My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  The day of the concert, we’d thought about where to go for a celebratory dinner afterward. We were staying at the George V Hotel, and my idea was to go to a place called Jimmy’s, which served soul food in the heart of Paris. By the time we got back from the Palais des Sports, a whole mess of takeout that I’d ordered from Jimmy’s was waiting in the kitchen of the George V. We gathered in the suite of actor Peter O’Toole, who’d been filming How to Steal a Million in Paris: Martin’s circle, my French gang, and all the stars who’d participated or attended, including, on the American side, Mahalia Jackson and Odetta. Food was coming, we assured them, and so it did. Peter O’Toole opened his door to see Martin with a napkin over his forearm, holding a large tray of fried chicken from Jimmy’s and plainly imitating a waiter. “Dinner is served,” Martin said in that deep baritone of his. As the plates were handed out, he went from star to star, dispensing chicken and pausing ever so briefly to give each a sense of his personal appreciation for their contribution. “You have no idea what it means to our folks back home.” O’Toole was shocked, but not me. For Martin, I knew this wasn’t a spoof. It was an exercise in humility, an act of abject gratitude to all these stars for coming out for him.

  I knew that Sweden would be just as receptive as France—I’d performed there, and Martin was certainly a household name throughout Scandinavia after coming to Norway to accept his Nobel Prize—so before leaving the States I called Olof Palme, leader of the country’s Social Democrats. In a short time, he, too, had made arrangements. Right after our Paris stop we would perform at Sweden’s Royal Opera House, with every major Scandinavian star onstage, and with the concert beamed to all of Scandinavia. The king of Sweden would be our official patron; the money from ticket sales would go right to an account at the Royal Bank of Sweden. The king himself would guarantee that the benefit raised $100,000 for the SCLC.

  And that’s exactly what he did.

  That European swing was one of the most gratifying tours of my life. When you get the U.S. State Department telling Paris to shut you down, and all the embassies not to work with you, and when what was to be a minor fundraiser turns into a major triumph, there’s a vindication in that—a very personal vindication. I couldn’t help but think again of J. Edgar Hoover in his dark little den at the FBI, and wonder if he was gnashing his teeth at the news of our great success.

  Not long after we returned, in the spring of 1966, SNCC made fundraising for the SCLC even harder, by electing Stokely its new chairman. That meant an end to nonviolence as SNCC’s credo. At the same time, a hard ruling was reached on SNCC’s white members. While not expelled, they were ordered to work on their own, in white communities. I supported the ruling—as far as it went. Whenever a biracial group of SNCCers went out in the field, they looked like what they were—activists. Instead of aggravating those already-tense situations, why not have white activists infiltrate white communities and try to turn them around? Or even infiltrate the Klan? But anger was rising, and with it, the radical view that blacks could never integrate into white society. They needed their own society, their own America, apart. The ruling pointed SNCC in that direction—and that I didn’t agree with at all.

  A month later, James Meredith, now graduated from the University of Mississippi, undertook a one-man “March Against Fear” across the state to encourage black voters to register. Alone and vulnerable, Meredith was shot by a sniper as he walked down a two-lane blacktop; by a small miracle, he wasn’t killed. In the aftermath, Stokely stood before a furious crowd and shouted the words that sent SNCC, and the movement, firmly in a new direction. No more “Freedom Now,” Stokely told the crowd. “What we’re going to start saying now is Black Power.” Enough going to jail for marching, enough bowing down in nonviolence and getting beaten. Black Power.

  I thought if I’d been jailed twenty-seven times, as Stokely had, I might shout, “Black Power,” too. But Martin was still right. Nonviolence set a moral example that moved us forward. Violence set us back. From now on, “Black Power” would define SNCC and dominate the movement. SNCC would give rise to the national Black Panthers, and in the way of all revolutions, each next leader would be more radical than the previous one—from Stokely to H. Rap Brown to Huey Newton to Bobby Seale—until the movement lost its power and direction amid violence and drugs, police harassment and FBI infiltration.

