My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  Not everyone I knew was inclined to heap such generous praise upon me. If I felt my head swelling a bit, if my feet were starting to rise off the ground, I knew there was one person I could always count on to cut me down: my ex–mother-in-law, the all-too-present Mrs. Byrd.

  Somehow, despite my extremely generous divorce settlement with her daughter, not to mention that little Adrienne and Shari, when they stayed with me, had rooms of their own, Mrs. Byrd was not appeased; she made this clear by trying to turn my daughters against me. Her influence on Adrienne was somewhat limited; I’d nurtured my first-born for her first eight years. But I’d had no closeness with Shari—by the time she was born, Marguerite and I were estranged, and I’d left the family when Shari was barely two years old—so Mrs. Byrd had a pliable subject on which to work. When the girls came to the apartment, seven-year-old Shari would hang back warily while her older sister settled right in. Soon enough, Shari would start having fun, too. But then that phone would ring, and Shari would get on the line, and start nodding as her grandmother filled her head with warnings. By the time she hung up, she’d be whining and crying that she wanted to go home. “Tell your mother to stop programming the kid,” I’d tell Marguerite. But nothing worked.

  Finally I exercised the right I’d retained in our divorce to say where the girls would go to school, and sent both Shari and Adrienne to a boarding school in Lenox, Massachusetts, called Windsor Mountain. It got them away from their meddlesome grandmother, yet was close enough that I could drive up to see them on weekends. As I did, I fell in love with the region and bought a 180-acre hilltop farm in Chatham, New York, in between Manhattan and the school, so we could spend cozy country weekends as a family. The very idea filled me with joy; I’d never had a country place. For months I spent every free moment directing its renovation, making decisions about furniture and curtains. In the course of that, Julie’s parents, quite elderly and frail now, came to realize they needed special attention. So I bought a little farm adjacent to my property, and they moved to a house at the bottom of my hill, one that met all their needs. Up in the main house, my daughters loved their bedrooms, and four-year-old David loved his.

  Julie wasn’t so excited about ours.

  I guess I hadn’t asked Julie what she thought about spending quiet weekends in the country. It never occurred to me that anyone wouldn’t want to, much less my wife. A major and somewhat arrogant oversight on my part. Country life bored her and country winters appalled her. She was a city girl. She had a circle of very close girlfriends in New York, all black dancers from the Katherine Dunham company. They made for quite a cultural mix. One, Jackie Wolcott, was married to Michael Goldman, the son of a powerful Jewish banker and a Rothschild descendant. Another, Dolores Harper, had settled down with an Italian guy, Joe Autori, who managed a fleet of garages. Frances Taylor, the third, was married to Miles Davis, no less. And then there was Julie, married to me! They called themselves the Sadies, after Miss Sadie Thompson, the 1953 movie musical starring Rita Hayworth as a strutting hussy. The Sadies were free spirits, with their own flirty style, not diminished in the least by marriage and motherhood. The one nonfemale addition, who had absolute access to their most private moments, was Vanoye Aikens; he happened to be Katherine Dunham’s leading man and the only one who could lift her. The Sadies got together on their own, spoke French and Spanish, smoked cigarettes, drank quite a bit, and stayed up late. They had no real interest in the countryside, and Julie had very little interest in being there without them—especially because, like many city girls, she’d never learned to drive and didn’t want to learn. She did appreciate having her parents nearby, but an occasional weekend was more than enough for her. Only then did I realize how dependent we were, Julie and I, on the distractions of our New York lives to make our marriage work. It wasn’t a sign filled with promise.

  I was giving a concert in Connecticut the night that Gina, my fourth and last child, was born in New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital: September 8, 1961. For all the decades of analysis I’ve had, I cannot say exactly why it is that I chose the name Gina only four months after Sidney Poitier chose to name his latest newborn Gina. Nor can I say why Sidney chose to name his third daughter Sherri, in July 1956, some two years after I named my second child Shari. But I think it’s safe to say that these were not coincidences.

  Even when months passed without our seeing each other, my life and Sidney’s remained intimately intertwined. Mostly we cheered each other on, had great fun, and knew that no one else could understand exactly what we’d been through, where we’d started, and what it felt like to be in the space we shared. And when one of us felt overwhelmed by the strange, lonely business of stardom as a black man in white America, we knew there was only one other person to turn to. Which was why Sidney made a point of flying to Miami one day in December 1961, while I was playing the Cafe Pompeii at the Eden Roc Hotel.

  Sidney was a wreck. His father, Reginald, had just died after a life of poverty and backbreaking work. Sidney had been one of the pallbearers, solemn and stoic like the others, but later his grief came flooding out. For all his success, he remained unhappy—uncertain about his career, stifled in his marriage. His Juanita, like Marguerite, was a light-skinned beauty from a black bourgeois family. She even had straight hair like Marguerite. And like Marguerite, she was Catholic, her values conservative. Sidney’s Hollywood success had put the same sort of distance between him and Juanita that my own success had between Marguerite and me.

