After protocol at the airport, we had Mandela go directly to one of the most underserved schools in the city—the Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn. This unbelievable appearance deeply moved the students and the principal of the school. Mandela thought it poetic that this was his first stop. And it was there that I first felt the extraordinary energy he radiated to all who heard him—an energy so much greater than his physical condition would ever seem to allow. From there it was on to a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan that New Yorkers would never forget, with Mandela riding in an open-topped car, waving to delirious crowds.
I had a lot of private moments with Nelson Mandela over those next eleven days, especially in transit. I’d had to line up a jet, which required raising money. We rented one, and at the Mandelas’ insistence—Nelson and Winnie both—Julie and I rode with them every leg of the way. Julie sat with Winnie on those flights, and I sat with Nelson, doing my best to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about Martin and his tactics at every stage of the civil rights movement. Nelson’s interest was not just personal; it was political. The whole catechism for apartheid was based on segregation in the United States. The United States had turned it into law, just as South Africa, following our example, had done a few generations later. How Martin had strategized to dismantle those laws provided a blueprint for Nelson to do the same in South Africa.
In those eleven days, I watched saints become devils and devils become saints. Everyone from the President on down wanted to touch Mandela’s garment, and no one wanted to take no for an answer. One of the most insistent was Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, D.C., who unfortunately was under indictment for smoking crack cocaine and was soon to go to federal prison for six months. Marion, whom I’d known since his early days as a SNCCer, insisted on meeting Mandela in front of the press. I said no, but when Mandela spoke at the Washington Convention Center, Marion pushed his way backstage before the speech. He was one room away from Mandela, with a whole posse of press photographers ready to snap pictures of the two shaking hands, when I got an urgent tap on the shoulder from one of Mandela’s assistants. “Mandiba wants to see you.”
“I’m having a problem with the ex-mayor,” Mandela said to me. “Will you fix it?”
I went over to Marion and pulled him aside. “This is not in anyone’s best interests but yours,” I said. “And you are not going to do this to Mandela. No private moment, no press moment, no statement to the press.”
Marion glowered at me. I knew exactly what he was thinking. I assured him that there was no authority other than mine.
Marion’s face crumpled, but he nodded. I had worked with Marion in our movement for a number of years. His courage and intelligence, like those of so many of the young people of his day, were exemplary. He took a lot of risks, and I admired him for it. His commitment to the movement led him to become mayor of Washington, D.C., but during his tenure he became careless, seduced by power. He crossed to the wrong side of the law and was paying a terrible price for that. I would have done anything to help my friend in this moment of trouble, but not if it involved using Mandela.
Mandela went out on the stage to deafening roars, followed by several officials, who took the chairs awaiting them. One of them was Marion. I watched him walk onto the stage, headed toward Mandela, but then, still out of picture-frame range, turn toward one of the chairs. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Any possible embarrassment was averted.
From my many days on the plane with Mandela, what came through most vividly for me was his sense of purpose. He knew exactly who he was; he knew exactly what he had to do; and the onslaught of press and giddy crowds and maneuvering politicians in no way unnerved this man who’d just emerged from twenty-seven years of prison. I would have been blinking at daylight if I were in his shoes, stunned by freedom, incapable of addressing a crowd, much less a country. Not Mandela. He didn’t need to rise above the fray. He was already there.
Our last stop was Oakland, California. Never had the Oakland Coliseum been so full; never had such love and exhilaration filled that space. I rode with Nelson and Winnie in the stretch limousine that took them from there to the airport, along with Julie, who’d become Winnie’s companion for much of the trip, and Roger Wilkins. When the Mandelas finally took off, their plane waggled its wings over the still-packed Oakland Coliseum. The crowd went wild all over again.
As I watched the plane fly off, I felt enormous, profound relief; nothing bad had happened! But also such a flood of affection and admiration. We had parted with a powerful hug, and Nelson’s last words to me were “See you soon.” I hoped I would, but maybe I wouldn’t. Perhaps I’d just had my last glimpse of this astonishing man. I could see that Roger Wilkins felt the same way. One of the most fascinating and dramatic times in our lives had just come to an end.
