Speaker I want to go back to when you were girl. And so I get a sense of what your family was like. Could you describe your mother for me?
Speaker Well. I’d have to be about. Five, I think, because the memory of it was always a different thing in my mind than the real thing. I had a I thought she was so beautiful, she was beautiful, and I just say I remember my mother. Vividly, the second time she came into my life, I was taken to be with her when I was about five years old and she was beautiful to me, like my idea of a movie star, although I didn’t know anything about movies then. But she was she had big hazel eyes, hazel color and curly black hair and very, very fair skin. And I think she made made her makeup very pale, too. So I remember that. And I remember she had beautiful hands and she was always, you know, this way with them. And I noticed them a lot. And then as I got older, I knew she was beautiful all the time because I think she was she wanted terribly to be an actress. And I suppose when she went back to work, when I was about three years old, she had the makeup always and the way she was dressed and she appeared to me was as someone on the stage remote from me.
Speaker As you look back on it. At that time, was it that we decided to have a career on stage at that time?
Speaker I think it was it must have been ridiculous. I didn’t know then how bad the time was for her and and girls women like her. But I remember being taken away from a place where there had been a lynching and she had gone to work and a a screen show tent show. And we had been in a car and someone warned us, don’t go in tonight to do the show because there’s been a lynching. And I saw a lot of fear in her and the people who that was the people that were with her. And then I was in Philadelphia with her when I was still this must have been the same year at the Earls Theater, I believe it was. And I was playing the child in a crib and Malcolm X. They were doing this on stage. And I remember.
Speaker It was either Malcolm X or some way down east or something, and there were two or three other little children must have been way down east and we hid behind the fireplace like. But I was frightened then because the play was frightening, the story was sad or something. And I began to cry and and make a loud noise and they had to take me off the stage.
Speaker But I remember just her having a bad time. Now I know how horrible it really was, but then it was frightening.
Speaker What how did you come to to actually be on the road with her? Could you tell me about what we will call the kidnapping?
Speaker My mother and father, I think I should tell you that my mother and father had a very unpleasant divorce.
Speaker I think my mother was too naive and had been sheltered so that she didn’t understand how hard it was for a young black man to to make it.
Speaker And he was annoyed at her having wishes to read movie magazines and go on the stage.
Speaker So they were really unsuited for each other.
Speaker And when they were divorced, my mother, of course, they always gave girl children to mothers in those years. And my mother took me for a time with her whenever she was able to because she said my father threatened to kidnap me always. My father wanted me back. And I was the sort of cabbage torn between a couple of people, you know, with leaves being taken off.
Speaker And always when she’d leave me with people who were kind enough to take me in, she’d come at weird times and say, we’ve got to leave, we’ve got to leave and be in the middle of the night usually.
Speaker And she’d take me off and say, your father’s in town. I was coming to where we are and you’ve got to get away. I’ve got to take you, because he’s going to take you away from me. I had one of those real movies, movie story, bring it up with two people disliking each other. And unfortunately, one the two or three times I was with people who.
Speaker Who were kind to me and that I had gotten sort of liking them, she’d come and take me away and I guess that stuck with me for many long years because I began to always want to be the one who left first. I didn’t want to I was afraid to to love people. They might leave me. They always did. Usually when I was young.
Speaker But that was the way it was, one of the things I was really struck by was your experience in Macon, Georgia, because I think yes.
Speaker Could you tell me about that when I lived in Macon, Georgia? I don’t know how my mother had met these people, but I they were so kind to me. They were very poor. And and we lived in these two rooms and there was one hundred and seven year old great, great, great, great grandmother who cooked and washed out in the big pot in the backyard and made soap.
Speaker And there was the the mother, the granddaughter who was raising her daughter’s child. And the four of us women lived in these two rooms. And I had a little cot at the foot of the great grandmother’s bed. And we roast potatoes in the the ashes in this little front room and had a big on stove in the back. And the mother worked for white people and she’d bring us little tidbits home on a plate. And the old grandmother was so wonderful. She was very lean and wiry and she’d tell us stories of when she was a little girl and and they were so good to me and she’d make baking soda biscuits that rose high and have a fat back, you know, and and fry in the morning for us before school or to take to school with us. I remember that.
Speaker And, uh, when I had had rheumatic pains in my legs, she’d she’d wrapped them at night and I’ve been growing and she put vinegar and brown paper, I remember. And that was one family I didn’t want to be taken away from. Of all the many that I was left with, I remember them and.
Speaker What if you had a dramatic change?
Speaker Yeah, probably had a fever, I don’t know, rheumatic fever and I well, you know, people didn’t think so much about drinking orange juice on our side of town. And I remember the first asparagus I ever tasted was on one of those plates she brought home from from her work at. And I probably didn’t eat properly as I was growing, you know, but they were very good to me. On the other hand, I lived with the family once, rather middle class and Georgia, uh. And they had children and I I was felt I felt rather like a little boy, an orphan child, and then but they had one member of the family, their aunt, who gave me books to read, and she was a teacher and she wouldn’t tell them if I was reading late at night by the light from the hall. And and she was good to me, whereas the people themselves were rather high and mighty, you know. But I had a taste of every kind of. Of household.
Speaker How did you get to Fort Hood?
Speaker Well, while I was living in Macon, Georgia, uh. There came a car with an automobile down the alley. There were a lot of alleys in those days.
Speaker We lived they lived in in Macon and in it was my Uncle Frank and two other people and my uncle was there. They fair with blue eyes and blonde hair. And the people, the few people that were out in the dust, you know, with me playing, thought that they had come a white man into the alley. And so we were staring at these people and he came up to me and he said, You don’t remember me, but I’m your Uncle Frank. And I remembered the name of my father’s brother. And he said, I’ve come to take you away with me to school. And of course, I was, you know, disbelieving and saying, well, what will my mother say? And he said, Your mother isn’t here, is she? And I said, no.
Speaker He said, well, I think she’d give permission because I am your father’s brother. And off I went with him and he they drove me to Fort Valley, Georgia, which isn’t too far from Macon. And he said, you’re going to live with me now and you’re going to go to school at this little Carnegie Endowed Grade School. And he said, no, I’m the president, I’m not president, but I’m the head of the faculty of across the road at Fort Valley High and Industrial School.
Speaker And it was a school supported by religious people, religious groups. And they taught farming and and cooking and and they were canning peaches, which is very, very big in Georgia. And it was an industrial school really for black people. And I lived with in the dormitory, the big people’s dormitory with his fiancee, who was a teacher also. And and I’d go across the road to school in the morning, but I and I loved it there because, well, my uncle was in charge and I was with so many of my own people and all from all over the country. And we walked a lot and there were Scuppernong grapes and and and persimmons growing. And it was like the tropics to me. And I still had memories of Harlem and New York. So that that was just wonderful to be in a place like Fort Valley. And I remembered one teacher I’d had there for years named Mrs. Walden, and she taught crafts and I made African baskets, you know, with corn, shucks and all that. And and I heard that the choir sang Good, Beautiful.
Speaker And I was a part of a unit of the first main thing I was. And I felt good. I always wanted to piece the family somewhere, you know, since they broke up my first one. And that’s why I left Fort Valley.
Speaker I was reading the first autobiography about the first time since we first left for the Valley of Romeo and Juliet.
Speaker You know, I don’t remember that too well. But I did remember one theatrical thing that I did with a group of the kids from our school. We did a version of some kind of romantic thing. I don’t know what it was called. There was a prince and there was there were people and and I had a part in it that I remember because I remember one the one song that I sang, Someday my parents will come, ba ba ba ba ba ba, something like that.
Speaker And maybe that’s what I wrote about. I don’t really remember too well.
Speaker What struck me about reading is that you just you weren’t in my play but you were just witnessing it.
Speaker Maybe I watched them. Do the big people do you do a. Herzfeld play, I got the idea, the idea I had always was what I thought about the stage was that I was in a cocoon, a nest. I was with relatives and I always was so hungry to to, you know, be back with my grandparents or be with my mother somewhere and relatives. And so the play looked protective. It looked like you were in a, you know, a nest with other people. And I guess I started liking that kind of show business.
Speaker Well, speaking of your grandpa. Yes. What was it like in Brooklyn? Tell me about your grandmother.
Speaker Oh, my grandmother and my grandfather came to New York from Nashville and from Atlanta, Georgia, and the last migration that came up from the south, who, along with people like the coachmen and bakers and and tailors and everything that came up from the south to the promised land. And I didn’t know about them at that at first, but I learned afterward they came up because when my grandmother had her last child before the last she saw that she I found an old letter of hers that she had written to my father. Telling why she had come up north. She said, I’ll never have raised another child in this place. My grandmother was a very privileged daughter of a free man, free black man who owned property in Atlanta and was very respected and raised his daughters, her sister, Lena, and she was called raise them to be ladies, you know, and they had everything but the the prejudice that they had from knowing that no matter how rich they were and how comfortable they were, they were nothing compared to the white people who saw them on the street or who owned some kind of store. They were passing by. They had all the disadvantages of being black in the south and but had a very beautiful life with their own people who had money. And that doesn’t mean that everybody did have certainly and they were privileged. But she wasn’t a very smart woman. And she graduated from Atlanta University when she was 16. She and her sisters and sister. And she wanted something better. She thought she’d get it. And the north, that used to be the paradise. And and my grandfather, she met him. His mother was an Indian and. And he was very, very fair also, but completely black, that is to say, he he chose to have put on his identity papers that he was black, though he was an Indian, actually. But there were many like that I hear in those days. And they came east and thought it would be better. And they found that. That was pretty rough here. My grandfather was. Relegated to jobs that he had been an editor of a paper and a poet and a teacher and principal of schools when he was coming up, well, here he got a job in the fire department as an inspector of combustibles, but he got around to all the fires and investigated arson tended places, but he wouldn’t get promoted. And white people who were not as knowledgeable as he was were given the jobs. The same old story, you know, and my grandmother visagie herself and social work completely. She was a suffragette and she worked with teenage unwed mothers and black boys who couldn’t get in to get a decent education. And her and her life was just all do it for my people, do it for my people, do it for my people. And consequently, I whenever I lived there with them, I had the advantage of knowing what was right. But I also knew what was wrong. And I, I, I never got. Hugs and kisses or or a relaxation of of affection or something, but I got taught what to do and what not to do and what to think of myself and what to think of what happened to me as a person.
