My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  Around this time, Sidney joined me in two TV specials that I produced as celebrations of black culture. The Strollin’ Twenties, which aired on CBS in February 1966, was written by Langston Hughes, whose voice-over prologue began: “Every Sunday was Easter Sunday in Harlem … when people were asked what they were doing, they usually said, ‘Goin strollin.’ … Our show depicts that era….” Singing and dancing with pride and pizzazz in the numbers that followed were Sammy Davis, Jr., Diahann Carroll, Nipsey Russell, Duke Ellington, and … Sidney, who played “the stroller,” Hughes’s narrator, stopping in on scenes like a rent party to save a family from eviction, a street-corner song-and-dance routine, and a jazz concert at the Savoy Ballroom. The Strollin’ Twenties was actually the first television show ever written, produced, and performed completely by blacks—a not-insignificant milestone. But for Sidney, it stirred complex and conflicted feelings. After a long period of guilt and confusion, he had obtained a Mexican divorce from Juanita in 1964, only to have her refuse to sign off on it. In New York State, that meant he wasn’t yet divorced. During the filming of The Strollin’ Twenties, Sidney was still struggling to get Juanita’s sign-off, even as he and Diahann Carroll tried to set up house in a New York apartment. But when Sidney insisted that Diahann’s daughter live with her grandmother awhile so that the grown-ups could adjust to cohabitation, Diahann balked. Her therapist, she told Sidney, had questioned the arrangement. Sidney declared, “To hell with you and your doctor.” And that was it for Sidney and Diahann.

  The Strollin’ Twenties made the cover of Life magazine and reached a large national audience. That was enough for ABC to let me produce an even riskier hourlong variety show in 1967: A Time for Laughter: A Look at Negro Humor in America. I got Sidney in for that one, too.

  A Time for Laughter did more than showcase a lot of great black comic talent. Negro comics on television played to white audiences. If they didn’t come out bug-eyed in blackface, they still mocked themselves. They knew white audiences wanted to laugh at them, not with them, and so they obliged, laughing all the way to the bank. I wanted the jokes and routines Negroes told one another, the humor they shared away from white folk, the humor that came directly from the severity of their lives: poverty, joblessness, prejudice. And I wanted white audiences, as well as black, to hear it.

  When I asked Sidney to join in, we kidded each other about those rooftop routines we’d done long ago. “If you’d stuck with stand-up, you’d be on that roof today,” I told him.

  “Not me,” Sidney retorted. “I would have jumped off to escape your jokes.”

  I gathered the best of the best: from senior statesmen like Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, George Kirby, and Pigmeat Markham to up-and-comers Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Nipsey Russell, and the youngest hot talent of the pack, Richard Pryor. Sidney showed his comic side, and so did Diahann Carroll (the two now on civil terms again, their romance strictly history). My longtime pal Bill Attaway wrote the show—at least, he got the credit. But the comics did most of their own writing and improvising. “Take one of your best jokes,” I told them, “and work it up into a sketch.” George Kirby played Santa Claus, listening as a black child whispered in his ear. “You’re dreaming of a what Christmas?” Diahann Carroll sat in a big bubbling pot, about to be eaten by … white cannibals. I played a surgeon in the operating theater, performing a complex operation. The nurse kept handing me tools and wiping the sweat from my brow. Finally the camera pulled back to reveal that the patient was … a watermelon! To this day, I think the way we opened the show—the billboarding, as it’s called—inspired producer George Schlatter to do the same for each episode of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In—not quite the cultural impact I’d had in mind, but an impact all the same.

  Some white critics grumbled at the final result; they just didn’t find one or another of the skits amusing. Perhaps, as the Pittsburgh Courier, one of a handful of Negro newspapers of the day, suggested, white audiences would never get it. How could they? The humor that came from a history of being oppressed was like a different language from the humor of those who’d been the oppressors.

  In this time of such contrasts, what greater juxtaposition could there be than to have A Time for Laughter air on April 6, 1967, just two days after Martin’s historic anti-war speech at the Riverside Church in upper Manhattan?

  Ever since America had become fully engaged in Vietnam, a fierce debate had raged in Martin’s inner circle. Poor blacks were being drafted in disproportionate numbers and sent straight to the front lines, where a lot of them were dying. Didn’t our fight for civil rights obligate us to fight this institutional racism? But Martin’s dismay with the war went deeper than that. As a pastor and a pacifist, he viewed it as a terrible abomination for all involved: for white soldiers as well as black, for Vietnamese as much as Americans. Yet to speak out against the war carried serious risks for him. He would lose support. How much, no one could predict, but in 1967, a lot of the media were still pro-war, Time magazine famously so, and so were a lot of church congregations. President Johnson would be furious, and likely become a political foe. Was all this worth it? In my talks with Martin, I said I thought it was, and so did others. But still I was surprised when Martin began drafting his anti-war speech in my apartment, discarding yellow legal-pad pages of scrawled script as he refined his thoughts.

