new chapter of social protest was opening for me, and I had Martin to thank for that.
By the time I met Martin, my career was hitting a new high; my second album, simply called Belafonte, was rocketing up the charts. Mark Twain had done fine, but by May 5, 1956, Belafonte reached Billboard’s number two spot, and stayed near the top for months to come. I’d started to think that my stage act would never translate into major record sales. Happily, I was wrong.
Belafonte was a mixed bag. It had folk songs (“Scarlet Ribbons,” “In That Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’ ”), spirituals (“Take My Mother Home” and “Noah”), and a calypso (“Matilda,” released earlier as a single), all from 3 for Tonight. One reason the album worked as a whole was that Tony Scott, my old friend and brilliant clarinetist, sat in as musical director. But also, everything I’d done to date had come together behind that album: the Broadway revues, the top clubs around the country, the two movies—I was perceived as a triple threat. At that moment in the mid-twentieth century, with the civil rights movement just beginning and the word Negro not yet questioned by whites or blacks, being given the title of Negro matinee idol filled me with pride, even if it had started, as all such titles do, at the typewriter of some unnoticed newspaper writer in a column long forgotten. Simply put, it was my time, though I couldn’t help but notice it was someone else’s, too.
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