Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  The temperature is 35 degrees tonight. Josh Logan stalks through the slime in baggy blue jeans, cowboy boots, a polo coat and a New York hat. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here,” he said, “all these extras, all these unions to contend with. You’re afraid to give anybody an extra line to say or the budget goes up $10,000. You have to organize all these horses, all these cows, all these people, get the shot during Magic Hour, while the sky is light enough to silhouette the nature you’ve come to photograph. I’m living each day to the next. I can’t wait to get back to civilization.”

  Ten men haul in more mud and throw it all over the extras. Netta Logan turns to Alan Jay Lerner: “Why, Oh why couldn’t we have gone to Arrowhead? Or even Lake Tahoe?”

  “It’s got to be difficult,” quips Lerner, clutching the finished scrip for Coco on his way to a private Lear jet which will fly him back to Los Angeles for conferences with Katharine Hepburn. “If it’s not difficult it’s not worth doing.”

  And you think musicals are easy to make. Spiders crawl across the ground. Jean Seberg sits near an oil lamp, playing poker with a full-blood Sioux Indian named Eddie Little Sky, a former member of the Green Berets, and a hunchback Chinese named Peanuts. Karen Lerner announces she’s just driven over a pine stump and knocked a hole in the oil pan of a new Continental. Word arrives that one of the helicopters has gone down in the mountains and the crew had to walk to a farmhouse to phone for a mechanic. “Never a dull moment,” says Jean Seberg, who is a long way from her fashionable house in the Rue du Bac in Paris, and even farther away from Truffaut and Godard.

  On the way down the gorge, a porcupine galumphs across our path in the road like a lopsided old man. “Hand me down that can of beans...” roars the Red Army chorus through the virgin wilderness, and the mikes bounce the music up to the snow-capped peaks above the pines. And up on the rise, for the 45th take, like witches in the moonlight, they’re still jumping in the mud.

  James Earl Jones

  “Are you the black hope?”

  “I’m black and I’m hopin’...”

  —from The Great White Hope

  As a boy picking cotton in Tate County, Mississippi, he had two choices. He could tear off through life down a Jimmy Baldwin trail of fire-next-time, knocking white heads together and spouting a lot of militant racist mumbo-jumbo. Or he could try to win them over with intelligence and kindness so that by the time he had polished up his extraordinary talent to a point where he was ready to tell the world who he was, the world would be there listening. James Earl Jones chose the latter, and that is why, at a preview a few nights before the opening of The Great White Hope, they were all crowding into his dressing room backstage at the Alvin, waiting for The Man, ready to say thank you.

  There they were: NYU students; Bill Cosby, chewing on his cigar like a gang czar; beautiful actress Ellen Holly, calling his performance “legendary”; white girls nervous about whatever it was they might say; Negro girls eyeing the white girls suspiciously, not worried about what they would say, but about the man they would say it to. All of them worshiping at the shrine of that new 20th-century hero, the black man who is “making it.”

  The dressing room was hot. There were flowers dying in the cigar smoke, knee pads, barbells, boxing gloves big enough for the Jolly Green Giant to wear, and oxygen tank for instant energy revival, and bloody towels on a makeshift clothesline. The only differences from being backstage at Madison Square Garden were the books by Gertrude Stein and Sigmund Freud and the fact that when you got close enough you could see the blood was only red enamel spray paint.

  The fans and the students and the actors paid their compliments in quiet, hushed tones, with all the respect and dignity of an elegant funeral, and after they filed out, he put on his engineer’s cap, stuffed a book into his Alitalia bag and we grabbed a cab at the corner. How did he feel? Humble? Smug? Satisfied? Like winning a medal in school? He laughed. “Well, none of those things, really. I often come home depressed because I know the audience stood and cheered but I want to be sure they do it for the right reasons. I want it to be for the play and for the company, not me. As for me, I rehearsed for six weeks in Washington, then played it seven weeks at the Arena Stage, and I’m only now beginning to see with a third eye where I belong. But I’m not there yet. I probably never will be. If you ever think you’ve achieved perfection, it’s the end of the road. There is no star in this company. I’m not a star and I don’t want to be one. There are 65 stars in this play. That’s the old guard Broadway that talks about stars. The old guard is on its way out. This is a renegade group and by throwing all the old concepts out, I think we’re gonna kick Broadway on its ass. Broadway seldom attracts everybody in one audience. Where are the black people? They don’t go to the theatre because there is nothing for them to identify with, man. A great number of black people would like to see a play about a white racist Southern family, but nobody has written one. Broadway is accused of aiming at the whites. The Negro Ensemble group downtown is accused of aiming at the blacks. I want to be associated with something that can talk to both audiences so they can each share in a common emotional experience together, and The Great White Hope is bringing them all in and they’re all involved. I’m proud to be lending my energies to something both races can identify with, and that’s what I want them to applaud.”

