I had to face facts: My mother was no longer possessed of a rational mind. In the weeks that followed, I tried to find her an apartment in Harlem that she’d like. Something was wrong with every place we saw. Finally she settled, unhappily, for a brownstone walk-up apartment on 143rd Street and Convent Avenue, a one-room apartment with a sink but no toilet; the bathroom was down the hall. Like some Dickensian character, she was trapped by her past, forced back to these meager circumstances because they’d shaped her, and they were what she knew. Soon enough I got her belongings boxed and shipped back from L.A.—Bill Wright, not surprisingly, chose to stay in the Victoria Street house, so this marriage, too, was over—but there those boxes stayed in her little apartment, unopened, for years to come. “I’ll be moving soon,” she’d tell me when I visited. “Why open them now?” But every time a broker showed us nicer apartments, she’d grimace and shake her head.
I was in New York most of the time now, and I was predisposed to movie projects that planned New York shoots. End of the World, the post-apocalyptic tale I’d agreed to star in for MGM, had a chilling, empty New York backdrop. Sol Siegel, the MGM producer, arranged for various Manhattan streets and landmarks to be cleared of all cars and people. No flashing traffic lights, either—the Department of Transportation saw to that. And what was always a mystery to me was the deal he cut with the pigeons. Not one bird ever flew past our lens.
We did have a lot of very authentic-seeming post-nuclear debris, an eerily apt setting and story for a time of peak Cold War paranoia, with fallout-shelter signs posted on every building and schoolchildren routinely ordered to hide under their desks in preparation for the coming blast. Long before the coming of technical special effects, the movie did a great job of evoking a post-nuclear New York in an almost poetic fashion, not by what it put into the picture but what it left out: all signs of life.
I felt excited about the script I’d signed off on, even if I wasn’t entirely sold on the film’s new title: The World, the Flesh and the Devil, a phrase from the Book of Common Prayer. For the first twenty pages, I am onscreen alone, wandering the streets in search of other people, my survival the lucky consequence of having been an engineer trapped in a coal mine three thousand feet below sea level when the blast occurred. Finally, I meet another human being: a beautiful woman, to be played by Inger Stevens. We fall in love and make our peace with the apocalypse, only to have a third survivor—to be played by Mel Ferrer—alight from a small boat. Now the story becomes a romantic tangle and, inevitably, a racial one, too. There was a lot of opportunity in those scenes.
Those first scenes of me alone—my shouts echoing against Wall Street’s empty caverns—seemed to go just fine when shooting began. Then Inger Stevens appeared, and our mutual attraction began to spark. A day or two later, shooting was suspended. The studio wanted a few minor script changes, we were told by director Ranald MacDougall. Back came the script, changed beyond all recognition. Apparently the powers at MGM—either Sol Siegel or his overlords—had broken out in a cold sweat over the daily rushes: too much interracial intimacy. Now the romantic scenes were completely gone. Instead, my relationship with Inger Stevens was neutered, the last half of the movie rendered all but meaningless.
I was furious. Barely able to speak, I threw the script against a wall and stormed off the set. I was through. Once again, I was confronted by the country’s schizophrenia on race. On the one hand, I’d just appeared on the cover of Time magazine, accompanied by a long, reverent profile inside. Yet the same sort of white decision makers couldn’t abide the thought of me touching or kissing a white woman. Wasn’t that the whole point of having my own production company involved, to protect me from just this sort of racism?
Jay Kantor, my agent at MCA, called first, pleading with me to finish the film. I told him no. The next call was from Marlon Brando, another of Kantor’s clients. “I’ve been there, man,” he said. “I know what you feel. But I know what will happen if you walk off. They’ll crucify you. You’ll be blacklisted—for keeps. This is very, very serious, what you’re doing.”
I ranted on for a while, but I finally saw Marlon was right. I had no exit clause to fall back on, and no say over the script. On this one, MGM ruled.
So I went back and finished the film, with all its obvious, irreparable flaws, and when it came out, in May 1959, it flopped, as I knew it would. “The evidence,” wrote Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, “is that a good idea, good direction and good performances—at least by Mr. Belafonte and Miss Stevens, to a lesser degree—have been sacrificed here to the Hollywood caution of treating the question of race with continuing evasion of more delicate issues and in polite, beaming generalities.” It did go on to become a cult favorite.