  Through much of the next two years, Martin would seem old news, his history-making campaigns behind him. But my faith in him would never waver. And though helping his cause would grow harder and harder, I had made a vow.

  When I look back at this period of such political ferment, no single experience defines it for me. Not even Selma. The swirl of it all is what I see. Speaking at a rally one day in Washington, singing the next night at the Greek Theatre in L.A., heading up to Vegas for a four-week stand, making a new record, discovering a new talent, meeting with Martin, with musicians, with SNCCers, African leaders, Black Panthers. I wanted to do everything, and I did. But why? Why race around trying to please every constituency, like that guy I remember from The Ed Sullivan Show, spinning plates on sticks, trying to keep them all spinning so none would fall?

  I took that up a lot with Peter Neubauer, my therapist. With his help, I came to appreciate the impact of the constant praise and approval that was hitting me from all sides all the time. That might seem the story for any celebrity, but this was different. Bigger. More complex. It wasn’t just adoration I was getting. People were investing faith and hope and trust in me. I was being anointed every day. Of all the black kids in Jamaica and Harlem, why had I been the one chosen to sit with leaders of state, who solicited my opinion? I felt driven to justify people’s respect, and with Peter’s help, I saw how that had become a cycle. The more I did, the more they respected me; the more they respected me, the more I felt compelled to do.

  At the core of all this was my mother, always pushing herself, and in the echoes of her voice, still pushing me, too. I’d long since realized how obsessive this was—a kind of insanity. A decade after abandoning the house I’d bought her in L.A., she was still in that little brownstone walk-up apartment on 143rd Street and Convent Avenue—the apartment with a bathroom down the hall—refusing to accept any help from me, save the occasional check. In a heartbeat she could have had all the comforts; she could have traveled the world. She preferred to stay there in that apartment, driven, fighting poverty with every breath and step because that was who she was; that was her identity. That same head-down, shoulders-squared drive still motivated me, too.

  In one regard, the greater influence had been those great jazz players at the Royal Roost and the life-changing break they’d bestowed upon me. I was still paying that karmic debt and would be paying it joyously for the rest of my life. My newest discovery was Nana Mouskouri, the marvelous Greek jazz and folk singer, whom I’d met on tour in Greece in 1960 and then shared stages with all over the United States and Europe.

  Nana was extremely shy, even onstage. Not by chance did she hide behind her trademark eyeglasses—heavy-rimmed and upturned, like a librarian’s—and her shoulder-length hair, which often hid part of her face while she sang. But she had a glorious voice, an astounding range, and brilliant rhythm—she could sing those complex Greek folk songs in 9/8 or 11/4 and never miss a beat. By the time I met her, she had a large Greek following and was wildly popular with the U.S. sailors stationed at the large military base on Crete. I just helped her broaden her following. I paid for her to come to New York that year. She brought her husband, George Petsilas, who accompanied her on guitar. Before long, Quincy Jones was producing her first American album.

  When I finally took her on tour with me, beginning in 1965, Nana, utterly fluent in French, German, and Spanish, made hit albums in all those markets, too, becoming one of the best-selling recording artists in the world. And still she refused to take off those heavy black-framed glasses! Onstage, they seemed to keep her apart from her audience. She stood stiffly, doing nothing with her body to dram
atize her singing. I felt that if I could just get her out from behind those glasses, she could open up as a performer. I said as much on the second night of our tour, and she gave it a try, but she felt so awkward and exposed without her glasses that the very next night, she went back to them.

  I knew Nana was a woman of churning emotions—you felt that just hearing her sing, which was a big part of her appeal—but I didn’t know how emotional she was until the day I sat across from her and her husband on our tour bus and realized she was crying. I caught George’s eye; he just gave me a little “she’s okay” wave. But she wasn’t. Her tears turned into racking sobs. Up and down the bus, conversations died, and the musicians exchanged worried looks. Had Nana and George had a serious spat? Had one of her parents died? The sobs went on for some time, almost until our next stop. After we’d checked in, I saw George alone in the hotel lobby and asked him why Nana had been crying. “Ah,” he said, “she was reading a Greek tragedy.” I looked at him, waiting to hear more. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “That was the reason. The story deeply touched her.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or start working up a Plan B for the tour. I was traveling with two strange people!

