My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  Whether that occurred before or after her separation from Stokely in 1973, I don’t know. I do know that by then, Sékou Touré had set aside his youthful dreams of creating a utopian socialist state and become a vengeful tyrant who tortured his real or perceived political opponents. The hanging of my friend Ambassador Achar Maroff was just the start. Almost everyone I’d met in the country and come to regard as a friend was being branded an enemy of the state. Thousands of the country’s intellectual, military, and political leaders were thrown into Camp Boiro, Guinea’s gulag, many to die by torture, starvation, or firing squad. Sékou Touré was said to have syphilis of the brain, but then they say that about all black dictators. Certainly he was paranoid, and with his absolute power, he now kept his people in a state of constant mortal fear, and let them live in abject poverty, despite the country’s many natural resources. Stokely and Miriam had to have known Sékou Touré was doing this by the early 1970s, but neither ever said a public word against him.

  When Stokely and Miriam separated, Stokely moved back to the United States and grew increasingly paranoid himself. Eventually he came to believe that the FBI had infected him with prostate cancer. Miriam stayed in Guinea and fed Sékou Touré’s paranoid fears. As his special adviser, she traveled with diplomatic immunity, and often visited Guinea’s embassies abroad, where she came to be feared as much as Sékou Touré himself. Anyone against whom she took the slightest offense, she would write up as a political threat in private reports for Sékou Touré’s eyes only. If an embassy official was called back home after a visit from Miriam, that would be it for him.

  I had long since stopped visiting Guinea, and fallen out of touch with both Miriam and Sékou Touré, but I did inquire, when I could, about friends I’d made there. One day I asked about Alassane Diop, the Senegalese-born diplomat who’d made Guinea his home. When I’d first met Sékou Touré, Alassane was his best friend; the three of us would stay up laughing late into the night. When I’d been summoned back to hear the bad news about the arts center, it was Alassane who translated at Sékou Touré’s side. Now, I heard, he’d been put in Camp Boiro and executed by firing squad. Yet even after this clear indication of Sékou Touré’s mental imbalance, Miriam stayed on. That saddened me, but I wasn’t surprised. My guess was that as a victim of a paranoid police state in South Africa, she felt, in a strange way, at home in Guinea, and perhaps in helping wield that power she was enacting a kind of revenge.

  Years later, after I’d joined UNICEF as a goodwill ambassador and begun visiting Africa in much the same way I’d done for the Peace Corps, I found myself at a conference in Senegal. Way down the hall I thought I discerned a familiar figure. Could it be? “My God!” I cried out. It was Alassane Diop. “You’re alive!” Behind him was his wife, Adelaide. I hadn’t expected to see her ever again, either.

  Over dinner that night, Alassane told me his amazing story. In a sense, he said, Sékou Touré had been right to feel threatened; he had a lot of enemies. But Sékou Touré had grown truly paranoid, and the confidante who did perhaps more than any other to provoke his fears was Miriam. It was Miriam who had given Alassane up.

  “I was put in prison,” Alassane told me, “and then I was put before the firing squad. Prisoners were shot in the head over an open pit. I closed my eyes, waiting for the bullet … but the officer’s pistol jammed.” The soldiers took that as an omen. Alassane was taken back to his cell and told that his execution would be rescheduled. Just at that time, the president of Senegal, Abdou Diouf, was making a state visit to Guinea. He had heard that a native Senegalese was in prison, about to be killed, and he petitioned Sékou Touré for Alassane’s release. As a favor, Sékou Touré released Alassane into Diouf’s care. “I came straight from prison,” Alassane told me. “I went on the plane in my bare feet.”

  I told Alassane he must write a book about all this. My old friend shook his head. He wanted to do nothing, he said, that would hurt Guinea’s legacy. What about telling the story of Sékou Touré and Miriam? I asked. No, Alassane said. The brotherhood he’d shared with Sékou Touré was too precious for that. As for Miriam, he said, “Remember, Miriam means so much to so many African people. Why destroy the inspiration she still stirs to this day?”