For my beautiful Swedish-born co-star, Hollywood’s squeamishness on the question of race was to have far greater consequences. Despite a number of film successes over the next decade—Hang ’Em High, 5 Card Stud, and Madigan—Inger often struggled to find work, and began to be passed over for leading roles as the next generation of ingenues came up. Inger was especially vulnerable. She’d secretly married a black actor, Ike Jones, and knew that if word got out, she’d be all but unemployable. Harry Cohn had acted brutally when he forced Kim Novak to stop seeing Sammy Davis, Jr., but he knew his market. One April day in 1970, Inger was found dead in her kitchen from an overdose of prescription drugs washed down with alcohol. She was thirty-five.
I spent the summer on my now-established concert circuit, from the Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Washington, D.C., to the Greek Theatre in L.A., and up to the Riviera in Vegas. Summer was the season for large, outdoor amphitheaters where I could play to bigger audiences. Now, as part of that circuit, I flew to London for the first of several European concerts. And it was in London that I had a most unexpected—and life-changing—encounter.
I’d come back to the Dorchester Hotel at about 1:00 a.m., after a giddy opening night and after-show party, where I’d had my share of Champagne. As I passed through the lobby, the concierge discreetly flagged me down. “Excuse me, Mr. Belafonte,” he said. “A priest and some gentlemen have been waiting for you. Shall I tell them to go?”
I looked over to see a white priest, in clerical collar, flanked by three black students with skin so dark they were almost surely African. Great, I thought: a Catholic missionary with his converts, hoping to convert me. But as the priest stood and timidly waved, he looked so pitiable that I went over to greet him. “Mr. Belafonte, I so apologize for encroaching on your privacy,” the priest began, “but we are in a truly desperate situation, and you’re the only person I can think to ask for help.”
I sat and listened.
Father Trevor Huddleston was, in fact, an Anglican, not a Catholic. As I quickly realized, he was the kind of priest I liked: a social activist. English-born and educated, he’d been sent to South Africa by his church and come to abhor the apartheid regime. He’d essentially founded the anti-apartheid movement in Britain. In his latest effort, he was promoting a searing documentary called Come Back, Africa, made by an American filmmaker, Lionel Rogosin, that laid bare apartheid’s ruthless cruelties. Come Back, Africa had just caused a sensation at the Venice Film Festival and won the prestigious Italian Film Critics’ Award, but the news had traveled, and down in South Africa, the government was furious. Its leaders had declared that everyone involved in the making of the film would be punished severely—and if existing laws didn’t cover this outrage, new laws would be written. The students who were with Father Huddleston had all appeared in the film and come to Venice to help promote it. Now they were in a terrifying limbo. If they returned home, they’d be thrown in jail—or worse. But their visitors’ visas would soon expire, and the British government had shown no inclination to grant them political sanctuary. Perhaps if I saw the film and was moved by it, I might be able to help.
I did watch the film the next day, and was riveted, not only by the atrocities it depicted but by an amazing young singer who appeared in a scene set in a sh
ebeen—an illegal speakeasy. The singer, a young woman, was both gorgeous and gifted; her extraordinary voice seemed to capture all the hope and despair of black South Africa. When the film ended and the lights came on, a door opened and in walked the singer, along with the students and Father Huddleston. The singer’s name was Miriam Makeba.
Makeba, I learned, was already South Africa’s best-known female black singer, revered as the “Nightingale.” She’d recorded scores of gospel and jazz tunes, as well as traditional African songs, with an all-girl group called the Skylarks. Yet when we met, what struck me was her humility. She wasn’t just humble, but meek. She took my hand in both of hers and bowed, which embarrassed me, but I thought if I told her to straighten up, she’d be more embarrassed. Later, she told me that the gesture was tribal, indicating respect by a youth for her elders. Some elder! I was thirty-two, to Miriam’s twenty-seven. I told her how much I’d adored hearing her sing, and how wonderfully melodic her songs were. Not just melodic but, to an American ear, startlingly fresh and original. I said I’d be happy to introduce her to American record producers and agents—after I did whatever I could to help her obtain British or American visas, if that’s what she wanted. I would, of course, try to help the students, too.