Speaker And when I was taken away from them off and on, I clung to what I had heard them say, rather than the literal and the frightened and the the hard aches of my mother, because I realized that my mother was very unhappy. She wanted a fairytale. She wanted a life of glamour and the theater. And there was no way but for her to work except in the chitlin circuit, you know, as it was called. And she was a frustrated actress. And so I always felt sorry and I understood her her because she was single minded and it was very logical, unrealistic at that those times to want what she wanted. And she must have been. Very beautiful and very unhappy. I learned that I learned that during all the years about her.
Speaker That put you in somewhat of an uncomfortable position as a child because you felt all this pain of your mother’s. And it seems that a lot of your experiences led you to protect her and the other way around.
Speaker I was always protective of my mother because.
Speaker Not only my grandmother, but as I got older, but other people who were snide about her, perhaps. Oh, why doesn’t your mother do for you? And this, that and the other. And and my grandmother saying, I don’t want you to be like your mother. I don’t want you to be like your mother. So I was loyal to her and I fought with my grandmother about that. But my grandmother was just making me stronger. I realized that because that was her way, she’s not going to let me have an illogical thought and unrealistic attitude about life. She wanted it to be tough because she wanted me to be tough because she thought that my mother’s softness and desire to be beautiful and lovely on the stage was crazy, was silly, and she didn’t have any respect for it. But always for your mother, you feel something. This thing in you and I took up for my mother. I took up for my mother and.
Speaker And was fierce about that, but I think it gave me a lot of strength.
Speaker I think it did. Well, you learned a lot of seriousness, I had a lot of teachers.
Speaker When you went to school. Well, let me skip for tonight, I think what’s.
Speaker I want to ask you about that one unpleasant incident where you sort of began to get the message that you really had to be very good. You had to. You know, you had to make sure that you didn’t have anything to disturb you. Do you remember that lady who basically, when your mother was very sick, was cut off for a while?
Speaker My mother was for a while. My mother was ill.
Speaker And when she first took me to Florida, that’s right after I had my first GEMCO train ride. But anyway, she was very ill and I was. Having to be very quiet and not make us move to upset her because she was very nervous also, and there was a lady who was rather abusive to me and I. Had to be new, that I had to be very good, first of all, I didn’t want to disturb my mother and I wanted to be good because I didn’t like being messed about with.
Speaker And as an as I stayed there longer with them before I came back to Birmingham, Alabama, I think. But anyway, I had gotten it into my head that I had to be good.
Speaker I had to be very good, very careful not to offend whoever house I lived in, that I’d be very grateful for the food and do my best to keep out of people’s way.
Speaker And I think early on I began to have a sense of knowing that what I did would be reflected upon my mother, who had to leave me with these people. And I didn’t want her to be angry or unhappy. And I knew that if I was the objective, objectionable in any way whatsoever, they’d throw me out and I couldn’t be with my mother at certain times.
Speaker And that became a pattern for me, for a great deal of my life being.
Speaker I became very secretive, I became very suspicious of everyone. I became.
Speaker Unable to be my real self, which I suppose then was just being a kid, you know, and laughing and talking and and being obnoxious as. But I learned that very early because I stayed with many different sorts of people. And I guess that came over into my adult hood and.
Speaker I’m a little schizo, I think I’m probably two people.
Speaker I used to go back to live with my grandparents when when my mother would send me away from other people and I’d come up north and had to lose my Southern accent and and I’d come up north so I could get back with my friends over in Brooklyn. And I had one man, one, we were a bunch of girls and call the. Debutants or something, I don’t know, but I liked her very much. Her name was Ruth and she had an older brother and I had such a crush on him when I was I don’t know what age, but and I would go to P.S. 35.
Speaker And for my last year in grade school, I think maybe just before the last and we’d have I’d go to her house because she had a wonderful mother and her name was Ruth Johnson then.
Speaker And she had a mother who was beautiful and and so good to to us and to me. And we’d have Ruth and I would have club meetings with the rest of the girls and the group would go around to each other’s houses and we’d walk to school. And Brooklyn then was heaven.
Speaker It was a beautiful city and beautiful churches and beautiful trees. And you could walk four blocks to each other’s homes or get on the trolley car and go another with the best times I had.
Speaker And Ruth was always very down to earth type girl and and her aspirations were, I suppose. Can sensible, I thought to me, I guess I was always kind of giddy and dreamy and. Silly, and we go to the movies when we could. And that was in my my lifetime in Brooklyn.
Speaker Do you remember the slam books?
Speaker Yes, I think so. We used to write what we thought about evidentally kids have done that for many, many years.
Speaker I didn’t realize, but we wrote what we thought about things and boys and and who wore what and who didn’t wear what. I think I remember that. And her mother could cook to my my grandmother never cooked and and my granddaddy and I would when he’d get off of work and I’d meet him on outside the house and we’d walk to the local delicatessen and get our supper, you know, and my grandmother never touched upon her pan, but that was her raising. She had somebody to do it for her, but. It was nice in those times that I was there in Brooklyn and I used to go to St. Peter Clover’s church and we were nice set of. People, girls and guys, fellows, and that was to me life, real life, other than the kind of theatrical other side of my bringing up.
Speaker Telling me that you had a voice then we used to have make you sing.
Speaker Did they now? Well, I we all used to know the latest songs. I remember that. And I’d sing in Adelaide. Holbrooke could sing. That was all my other girlfriends. And but I didn’t think anything of it because everybody sang. We didn’t sing.
Speaker Folk music, we didn’t sing spirituals, we were not a very we were a kind of Episcopal Catholic group, didn’t know too much about Baptists, and I don’t say it from a sense of glee or happiness or anything, but I say it because we were all very uneducated to life outside the.
Speaker Our outgroups, they were all people, offsprings of people who were Catholic, Episcopal and.
Speaker We didn’t know much about the Baptist faith until I got older than.
Speaker How did you feel when you basically had to leave the group to go to the doctor?
Speaker Well, I cried, I cried and I never told them and her mother was very understanding.
Speaker Ruth’s mother. I cried. When I heard.
Speaker That I would go into the Cotton Club. I never thought it would happen, not because of me wanting it, but because it just had never gotten into my mind that I would go on the stage. And we all yeah, we swooned over the movies, the movies of the Time Warner Brothers musicals and everything and. But we had no the first hero I think we had was Cab Calloway, my group, I mean, and Cab was working at the Brooklyn Paramount and we cut school one afternoon, maybe two to three others, I don’t know. And we went to see Cab Calloway and, oh, you know, that was he was the most beautiful thing. We’d have the same and the famous man and that he was working at the Garden Club.
Speaker And the first show I went into and imagine my surprise is, was that exciting? Suddenly be working with your.
Speaker Well, I think it was probably in the first week I was hired and they were already in rehearsal for the show when I went up to the Cotton Club and. I was sitting there with some of the girls and he in Cab Calloway walked and I was really surprised and he said, Hey, Brooklyn, what are you doing here? And he remembered me from Brooklyn because he had done a benefit for the local one of the Brooklyn organizations. Some I don’t know. I don’t remember what it was for. But he came and we were usherette roofs and all the girls and me, we passed programs out and he remembered us from there and remembered me. And I was just taken aback. And of course, my mother was there at my rehearsals and every night from then on. So I was not allowed really. And in my heart, I have always got crushes on the musicians who were sitting in the bandstand. I didn’t pay attention to the leaders.
Speaker I like those horn blowers.
Speaker Oh, yeah, oh, give me three upstairs.
Speaker So how are you doing?
Speaker I mean, what does he do with those oh four oh oh oh was this is Laura.
Speaker Oh, she was she was the first Mrs. Laura Orlock was the first.
Speaker Well, one of the few people that was that treated me like a child, like a like a young person who was good to me and made me take my bath, made me keep clean, fed me.
Speaker She had the top floor of a brownstone and I lived with her and she got me a little tiny radio and, uh, and and she was like, I imagine a mother would be. And she was kind of Roly-Poly. And she she was she worked for old, old, older people in a retirement sort of home. And she was a widow. And my few months that I had with her what was wonderful, because she made me behave and made me stop biting my nails and made me be aware of that I should entertain the other girls. And because they always gave them food and everything when we go to club meetings. So she’d make me chicken salad and everything for my friends. And she made me practice on the piano and she was really wonderful to me. And she showed a beautiful gown for me to wear and a production on the stage we did to raise money for the Lincoln Follies that was called and.
Speaker I was sorry to leave her because when that was when my mother and my stepfather, my new stepfather, came back from Cuba where they had been living, and they took me away to the Bronx.
Speaker How did you come to live with my dad and my uncle Frank?
Speaker Had a fiance say that I lived within a dormitory in Fort Valley, Georgia, and I came to know Mrs. Rala because his fiance’s mother and father took me to her and asked if she could, you know, take on this kid and let me stop.
Speaker Yeah, because what I really want to get out, because we don’t know yet now that your grandmother died. Now. Well, that’s just it just in terms of the chronology, but that’s why, you know. Yes.