  And it was true. Sékou Touré had died in 1984 of heart failure, but Miriam was still a vital figure—Alassane and I were having our dinner in the early 1990s—and after leaving Guinea she had helped push for Nelson Mandela’s release. In her last years she became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and won international prizes for her charitable work. At the time of her death in 2008, she was giving a benefit concert in Italy to support a writer who’d dared to expose the workings of the Camorra, a Mafia-like cartel. She had a heart attack after singing one of the songs she’d made famous, “Pata Pata,” and was eulogized as “Mama Africa.” Did all her good works outweigh those dark years with Sékou Touré? Who could say?

  The sixties had taken a toll on Miriam as they had on all of us. A lot of us hadn’t made it out. When I looked back at all I’d tried to do, my first reaction was despair. So much more needed to be done. But if the energy that had led to two landmark civil rights laws lay fallow—and it did—green shoots would soon be growing from the warming soil. The women’s movement, the American Indian movement, gay liberation, and the environmental movement—all these would emerge in the 1970s. A mighty force had been unleashed, and it would not be kept at rest for long. At critical junctures over the last two decades, I had played a role in that unleashing. I felt I’d lived two lives, perhaps three. At the threshold of a new decade I felt almost ancient.

  I was forty-two years old.

  PART THREE

  17

  If I’d had a credo for the life I’d lived so far, it might be: Do it all. My days were jammed, my evenings, too, in a constant balancing act between art and activism, tipped toward the latter. All too often, I’m sorry to say, I relegated my family to the cracks and margins: an evening at home between one day’s rally and the next day’s flight, a stolen weekend at the farm in Chatham to make up for a week away. “My father was serving two families,” my son, David, later observed. “Us and the family of Man.”

  I know that though my intentions were good, I did fill my days with a certain self-importance. But I do believe the deeper drive was for validation, a search for self. Who was I? If I just did enough, and then some more, and then some more after that, perhaps I’d know at last. Perhaps, in the process, I’d do well enough, and do enough good, to please the parent whose West Indian voice still echoed in my head. Again and again, my psychoanalyst, Peter Neubauer, led me back to my mother, the source, it seemed, of all my drive and despair.

  I called it a balancing act, but balance wasn’t a word that rightly described my life so far. Now, as I moved toward the half-century mark, I searched for a real balance, between public and private life, work and family, time given and time shared. I’m not sure I ever found it. And then, at an age when most men decide to take their tea by the fire and cherish their long-suffering wives, I wound up throwing my marriage up in the air and starting all over again.

  Perhaps balance just wasn’t my thing.

  I thought a lot, after Martin was gone, about the friendships in my life and how precious they were. Right up at the top was my friendship with Sidney. And yet for two years we hadn’t spoken a word to each other. I’d done a lot of stewing about the way he dashed my hopes of a memorial concert for Martin, and I know he felt just as hurt and angry that I’d blown up at him. We were two very proud West Indians, and here’s the truth: It takes a lot for a West Indian to put his pride aside. Finally, one day in the spring of 1970, I just picked up the phone and called. I had a script I wanted to pitch him, but that was just an excuse. I missed my friend.

  The script had come to me from an intern on the set of a small film I’d made the year before, The Angel Levine—my first film since Odds Against Tomorrow in 1959. Once again, I’d been drawn to a story of race relations. The
Angel Levine is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud, about a Jewish tailor with a bad back, a sick wife, and no money. He prays for an angel, and gets one, though in an unlikely form; the Angel Levine is a black street hustler who has twenty-four hours to convince the tailor he really is an angel, in order for both to be redeemed. I was reminded of that Jewish tailor who’d let my mother buy those sun-bleached suits in his store window at a generous discount, then taught her how to dye them blue. Along with the mixed cast—Zero Mostel as the tailor, me as the black angel—we had a black screenwriter, Bill Gunn, and an Academy Award–winning Czech director named Ján Kadár, making his first film in English after winning a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar for The Shop on Main Street. Oh—and a Ukrainian actress named Ida Kaminska playing the tailor’s wife. But I didn’t stop there. I’d decided the making of The Angel Levine would be, in itself, an exercise in race relations (and since HarBel Productions was financing it, I could make that decision). I got the unions to agree to let young people of color serve as interns to the various union workers on set. The whole production process was a model for an enlightened, race-sensitized Hollywood. Except that Hollywood had no interest in adopting it, with one exception: Norman Jewison, who would always be a stand-up guy.