  We arrived at 30th Street and tipped the driver, who looked us over quizzically and drove off in a roar of gasoline. He lives in a rundown neighborhood which he apologizes for quickly and unnecessarily. “I don’t care how much money I make, I can’t see spending it all on rent.” A drunken Negro woman reels out of the house next door and nearly knocks over a garbage can. “The neighborhood is full of whores. The only thing I worry about is Julienne coming home alone at night. It could be dangerous. She doesn’t exactly look like one of the local hookers.”

  She certainly doesn’t. Julienne Marie came downstairs and let us in with one of those radiant ingenue smiles she’s been lighting up comedies and Richard Rodgers musicals with for years and we made our way up the stairs into a charming $125-a-month apartment as warm and inviting as a country house. It was already Julienne’s place before she fell in love with Jimmy onstage playing Desdemona to his Othello and married him last year in Washington. It has a lemon-yellow fireplace, cornflower-blue walls and antique farmhouse chairs and now this is where the offstage Jimmy Jones breaks down the adulation and goes back to real life. The walls are full of books (“I was never interested in sports, I always read books and poetry; I seldom read them all the way through, but I haunt the indexes—I’m a nibbler—I just love to have them around.”) and the talk is diffuse, ranging in one night from the urban school crisis to psychiatry (Julienne went to a black shrink before she married Jimmy, but he has never needed one) to “The Problem,” which, although unnecessary, usually becomes the thorn in the side of all Negro interviews. “I always feel like white reporters talk to Negro actors to solicit black information. Then they go and print that every Negro actor is having a feud with Sidney Poitier. Well, don’t print that about me. Sidney came backstage and said, ‘You’ve accomplished what no other actor

  I know could do.’ Then Bobby Hooks, who is a completely different kind of cat, said, ‘Hey man, cool it!’ and I knew what he meant, you know? Tonight Bill Cosby, a third member of the Black Rat Pack, came.”

  “Oh, what did Bill say?” asked Julienne, pouring coffee.

  “He said he was sitting there and people started getting up at the end and shouting bravo and he said, ‘Hey, sit down! Just sit down!’ Maybe that doesn’t sound like a compliment, but I understood what he meant. We’re all club members, all black actors, and we should all get on board, you know what I mean? What I said in the cab about Broadway. It can work both ways. You can learn from the old guard too. Last Sunday there was a big picture of me in the Times with my hands up holding a champagne bottle right next to a big picture of Marlene Dietrich with her hands up and our bellies were touching, and I loo
ked like Hello Dolly, and I liked it. I really dug it. There was no scene like that in the play, but now there is. I hold up the champagne bottle now and the audience loves it. What I mean is, you can always learn something. You can’t go through life closed off from people and ideas or even prejudices. You have to learn to make them work for you. Godfrey Cambridge was a cab driver and once he got so mad he ripped the door off a cab. Then he used it in a comedy act and it made him successful. When people used to call me a nigger it ruined my whole year. That’s stupid. You’re only as big as what makes you mad. Being called a nigger? That’s nothing, man. After Dick Gregory used it for a book title, it’s not even such a terrible word to say anymore. Nigger. Nigger! Think of how scary it can sound. I could use it another way and terrify people if I wanted to. NIGGUH! Not sissy nigger, but NIGGUH!” The eyes rolled back and the whites of his eyes stared out like thumb tacks, the powerful arms crossed across the massive legs like a Buddha god, the black lips rolled out like a black assassin in a Bagdad sultan’s torture chamber, and the spittle flew across the room as all 200 pounds and six-feet-plus of James Earl Jones screamed out the word “NIGGUH!” and frightened the two white onlookers into silent submission followed by nervous laughter. “See what I mean?”