Speaker When my grandmother died. It was after about a year after my mother had come up from Cuba with my new stepfather and had taken me to live with them in the Bronx, my grandmother, meanwhile, was very ill and I’d call Ruth and she’d tell me how she was and. I got word from my Uncle Bert that my grandmother had died and a.
Speaker I was being moved away from Azraq and had my few little things packed up to go to the Bronx with my mother and.
Speaker I went within walking distance of Mrs. Relix house and my grandmother. And I walked over there. I have to back up because I have to tell you that my mother and my stepfather were stopping at this hotel and I knew that I had to leave Mrs. Frolich and be with them. Meanwhile, I was in touch with my uncle Berg and my grandmother, her house, that is. And so when they called me and told me.
Speaker I.
Speaker Told my mother that I had to go to my grandmother. It’s a time in my life I don’t really like to talk to talk about after all these years, but. I had to go and I walked and they came after me and in a taxi car and I was standing outside my grandmother’s house and my Uncle Burke was there trying to talk to me and I felt. Deeply about my grandmother’s death, because my grandmother was the.
Speaker The the the center, the core of me, because I made me Brooklyn and 189 Chauncey Street and P.S. 35 and Girls High School, I made that my life. That was my life. The other was something else. And my grandmother dying was no, I had nobody to say, are you are you know, and.
Speaker My my mother wouldn’t permit me to get into the funeral cars that were stationed there, my mother was on the sidewalk crying. I was on the bottom of the step crying. My father, my stepmother, my grandfather, my uncle Frank, they were all in these cars.
Speaker And I think that was the first time I just realized that my Santa had gone and we screamed at each other. I remember when I was 15 and 14, 15 and screamed at each other and she said terrible things. And my father was very stoic. Call me over, and she wouldn’t let me walk toward him. So he came over to me and he said, be brave. You know, your grandmother knows how you feel. And they all drove off and and left me down the street with my mother and my stepfather, who was standing back sort of the way and just took out a half me, you know.
Speaker Uh.
Speaker So then I went back up to the Bronx and then had it was very bad because my father had known my stepfather had no job because his English was very poor and my mother had no job and I was there and had to be fed. So that’s the way the Cotton Club evolved.
Speaker It was also the depression.
Speaker Oh, yes.
Speaker What was what did that need to be there?
Speaker Well, I was never any better off than anybody else in a depression. I think everybody felt something because I had no buttoned down family that I could turn to. Many of the people I was with were all in bad shape. Mrs. Frolich being a widow and very little income coming in. She was in bad shape. But and the people in Macon, Georgia, who kept me, they were in bad shape. But the people who were kind to me, it same never to be about not being fed because I was punished by people, by not giving them giving me food when I was bad or something. I didn’t take it the same way. The Depression, my grandmother and my grandfather were not very well off. My grandmother didn’t eat a lot and didn’t cook a lot. And my grandfather I delicatessen and I was never around people that made food. The situation in the South, they seem to have food. They grew food, I think.
Speaker But I was never with a very luxurious family and except the ones I lived with who were sort of middle-class. They were doctors and seemed to have little better food, better table and a lot of. For stage people that my mother left me with. They shared spareribs and rice when they are being, you know, I. I guess food didn’t bother me, but I was aware of depression as a way of life.
Speaker We didn’t have many things to wear. Didn’t think about that. Oh, that’s odd. I don’t know if my grandmother had books and I, I ate a book.
Speaker I understand that now you do devour books. Is that so?
Speaker Well, I guess it’s a long, long ago habit I picked up.
Speaker They’re moving forward. Yeah.
Speaker Mm hmm. One of them is, um. Coming out of this middle class environment, Brooklyn was all about you dancing, you talk about that because I think this is why I was upset when I went into the car and everybody that I had left in Brooklyn, of course, was horrified.
Speaker And a few in New York, too.
Speaker I remember the the black press.
Speaker Was they were a little angry and. My people, most of them over in Brooklyn that I knew had always had a view, not always, but it seems that there had been a view of black people on the stage.
Speaker Uh. As sort of.
Speaker Second class people, but that’s it’s not hard to to to realize that all they had seen of black shows was the kind of things that the establishment made it up here. I mean, we worked for, um, the South and they worked on the South on tent shows or wherever they could and ad. Attitudes, our people had to sit in the top galleries to see a show and we believe they were a man’s chosen and artificial people or else aping the white shows and small stock companies, there was not.
Speaker And there were there were singers who were respected who went around the country singing, but there were no dignified.
Speaker They thought.
Speaker People to be admired on the black stage, because that’s what we were we were second rate looked upon, looked down on by church goers and intellectuals and but not recognizing artistry, not saying that we we were artists. Those girls up in the Cotton Club were artists, but they had no other place to work and they had to work hard and be at the mercy of whatever their bosses said or did. And there was no respect for black theatre for so long. And black actors, yes, there was Bert Williams of Great Star, and my grandfather knew about him and admired him, but he was an a white show and there was.
Speaker But people like Bessie Smith, who was out on the road with black shows and and then before Ethel Waters, we rather looked down upon as artistic people so that my folks over in Brooklyn said, well, that’s terrible. She just can’t be with those second rate people and we’re Brooklynites and she shouldn’t be. And not knowing that I had to, you know, feed a couple of people and knowing that I’m not known and realizing that I needed a job because they’re their households were not rich, but they were reasonably able to just go and work hard on a job and come home and have a house and family and be wonderful people. But apart from show folk, you know, a. So that I worked for a while, a year, probably until then, till they realized that I wasn’t going to go to the dogs, you know.
Speaker Did you internalize any of those feeling yourself that maybe what you were doing wasn’t quite respectable, wasn’t quite as good, good enough?
Speaker No, because I didn’t like my stepfather and he couldn’t be a supporter. And I was and I had at least to say I didn’t say it, I didn’t dare say it. But I could say to my mother, if I didn’t have this job, we wouldn’t eat. I couldn’t we couldn’t pay the rent. And that times were very hard. Yes, it was a depression. And we did get turkeys from the club owners, you know, who passed out free turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Speaker And I know I was with other girls who didn’t have a good either. And some had babies and they had been in that business a while and they knew what they couldn’t do without this club. And many who were just marvelous didn’t have any place to work up there. But that the Cotton Club and they they they respected it so that I had two sides.
Speaker I could hear my one side, my family saying, oh, that awful. And I could say on the other side, the girls that I worked with who were good to me, who sang, yes, good. We got this job, you know.
Speaker It was. Two sides to every story.
Speaker And you also wrote about that, that you were really also protected, too.
Speaker Oh, yeah. Yeah, my I was very protected all the while I was in Harlem, my father. I loved my father terribly and I loved him all the more because he had been the one who was good to my grandmother. He wasn’t there often. He got meet me, but he sent my grandmother on a grand tour of Europe and he sent her sent me clothes and he sent her money because my grandfather was not able to be at his best. And so even though I didn’t see him very much, I adored him. I had pictures of him too. And my father was a gangster. I mean, not with a gun. So but he was a no banker. He was a no brainer to begin with. He he he worked with other black men like him who would rather. You know, they didn’t have a chance with the establishment, and so they took advantage of it and they worked for. People who organized and he. He and his buddy worked for people of Dutch Schultz’s group, and and I was never ashamed of my father because to me he was like a cowboy.
Speaker He was daring and and and all all my life that I was around him, he was wonderful because he was from the street and he had friends then all up in Harlem. And they somehow knew tribal drums that I was there. I was Terry’s daughter. I was in the Cotton Club. I was virtuousness, whatever that means, and that he was my father. And I’d be walking along the street sometime. And they people guys would pass me and they’d say, hi, has has Teddy’s daughter. Yeah. I was never alone up there and I was never bothered by anything. My father’s influence was they liked him. He was an honest man. He kept his word, but he taught me and he was a hero to me. And I’ve never had any trouble with anybody. And I was, you know, so-called jailbait in those days.
Speaker I just I just want to yeah, in terms of our chronology, just to get a sense of there came a point at which your situation with your mother, your stepfather, became intolerable. And I think it may have come to a head while you were with normal. Yes.
Speaker I went on the road with Noble Thistle’s Arkestra, and this Sissel had a very reputable aura. He had been very famous in the First World War, he and his partner, and they gave me this job with them. And Sissel was very determined that I would never be like the stereotype type. The stereotyped person that other people had put on show people, hey, he was determined that I was not going to be like the people who were pictured as hot, sexy, colorful ladies, you know? And he my training began began sort of they’re making me a very lady like Lena Horne and.
Speaker As opposed to my dancing in the chorus of the Cotton Club, and it was very it was rather like a very fuddy duddies schoolmaster, I imagine, and. He he didn’t want me to be like he thought.
Speaker Other other people had made black women saying, all of us very hot, very sexy. So he also taught me the part deportment on stage, how to walk on stage gracefully, how to sell whatever I was doing. And it was fine for a while. But my mother and my stepfather were with me. And my stepfather, unfortunately, had a very. Bad view of black people, and because I traveled in which we traveled in the bus with the whole orchestra and many great musicians and Mr. Cicely’s orchestra, we traveled with them and they we they had to find places where they could stay. There were no hotels at rooming houses, a few. And they mostly through the years that they had been with Sissel, had found families that they could move in with during the times we were there in their cities. And but my stepfather resented it terribly. He didn’t understand black man. And so I was. I just got sick of hearing him.
Speaker Disrespectful of the men I was working with. And.
Speaker I just saw something in me rebelled against him, against it, and I’ll fight for that sort of thing. I don’t know why black people have to. Why do these men put up with it? Why don’t they fight? And why don’t they? Well, he was a revolutionary from Cuba. I know nothing about that. And he obviously knew nothing about our problems. And it drove me away from them and in my heart and turned me toward something I had to get away from them.