  What fascinated me most about the speech, when I heard it, was its depth of detail. Martin had read deeply on the war’s historic origins. In his speech, he explained that history from the perspective of the Vietnamese, and how French colonialism and all the worst American instincts had led us to this place. Rather than dwell on the moral implications, he made a cool, clear case for why we had no business there. When Martin had headed back down to Atlanta, I saw that he’d left those legal-pad pages in his guest-room wastebasket. I retrieved them, and framed them, and for years they graced what I called my civil rights wall: a hallway of movement photographs, letters, and other memorabilia.

  Martin’s Vietnam speech was bold and brave, not just in raising an early, prominent voice against the war but in doing so while he was fully aware of the cost to his own political power. Afterward the Johnson administration was furious, the President an ally no longer. And while Martin had already lost whole battalions of backers to movement fatigue and fear of the new black militants, now he lost more. Many middle-of-the-road Americans who were inclined to support civil rights still supported the President in a time of war; not to do so, they felt, was to be unpatriotic.

  That September, I embarked with Martin on a fairly urgent eight-city fundraising tour for the SCLC. We had guest appearances by Aretha Franklin and Sammy Davis, Jr., among others, at one stop or the next. In Oakland, California, Sammy told the modest audience about his trip to Vietnam to entertain the troops, only to have Joan Baez confront him onstage for supporting the war. In Houston, we got a larger crowd, perhaps because Aretha Franklin sang for us that night, but early into the concert, the hall began to fill with a rank odor. The Klan had put tear gas into the air-conditioning system, forcing us to cut the concert short.

  And then in Baltimore, I walked into my dressing room and noticed a state trooper standing at attention nearby. He wasn’t just white. He was blue-white. He had a bristling, mean look about him, the kind that sets off alarm bells. All evening, as I performed, he stood backstage, glowering at me. I think Martin drove on to Washington that night; I stayed in a campus lodge at the Univeristy of Maryland. When I got to the front desk, the clerk handed me an envelope. That was weird—no one knew where I was staying. Stranger yet, it was rather heavy.

  The envelope contained bullets—six of them—and a letter. “Dear Mr. Belafonte,” the letter read. “I give you these six bullets because they will never be used. None of them will ever take a human life, because my experience listening to you and Dr. King made me realize I have been serving the wrong forces. I should be in your ranks. Tonight was transforming for me.” It was signed by the state trooper who’d
guarded me that night. I keep that letter, and the bullets it contained, at my home in a box of precious objects.

  In his remarks at all those concerts, Martin articulated a new goal. He’d come to the conclusion that the movement must wage a broader fight. Not just for poor black Americans, but for all poor Americans. Martin understood that this would anger the government, and much of the population, far more than demanding civil rights for blacks. He would be saying that the very soul of America—capitalism—was flawed and should be changed. How could it not be, when so many Americans were denied capitalism’s benefits and simply tossed into the ranks of the truly, hopelessly poor? For decades, the American labor movement had pushed for justice in the capitalist system, but always on behalf of a particular constituency: miners or autoworkers or farmworkers. Martin wanted to fight for them all, to push for nothing less than a redistribution of America’s wealth and power.

  When he talked of this “poor people’s campaign” at those gatherings, I sensed some confusion in the crowd. So did he. Far from discouraging him, that only made him more certain that he was on the right path. The worthiest causes, he often told me, were never popular at first. The injustices they took on were so ingrained in society that the majority took them for granted, and liked them just the way they were. At no time would a prophetic remark he made be more applicable: “Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ ” As Martin knew, there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither politic nor popular, because conscience tells him he must.

  Unlike most in his kitchen cabinet, I endorsed Martin’s new campaign without reservation. But I also realized that the goal he’d set was so lofty, it might just be unattainable.

  16

  When I got the call from NBC in early 1968 inviting me to host The Tonight Show for an entire week, it blindsided me. Johnny Carson, late-night talk-show host without peer, seemed to think I’d be an interesting … change of pace.

  Both of us knew that this wasn’t some casual fill-in gig. There wasn’t any black talk-show host on American television. The very idea was an oxymoron. And Johnny Carson’s seat wasn’t just any talk-show host’s seat. Carson was the king of late night; the whole country tuned in. My hosting the show would be breaking a barrier of significant proportions. But the potential for disaster was huge. I couldn’t go on the air like some overeager comic, trying to please the audience with bright one-liners drawn from the news of the day. I had done Johnny’s show many times and, like the rest of America, loved his style, but to attempt to do what he did could have serious ramifications. I’d just look like a buffoon and, more important, blow a chance to reach America with a message of tolerance and understanding. Maybe, I thought, this was not the platform. So I took the easy road. I told Johnny thanks, but no thanks.

  Johnny wasn’t about to give up that easily, it turned out. I picked up the phone to hear a secretary say, “Please hold for Mr. Sarnoff,” and onto the line came the chairman of RCA, owner of NBC, home of The Tonight Show. I decided to tweak the great Robert Sarnoff a little bit. “So,” I said, “are you calling to give me my weekly show at last?”

  In a perfect world, it would have made complete sense for Sarnoff to make me that offer, with my Emmy-winning record for television variety specials. Only this wasn’t a perfect world. Sammy Davis, Jr., had been given his own television show two years before, and it hadn’t worked out. A decade before, Nat King Cole had broken the color line as America’s first black variety-show host. Ironically, his show had the highest audience viewership in its slot, but the hammer still came down hard—very simply, corporate America wouldn’t buy in. He was just a bit too black. And although this fact had to be challenged, the trick was how to do so. Sarnoff knew I’d turned down the offer.