19
Mandela was free, and the pillars of apartheid were coming down—but not overnight, and not all at once. The newly legitimate African National Congress would have to negotiate for four years with the ruling National party before free elections were held. And while those elections would lead to the ANC taking power—and Mandela becoming president—not all change was for the better. I saw that up close with Carl Ware. All through the 1980s, he and Coca-Cola had hung tough, refusing to dismantle the company’s South African bottling plants, ignoring the sanctions movement altogether. Meanwhile, archrival Pepsi-Cola had pulled out of the apartheid market in response to our entreaties. So what happened? Once in power, the ANC gave national contracts to the company that was up and running: Coca-Cola. Pepsi, the multinational that had made a moral decision in order to help South Africa’s blacks, was shut out. Carl Ware, by staying coldly pragmatic and apolitical, handed his bosses a big business coup.
South Africa’s needs were still profound. So were those of nearly every other country in Africa. I couldn’t ignore those needs, not even if I wanted to; I had a new, formal obligation to help. Back in 1987, I’d succeeded the late comedian Danny Kaye as goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. As with my Peace Corps mission, this new posting drew me mostly to Africa. I started by organizing a forum with UNICEF’s director, Jim Grant, in Dakar, Senegal, called “Artists and Intellectuals for Children,” that brought together all of Africa’s leading artists and thinkers to focus on children’s issues: hunger, polio, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS, and more. From that gathering came everything from countrywide immunization programs for children to sexual education to help prevent women from contracting HIV/AIDS and passing it on. For me, it led to visits with leaders of nearly all the sub-Saharan countries. On these trips, one or more of UNICEF’s other celebrity board members was usually with me, among them actors Roger Moore, Audrey Hepburn, Liv Ullmann, and Peter Ustinov, and director Richard Attenborough. All were fun, but none more so than my erstwhile Bonaire business partner Roger Moore.
With Audrey Hepburn we went on a mission to Senegal. She’d worked for UNICEF since the 1950s, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she traveled constantly as a goodwill ambassador, not just to Africa but all over the world, overseeing vaccination programs, bringing water systems to remote villages, visiting displacement camps and famine sites. No one, not even Princess Diana or Grace Kelly, had her shimmering radiance. What made her all the more dazzling was that she’d go without hesitation into the most impoverished places. Hungry children would be sorting through mountains of garbage and waste for scraps of food, fighting with mangy dogs, and emitting a low, constant moan of extreme hunger. It was in that moment of great degradation that Audrey would go over to one of these desperate children, pick him up, and bring him over to one of the large enamel basins used both for bathing and for washing dishes and clothes. She would set the child in fresh water and clean him while she soothed him with her gentle voice. She never succumbed to sentimentality in these situations; she just focused on getting the job done. I don’t think any of us other goodwill ambassadors inspired the love and gratitude that she did just with her extraordinary presence and compassion. T
here was something deep in her that I never saw in anyone else. She was searching for an answer; I wondered what the question was, because she wasn’t just cleaning these children as a response to a social crisis. It was so spiritual, the way she did it, that she had to have been on some quest for meaning. I found myself envying her, because if what she was looking for could lead her to do the work she was doing with such abandonment, the quest was meaning itself. By about 1992, I sensed she was ill. I saw her tiring easily, getting frail, being more selective about the trips she went on. And then suddenly, she was gone, dead from cancer in January 1993. She was sixty-three years old.
That same month, I sang at William Jefferson Clinton’s inaugural ball. I had a unique perspective: I was the only performer on the roster who had participated in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural three decades before. Clinton was nearly as young as Kennedy had been then, and in his own way as charismatic, but I was under no illusions. I’d made some critical campaign appearances for him all over the country, but mostly in the Deep South, where he needed every black vote he could get, and I’d spent time in planes with him, offering my vision for what had to be done to advance civil rights. But as he filled out his circle of advisers, I felt that Clinton would be far more centrist than Jack Kennedy, certainly more than Bobby Kennedy.