  At least I got that intern’s script out of it.

  When he got on the line, I could tell that Sidney wasn’t his usual stoic self. He was a bit rattled hearing my voice. With some hesitation, he told me to come on over and tell him the story.

  Sidney and I were both based in New York. We both had offices on Fifty-seventh Street, just two blocks apart. Somehow we’d managed never to run into each other on the street in these last two years, but then, New York is like that. The next day, I walked over to say hello again to my friend. Neither of us made any mention of our rift. We just took up as if we’d seen each other the week before.

  I reminded Sidney that a decade or so before, we’d talked about doing a black western. Blacks had played a serious role in settling the frontier, but not a single film had ever explored the subject. The script I had in hand, Buck and the Preacher by Drake Walker—he was the intern—could be a first step toward remedying that. Its two lead characters were both black frontiersmen, and if Sidney felt as I did about it, we could play those roles ourselves.

  I left Sidney with the script, and in less than a day, he called back: He was in. With his string of box-office triumphs, he now had his own production deal. Within reason, he could say what he wanted to do next, and so he informed Columbia Pictures that Buck and the Preacher was it.

  “You brought the film to me,” Sidney said. “So let’s make the deal very simple: It’s fifty-fifty all the way, and you can take top billing.” This was a lot more than generous; Sidney was the world’s biggest black movie star now, and I wasn’t. I told him I was in for 50/50, but he would take first position on the screen. “This is your kingdom,” I said, “and you should reign.”

  I knew Sidney would make a perfect Buck: a wagon master set on protecting former slaves on their new western homesteads from the labor wranglers who want to press them into work gangs. Sidney was as square-jawed and upright in a cowboy hat as any white hero of a Hollywood western. For my own part, as the rascally preacher who comes along for the ride, I decided this was my chance to stretch. Instead of looking myself, as I’d done in every film I’d made in my matinee idol days, I’d have the kind of fun that my pals from the New School had been having for years, changing into a completely unrecognizable character. I let my hair grow wild and curly. I had the preacher chew tobacco, and stained my teeth, so that my smile looked more like a sneer. And like those fire-and-brimstone preachers I recalled from my early days in Jamaica and Harlem, crying out, “Jesus,” and passing the hat, I rattled off evangelical riffs that rolled off my tongue as easily as my own name.

  Both of us had money in this game—that is, my production company did and so did Sidney’s—so with an eye toward the bottom line, we decided to cut costs by filming in Durango, Mexico. That would have been a smart decision if we’d hired the right director. Unfortunately, we didn’t.

  Joe Sargent would go on to a successful career (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Jaws: The Revenge), but at the time he took on Buck and the Preacher, he’d mostly done episodes of Lassie and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The first week of shooting showed a serious drift from the whole tone and sensibility of the script. We were sending film up every day by air courier to be developed in L.A., so the studio was seeing the “dailies” even before we did. No one was happy. So Joe was to be replaced. But now what? We tried calling a few other directors, but no one wanted to parachute into the problem. That was when I started pushing Sidney to take Sargent’s place himself. “We have a great crew and cast,” I told him. “Everybody’s pulling for you. So any problems that come up, we’ll solve them together. Don’t be afraid to try this.”

  The studio gave its blessing for Sidney to try a few days in the chair. He was very hesitant, but with a lot of urging from all of us—including Julie, cast as the wife of the Indian chief, and perfect for the part—we helped him take up the gamble. The response to the first viewing of the dailies was encouraging. Finally two young executives flew down to take a closer look. One of them, Peter Guber, would go on to produce many of the most popular films of his generation, from Rain Man to Batman. After watching Sidney work for a day, he made one of his early executive decisions: Sidney could stay in the director’s chair.