  “I think you’re missing an opportunity here,” he said.

  I knew the RCA chairman to be a staunch liberal, good on race issues. I was surprised and intrigued when he started framing the offer as a chance to influence racial attitudes.

  Over the next few days, I met with the NBC hierarchy, and bit by bit, we talked out what this hybrid of a talk show might be. I would do no opening monologue. Instead, I’d sing an opening song. And I would do no commericals. Ed McMahon, Johnny’s sidekick, would have to do all the pitches. Most important, I wanted a handpicked list of guests with whom I had a lot in common, so we could speak with intelligence and passion. The NBC executives countered that they had to approve the list. The miracle was that the names I submitted for the week were approved without a murmur. Now all I needed to do was convince the stars on that list to come aboard.

  One Monday night in early February, Johnny’s vast audience tuned in to see me chatting with the likes of Senator Robert Kennedy, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, and the Smothers Brothers. For a lot of black Americans, just seeing me behind Johnny’s desk was mind-boggling in itself. In the New Yorker profile that he later wrote of me, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recalled, “For one week in February of 1968, something strange happened to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson: it became the Tonight Show with Harry Belafonte. I was a high-school student, growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia, a partly segregated hamlet in the Allegheny Mountains, and television was the only thing that connected any of us there with the larger world. Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot—history in the making.”

  I started by trying to get Bobby to say what he thought would happen in Vietnam. Bobby dutifully parroted President Johnson’s war policy. I told Bobby I knew his opinion didn’t coincide with the President’s. Bobby smiled and dodged. I asked him directly if he was running for president, and would he declare it on the show. Bobby flashed another smile and said he was just hoping for a happy ending. Then I asked him what he had seen on his recent travels through Appalachia.

  “I’ve seen despair and hopelessness, and I’ve seen children who are starving to death in the United States,” he told me. “I mean, not ‘I read about children who are starving in the United States,’ but I’ve seen children who are starving to death in the United States. And as the reports have said, they will never recover mentally after the age of four.”

  It was a poignant moment. Bobby wasn’t talking like a politician. He was talking like a man with a moral center. Just what I thought America needed to hear.

  Lena Horne, elegant and gorgeous, came on to talk about being a grandmother, which astonished Bill Cosby, sitting next to her. “Times have really changed,” he marveled. “My grandmother spent most of her time worrying about which tooth would fall out next.” Tommy and Dickie Smothers, the bad-boy comics of network television, shared details of skits that CBS had censored—a first, in its own way, for the stars of a rival network. Since I’d asked Bobby Kennedy what he thought of Johnson, I asked Tommy Smothers, too. “I think he’s indisputably the best president we have at the moment,” he said.

  It was an amazing week. Paul Newman came on, not to talk about his next movie, but to play his trombone! I had Wilt Chamberlain, Sidney Poitier … as many black guests as white, talking not just about their movies or sports, but about issues of the day. By Wednesday morning, I’d stirred up the entire television-watching South. “Colored on TV,” astonished white southerners told one another, while black folks, filled with pride, said, “TV’s gone colored.”

  I wanted Martin as a guest, too, of course, and he agreed to come, though on the day he was scheduled he hadn’t shown up by the start of taping. I had faith he would make it, so I greeted the house audience and sang my nightly opening song. Just as I was finishing, I saw Martin backstage, out of breath, gesturing an apology to me. When I brought him on, he told me what had happened. “Everything went wrong today,” he said when we’d settled into our chairs. “A meeting ran late, I was late to the airport, the plane got to LaGuardi
a late…. Finally I got in a cab, and the driver recognized me. I said, ‘I’m doing The Tonight Show with Harry Belafonte and I’m late.’ So that driver hit the pedal, and it got very dicey. Finally I said, ‘Young man! Young man!’ He turned around. ‘Yes?’ he said. I said, ‘I’d rather be known as Dr. King late than the late Dr. King.’ ”

  The crowd laughed, and so did I, but I realized he’d given me an opening for a question that needed asking. “Tell me,” I said, “do you fear for your life?”

  Martin took a beat. “I’m more concerned about doing a good job, doing something for humanity and what I consider the will of God, than about longevity,” he said. “Ultimately, it isn’t so important how long you live. The important thing is how well you live.”

  The audience was dead silent as we spoke; I knew we’d ventured a long way from the territory of one-liners and cute little personal confessions The Tonight Show served up as its usual meal. But when the show was over and I thanked the studio audience for coming, their applause was heartfelt. I knew applause; I knew when it was real. This was real.

  After days of hearing what nests of right-wing hornets I’d stirred up, I finished on Friday night by thanking NBC and Johnny Carson for a week I’d never forget. Then I added, “I am fully aware of how many of you have been offended by the politics aired on this show this week. None of it was meant to offend. But all of this was consciously arranged by me to give you all a taste of what’s being said in rooms that many of you may not know or enter. Thank you for listening.”