Odds Against Tomorrow is a bank-heist story, but one in which race plays a determining part. The planner of the heist is a white ex-policeman, played by Ed Begley, who’s worked out every last detail of the heist he wants to pull off at a small Pennsylvania bank. He hires me because he needs a black deliveryman for his scheme, to be admitted through the bank’s back door with a delivery of coffee. To round out his trio, he hires a white ex-con and seasoned bank robber, played by Robert Ryan. The twist is that Ryan’s character is a hard-core racist. How the three of us struggle to work together and pull off the heist, amid sharp racial divisions, is what gives the film its power.
As co-producer of the film, along with United Artists, I had final say not only on the cast but on the director as well. When I felt Abe’s script was ready, I sent it to Bobby Wise, who’d cut his teeth as the film editor on The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Charles Laughton and Citizen Kane and had gone on to direct movies in all genres, from horror to sci-fi to war stories to film noir. Robert loved the script as much as I did and had no qualms about working with a blacklisted writer using a pseudonym.
Once again, as with The World, the Flesh and the Devil, the filming was done in Manhattan. The difference was that this time, everything went better than I’d dared hope. Wise shot in gritty black and white, focusing almost entirely on the three bank robbers as they prepare for the heist. Visually, the scenes have an almost surreal quality: the streets desolate, the city bleached out and eerily silent. Wise actually used infrared film in some of the sequences, making the Manhattan skyline look black, with white clouds. The film, in all of its aspects, is top-rate, the tension among the three robbers almost suffocating.
Upon its release in October 1959, Odds Against Tomorrow brought me the best reviews I’d gotten as a movie actor. Everyone, both in front of and behind the camera, was highly praised. Even the music was terrific; composed and performed by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, it went on to be one of the year’s top-selling screen-score albums. Taut and bleak, Odds Against Tomorrow could stand with the best of the fifties film-noir genre. It still can. It had only one problem: It made no money. Half a century later, it remains a favorite of film buffs, the first film noir made with a black lead character and, as far as I know, the last. The New York Times’s Stephen Holden has called it “sadly overlooked.” But as I knew in my new capacity as film producer, the bottom line is … the bottom line.
I made no more movies that year or the next. I made none for the next decade. The critics all agreed I’d been good in Odds Against Tomorrow, and as an entertainer, I remained at my peak. Why, then, no more movies? The truth is I was tired of fighting Hollywood. Tired of trying to push the studios into making films with black male leads who fell in love with their leading ladies the way white stars did. Scripts kept coming to me, some for films that went on to become box-office hits. But in every one of them, the black male lead was neutered. Judging by those roles, you’d wonder if black men even knew what it meant to fall in love, much less to have sex. Two of the more memorable ones that were offered to me were Lilies of the Field and To Sir, with Love. In one, a handyman on a cross-country jaunt stops to help a bunch of German nuns trying to build a fence. No romance there. In the other, a teacher tries to inspire his unruly students. Clearly teaching is a full-time job; no romance there either. Sidney Poitier took both of those parts, and they rocketed him up to new, stratospheric heights of stardom. Everyone loved Sidney in those roles. Ironically, his dark skin, which he felt worked against him in those early days at the ANT, now proved a decided advantage. Yet Sidney, for all his blackness, never looked like an angry black man, and even in In the Heat of the Night, where he did break his mold and went so far as to slap a white man (I sure sat up when I saw that), Sidney radiated a truly saintly calm and dignity. Not me. I was a lighter-skinned Negro … and an angry one. I didn’t want to tone down my sexuality, either. Sidney did that in every role he took. I don’t want to put the full rap on race. Sidney is a wonderful actor, and he mesmerized audiences with all his performances. But he knows as well as I do that these nuances were fundamental to his success.
Television, for me, seemed far more open than Hollywood’s film community. In the fall of 1959, CBS and Revlon called me in for a top-secret meeting. Revlon had just spent a ton of money on a new show called The Big Party. The idea was to throw a lot of celebrities together in a black-tie cocktail-party setting and invite the television audience in. Each week a different superstar hosted: Rock Hudson the first week, Jane Wyman the second week, and on and on. Most of them had never been on television before. On any given show you might see the likes of Sammy Davis, Jr., and the Will Mastin Trio tap-dancing their way down the wide flight of stairs, passing José Greco and his flamenco dancers clicking their heels on their way up. You might pass a big-name comic in the kitchen tossing salads and flipping pans while doing his monologue. In the next room you might find Nat King Cole at the piano, while Judy Garland was in the adjoining room singing to a small group. It was chaos made up of a parade of stars. Every well-known comic in show business, every singer, every dancer had been solicited to take part. Each segment was ninety minutes long. Despite the celebrity wattage, the show was tanking badly. When they invited me to join, I declined the offer. But they were most persistent. I told them I did have some thoughts about a different kind of variety show, if CBS and Revlon would like to hear them.