Speaker And that’s when I had to leave them.
Speaker And I got married. I ran away and got married, woefully unprepared to be a wife. But it was better than not fighting every minute from my step father and mother.
Speaker Did you take a break from your career at that point you got married?
Speaker No, I thought I had I when I got married, I thought, that’s the end. I don’t have to be in showbusiness. My mother doesn’t have to worry about me going to bed with somebody. My and my stepfather will not be with me. I am going to run away and and get away from this. And I was met this young man, and it might have been any other young man except that he lived in Pittsburgh. And that’s where my father lived. And I met him with my father. And you see, I really wanted to marry my father. So I got caught up in this whole situation and my father couldn’t marry me, of course, but I was happy being around him and he was happy with having me there and. I was I had always believed that you had to marry the person. So I got married and didn’t know how to boil water. I could be attractive and dance around on stage, but I didn’t know what to do in that kitchen.
Speaker But I learned.
Speaker And there are so many tales of how good you are in the kitchen. Where did you get it from?
Speaker Well, I learned to cook some things pretty, mostly because I read so much and I had recipes from days gone by, but also everywhere I lived with different people that I lived with earlier on. I had watched them, you know, watch what they did and watch you take a stand off a pot by putting a piece of lemon and boiling it and all those good things you should know. You know, and I when I began to travel, I just picked up and then my father took me to have my first lobster. And I learned like I already liked it. And my father was there in Pittsburgh. And so he took me to different of the Italian people that he ran numbers with. And and I went to good restaurants that took black people in. And I had good food.
Speaker Well, you were running away from show business, but show show is about to let you go. That’s when you got the call to do the dishes stops.
Speaker We talk just briefly about it in the last interview. I just want to go to.
Speaker That was when when I was in Pittsburgh and had my baby, my first baby, I got a call from.
Speaker Someone who knew me in New York, I can’t remember now, possibly Clarence Robinson, but he had talked to this white man named Come to you, a man who was an agent. Evidently, they had been agents a long while back. He was an old man, I think, elderly. And they put him on the phone and he said, must have been Clarence. He said, we’re going to make a movie with Ralph Cooper and would you come and do it? And I said, well, no, I don’t know anything about the movies anyway. Plus, I just had a baby and and my husband probably won’t even think of it. And my husband must have said yes. And Gail, I think, was only two months old. And I had a friend, a wonderful family there in Pittsburgh. I can’t remember her name at this minute, but she sat stayed with Gail and I went out to California first time I ever got on an airplane. And I wasn’t afraid then. But anyway, I got on this airplane and went out there and a wonderful woman named Lillian. Oh, she played the part of Gildersleeve, she was Berdy, Lillian Randolph, Randolph, she had me and I stayed at her house.
Speaker She was another person very nice to me, like Harry MacDaniels.
Speaker And I was crying every night because I didn’t want to be away from Gail. And when I went out there, they were surprised because I was fat. I had just had a baby and I could sing a little bit of follow too.
Speaker And they played, you know, lovely little songs, I think, because I haven’t seen it. And so anyway, they they said, well, what? We’re going to have to let the dress out. And they said, well, we’ve got a tweezer eyebrows and and do all this. And I’d cry even harder. And somehow I got through that movie and I saw a lot of people that I eventually became friends with. And I think I was terrible probably in it in the movie. And and I heard Ralph tell the people while she used to be thin, I mean, you know, and I had all this puppy fat plus baby fat all over me. And I don’t really like to think too much about that, but my husband had been happy for me to be not happy. But he said he should go and we could use that money because he had problems, too, being a young college black man who couldn’t get arrested. And so.
Speaker That was my thing back in show business, and the next time I want to be in LA Leslie Blackbird’s, well, when you were right, there also was no problem with the money the producers had raised the money.
Speaker Yeah, well, you know, it was a little Bobcat company, I guess. Yeah. I hear it’s released and released. They show it, you know, I don’t know. But I think I got a little money, not as much as well. It wasn’t much. You know, I would have gone for two hundred dollars, you know, for all the time it took us. And Lilyan was very good to me and it rained all the time. I hated California. I mean, I hated California.
Speaker All right, moving forward, we spoke a bit about Cafe Society in the last interview, and I just want to ask you very specifically about Barney Josephson and.
Speaker When I went back to New York and got a job at Cafe Society when I was in New York and got a job at Cafe Society, I was lucky, first of all, because I was with Teddy Wilson’s orchestra and I was with, for the first time, black and white people together in a cabaret.
Speaker And the people that worked there were interesting to me because they were all races. And they were in the audience was not segregated, and I saw famous people there and they had famous black people working for them, Pearl Reynolds and Billie Holiday and Albert Ammons and P. Johnson. Kenneth Spencer.
Speaker Art Tatum. Uh.
Speaker But a great piano duo played boogie woogie all the time. There were famous people working there and it was unlike any group of theatrical people I’d been around since I’d left the Cotton Club. And Barney himself was a teacher, too, in that position and. Are very, I think, honest man. He know a lot about my people and I liked it if I talked to a white person that knew about black history, black people and their their thoughts about that and about them.
Speaker And he was the one who introduced me to Paul Robeson and he introduced me to Walter White, who was president of the NAACP, and he introduced me to Duke Ellington and and and Billy Strayhorn. And I met Billy on my own. But he introduced me to Langston Hughes and people like that of my own people.
Speaker And he knew a lot about us.
Speaker And so he came at a time when I had begun to want to know what my people were like, what they didn’t like, what they did like and what how are they are you know, everybody goes through, I’m sure, time they did in my day when they wanted to know more because the other side had made me so confused. About the way they were told me that I might have sort of fallen into a trap believing that I was not what I was, what I am, and I was very young and uneducated, and he came along and introduced me to wonderful people. Home I learned a lot from, I learned more, I learned to be more proud than I was, not about me myself, but what I am and the people that worked there were like me and I had a big education there from enlightened white people as well as black people.
Speaker And while you were there in New York at the Cafe Society, you had just the best it seems the best circle of musical friends.
Speaker That’s where and when I was in cafe societies where I.
Speaker Was able to make choices. I I just seem to gravitate toward the music, toward the musicians. I learned a lot from them, especially Teddy Jayce, her Daisy Higginbotham a.
Speaker John Hammond was around there. He was a great entrepreneur of what he called basic blackness. I was I didn’t have it, but he said, but I look good, you know? So it was amazing to hear me try to sing a blues, which I didn’t do well. So I didn’t do them. But and I had all types of people. But I went to the music. I don’t know what I guess it was just there. And the best people in the world were in a radius of Cafe Society, Kelly Stables, Kev’s society uptown. They were just solid. And Fifty Second Street was all the great jazz places and everywhere surrounded by and Nat Cole and his children. And I was surrounded by brilliant musicians and actors and dancers.
Speaker And I wouldn’t give them I wouldn’t give five, fifteen million dollars if I had to give up that, that I had. It was, it was wonderful. It was another family cafe society. I went every night. Now I’m going home. Now, you know.
Speaker I lived in the YWCA in Harlem and I worked at Cafe Society. Until I moved to Brooklyn, and that’s another story.
Speaker When you went to while you were at the Cafe Society, you got a call from Felix Young about coming out to California. Yeah. Could you tell me what happened?
Speaker I got a call from California. No, it was gum called me who said the guy’s going to call you name Felix. Yeah. And talk to him about going to California. I know. But anyway, they called and said, come out and do a show with Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, Katherine Dunham, and you, incidentally, at this big cafe were going to Mocambo in California. And I said no. But meanwhile, Barnea, because I had got to I said, they want me to come to California and Bonnie didn’t want me to go.
Speaker Tedi’s didn’t want me to go. But two of the other musicians said Yes, baozi also my darling. So anyway, I grieved and said, Oh and what am I going to do in California? And I may be able to get my children with me now. And I want to move to Brooklyn and have the house there for the house I was born in and be with my family. And I’ve got this nice job at Cafe Society. Well, I was torn between all those people and my father called him and I had to go to California to take this job. And they finally talked me into it. And I got my cousin, who was from Chicago, to come and be and be able to take care of Gayle for me. And we flew out to California. I had both children with me at that time and I. Got to California and for eight or nine months had no work because they paid the rent for me, Felix Young rented this apartment and the war scarers had come along. And California seemed to be very kind of nervous about it because they’re right there on the Pacific from hell. And you couldn’t get materials, building materials, because they were, I guess, knew that in the future they’d have to get materials for war and they couldn’t make the stage big enough and the club make the alterations they wanted so that I sat there for months at the time waiting for them to get open. And meanwhile, Roosevelt had. And no, he didn’t die, but he announced the war and then soon after. I mean, everything happened to make this a bad time for me in California, we couldn’t open at this big cabaret. Ethel Waters had other dates to go to. Duke Ellington had dates. Katherine Dunham opened. And I was on the bill with her in a little place called The Little Truck. And it was so small that had the skirts of her dancers would get in people’s soup and plates around the room. And I was safe because I didn’t need a microphone. I just stood on the corner of the stage and did what I had to do. And it was a great opening for me, but very uncomfortable for Catherine on account of space. And but while she was there, while they were there, my best friends were the Dunham Group because I didn’t like being called Hollywood. And that’s where some people from MGM saw me working.
Speaker Roger Ailes, Roger even saw me working at the little track, and he came one night and he came back to what the backstage was and said, I want you to come out to MGM. I want you to sing for some people. And I liked him because he had this very lovely Southern accent. And I didn’t usually like the sound of it, but I liked him. And I said, well, okay, I’ll come out. But meanwhile, he had spoken to my agent, Mr. Gumm, who had sold me to another agency called.