It was a different time, a less idealistic time, for all of the new president’s rhetoric. When I called him, as I did about Haiti and the administration’s early failure to support deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he returned those calls, and we had a spirited debate. But no one in the Clinton White House reached out, as President Kennedy had, to enlist help in forming a new civil rights agenda.
That was all right with me. I had my own portfolio with UNICEF. Of all those trips, the one that haunted me most came the following year, when I went with Nigel Fisher to Rwanda.
Fisher was—and is—a courageous and indomitable figure, a longtime envoy for UNICEF in the world’s most war-torn places. When I joined him on a fact-finding trip to Rwanda in the late summer of 1994, the one-hundred-day genocide was just winding down. No one could imagine how many had died: some eight hundred thousand, it would turn out, mainly Tutsis killed by Hutus. I thought I’d seen carnage in Ethiopia and Sudan, but the famine of 1984–85 was, at least, a work of nature, if one made worse by human cruelty. Nature played no part in Rwanda. Human fear and hatred and prejudice were solely to blame. I’d never doubted the existence of evil; I’d seen it all too often in the American South. But the scale of atrocities in Rwanda was overwhelming. “The horror,” says Joseph Conrad’s character Kurtz with his dying breath in Heart of Darkness. “The horror.” And that’s what it was.
Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, whom we met upon arriving, had seen more of that horror than most. As commander of the U.N.’s peacekeeping force in Rwanda beginning the previous fall, he had sensed that the country’s civil strife was entering a dangerous new phase, and pleaded in vain to be allowed to seize a planeload of weapons and ammunition going to the Hutu army. When the genocide began, Dallaire had had to stand by, his forces too meager to put up any fight, his pleas for reinforcements refused by U.N. Undersecretary General Kofi Annan and the U.N. Security Council. His inability to act left him deeply anguished; later he would suffer from deep depression and attempt suicide. When we met him, the pain and horror of his experience were written all over his face as he bared his feelings to us. He was a broken man.
Almost more disturbing was the young UNICEF staffer, Marcel Rudasingwa, who became our mission guide. He was a Tutsi who’d been in Italy at a UNICEF conference when the genocide began. The Hutus had murdered all his children, five of them. Yet Marcel had steadfastly committed himself to helping his countrymen, steadfastly ministering to their pain and somehow pushing his own aside. Watching him, I wondered what deep faith sustained him. Whatever it was, I envied it. I would have simply collapsed. Certainly I wouldn’t have been ready to lead our delegation, as he was, in search of orphaned children, getting them to centers where they could be cared for and perhaps found by relatives.
“Can you really do this?” I asked him gently.
“My wife and I will bring more children in the world,” he told me simply. “Meanwhile, we must help the ones who survived.”
Most, but not all, of the bodies had been cleared from the roads and villages by the time Nigel and I arrived. But so much remained to be done. Our group went to the building UNICEF had used as its local headquarters. At the gate, our military escort stopped us. For a moment we stood in silence, looking at something. “What is it?” I said at last. Nigel pointed: The gate and entrance were booby-trapped. Had we walked in, we would have been killed.
While the military cordoned off the area and set about gingerly defusing the bombs, Nigel located a bank building that would serve as temporary headquarters. To his fury, the building’s owner started haggling with him over the rent. The city was all but abandoned; no one else would rent the building; who did this owner think he was? But the owner, sensing a windfall, held firm. Nigel, who does not recognize the word retreat, outnegotiated the owner; we paid for nothing but his space, and we removed all the dead bodies. Then we took occupancy until our main building could be secured.
We pushed into the interior, only to be stopped at checkpoints commanded by teenage boys from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with AK-47’s. Some looked to be as young as fourteen; their guns were almost bigger than they were. “Report to Major Rose,” we kept hearing. “You need Major Rose for safe passage.” Finally we got to a Spanish-style hacienda where, we were told, Major Rose presided. When we walked in, we were stunned; Major Rose was a woman, all of thirty-three, extraordinarily beautiful, with coal-black eyes and high cheekbones, who might have just posed for the cover of Vogue. And yet her young male soldiers snapped to attention with crisp salutes. Clearly she’d done something to deserve this respect, but we thought better than to ask what it was.