I knew that CBS and Revlon were fairly desperate, and not just for a way to solve the Big Party problem. CBS had produced, and Revlon had sponsored, The $64,000 Question, which had mesmerized the nation until the truth came out the year before: Revlon, almost certainly in the person of its CEO and founder Charlie Revson, had manipulated the questions to favor some contestants and push aside others. Single-sponsor quiz shows had been a huge moneymaker for the last several years; now, in the wake of the scandal, they were gone, and both CBS and Revlon needed something to replace them. I knew one other thing: Black women were a big audience for Revlon. The complexions of white women were fairly similar, so they bought similar beauty products. Women of color had a whole panoply of skin tones. Thus, more varied beauty products. I might have a largely white audience in Vegas, but on television I could bring them all in. And I was happy to do it … if Revlon wanted to meet my terms.
First there was the money: $200,000. That’s what Revlon would pay for the show—period. However much I wanted to spend producing the show, the rest would be mine. I could spend $200,000 ordering up the most splendid sets in the history of television and not earn a dime, or stand myself in front of a bare backdrop, sing the whole hour, and keep the $200,000. My choice. But also, I told them, I wanted free rein to choose the talent I did employ, both in front of the camera and behind it. Revson said fine.
Where did I want to go with this opportunity? I started envisioning a portrait of Negro life in America told through music. What better way to promote understanding than with music that reached millions of Americans in sixty minutes? Tonight with Belafonte was to be virtually commercial free: There would be some time to introduce the show and wrap it up, but in between there would be no commercial breaks. That was one of my terms, and a television first.
I started by hiring a young director whose work I’d admired on The Andy Williams Show, a Revlon summer-replacement variety hour. The show had caught my attention because of its spare sets, straight camera shots, and lack of the usual producing frills. When I met with the director, Norman Jewison, I told him I had something similar in mind for my show. Forget it, he said. Revlon, because of creative differences, had just fired him from The Andy Williams Show. I told Jewison not to worry; I was making the hiring decisions. At the first production meeting, I told the assembled CBS and Revlon executives that Jewison was my choice. They blanched, but what could they do? Then I told them the name of the singer I wanted to feature, along with myself: Odetta. There was a long silence.
“What’s an Odetta?” one of the executives asked dryly.
“She’s a singer, looks like Paul Robeson,” I said.
The executives turned green. But what could they do? They’d agreed to my terms.
The show aired on December 10, 1959, to excellent ratings. Odetta, the Alabama-born singer, reached a far larger audience that night than in any appearance she could have made in the clubs of New York and San Francisco. She made a name for herself in the heartland; soon she would be known as the “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.” Norman Jewison’s direction gave him back a career: He would go on to direct The Judy Garland Show for CBS, which led to films like The Cincinnati Kid with Steve McQueen, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, with Alan Arkin, and In the Heat of the Night, probably Sidney’s best picture, along with a lot of other memorable films. As for me, I won an Emmy that year for Tonight with Belafonte, the first Emmy ever awarded to a black television producer.
CBS and Revlon were happy, too. They wanted more. We negotiated five more shows, and on my terms. Each show would be an hour; I would have complete control; and it was pay or play, which meant if for any reason Revlon or CBS didn’t shoot or air the shows, they still had to pay me.
A local phone directory gave me the idea for the first of these five hour-long specials. In those days before ZIP codes, the city was divided into larger postal zones. One of them, Zone 19, went from Forty-second to Fifty-ninth streets, and from Riverside Drive over to Fifth Avenue. Within that broad swath, I realized, one could hear, on any given day and night, most of the world’s musical styles and cultures, from classical in Carnegie Hall to show tunes on Broadway to bebop on Fifty-second Street, but also salsa in Latin bars, jigs in Irish joints, the music of Israel in synagogues and the Yiddish recitals in theaters—the list went on and on. Why not a variety show with a song from each culture and genre within that small, dense district? The show was called New York 19.
Everyone thought it was a great idea. But as I would learn when the show aired the next year, television had its own racial stigmas, as hard to deal with as those in the film world.
That Christmas season, fresh off the triumph of my first television special, I opened a one-man show at the Palace Theatre in Times Square. For all my lingering doubts and demons, even I could feel I was breathing the rarefied air at the top of the mountain. The Palace, in 1959, was sacred ground, high above the club circuit, higher even than the Greek Theatre and other outdoor amphitheaters. And unlike any of the Vegas clubs, it was steeped in theater history. From its opening in 1913 as the ultimate vaudeville venue, the Palace had gone on to host all the entertainment greats, from Will Rogers to Ethel Barrymore and Harry Houdini. Having an engagement on that stage was far greater than getting your star on Hollywood Boulevard. Mine lasted fourteen weeks, shattering the Palace’s record for one-man shows. The lines went around the block, the critics raved, and the Palace rocked. Did I care if I never made another Hollywood movie? Sure, but not that much. Besides, there were more important things in the world to worry about.