Speaker I can’t remember this time, very famous agency, and so the percentage of me was also meted out to a lot of people, but anyway, they took me out to MGM and they had never heard of me or anything. But Roger told them to bring me out there and I didn’t think nothing about it. And I sang for him and he had some people in the office with him. And then they took me to the parade. And by the time I wound up that afternoon, I had been. Then taken to Elby, mayor, and.
Speaker The rest is some strange history, the.
Speaker Well, he was the head of they were Arthur Freed was a kind of wonderful man. He was head of what was called a freight, the freight unit.
Speaker There were units. Pasternack had a unit and and other directors. Some of the worth of serious pictures were there. And it was a caste system, you know, and also was a musician. And he liked music and he was making the musicals out there.
Speaker And I have to cut because I have to call.
Speaker Arthur had musicians that worked most mainly for him in his unit and Kate Thompson was in his unit, Lenny Haden, whom I eventually married, was in his unit.
Speaker Johnny Green worked for him, fine musician and conductor. And I don’t know a couple of other very famous people. Andre Previn sort of father worked for him and then his son, Andre. And so it was a good unit full of fine musicians. And I asked them to get a brother named Fillmore to come and play rehearsal piano with me finally when I was hired. But I didn’t think anything about it that first day. And I went back to my job and they said the next day when they sent me out there, these agents, they said they want to hire you. And you know for what? And they said, well, we like the way you sing and and we we want to do we have this band director named Vincent Minnelli and we want him to do a piece of property he has called Cabin in the Sky. I said, oh, I saw that in New York with Miss Waters and Katherine Dunham Stonham. And they said, yes, and we’re going to make that picture.
Speaker And so I went and called my father and told him what had happened. And he said, are you sure they’re not gonna put you in a Tarzan picture? And I said, I don’t think so. But I mean, I don’t want to be in the movies because all the movies that scene didn’t make me that happy. And I was happier at Cafe Society. So my father came, flew out to California and went the next day with me to Mr. Mayor and went to Mr. Frade first. Mr. Fred said, well, Mr. Mayor. So we went to Mr. Mayor’s office and my father gave him the drawings, you know, said, well, you know, we’re not really happy about black people in the movies and I don’t want it to be in the movies.
Speaker And so by the time he got through telling Mr. Mayor how happy my father himself, he could make me like, but they took me so and didn’t know what to do with me then because I didn’t have anything about anything against Tarzan pictures or being working for people in the movies or maids and all. But we had never seen anybody like a person be in the movies, you know, so I thought it was very funny when I think about it, but I guess it wasn’t.
Speaker Well, I remember when you I remember when you when I sat in on that little interview that you did with Turner and you said, well, gee, I wouldn’t mind being a maid. And you gave this outline exactly the kind of man you wanted to be. I wondered if you can tell me.
Speaker I don’t even remember what I said because that was so long ago, you know, and to find them having made be a part of the speaking of this, this is entertainment, I doubt I must have said. And she wore beautiful clothes and didn’t know how to cook and didn’t know how to baby sit and something ridiculous. But I guess they kept it in.
Speaker You know, actually what I’m referring to was a recent thing that they did with you just back in December, I think it was. Yeah. And you said something to the effect of yeah, I would have loved to have been the kind of boys in the family.
Speaker Oh yeah. That kind of maid. I always wonder when they finally said you got to be in the movies.
Speaker You know, I said if I could have a part where I am the head cook in this great old Southern household. And I said, and secretly, if any of them were mean to me, I’d have these potions that I made in the soup, in their gumbo, in their jambalaya, and anything that poisoned slowly all the members of the family, as it were, they never made that kind of picture.
Speaker But that I would have loved you.
Speaker First, your screen test at MGM, they had they actually had burnt cork that they put on you while I was in MGM in the beginning, they really didn’t know what to do with me and they didn’t know what to make of me since they had heard. I didn’t want to be. Any other race except my own, they began to test me for working with. Other black people in the film say they were thinking of Cabin in the Sky at first, I think, and they they wanted to, since they had decided that the leading man I was working with would be Rochester, who was a famous star artist. Anderson, they began to try to get a makeup to make me more. Coloured looking to with with the protests and other people standing in for other protesters parts, they didn’t know that I did.
Speaker They didn’t let themselves know that black people, all shades of the rainbow, you know, so they started putting makeup that they called Negro or they didn’t say black people that were colored or African and. I began to disappear, you know, the nose didn’t stand out on the lips were not there, and I didn’t know it was just the wrong color for me. And so they tried other things and other colors. So they finally said. They had signed me to a seven year contract and they said this seven years, we get to find something to do with this girl. They must have said that. And so, Jack, Don, you’ve got to invent a makeup for her. And they tested all kinds of shades on me. And they finally made one that he called Light Egyptian. And that was the makeup that I wore whenever I was in one of their movies. But meanwhile, Hedy Lamarr wore to be Tom DeLay and the movie and other people who were playing native people and all started wearing white Egyptian. And I I don’t know. I was working once at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and a group of good looking young people had come in to see. And when I passed by their table, they said, Oh, Mison, we’re so happy to see you, because MGM sent us a free lot of free makeup when we said that we were opening this little theater company and it was all light Egyptian. And we know now what you know about the color. And I laughed because they didn’t know what would happen with that light Egyptian. It became a very hot number. So it was pretty silly. But I didn’t know enough to get on my uppers and say, look, we’re all colors. Take it or leave it.
Speaker Well, before before you actually did your first movie, you had a whole lot of trepidation about actually doing this Hollywood thing. Mm hmm.
Speaker Could you tell me about going back to New York in the Christmas holiday, basically spent in New York with Count Basie?
Speaker Oh, when I was being looked over and looked at and decided upon to do in the movies, I. I always had a. I always ached for New York. And I I took I went and took my pride in my hands and asked to have this Christmas week off the first Christmas out there at MGM, and if they had nothing for me to do, could I have that week to go home to New York?
Speaker And.
Speaker I went to New York on the train.
Speaker And. I came in.
Speaker One, the night that I came in, it was two days before. New Year’s was the day before New Year’s. I went in the cab, took my bag to the Theresa Hotel.
Speaker I came back and went to Birdland, and I I knew I would find whoever was playing there, plus baozi plus Billy Eckstine plus. Any any band leader or anybody else, because we all in those years went there and. I had on my first mink coat that I was paying down on.
Speaker And I went downstairs into the club and there they are serving yelled and I went over to the bar and we said, What are you doing here? Come on, open up the drinks. There’s a lot of people at the bar are not seated on that side. And I began on my first of the many champagnes I had that night. Charlie Barnett was there. I had worked with him, all the great people in the world and.
Speaker By the time we left there, I was high. I was with Alex that I was with.
Speaker Charlie, for a while, I was with baozi enough and I forget who else was, but we went walking down the middle of Broadway. It was cold and the clothes were flying in the breeze and mank and everything. And I’m crying. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to because we had naturally talked about the movie The Things Hollywood, I’m unhappy and miserable. Why can’t I be here with you?
Speaker And that’s when Bassie. We stopped in the middle of the street and he said, you have to go back. He said. There’s no one out there yet. Like you, he said, we want to be in the movies, too, you have to go back because you’ve got to make it possible for others of us to go out there. And it was he was very old fashioned about the whole thing, but he he’s.
Speaker Brought to life and me, this kind of sparked it wasn’t always happy, but it was that I must be representative of people and I’m so glad that it is over now. But he made me realize that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t like it and I wasn’t happy. But I had been given the job, so I had to do it.
Speaker And I better be good in it because we always have to be representative. And that’s a hard row to hoe, you know. But he made me go back. I got on the train next night and on 20th century and change and went on from Chicago to L.A.. And that’s when I went to see Jump for Joy met Billy Strayhorn.
Speaker You needed to meet him at that time. I certainly did.
Speaker How was your first?
Speaker I sang a number and my first movie, Panama, had I met and saw them, she was very nice lady. She I think she was a star, but I don’t remember. It was I wasn’t in the picture, but I just did this one song and then sent directed me and I liked him from the very first because I had met him the night I went to see Cabin in the Sky. I think my father took me to see it. The night I went to see it, he was there. Uh, Vincent Minnelli with another producer, Dwight. No, I can’t remember his name now, famous man and I met Vincent then and then when I went there that first day in California, he was there in the room while I was talking to Fred and all these people.
Speaker And he said, I’m so glad you’re going to be because we’re going to make a cabin in the sky and you’re going to be in it. It took another year or so before they made it, but. That was when. Cut. I’m sorry, what was I talking about then was Panama, Haiti, and I’m sorry if you could just repeat the first movie that I was in at MGM was called Panama Haiti. And it was the first time that Vincent directed anything out there. And then the next little piece of the I forget the name of the picture. I sang something in with the Nicholas Brothers. And Vincent directed that segment of that picture. And we had become friends by then.
Speaker And he was marvelous. The most beautiful taste, most beautiful imagination. And he was one of my few friends because he was from New York also.
Speaker And I would I would see Gene Kelly and his wife and their friends. And they were New York people. So that I was comfortable with them.
Speaker Tell me about the cabin in the Sky experience.
Speaker What was it like our cabin in the Sky was wonderful and we have this great star and Ethel Waters was the star of it. And I was certainly nervous to be working with her. And fortunately, Vincent knew how I felt and. He told me how to play in the scenes with her, which I was very grateful for, because it saved them time, the crew and everybody else, and and helped me, he he he taught me how to underplay everything I said in a very kittenish attitude, which played very well against her strength and her.