  In my hotel suite, Sidney shared his doubts with me, and with Julie, who’d come to Miami with me and was tending our newborn with a full retinue of hotel staffers on call. Despite our friendship, despite all the adoring people who surrounded him, despite even his four daughters, Sidney felt profoundly alone. He knew this sense of apartness could be traced not only to the poverty of his childhood and his parents’ problems and now his father’s death, but also to the darkness of his skin—a barrier between the man within it and nearly everyone he encountered. The irony of his situation was not lost on him. In both of his latest triumphs, A Raisin in the Sun and Paris Blues, his skin color heightened his character’s dramatic impact. But none of his Hollywood successes had made him any happier. He was posing a question that he wouldn’t have asked anyone else. Where do you go with this money and power and adulation from white folks, as a man of race? And if none of it keeps you happy for long, what do you do about that?

  Sidney had an answer, but it wasn’t an easy one. During the filming of Paris Blues, he’d fallen in love with Diahann Carroll, whom I knew not only from Carmen Jones, but because she was married to Monte Kay, the onetime boy manager of the Royal Roost who’d given me my big break! Diahann had looked a little scrawny in Carmen Jones, but she sure had blossomed since then. Now she was one of Hollywood’s three leading black actresses, along with Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. Sidney was madly in love with her, but both he and Diahann felt deeply conflicted about ending their respective marriages. Sidney felt not only guilty but anxious: How could he hurt Juanita this way? How would his children cope? And selfishly, how would a divorce affect his career? He felt he wasn’t emotionally stable enough to go through all this.

  I’d faced all those questions, as Sidney well knew. The parallels were all there. I had been married to Marguerite when I met Julie. On occasion, I told him, I’d been all but paralyzed by the guilt and rage and fear I felt in contemplating divorce, especially given that my father had left my mother, and even more so as a black star whose marriage to a beautiful black woman was an inspiration to the black community. “You can’t do this alone,” I told him, “and you can’t just unburden your heart to us and hope that solves the problem. It helps, but what you need is a very good analyst—and a lot of time.”

  I told Sidney about Peter Neubauer, and how I’d finally come to trust him after my nightmarish experience with Jay Richard and Janet Kennedy. “All right, so I’ll go to him,” Sidney said.

  Julie shook her head. “I don’
t think so,” she said. “Too close a connection.” She was right. Peter was far too professional to take on a patient’s best friend, knowing that I’d be part of Sidney’s story. “But try mine,” Julie added. “She’s amazing.”

  “ ‘She’?” Sidney echoed.

  Julie explained that Dr. Viola Bernard was not only a distinguished psychoanalyst but a tireless civil rights advocate. As a white liberal, she’d pushed for more black psychiatrists in her profession, and worked with Eleanor Roosevelt in helping the troubled youths of Wiltwyck. She’d also signed on to the study with Dr. Kenneth Clark that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court that segregation adversely affected the mental health of children, which led to the court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Sidney still seemed dubious about going to a woman analyst; how could he be honest with her? But he went, and then kept going, four or five times a week, just like me. Almost immediately, his sessions led him to tell Juanita he wanted a divorce.

  That week, Sammy Davis, Jr., was in Miami with a gig at the Fontainebleau, and Floyd Patterson was training somewhere nearby for a fight. One evening all five of us gathered in my hotel suite—Sammy, Floyd, Sidney, me, and Julie—and a hotel photographer, at our invitation, came up to record the moment. Four stars at the top of their game: famous, charismatic, with money in the bank, and all of us, behind our smiles, wrestling with the puzzle of what it meant to be black stars in white America.

  Sidney and I were still talking in Miami when just north of the Florida state line, Martin Luther King was arrested for leading a prayer march in Albany, Georgia. The official charges were obstructing the sidewalk and parading without a permit. The truth was that Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, was clamping down on a mass uprising of daily marches and demonstrations that was growing way too successful.

  The Albany Movement had started with a sit-in on the very day the Kennedy administration officially desegregated interstate bus and train stations after months of Freedom Rides. The Kennedys were furious. How ungrateful could these black folk be? Charles Sherrod, a twenty-four-year-old SNCC volunteer and Freedom Ride veteran, had rallied Albany’s rural black population by saying exactly what the Kennedys didn’t want to hear: It was time to strike down Jim Crow in all its forms, not just at the bus and train stations. As the protests spread, Martin arrived with reinforcements from the SCLC, and Chief Pritchett decided enough was enough. On December 16, Martin was jailed along with hundreds of others. He declared he’d stay in jail indefinitely—“jail, no bail”—but in the cell he found himself sharing with two others, a private drama began to unfold. One of his two cell mates, a local black doctor who’d been voted head of the Albany Movement, was overwhelmed by his imprisonment and appeared to be suffering a mental breakdown. Martin feared the doctor might not last much longer behind bars.