  He went off to take a shower, analyzing from the bathroom why people like him. “I have the advantage of playing a character in this play who is an American folk hero like Johnny Appleseed or Joe Louis or John F. Kennedy. The first Negro champ. They made him, then they destroyed him. America is afraid of the unusual and Jack Johnson asserted himself and his fame as an individual and people couldn’t adjust to a Negro who didn’t fit into their image. You can say times have changed. Jack was a big success, he had a white girl, and the world beat him down. I’m successful, I have a white wife, and they accept me. But I don’t know if things have changed that much. Sure, they liked Floyd Patterson and Joe Louis, but they were great white hopes, not black hopes. They conformed. The public hates Muhammad Ali’s guts because he doesn’t conform. They like me because my social mask is a gentleman. I don’t like to offend people. But I don’t blame Cassius for being himself. Here I am married to Julienne, but I don’t know if we should even take an auto ride together through my home state of Mississippi.”

  “I’m not going, darling.”

  “Well, let’s consider it. Let’s see if people have changed. Let’s not assume any thing—”

  “I’ve already considered it. I’m not going.”

  Would he protect her? “Ha,” she giggles, “that’s a laugh. When we got married, we never discussed race as a social issue. The subject never came up. But he did tell me once ‘If you are ever with me and someone insults you, run! I’ll catch up with you in the next block.’ That’s the kind of husband I’ve got.”

  “I figure I can clean up two guys,” says Jimmy, coming out of the shower drinking a quart of grapefruit juice in a white T-shirt with great bear-like feet sticking out of white chinos. “But my philosophy is provoke but never flaunt. Never back a guy against a wall. I hate fighting. I believe wars should be fought by men over 50. We should send the old and the feeble-minded to Vietnam and wire them with electrical devices to make them respond to enemy advance, then wire their trigger fingers to fire on response. People will hate me for saying that, but I feel it’s a worse alternative to send young men with future potential and destroy them so they are of no use to anyone.”

  Although he has a build that would delight a fight manager, he wouldn’t even go to a gym to train for his role as a boxer. “Fighters have the wildest egos in the world and you can’t learn anything from them. My understudy is a former professional heavyweight and a sparring partner for Floyd Patterson and Cassius Clay and he taught me everything. I even shaved my head to look more ferocious and somebody said, ‘You look like a newborn baby.’ It blew the whole thing. I guess I don’t look too mean, do I?”

  Not really. But that doesn’t mean he’s a softie. A hard childhood taught him a sense of justice, but also a kind of gentle toughness. It’s how he survived. “It was a feudal isolated farm system in Mississippi. We never saw white people until the day we took the cotton into town. We had to tow a certain line. The white kids were never punished if they lost a wheel on their wagon, but we were. I remember catfishing, floods, eating persimmons and hickory nuts and grasshopper legs and if you dug down under the ground past the worms, the dirt was very clean and we’d eat that too.”

  His father was a prizefighter who went North to seek work, so when he was six he was adopted by his mother’s parents and moved to a farm in Michigan. “It was a common thing in black families and I didn’t mind being adopted. My grandparents were black people who had a hard job to do nobody else could do and I took care of the livestock and learned masonry as a trade. To them, the theatre was something irresponsible. I got into it because I stuttered so badly I couldn’t communicate, so they were glad when I got interested in speech and forensics. Hard work was all they knew. I read Jules Verne and once drew up some blueprints for a subterranean machine and my grandfather burned them. To him, I was a Galileo who had to be stopped. It was a great place for the mind to start cooking and until you found something to stimulate you out of it, it wasn’t really a bad life.”