Speaker Her thing, which is a strong black woman, you know, and. We all I’m sure, as I’ve thought about it in later years, have a way of protection, our survival. We have a way that we. Protect ourselves and to protect me from feeling insecure, certainly with a great actress, like she wasn’t a great singer like she was, he knew the way to direct me so that my pride wasn’t hurt too badly and my insecurity didn’t show because I was very new at all. That acting, that is, I just been singing. So he helped me very much in that and. The only other bad thing that happened and the picture was that I broke my ankle dancing in this one, no supposed to be with Rochester, and I did the last part in a cast, the whole part of the movie and. It was an experience Duke came out by then with his orchestra. They came back and forth and that’s while I was there when I made stormy weather and all the other great people in the world that I knew. So but that experience was helpful to me.
Speaker And so so talk to you, I mean, and I know that everybody and his mother, father, sister and brother has asked you about this, but I have to ask you about that. They want us to because there was. What could have been a nasty situation that took place with Ethel because she felt that so much attention was being given to you. Could you just tell me about what happened when the cast, the stagehands came over? We’re paying so much attention to you because your head hurt your leg.
Speaker Well, you know, I had been I had a taste of a star people when I worked with Charlie Barnett, we worked at the Paramount Theater and Dinah Shore was the star.
Speaker And she sent word that that girl that’s with Charlie is not the same certain things and cut what she does.
Speaker And and I began to realize what. Leading ladies, all stars, man or woman, man or woman, do to protect their thing now. So it wasn’t new to me that people might have thought that that I’d be uncomfortable with Ethel, but to see. I knew what she’d gone through. I mean, when I sat back and think of the joints that she had to work in and the audience before she was the big star on Broadway, she went through hell to be alive and be on the stage. And I just had a taste of it. I mean, I had already begun to be aware of manipulation from both sides so that I was nervous, of course, and and and really not prepared to feel secure with her. But the crew that I had worked with in Panama had in the other picture with the name of the crew had taken to me now. That was manipulation, too, because they could have made it difficult for her to be friendly to me or be anything because they were sort of one sided. Now, I don’t know what their argument with her had been, but it was a kind of divide and separate that was going on and. I couldn’t let it happen because I had too far to go and she had already been there, so the crew did make a lot of me and then they made it comfortable that the cast could be hidden and they lit it so that I’d be fine and. I know how she felt. I know now how she felt. I know, you know, if I had a big lady on the same stage with me, I’d be insecure.
Speaker I’d make her life miserable, probably.
Speaker But I think I learned psychologically so much about myself and how myself, the other linnehan that I was aware. And so I didn’t let them go too far. And fortunately, I only had that one day whether the rest of the scene was a wreck, I think collapsing the building. But that was an experience, uh. Miss Dunham, I worked with her in stormy weather, but she was Miss Dunham, we all had a great thing about her.
Speaker You know, dancers and musicians are my.
Speaker Life, I think so that and she was. She was so aloof sometimes that you didn’t even she didn’t make you uncomfortable stonham, and it was so beautiful to see her move and work, you know, and she had done so much for so many kids and her dad’s company, so.
Speaker One of the things that the thing that I guess I would say the blow up that happened, I thought sort of also highlighted something else that was happening among the other black actors in Hollywood at the time, because it was very difficult for you to be there. They were afraid.
Speaker Well, actually, Tony, while I was in Hollywood, I sort of had the one uncomfortable thing I had among the film was the attitude of the black actors while I was there.
Speaker I don’t know why it was such a big thing that they had signed me for seven years, but that meant every time I did something wrong, they put me on. But they had there was a whole group of them, sort of like a unit of people who’d worked on all the Tarzan pictures, had worked with the stars, had been, you know, in the picture. There was no Nanami McKinney there at that time who had worked, but had not been signed for a picture out there. So this was I was sort of the first like again.
Speaker And they had rented me this house Felix Young had in Hollywood on Hawthorne Avenue. And I moved on up the street on Highland Avenue and a bigger house because I had signed at Metro and I could afford these two little bungalows. And my babies kids were there and my cousin, but they lived on another side of town. And every time I got the chance, I went over there to be with them because I wasn’t with any of the white stars of actors and. There were those of my people who felt that.
Speaker I might have made it impossible for them to make more pictures like that or for them to be chosen to work, and and that was a very unnerving to me at first because I had gone out there and stayed out there for the NAACP and the Urban League and this that and the other organization. And now they were keeping me from friends I might have made. And at that time they had a wonderful little star. She named Dorothy Dandridge, and they arranged it so I could meet her and talk with her and found her as unhappy in her situation. And she had been in a long time. And as unhappy as I was and I found that my being given this great job didn’t make me and didn’t make me any kind of happier circumstance because I was not allowed to be with girls that had been in the Cotton Club out there and was.
Speaker Billy Strayhorn came along at the very first moment because he became my.
Speaker Fran, to to be with me on my other side. The Lena Horne that I am, you know, and because I would have been miserable if that had gone on much longer, they had meetings about it, they called me up.
Speaker I had to appear in front of them. It was a rough time for everybody. I got through it somehow because I always knew I could go back to Cafe Society.
Speaker How did the situation resolve itself to the actors finally, just keep getting when they saw that I wasn’t there a bigger parts than they were and that it was not a great thing? I think the organizations felt I should have a better should have had a better attitude about it because I was. The means of certain things happening, but the actors finally got easy because I was always with my own people when Billy would take me and I’d be there and I made friends who understood and people like Harry MacDaniels, who understood and who told me she wore I told you she wore so many hats, won the bandana for the movies and other hats for her.
Speaker And I saw that my situation was just another little piece of the whole picture. I wasn’t going to be going to be just like my father thought you. They’re going to give you this one part. And you. That’s it. And he was telling the truth. That’s what happened and they weren’t any better off either. And they stopped making the Tarzan pictures eventually and. I stopped being tested for a movie that they were going to put Ethel Waters in, and when I heard that I, you know, went off, but. It all worked out. And then 10 years later came Sidney Poitier.
Speaker I’m sorry.
Speaker Speaking about it all worked out, you went to two parties where people were talking about how important it was to have a heart. And your friends were writing things for you. Could you tell me about that, about how you heard that you knew that a part was the key thing and that you had friends, actually, who wrote things for you?
Speaker Well, I told you that I had this dream about being this great chef and this this household I myself could see on their roster of movies they were going to make that year.
Speaker And the next year would certainly not hold anything for me and. I talked to Kathryn Grayson once.
Speaker She was kind of sensitive and she knew I was working on this part in the picture. They made words and music. They had a picture in there and had a little piece of showboat in it. And I was to be Julie. And I was in that one scene where I sang where when I think I don’t know what I sang just might go back.
Speaker I think it was Ziegfeld Follies with the second picture made.
Speaker Ziegfeld Follies is the one where, you know, I’m sorry, it’s still the clouds.
Speaker The clouds are over. Yes.
Speaker You go back and say that when I was put in till the clouds roll by, I was playing the part of Julie in the segment they did about Showboat. And Katherine Dunham was playing Julie. And she turned out to be a very sensitive girl, I think, in many ways. And she said, we talked about this. She said, well, they just I make a lot of pictures.
Speaker What I’m trying to think whether they had had ruled out my doing Julie on Broadway, Mr. Curran himself, and asked if they could borrow me from MGM to do the show.
Speaker And they were angry with me at MGM because, you know, so that when they said, you’re going to do this little piece of showboat and I think I must have heard the punishment. I heard about what happened after I made this scene, Catherine. Perhaps I found her talking to Kathryn Grayson, a very, very sweet and kind of. Her knowing a little about me.
Speaker I have to confess, I must have been told by MGM that they were going to let me go and do Showboat on Broadway. So they put me in this scene with Katherine Dunham and we both played I played Julie. She played Magnolia and.
Speaker I in the course of our talking to each other while the cameras were setting up and changing lights and certainly certain it came out that I had so wanted to do that part.
Speaker I’m sorry. I’m talking too much. I won’t come up. I hate this cough. Just old age, I guess.
Speaker Anyway, again, I said down all right. When I was working with Kathryn Grayson at MGM in a picture called Words and Music, I think till the cloud, till the clouds roll by, I get confused. And she and I started talking and I wasn’t in the habit of talking to all the stars out there because I didn’t know them. But she was nice. She understood when I told her how unhappy I was at not getting that part because it would have taken me out of the studio onto Broadway and in New York where I would be happy. And she told me some of the things that she felt she had had to sing, song she was crazy about and work with people she wasn’t crazy about. We both sounded like the same people on the same track. So it wasn’t just me that was miserable, but I liked her ever since that. And she has called me a couple of times.
Speaker I think she lives down somewhere in Florida, Texas or someplace, and she’s still the kind of enlightened, nice woman that I knew. So we both did the same from Schobel. And I don’t know whether she sang Showboat in another movie. Maybe she did a hoax. You did anyway.
Speaker Could you tell me about the motion picture called basically was the rationale for not giving reports in MGM, they used the fact that certain of their Southern exhibitors and theaters were prejudiced.
Speaker So that that was why I always had to just play a singer in the scene, but not out of the picture. I know some of that was true because I knew that from reading the Army papers of people I know and the camps that were Chuka Fort Lee that I went around to, they they said that to me. And I believe most of it was true. On the other hand, when I got off a kelkar with some guys in the army in the forties, you couldn’t really travel that comfortably. And the white woman was standing there. She was the station little hamburger joint. And she didn’t sell the gas, didn’t go to to her. They had no uniforms at all between camps. But when I went to stand with the guys and said, well, to hell with it, we won’t eat. She came over to me and she said, Are you Lena on? You wouldn’t have pictures till the clouds are about my heroism. And she said, Would you give me give me your autograph? And I said, Well, then can we buy some sandwiches? She said, Well, no, it’s not. We can’t afford to sell to anyway. Those little tiny things sort of have happened to me in many places, but so has it happened to everybody? You know, I don’t think anything’s changed very much.