  By the time we stopped touring together, Nana’s star was rising so fast that, unlike Miriam, she could now fill big halls and command large sums on her own. It simply made no sense for her to keep touring with me. But we did record an album together, An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri, and before we parted ways, we played the hottest new house in Vegas, the resort that would become my new home on the Strip.

  Overnight, with its opening on August 5, 1966, Caesars Palace transformed Las Vegas. Everything about it, from its fourteen-story tower with seven hundred rooms to the eighteen fountains sending spray high in front of its vast casino, announced that Caesars was now the place. The place where Frank would hang his hat. The place where I would, too.

  Andy Williams inaugurated the Caesars Circus Maximus room. Nana and I came two or three weeks later. Leaving the Riviera was hard, but, frankly, not that hard with the salary Caesars was offering. My manager, Mike Merrick, told me with a wolfish grin that I wouldn’t believe it, and I didn’t. I liked the glamour, I liked the room, I liked the pay. As much as all that, though, I liked what Caesar’s did for Joe Louis.

  Since that Sunday long ago when my mother had barred me from going to see him practice, Joe had vanquished every foe in sight except the Internal Revenue Service. Shamefully, the IRS had hounded Joe for back taxes his accountant had failed to pay. By the IRS’s reckoning, those sums had ballooned with interest and penalties. Never mind that in World War II, Joe had gone on one tour after another to entertain servicemen, and done all he could to encourage blacks to join the segregated army. In the postwar years, Joe had been forced back into the ring again and again to raise money to pay the government, until his aging body had given out and he’d taken punishing hits. Who had taken care of Joe when his country did its best to destroy its greatest living sports hero? The mob—that was who. Frank Lucas, the ruthless black gangster who built a global drug empire, grew so disgusted with the IRS’s treatment of Louis that he supposedly paid off one of Louis’s tax debts of $50,000. At Caesars, owner Jerry Zarowitz, whose Chicago mob connections were never in dispute, did much more. He hired Joe for very good pay—possibly not all of it declared to the IRS—to meet and greet high rollers, and go to sports events representing Caesars. The casino put Joe’s daughter to work, too, as a front-desk manager. That place did Joe right.

  Joe wasn’t at Caesars that first time I played the room, but he arrived not long after, and from then on, I sought him out every time I played there. He wasn’t bitter, though he had every right to be. He just seemed resigned to his fate, which broke my heart. I loved to listen to him talk; he had a thick Alabama accent I could barely understand, and his syntax was mangled, but his words rolled out so beautifully. He used a lot of metaphors, and the thing of it was, they didn’t always make sense, at least not to me. But that didn’t make them any less charming.

  I’d ask him about Muhammad Ali, who’d just changed his name from Cassius Clay. “So what do you make of Muhammad Ali as a Muslim fighting in the ring, when Muslims are supposed to be so peace-loving?”

  Joe would nod sagely, and give me a look. “Well, you know, I kind of believe that if a rabbit could throw rocks, there’d be less hunters in the forest.”

  Joe’s patron was a Chicago gangster, no doubt about it. But Jerry Zarowitz, better known as “Z,” was also a sweet, erudite fellow in his sixties; you didn’t live that long in his world if you were greedy or reckless. Before long, he and I became close friends. Of course I was somewhat predisposed to like anyone who wanted to pay me as much money per week as I was getting and put me up in high-roller suites with all the perks. But that wasn’t the only reason. Whenever I needed bail money for friends in the movement, I knew I could count on Jerry to wire it for me, no questions asked.

  Jerry didn’t just give me the money because he knew I was good for it. He really enjoyed helping the movement. He loved me, loved Martin, loved that we were taking our hits for civil rights.

  “Jerry,” I said to him one day, “when I ask you for bail money for Dr. King, who’s fighting for justice, and campaign contributions for Democrats who want to get tough on crime, that’s not actually in your interest, is it?”