  But he knew there was more to life than that. He worshiped his Dad, who represented to a small boy on a farm the black man who got out. Once he was thumbing through an old Look magazine in high school and came across his picture in the cast of Strange Fruit. He had become Robert Earl Jones, Broadway actor, and it made him a big celebrity in school. “I remember once when I won a public-speaking contest and a scholarship to college on the same day, the little agricultural school I went to gave me the money to call my father. They dropped me off at a drug store and it took me an hour to get up the courage to phone him.” He studied pre-med on a University of Michigan scholarship but failed (“I loved the idea of being a savior, but I didn’t care about the names of all those bones”) and switched to drama. He graduated in 1953, narrowly escaped being sent to Korea, spent two years in the army instructing mountain climbing in a ranger station in Colorado, and when he came out worked as a carpenter in a stock company on the shores of Lake Michigan. Whether he realized it or not, he was already following in his father’s footsteps. It beat milking cows.

  He made a beeline for New York, moved in with his Dad, who had him reading Iago to his Othello before you could say Paul Robeson, and picked up the father-son relationship that had never existed back home. He studied for two years at the American Theatre Wing, auditioned for seven years straight for the Actors Studio but never got in. “Rip Torn and Geraldine Page kept saying ‘We gotta get some black folks in here,’ but all they took were Diana Sands and Sidney Poitier.” He took every off-Broadway job he could find and he’s never been out of work since. “I respect people who hustle for a livelihood, but I don’t believe in integrated casting unless the parts can be played psychologically and physically by Negroes. Otherwise, it’s unemployment, not art. The day will come when black actors will enter the psyche of white characters and vice versa and we’ll play the hell out of it until your hair stands on end. But you can’t integrate a Tennessee Williams play by having a black Blanche and a white Stella. That’s not the way to do it. To play Hal as a black man in Picnic the play would cave in. I’d like to play it in workshops, but I don’t want to sell it as a definitive statement of me as an actor. My father and I played in Of Mice and Men. I was Lenny. He’s a character in any country, any color, he goes beyond a social theme. Integrated casting is fine as long as it doesn’t distort the scope of the play. I thought Diana Sands probably knew more about the psyche of a French peasant girl in St. Joan than any white actress, and it worked. It was good for the audience because it allowed their imaginations to stretch. The psyche is more important than the image projected. Integrated casting is fine as long as it doesn’t distort the scope of the play, but I’m not out to prove anything and I don’t want to be used to further caus
es because I’m black.”

  It was 5 a.m. when we moved into the kitchen where Julienne served scrambled eggs and whiskey sours. “I don’t want to be condescended to because I’m a black success,” he said. “People assume they can use you to sell something.” He fingered two telegrams. One was from Tony Bennett, inviting him to a nightclub opening. “That’s all right, because we know Tony and he sent it to the theatre because he didn’t know how to reach us anywhere else. He didn’t do it because I’m a sudden success he’d like to have at his ringside. But this other one makes me furious.” It was from the Citizen’s Committee for Hubert Humphrey. “They make it sound like if I don’t use my influence to get black votes, Wallace will get in. Well I’m not so sure that’s such a bad idea for this country at this time. I don’t know. But I don’t want to be used. I don’t want to let suspicions rule my life. I played Macbeth in the ghettos, and the kids threw Coke bottles and paper clips at me, then came backstage and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Star,’ and tried to shake hands with single-edged razor blades in their palms. But if I had let those suspicions rule me, I couldn’t have performed.

  “Even if this play is a success, I won’t let it change me. I’ll have to fight temptations to make big money and fight a lot of people to retain my freedom, but I intend to go right back off-Broadway. I don’t get along with the smooth goodness of Broadway and Hollywood. I’m happiest in shoestring budgets in off-Broadway basements. I’ve been in positions before where I could have been an overnight success. But people never see me in one role in terms of another one. I didn’t look the same in Othello, and with a beard I could look like a completely different man if I played Malcolm X. I’ve never been hounded by mash letters or autograph hunters. Most of the people who come backstage are usually students who want to give me information or trade an experience. I think people also are perhaps a bit afraid of me physically and unsure of where I stand politically. I am an unknown and I enjoy that. I don’t want Broadway and success to change anything. And I try to be that way in my private life. My Negro-ness does not rule my life. If you are happy, people more readily accept you as who you are. If you are hostile and show fear, they want to find out why. I rarely notice hostile glances, do you, Julienne?”