Speaker Please don’t say I said that if it’s bad.
Speaker One of the things and it’s everything you say sparks something else. And I want to go in a thousand different directions, though, because the crew’s going to get there. OK, well, nothing. Yes.
Speaker Tell me about this irate phone call you were calling to collect because you had just had this horrible experience with your soldiers were seated behind the black the white prisoners of war?
Speaker Well, I had I since they I had started doing USO shows, not with USO proper, but me going around, I had wound up and I think it was Kansas. What was the name of that camp and that Fort Lee? It might have been for labor. It was another camp in Little Rock, Little Rock out outside Little Rock, Arkansas. And I had been ticked off quite a lot and gone from camp to camp because they either kept me with a black officers and the white guys who were not even in the same rank of these guys were allowed to take me around and I’d have to go in the white orchestras, white officers, buildings and a tank. So I put my foot down and said, no, I will sing. And kitchens, supply rooms and places. I’m not going in the kitchen and eat with you all. When you get black guys, I’m allowed to, you know, hide in Tuskegee and look for me. But anyway, this place I had done a show the night before to all the white people on the place and white workers. And I was going to get to sing for black soldiers this next night. And there they were in the back of the auditorium. Not on time is just a big Quonset hut or something. And then the white soldiers and then mingled in with them on one side, German prisoners of war and other white prisoners. And I just. Got choked and I went to the back where they were sitting and sang with my back to all the other people and and that wasn’t very pleasant. They said, get her out of get out of these tools. You know, she causes trouble. And I was with her, Sanderson, who’s playing piano for me. And I said, we’re getting out of here. Come on, let me pick up my bags were there and get us in the car and go to the nearest NAACP office or hall or church, wherever they are. And there was a little black driver took us in. He was he had the jeep and we were and I said, now take me to where the NAACP was. And in those days, the NAACP was flourishing. Work and organization had done fabulous work. And I went in and I said, who’s in charge? And then this lady, this woman came and she said, I am I’m dissipates. And that’s how I met another heroine allows. And I told her what had been going on. And she said, well, she said it’s everywhere like that. So, you know, they’ll be cleared up. Mr. Roosevelt will clear it up probably anyway, they throw me out the USO. So I took my own money and went whenever I could get space on a train.
Speaker OK, you know how long I remember that dress?
Speaker Why then, I don’t know. What do you want me to say?
Speaker OK, what I want when you look at that woman.
Speaker Yeah, I was I was impressed when I saw it. I thought. Now, who’s fantasy is that? What was Hollywood making to them, somebody who sang a couple of those songs?
Speaker Well, did pretty good, but they really didn’t know what else to do with me. I couldn’t tap dance like and Miller. I couldn’t. And in those kind of pictures, they had to have a, I guess, a black romantic lead of somebody to be with me in a scene in the picture. I was never in a story. They were never in these white movies I was in. I don’t know what the stars were. Oh, girl. Stop at. That’s awful. I mean, that’s nice, I was young and but you see, I was told that.
Speaker We can stop now. Yeah, look. OK, what was?
Speaker So in order to escape that. Well, yeah, while we’re there, yeah, we’re in this Yeah. Mood, there’s some things that weren’t quite so torturous to Hugh.
Speaker Yeah. They say, like their song sung, any time there’s a musician who’s written a song and he likes to sing, to sing it, he wants it all the time and they would. Texas was very young and Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin were working at MGM. They were in, I call it, in the music department. But they they had their their their material. And many of the pictures were made. They made. But I liked them and they liked me because I knew who sang the words well and love that they wrote.
Speaker And one silly one called the Brazilian Boogie. Yeah.
Speaker And I’ve heard from them.
Speaker One of them’s gone, but I hear from I heard from them lately through the years. They were big friends with Kate Thompson. CNN Electic already was. I was in that small group.
Speaker You actually played Brazilian rugby for me, Brazilian movie sort of made you famous because it did get you on the cover of Esquire magazine.
Speaker Now a picture in Esquire. Yeah, that was Brazilian Bobby. The costume was nice. And that’s the first time they had a big color picture of a black woman in that magazine.
Speaker Do you remember Chaplin?
Speaker Yes. Oh, yes. Because I remember Sal, because he’s the father of Judy Prince. And Judy and my daughter were girls together, grew up together. And in Hollywood, she she was with her family and my girl and she were buddies. And they you know what, to MGM when they were little girls. And so all the stars.
Speaker Is there a cop? Well, if I have a cough drops, it’s going to screw me up. OK.
Speaker Basically, in order to save your professional life because you were going nowhere fast in the movies, you renegotiate your contract, could you?
Speaker Well, while I was in the movies at my lowest peak, I think I had been put on suspension by the studio. That means no salary. And and I was punished because I didn’t do a property of theirs that I didn’t want to be in. And Joan Crawford called me. I went to house Adams Massiah talking to someone there, and she came in and she said, I heard about the trouble you having with MGM. And she said, you know, I’ve been through my troubles off and on a couple of these studios, she said.
Speaker You have to not show that you have any pride at all. She said you have to go to Mr. Mayor and tell him you have been remiss. You have been wrong. You’ve been. Been punished, and you’re a nice girl who owes them everything and to try to play the whole thing as a Subscene to Mr. Mayor and you’ll do that all the time. And it took a couple of weeks. But meanwhile, she said, go to MCE bail. And I said, well, if I can get out of this whole situation, they said, if MejÃa has you, they will settle the business with with MGM and we will become your managers, which is what I did. I was paying them off for about 10 years, but they bought out my contract, I think. And the way I was put back on payroll and I was sent to work with a lot of Cabaret’s that they owned, not a lot, but four friends of theirs. And Cabaret’s that’s how I got off suspension. But I’ll always remember half of that is she was a very interesting lady.
Speaker Well, this is also when you begin to to I mean, Cabaret’s really were your bread and butter.
Speaker Mm hmm. And this is when basically you went out on the.
Speaker With levees that, well, no, I didn’t go out there with learning. I know him like three years before we were married to I get a little cold in the time zones. I work then in Cabaret and the Shappi in Chicago a lot in New York. I worked at the Copa, had big success there. The first one, I might say, and had an argument with them about ordinary black people coming in to see and they didn’t allow that. But my money came in from working at the Capitol Theater there, theater they owned and another theater in Pittsburgh they owned. And it was always someplace I could make a living because I had finally said to myself, go and do it, you know, the best. You know, forget this movie Jazz. So.
Speaker And then.
Speaker That caught my eye when I worked and did a little song and dance in the movie, the last one, I think it was made. Meet me in Las Vegas. I don’t remember what I sang or anything, but I remember the dress was white with crystal beads or something. And that was the last movie I ever made for them. Meanwhile, I had been very successful in New York, but across the river in New Jersey, Bill Miller’s Riviera and the Copa. And I was my darling. The baby had started school. I think Gail and I was happy working and I began to just polish up what I knew and get better and try to get better and. I very seldom went back to MGM, except that they were there for me when a couple of people tried to intimidate me or tried to get in my business. And I called the publicity department out there at MGM and they were always on the case. So I’m very grateful for for one thing, they did like that.
Speaker Well, you were just talking about. Polishing up your act now. How important was it to the Polish?
Speaker Well, when we finally get married, say we were married three years before and we announced it and he began to work with me musically and he made wonderful arrangements for me and they tended to stretch me vocally. And I was learning from that. And I was a I love working at the Copacabana because I could see all the important people in New York. They came there.
Speaker And but when I talk to you about this, it seems that I was always working and must have been honing my craft because every place was a new experience and a new lesson and new musicians sometime. That’s the reason I hurried up to try to get one musician with me who really was marvelous and who who knew me like Luther Henderson and then wanted to have a bass player and a guitar. And I got all these wonderful musicians. I didn’t make any money, but they did because I knew you had to have important good musicians if you wanted to be a singer. But that was part of learning more about my craft, because when you’re with someone who’s familiar with you vocally and so forth, you are happy, you know.
Speaker And I worked a lot of times and I worked with all band musicians. If I could get with them, you know, and I didn’t play the movie making much mind, except that when I went in 1947 to England for the first time was my great starring time because they didn’t have the same luggage. They weren’t carrying around the same luggage as I in this country.
Speaker They hadn’t yet had a problem with their color races and they were still in the throes of the Second World War. It was over, but they had nothing. They were still living on coupons. They shared coupons with me. They came to the theater. And they they a lot of them know me because they had seen in the end the troops had on ships. And so they had stormy weather, which was my big entree to them.
Speaker But they made me feel like a star for the first time, the Copa and then London. And they they took me into their homes and they shared their rationed tickets with me. And I was listened to as an artist, you know, as as a performer who they respected. And there was no back saying about you can’t live here and you can’t live there. But there was for my musicians. And they if they were black, I had to find them someplace that they were allowed to live. I live with them because England had their problems with color situations. I found it everywhere I go except.
Speaker Well, except the first time I went to Israel, I don’t know what it would be like now, but they helped pull one of the other wonderful time watching, uh, some of your performances on Perry Como.
Speaker Oh, I liked this. Perry was nice. Perry was nice to me on his shows. And I was kept off that show off of the the American TV and radio for seven years, I think, because I was Red Channel and listed as a communist and so forth. And so I worked in Europe a lot. And when I came back here, I think Dave Garroway used to be a host on a great show. From here he he gave me a job and Steve Allen gave me a job on his show because I was just not there as far as the media here was concerned, but. I was free in London and as a performer and as a person, and that’s when we got married over there in France, me and Lenny and me.
Speaker Um. Did the marriage raise any hackles among the blacks?