One morning in early February 1960, recovering from another night at the Palace with a cup of strong coffee in the kitchen of my West End Avenue apartment, I opened The New York Times to a story that electrified me. Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, four black college students had staged a sit-in at the local, segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. Refused service, they’d continued to sit at the counter for hours. Over the next days, as they kept returning, hundreds of fellow students joined them, and similar sit-ins spread throughout the South. So poignant were the news pictures of those sit-ins—the black students sitting at the counter, surrounded by jeering whites who often doused them with mustard and ketchup—that President Eisenhower, not known for his bold defense of civil rights, actually spoke out in support of the students. All they wanted, he pointed out, was to enjoy the rights of equality they were guaranteed by the Constitution. In July, the owner of the Greensboro Woolworth’s would capitulate, desegregating his lunch counter; others would follow.
There was a radical, mind-blowing lesson in this. The country’s preeminent civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), hadn’t desegregated the lunch counters. Nor had Martin Luther King’s SCLC, or the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The four original students had staged that sit-in on their own, and hundreds of students across the South, unaffiliated with any group, had followed their example. Students had power—the power of their independence. They didn’t have jobs they stood to lose if they protested. And when they did protest, they stirred widespread sympathy if angry policemen tried to intervene. Black or white, these were America’s children, after all, still more innocent than not, and as youths, their protests had a special, universally appreciated moral gravitas.
I had a number of phone conversations with Martin as the sit-ins spread. He saw the potential for students to play a central role in the civil rights movement now. They could be the solution to a problem that had vexed him ever since the Montgomery bus boycott. The established groups, including his own, were dominated by what he called the elders. By that he meant traditionalists like Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and James Farmer of CORE and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, but also, even more so, by the ministers who occupied positions of influence in all those groups. The ministers might talk the talk, but many balked at confrontation. They didn’t want to upset the white powers in their communities. Nor did they want to alienate the bourgeois blacks who made up most of their congregations. Students sensed that. They knew they needed a group of their own. Soon, they would form one—with Martin’s blessing but without any help from the SCLC—and call it the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. I didn’t know it yet, but those students would have a profound impact on my life—as I would on theirs.
News of the sit-ins spread far and wide—as far as South Africa, where, on March 21, thousands of black protesters gathered in the township of Sharpeville, outside Johannesburg, for a nonviolent action of their own. The apartheid government required them to carry identification papers called pass books, seizure of which by the authorities was in itself cause for arrest: a perfect system of oppression. The protesters massed without their pass books, daring the authorities to try to jail them all. Mahatma Gandhi had preached this very form of civil disobedience; overwhelm the government’s jails, he reasoned, and the government would have to compromise or collapse. “Jail, no bail” would become a rallying cry of the American civil rights movement, often to great effect, but on that day in Sharpeville, as the crowd grew to five thousand, police opened fire point-blank. At least sixty-nine people were killed, many of them shot in the back as they fled in panic. The Sharpeville Massacre, as it came to be called, stirred angry strikes and riots and led the government to jail more than eighteen thousand people. It also made the world recognize, for the first time, the brutality of apartheid, and led the United Nations to condemn the government. Furious and defiant, the ruling National party outlawed the African National Congress, among other groups; soon Nelson Mandela would be jailed, and the long bitter standoff between South Africa and the rest of the world would begin.
I spent long hours talking about all this with Miriam, whose friends and family were in immediate danger. Miriam was especially worried about Hugh Masekela, a brilliant young horn player still living in South Africa, whom Miriam would eventually marry. Soon Hugh would be banished from the country, and I would help him resettle in the United States, paying for him to go to the Manhattan School of Music and helping him get his musicians’ union card. For Miriam, the best thing I could do was put her front and center at my concerts, and let her be the stirring symbol of black South African talent, beauty, and grace. I didn’t have her open my shows, for fear the crowd would dismiss her as an opening act. Instead, I always came out at the start, grabbed the crowd, sang half a dozen or more songs, and only then introduced her. Miriam would sing songs of her own while I went offstage, I’d come back for a duet or two, and, after
thunderous applause, Miriam would take her bows and I’d finish the show. To me, that seemed the best way to promote her.
On May 2, I did that with Miriam at Carnegie Hall, and also brought on Odetta. I loved sharing a stage with her. That night, I had the Chad Mitchell Trio on as well, and the whole package became a best-selling live double album, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album of the Year; I earned a Grammy nomination of my own for Best Male Vocal Performance; and then I won an actual Grammy, for Best Folk Performance, for “Swing Dat Hammer,” a single from an album of chain-gang songs that same year.
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