We treated a lot of children on our ten-day trip. Often we came upon groups of orphans huddled together, and so we put them up on our truck beds and got them to safe havens. We also went over the border into the Congo, where the retreating genocidal Hutu army had been given safe haven by Congo’s tyrant Mobutu, but forced to remain on a barren stretch of black volcanic rock called Goma. Families had fled here, too, and were trying to set up camps on this razor-sharp volcanic rock. The whole area, for miles in every direction, had become a no-man’s-land in which man, somehow, would have to find a way to survive. We saw so many orphans there, too, and brought as many as we could back to Rwanda, to field hospitals and orphanage centers. The faces of those orphans—I’ve never forgotten them. We filmed everything we did, and took lots of notes, and all this reporting found its way to the international agencies trying to make sense of what had happened. But I came home unconvinced that there was any sense to be made of all this. For more than four decades my activism had been underpinned by the conviction that change could come, that the world could be a better place.
After Rwanda, I wasn’t so sure.
I spent a lot of time with actors on those African trips, but I was far away, in every sense, from any acting work myself. Mostly I felt fine about that. I didn’t want to waste time reading mediocre scripts that always avoided hard truths. I also kept from pinning my hopes to the rare script of substance that made it through Hollywood’s hoops, only to die when it finally appeared. I could live without more of those heartbreaks. Certainly I could go without making another crowd-pleaser like Uptown Saturday Night. But in the roughly two decades since then, I’d never quite shaken the hope of acting again in a role that had purpose and meaning. All that New School training, all that fierce ambition instilled in us by Erwin Piscator to do theater that lit up the world—I’d never entirely let those dreams go.
Then along came Robert Altman, the legendary director who’d made film history with M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and so many others. Altman was a staunch supporter of
the civil rights movement. We were a mutual admiration society. I loved his films, and Altman appreciated my work as an activist; he once told Vanity Fair that I was the person he most admired. I stayed as a guest of Bob and his wife Kathryn in their large Paris apartment. It was an apartment that had a very long hall. One night, I remember, Bob was in his bedroom at one end of the hall watching the winter Olympics. From the guest bedroom where I was staying, at the other end of the hall, I had a long, unobstructed view of Bob’s television set. And I had the remote control. When I saw one of the top skiers fly into the air, I pointed and clicked. “What the hell!” Bob swore from down the hall as the TV switched to another station. He leaped up from his bed and changed the channel back. Up came the next event, and the next dramatic moment. Click. “Goddamn it!” And so it went, with the channels changing and Bob cursing French television until I couldn’t hold my laughter any longer. He finally realized that I was the culprit, and from that time on, wherever we went together, he made it his business to hide the remote control.
Bob had given me a cameo role as myself in his brilliant Hollywood satire The Player, in 1992. We hadn’t met at that point; he just thought I’d be right for the movie. Two years later he gave me another in Prêt-à-Porter, his send-up of the fashion industry. And then in 1995, he offered me a meatier part, one that I wasn’t at all sure I could play, in a film about Prohibition gangsters set in 1930s Kansas City, against a backdrop of searing jazz.
In our social get-togethers, Bob and I inevitably talked about films we wanted to make. We were roughly the same age, and had grown up listening to the same radio shows; we shared a fascination with The Amos ’n’ Andy Show, still awed that white actors had played its black characters with such preciseness. Bob wanted to make a film about them, and the complex social and racial implications of white performers in blackface. He even had a title for it, Cork, after the burnt cork that white performers in minstrel shows, and later in vaudeville, used to blacken their faces. For Bob, Amos ’n’ Andy was a metaphor for a culture of masks that he—and I—saw as a pervasive aspect of American society. Everyone wears masks, from their first “Good morning” to their last “Good night.” The masks of racial attitudes are perhaps the most blatant—hiding, as they do, the underlying truths of racism—but Bob was fascinated by all masks, and saw Cork as the way to convey those cultural realities. Bob and I both felt that if America could honestly resolve the contradictions of race, with Cork as a contribution to that dialogue, we could go on to confront those other masks. He never got to that one, but he did get to Kansas City.
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