  Jerry gave me a deadpan look. “Justice,” he said, “is always in my best interest. With the Democrats, a guy like me can get his case heard by the Supreme Court. With Republicans, justice starts in the lockup!”

  Jerry was right, in a sense, though mob justice was, perhaps, the kind he meant. All these guys had a code; they knew right from wrong in the business they did with one another. As long as they played by those rules, they could, and usually did, lead fairly bourgeois lives. Which was to say that in a city where organized crime ruled, a lot of them had wives and kids, well-kept homes and late-model Buicks. I went to barbecues at mobsters’ houses, traded sports talk and drank beers with them. When one pit boss I knew got put in jail, I’d look in on his family every time I came to town, and take his wife and kids to Lake Mead for an afternoon of waterskiing off the big yacht that was mine to use, courtesy of Caesars. I brought them backstage after my shows, arranged for them to see other shows—everything I’d do for any other good friends. The truth was that I felt immensely comfortable with these gangsters and their bosses, and with the casinos that served as their courts. Their world was the one I’d come to know through my uncle Lenny and aunt Liz.

  I had just come back home for Christmas and New Year’s, and was readying to travel again when I heard from Sidney. Usually I was the one who called Sidney for help on my latest cause, but this time the roles were reversed. As America’s uncontested top black movie star now, Sidney brought a lot of power to any cause he took up, and while he didn’t take up nearly enough, in my opinion, he did throw himself into the national elections in his native Bahamas in early 1967. A lot was at stake. Lynden Pindling, the island’s leading black politician, had rallied his Progressive Liberal party (PLP) to try to win a first-ever black majority in the House of Assembly. Sidney was down there the weekend before the historic election of January 10 when he heard bad news. The PLP had counted on a shipment of walkie-talkies to arrive from America for its get-out-the-vote effort. Somehow, it hadn’t arrived. Could Sidney do something? Sidney called me in New York. “Harry,” he said, “I need half a dozen sets of walkie-talkies. It is absolutely essential that I have them on this island by tomorrow.”

  “You been drinking?” I asked.

  “Not a drop,” Sidney said.

  I told him I could probably get the Empire State Building down to the Bahamas more easily on a Saturday night than half a dozen sets of walkie-talkies. This was long before the Internet, or even FedEx. Stores were closed; it was about 8:00 p.m. But I said I’d try. I opened up the Yellow Pages and started matching the names of retailers in those ads to names in the White Pages. Finally I
reached a guy who actually was a retailer, and whose store sold walkie-talkies. Only he lived a good distance out of the city. When I’d managed to convince him that I was, in fact, Harry Belafonte, and not Prince Albert in a can, he agreed to drive in on Sunday at 7:00 a.m. and open his store, just for me. He warned me, though, that I’d need permission from the Federal Communications Commission to put them on a plane headed out of the United States. So then I had to call Bobby Kennedy and get him to make a few calls himself. But Sunday morning, I had those walkie-talkies on the first commercial flight to Nassau, and Sidney was at the other end to receive them. In some part because of that better communication through the rural areas, Pindling’s PLP won that black majority, and the islands took a giant step toward independence, which they would win six years later. I made Sidney repay the debt before the month was out, dragging him up to a benefit for SNCC at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. Those walkie-talkies weren’t free!

  Sidney was on a remarkable roll, starring in one hit film after another. From his Academy Award for Lilies of the Field, he’d gone on to star in A Patch of Blue, for which he would win a Golden Globe nomination. And now three of his biggest films were about to appear one after another: To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sidney knew how I felt about those roles; in every one of them he was neutered, unless you counted A Patch of Blue, in which he romanced a blind white girl who didn’t know he was black. But to Hollywood, Sidney was the one black actor with whom white America felt comfortable, because of that dignity he radiated, that sexless gallantry. The resentment I felt wasn’t directed toward Sidney—I had my stardom; I didn’t need his—but at Hollywood and white America. It really burned me that in the midst of the civil rights movement, with Jim Crow laws falling away, the only black who sold movie tickets was one who posed no threat whatsoever to the masculinity of white moviegoers.