  For a while, spirits ran high. I wanted my dear friend to succeed, to make his bones as a director and, in the process, break that next race barrier; as far as I knew, there wasn’t another black director in Hollywood at this level. I knew Sidney wasn’t Martin Scorsese, but then, so did he. I was just grateful the film was getting done—and more, that Sidney was letting me run with my part.

  When the film came out in the spring of 1972, Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave me some of the highest praise I’d gotten as an actor. “With what I suspect is the complete co-operation of Poitier,” he wrote, “the film is stolen almost immediately by Harry Belafonte as a bogus preacher…. Belafonte has mellowed considerably as an actor since his matinee idol days … and his performance here seems limited only by the simple material. His Preacher is a high-spirited con artist with bad teeth, a patulous eye and some dark memories that give the film its few moments of dramatic distinction.” Otherwise, Canby said, Buck and the Preacher was a “perfectly ordinary” western. For some reason, the black audiences we’d hoped would come in droves never showed up. Nor did the white ones. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had shown that the western as a genre still had legs, at least when it was leavened with a lot of dry humor. Well, we had dry humor. And weren’t Sidney and I the black equivalents of Robert Redford and Paul Newman? Apparently not. But Buck and the Preacher would become one of the most viewed movies on TV (or so it appears to me), with endless showings in the wee hours of the morning.

  Hollywood is littered with the dead production deals of marquee actors who thought they had the money to make four or five pictures. They did, and they didn’t; one bomb usually blows up the deal. Buck and the Preacher didn’t end Sidney’s run, but it did put him on the ropes. He needed a hit, and in the midst of an early-1970s trend of cheap black dramas and comedies—blaxploitation, it was called—he thought he had the answer.

  I was in Vegas, working at Caesars, when Sidney called to say he was coming up. He had a script he wanted me to read. I told him to stay for a couple of days as my guest, see my show, and hit Lake Mead. Sidney was a smooth poker player, at times almost lethal. But he skirted the casino like the plague. “No,” Sidney told me, “no lake, no poker. I can’t do that, and I can’t leave the script with you. I need you to read it while I’m there.”

  With the first few pages of Uptown Saturday Night, my heart sank. The story seemed very weak to me, way below Sidney’s standards. A guy wins the lottery but loses his ticket; it winds up in the hands of a jewelry thief who do
esn’t know what he has. So the hapless lottery winner has to seek the help of another gangster to outwit the first one. Sidney would be the lottery winner; I would be Geechie Dan Beauford, one of the gangsters. The whole script was contrived, the comedy trite. I said, “Sidney, if I were you, I wouldn’t do this. You just came off Buck and the Preacher, it didn’t do well, the black audience didn’t show up at all. I don’t think your career can take another one of those. Wait till you find a script that sings. And wait till you get another great co-star,” by which I meant, as we both knew, a white co-star with box-office appeal.

  “I don’t have that luxury,” Sidney said. “I’m committed to make this movie. And I need your help.”

  So I started thinking about what might make this work. I said, “If this is the script you have to make, you have to figure out how to stay ahead of the audience, because the way this is written, the audience is going to be way ahead of you in no time flat.” How? Sidney asked. I was thinking of A Time for Laughter, my television tribute to black humor. “Let’s get all of those comics,” I said. “Put them all in, one after another. Let each one ham it up, do his bit. Just as the audience is starting to get bored with one of them, we’ll kill him off and bring on another one. That way, each one can do his bit in a couple of days’ work, and you don’t need them all there at the same time.”

  Sidney looked at me hopefully. “It could work,” he said.

  Everyone wanted to help Sidney, so we had no trouble lining up Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby. I did a comic turn myself, in a send-up of Marlon doing his Godfather death scene with slices of orange in his mouth. Pryor, at the height of his powers of improvisation, did hilarious, unscripted bits that had virtually no relation to the story. Who cared? They were funny. Our instincts, as it turned out, were right on the money this time: When it came out in June 1974, Uptown Saturday Night made $10 million, a major payday at the time. It was frothy and buffoonish, and audiences—both black and white—loved it. It became the first crossover racial comedy of the decade.