From my civil rights work, I had a network of activists throughout Europe, figures of political influence working for world peace. Though the peace movement focused primarily on building channels of communication between the Soviet Union and America, with the goal of uniting both peoples in peace to stop their governments from waging war, it would soon embrace the anti-apartheid cause as well. With a few phone calls, I found Miriam and the students a lawyer to take on their cases pro bono. Their visas were extended, and the students immediately began establishing a cultural base for South Africans in London. It was a propitious time; another new transplant from South Africa to London was Oliver Tambo. A founding member with Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress Youth League, Tambo had been served with a banning order by the apartheid government, and at Mandela’s urging, left South Africa to promote the ANC from abroad. For thirty years he would be based in London, raising funds and promoting the anti-apartheid cause, while Mandela remained jailed and incommunicado.
For the moment, Miriam didn’t need my help to get to the United States; Lionel Rogosin had arranged to fly her to New York for a debut at the Village Vanguard. I went to hear her perform, though even before she came out on that tiny stage, I had a bad feeling about it. The Vanguard was billing her as South Africa’s most famous jazz singer. Miriam wasn’t really a jazz singer; she was a Xhosa tribeswoman from Johannesburg who sang traditional songs like “The Click Song,” with the Xhosas’ distinctive tongue-clicking sounds, and “Pata Pata.” Instead of singing what she knew that night, she launched into American standards—better done by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and others—with a strong South African accent that only got in the way. I could see people at the nearby tables looking wonderingly at each other. I had a pretty good sense of what would happen if she kept this up: She’d find herself on a plane back to South Africa, her American singing career over. That night, I took aside the critics I saw in the audience—The New Yorker’s Pop Whitaker was one—and asked them, point-blank, to hold their reviews. Give me a few weeks to work with her, I pleaded. She’s just gotten bad advice, I told them—she’s so much better than this.
I told Miriam the same thing. America didn’t need a South African Ella Fitzgerald. It needed Miriam Makeba doing her own music. We walked the streets and talked for hours. Miriam told me about growing up as the youngest of six children in conditions so desperate my own childhood seemed comfortable by comparison. As an infant, she’d been imprisoned with her mother when her mother was charged with brewing and selling beer—a crime for blacks in South Africa. When she was six, her father had died, and the family had struggled even more. At least both her parents had introduced her to traditional music. After winning a missionary school talent contest at thirteen, she’d begun making a name for herself as a singer. But she’d then made the mistake of marrying, at seventeen, an unfaithful and abusive man. All too soon she was back in her mother’s home, the marriage over, with a daughter known as Bongi. Her career had begun to take off in her early twenties. But then she’d signed a long-term contract with a record company, a contract that apparently made no mention of royalties. What, she said pitifully, should she do?
I told Miriam to let me put some musicians together. They’d start rehearsing with her. She’d become an official arm of my company, Belafonte Enterprises, and when she was ready, she’d perform with me on my next concert tour. She would need a lawyer to hammer out the financial arrangements—a lawyer of her choosing, not mine—and she would need a bank account. To give that account a little heft, I would deposit into it $25,000 of my own money. That was my gift to her; it wasn’t against her future earnings. It would just be her cushion, so she could live in New York on her own. I told her in no uncertain terms that she would have to learn to be responsible with money, to pay her taxes, to keep from overspending. And I warned her to avoid talking publicly about apartheid. Unfortunately, the U.S. government was closely allied with South Africa’s regime, and hardly any of its citizens had a clue as to how bad apartheid really was. Speaking out as a foreigner—a black foreigner—would jeopardize her visa. This wasn’t hypocrisy on my part; I just knew the lay of the land. I could get away with speaking out because I was an American citizen; paranoid as our government was, it couldn’t deport me. It could send Miriam back in a flash. Just work on your music, I told her: your music. Politics could come later.
When I laid out the details of the bank account, Miriam’s eyes grew wide. “You’re like my big brother,” she said, and for the rest of her life, that’s what she called me: Big Brother. As soon as I started spending time with her, I sensed the emotional scars she’d incurred from growing up in a world of violence, inflicted by both the authorities and her own people. Her docility was both a defense and a way to hide the damage beneath. Like many young victims of extreme abuse, she’d put her pain in different drawers—drawers she could close when she needed to, so she never had to deal with the accumulation of all those hurts.