  Within forty-eight hours, Martin and his cell mates agreed to be released. Martin was put in the awkward position of trying to explain why he’d agreed to leave jail after all, without embarrassing the local doctor by disclosing details of his mental distress. To all watching, he seemed to have lost his nerve. Certainly he’d accomplished nothing; Police Chief Pritchett was able to say that aside from desegregating its bus and train stations on federal order, Albany had made not one concession in its Jim Crow laws. Nor would it—with Martin’s release, the Albany Movement deflated like a pricked balloon. So smoothly had Pritchett defused it that Bobby Kennedy called to congratulate him on keeping the peace. Soon it would be said that Pritchett had “killed the Movement with kindness,” and Martin, for a long time, would look like a loser.

  I heard a lot of anger when I talked to the SNCCers about Albany. They’d done all the hard work. They’d gotten the Albany Movement started, done the door-to-door organizing, made the marches happen, and for what? So Martin could do what he always did: come in at just the right moment, get all the media attention, then fly off to his next high-profile appearance. With his about-face on “jail, no bail,” Martin had really outdone himself this time. The movement had lost its momentum, and he was to blame.

  I saw both sides of that bitter divide, and sensed I might be able to help. One day in February 1962, I hosted a delegation of SNCCers in the red-walled living room of my New York apartment. I listened as they reeled off their many grievances against Martin and the SCLC: how aloof and self-important Martin was, how overly cautious, how out of touch he was with the students who at this point led the movement. In their scorn, the students ridiculed the whole King family: Martin and Coretta for their too-fancy clothes and social affectations, and Martin’s father, “Daddy King,” with his bragging and swaggering, as if the whole movement were his congregation. All these charges were grossly exaggerated. I came in for some hits, too, not just for defending Martin but for thinking that the movement had to have a star, as if it were a Broadway play or Hollywood movie. The whole point of SNCC was to cause social change as a group of equals, no one more important than the others, no one even telling the others what to do. Which was true: If you were down in Mississippi as a SNCC volunteer, registering voters, and you said you had a better way, no one stopped you. You just went and did it.

  I told the SNCCers I had nothing but admiration for what they’d done. They had the DNA for courage and struggle, going places where no black preacher, including Martin, dared go. I admired their militancy, and I understood their chief grievance: They were doing the hard work, and Martin was getting the glory. But they needed to know that Dr. King’s commitment was profound, and that SNCC wouldn’t exist without the foundation he’d laid down. They needed to give the man his due.

  Then the doorbell rang and in came another guest: Martin. He had no airs that night. Humbled by his failure in Albany, he took great pains to make the SNCCers aware of how much he valued their efforts. Martin knew that a lot of the SNCCers there had lost patience with him. As the evening wore on, though, a grudging respect filled the room. The SNCCers left no doubt that they were going to do exactly what they thought it right to do. No one, including Martin, was going to dictate to them. But they did agree to let the SCLC work with them. And so for the moment, the divide was bridged, and the question became not whether the two sides would work together, but what their next target should be. They had to pick it with enormous care. If they chose a city where the police had learned, like Chief Pritchett, to hide their hatred under a veneer of politeness, they wouldn’t succeed in showing the world the true face of segregation. If, on the other hand, they chose a place where the authorities were too unrestrained, the next campaign might descend into widespread violence.

  For nearly a year, where to strike next would remain an open question. And then, with a sudden clarity, both sides would agree on the answer.

  13

  To hear stories of the movement all these years later, you might think no one ever stopped marching long enough to crack a smile, much less tell a joke. Not true. Just inside the front door of the Manhattan apartment where I now live, I keep a large framed photograph of Martin and me taken in the early sixties. It’s a picture of us cracking up at something one of us has just said. It’s a good reminder that even in the movement’s darkest days, we still had room for humor.

  That was especially true at the end of the day, when Martin was staying over, which happened so often that the apartment became his home away from home. Julie would bring out his bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, and Martin would make a big deal of checking to see if anyone had drunk any since his last visit; he marked the level just to be sure. At the oak bar in the corner of the living room, I’d mix drinks for Julie and myself, and bring them over. It wouldn’t be long before we were laughing at something—like the way Ralph Abernathy, Martin’s heavyset aide-de-camp, snored in that jail cell in Albany, Georgia, so loudly he kept Martin awake all night, so loudly that Martin was convinced it was Ralph’s snoring that had driven their third cell mate, that poor local doctor, out of his wits. “Never again,” Martin would say with Baptist fervor about sharing a room wi
th Abernathy. “Never again, sweet Jesus!”

  Time was filled with laughter with everyone in my life, even in that grim, going-nowhere year for the movement between Albany and Birmingham. I never let a conversation go more than a minute without finding something funny to say. That was just my way. I laughed with my wife and children. I teased the people around me. With good friends like Sidney and Bill Attaway, there was always a lot of laughter. In my shows, after that trademark intense opening, I always threw in some humorous songs and tried to get the audience going. And then there was Vegas, a whole other kind of fun, not only because I packed them in at the Riviera, but because, thanks to Bruce the sneering pit boss, I’d rediscovered my love of gambling.