When I felt she was ready, I helped Miriam land a spot on Steve Allen’s TV show. Aside from The Ed Sullivan Show, there was no better way to debut on national television; the show had an audience of sixty million. Miriam appeared on November 30, 1959, and received exuberant reviews the next day. Twenty-four hours later, she walked out once more onto the tiny stage of the Village Vanguard. This time I’d packed the house with high-powered friends—Marlon, Sidney, Nina Simone, Anthony Quinn, Robert Ryan, and more. Miriam’s very appearance wowed them: She wore a resplendent outfit made for her by John Pratt, one of the great theatrical designers of his day and, as it happened, husband of dance troupe leader Katherine Dunham. Later, Miriam would say she nearly forgot her lyrics as she looked out at that star-filled crowd. But she didn’t, and the crowd adored her.
Afterward, I went up to Max Gordon to ask how long an engagement he could give her, and on what terms. Gordon said he was happy to give her four weeks, but I could forget about negotiating on her behalf. He would pay her what he wanted to, because he was her manager! He pulled out a document, dated from that first unfortunate debut, showing that he and Lionel Rogosin had signed her as their client. Now that I’d made her a hot property, Gordon and Rogosin intended to cash in. Worse, Miriam’s percentages were minuscule. This was hardly better than chattel slavery. Steaming mad, I pulled Rogosin over—he was there that night, too—and told them both that if they dared enforce this contract, I would do everything in my power to see that they were disgraced. After some grumbling, they gave in and tore it up. Then I went to work on Miriam’s other contract—the one she’d signed in South Africa for terms just as unjust, with a company called Gallotone Records. Not only was the contract shamefully ungenerous; it prohibited her from recording outside South Africa. First I
wrote a friendly letter to Mr. Eric Gallo, saying what I thought I could do to help build Miriam’s career in the United States. When I got what amounted to a “Drop dead” reply, I went to George Marek, who oversaw my albums as head of RCA Records. RCA, as it turned out, was Gallotone’s distributor in South Africa. Within forty-eight hours, Miriam was free of that contract, too, and signed, instead, to a proper contract with RCA.
A little more than a decade earlier, four gods of jazz had glided out onto the stage of the Royal Roost to give a trembling rookie his break. Now with Miriam, I felt I was paying back a little chunk of that karmic debt.
That October, along with Marlon, I tried my hand at being a theater producer, with a French comedy called Moonbirds, by Marcel Aymé, starring Wally Cox, our onetime fellow student at the New School. It told a quirky story of a French teacher who discovers he has the power to turn people into birds. There were a few future notables in the cast—actor William Hickey for one—but the critics were merciless, and after opening on October 9, 1959, at the Cort Theatre, Moonbirds fell to earth exactly one day later, after three performances.
Hollywood was confounding me, too. What could I do to keep my next film—assuming that as a black leading man I could find one—from being rewritten halfway through shooting by some timid studio boss? Only, I realized, by putting the whole package together myself—story, director, co-stars—and going to the one studio I felt I could trust: United Artists, run by the staunchly liberal Arthur Krim and a man I truly loved, Max Youngstein. Along with Arnold Picker, they were collectively making films in a way that overnight changed how Hollywood would be doing business.
I’d loved a noirish crime thriller called Odds Against Tomorrow, by William McGivern, a southerner whose hard-boiled novels had led already to two great film noirs, The Big Heat and Rogue Cop. On behalf of HarBel Productions, I sent the novel to screenwriter Abe Polonsky, best known for his Oscar-nominated original screenplay of Body and Soul, the dark, brilliant boxing classic of 1947 starring John Garfield and Canada Lee. “You know you’re taking a risk if I write the script,” Abe told me. I knew: Polonsky had refused to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and seen his career screech to a halt—ironically, thanks to Robert Rossen, my drunken director on Island in the Sun. I told him not to worry; I had talked to the powers at United Artists, Max Youngstein and Arthur Krim, who were already doing their part to hire blacklisted writers, and they were my backers. Hollywood was still cowed, so blacklisted writers had to use pseudonyms. Not just dreamed-up fake names—that was too easy for some anti-communist zealot to uncover—but the names of real writers who hadn’t been blacklisted and were willing to help those who were. I went to John Oliver Killens, the highly respected black novelist I’d first met in Harlem through the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Killens agreed that we could use his name instead of Abe’s, though Abe, of course, would get the money for the script he’d written. If anyone questioned us, Killens would claim the script as his own. The co-writer we hired, Nelson Gidding, had worked on several of director Robert Wise’s films. He was an untarnished writer we could take to meetings and screenings; he could also be on set to make changes as shooting got under way.
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