Speaker Oh, of course, my members of my family didn’t speak to me for three years and they were their family. I was finally let out. But there were a lot of people at that time of MGM and my husband eventually, and Tex McCreary, who’s an old friend of mine who used to have a famous talk show, was he and his wife, James Falkenberg. And he did a poll taking had mail, rerouted them to the Copa and everything. And there was a great to do among black people because I had been the first and they didn’t want me to, you know, and he got letters, of course, from white people, but white people didn’t know that much about me as my own people did. So that’s the crux of the problems came from them. Who were who were it sounds so silly to say it now, but I find that there’s still parts of that going on in the country. But they he said that the mail has been enormous and they’re all against it. But so we had to weather it out. And I went back abroad and worked and finally got put back on the TV here.
Speaker In your interview with Ed Bradley, yes, you told him you said this about at times, too, that initially it wasn’t so much love that what you think. That’s right.
Speaker I married Lanny, I guess, for selfish reasons. I liked him very much and I think he liked me, but.
Speaker I had I I said this was the Nina Simone I liked very much, and she said, Hallelujah. She patted a foot. We didn’t have a black man like Barry Gordy at that time. And we didn’t have any black entrepreneurs like Cosby and all this we didn’t have anybody to to fight this battle for me. And I don’t know what I said to Ed in the in the program, but. And I don’t know what the question was. Sorry about that.
Speaker I thought we were just talking about why.
Speaker Oh, why I. Yes, I knew that a white man could get me into places that black men could. I knew that would happen because he was white. They didn’t have to know when I was married to him or anything. So rather cold blooded bloodily.
Speaker I had that in the back of my mind. And I was terribly surprised that he was going to marry me, not because. Of anything he did or said, but my aunt, my cousins in Chicago tell me it’s terrible to marry a white man because they’ll go to bed with you, but they never marry you. Now, that’s from another age, just behind before me. That’s coming from her and. The reputation of that was like, yes, they they’ll go to bed with you, but they don’t marry a. It was a challenge to me, but the main reason why was because I knew he had the answer that I couldn’t have with a black man to workplaces. But, you know, I learned to love him completely because he took all this from me and went along with the flow and made me at times to forget he was white.
Speaker But.
Speaker I don’t know why I didn’t sit down and tell him the history of jazz, which our grandparents never told us my generation, and give us all the drawings, I had to get a bit by piece and I should have sat down and told him about many of the things that made me angry because he didn’t understand what my anger was. And he’d say, oh, she’s just like that, you know, don’t pay attention to.
Speaker And part of the anger was by not having anybody but my closest friends. The sale is too, because I didn’t want to. When I found out he was such a decent guy, I didn’t really want to tell him what I felt. And I learned to love him. And I traveled all over with him. He and I worked as a great unit and we made a good marriage for 20 some odd years. And part of that was because in the 60s he realized what I felt. And a lot of people learned some few things during the 60s.
Speaker The 60s were a watershed period for you.
Speaker The 60s were a sort of watershed period. Yes, because it.
Speaker It bought kind of new understanding with my husband and made me feel close to my grandmother for the first time, I. It’s just, you know, you you you’re exposed to the other people in those years who came in the clubs to see you, my own people couldn’t for a long time so that I always missed being with.
Speaker Oh, my race, and when I but I I came to life because I knew I had a right to be in the 60s, I had a right to be absorbed in it because my family, my grandmother and my grandfather and my great grandfather had been fighters all the times the Indian side was fighting to get a piece of ground to sit on. And the black people in my family and.
Speaker I just didn’t feel I could be family. You really had to, you didn’t have to, but you did draw sides. You did go to the side that you wanted to be with, the one that I most admired. The the the the people who were who were decent. We were going through some rather bad times there. And yet I knew that my one of my grandparents had had trouble being welcomed in a restaurant and having a place, not having his his stuff bombed out or burned out.
Speaker I had a right to be involved in the 60s, and I just knew that I had to be with brave people, people who had to be brave and. It was a way of finally. Getting that part of me up.
Speaker When you were singing this little light of mine to me, it made me think of what Jean-Noel told me about when you and Billy Strayhorn did this little light of mine. I fell asleep really quickly.
Speaker Well, I. I wanted to go south very badly and.
Speaker And part of that was also fueled by James Baldwin, the piece that ran in the New York magazine New Yorker, I don’t know whether you had the fire next time, but that was the title. And I read that and one I had all the copies it was given me through text.
Speaker I, I read it all in the two days it took crosscountry coming back from California and. It had there was a couple on the train that knew me and white people, and I came out that second day and I was still shaking and she said to me, What’s the matter with you? I said, I I’ve just read James Baldwin’s pieces in the New York No New Yorker. I have got to be around.
Speaker People like this who when you put a stamp of approval on it, who are the people who whom I want to be with because I feel so close to him and that the piece just destroyed me and it made me also strong and. I went I he came to New York, James Bond came to New York, and I was with him at a very important meeting we had with Robert Kennedy and some other people. And I began to feel myself again because I wasn’t singing and dancing and entertaining.
Speaker But I had the right to to be with them as a black woman, not as Lena Horne.
Speaker But I guess Lena Horne was rather valuable to some. In some instances, the name was valuable and I had thought of the name I could get to certain people and certain places.
Speaker So on the other hand, I guess MGM helped a bit.
Speaker Well, do you remember that night with Medgar Evers?
Speaker I remember, yeah.
Speaker And I went down there with Billy Strayhorn to play piano for me, and I was going to work for the Southern Leadership and Julian Bond was met me in Atlanta and we talked about that outfit. And I went on down to Madison home, Mississippi, to be in to see him to appear at a church to meet people. And I came a day earlier and I was driven around the town. And that’s when he said to me, he said, I love my country here. He says, I’m from Mississippi. I love it. It could be a wonderful place, a place where I was the first kind of black man like that I had had the pleasure of getting to because I’d either been with entertainers, musicians, husband or acquaintances and all the people that are always in a group. It’s the first time I ran into a man that I thought sounded like what I had heard from Paul Robeson about my grandmother and my grandfather. And I went there and he was a wonderful man, strong. Physical, aggressive, nice, sweet family and working with people who were trying to get voter permission for black people, and they said to me that they said, would you mind living at so and so’s house because they bombed my place. Yeah. Then we haven’t finished fixing it up. And I said and I went to the church that night with Bill and and was not prepared for it, but felt at that church full of people who were in the thick of trying to be real.
Speaker And then and they they put up with what I did. I mean, it wasn’t anything they we used to hear, but I did it and I sang this little this little light of mine. That’s one thing I could hear that I had maybe been around some of my own people and. And that’s, of course, when Dick Gregory was on stage with me and other people and he got up and started talking about you, Blue-Eyed. People who you’re not supposed to have blue eyes and and I was my son and gone with me and he’s sitting there with big blue eyes, you know, blue, green. And I felt so insulted for him. But I understood the whole thing as he was making a point that Greg was making a point. But that was quite a night. And then I got back to New York and the next morning I was going to go on hello with NBC to do a show with, uh, Huntley Brinkley, which was which was the one who just died.
Speaker Chet Hardly.
Speaker Well, I was he was to be the master of ceremonies. And and we were just I was waiting in the makeup room or somewhere to go on. And he came when he came in the room and he said that we’re going to be a little late starting because.
Speaker They’ve just killed Medgar Evers and I, you know, went off what and then it just came out and they when they put me on there that morning.
Speaker I was black and proud of it.
Speaker I mean, really answer that pride, that was where my grandmothers came from and I was so we were all angry. But, you know, it wasn’t a surprise. It’s never a surprise when you know what is going down, when, you know was being put down. You know how to not you cannot be on my way here.
Speaker So that they killed him was just a forerunner of some more stuff they did, you know? He was quite a man. And then, of course, now the wonderful young.
Speaker Black men who were making his dream come true, some of them probably in Mississippi doing their.
Speaker Malcolm X oh, how did you feel?
Speaker Well, I met him a long time ago, Gene said, just before he became Malcolm X, but. I read his book, the one that Alex Haley wrote, also going on the train to visit the great white woman who was a senator, I forget her name. And that said she was in the House of Representatives anyhow. I read that in the two days it took us and that was the other book I read that just dissolved every thought of. Leonardo Payden believing anything that anybody said to me. At BOOKLESS. Was a head opener, really for me.
Speaker So you then became pretty much involved with the National Council?
Speaker I did that and then I became involved with the National Council of Negro Women at that time and. I had never wanted to be in a club or be a job. I know this idea that because I had always said to me many times when I was fighting in Cabaret’s for my musicians as something that they’d say, come on, be with us. Why are you like this? Why are you angry? And I had known only certain types of people.
Speaker I didn’t know the wonderful women who had.
Speaker Who were lawyers, doctors, hairdressing salon owners of hairdressing salons, I didn’t know so many wonderful black women and I had been so hungry for that kind of knowledge for so long. And I went south with them. I found myself down there, people who knew me when I was a little girl and were not in one place or another and even ran into one of the girls I had lived with in Macon and Macon, Georgia, and my whole life. I need these people whose homes I had stayed in our homes seeing me on the near the houses where I used to live. And that opened me more my. And I felt so.
Speaker I began to respect even the cafes that I worked in and all that because it was just getting me together, so I was useful to some other people. It’s hard to explain what I felt. And when I went to colleges and they had seen me in a movie, you know, these people, and they met me in person. And it was I just said, well, I was for real to them in the movie, but now I’m here. And it was an experience I can’t describe. It was wonderful and gave me so much more respect for because you when you feel you by yourself, you get into that little selfish rut where you said, well, me, me, me, me, me, and you go out and you buy as bad off as you are. But but moving onward with it and being brighter and smarter than you are, you just have to admire that.
Speaker Well, that’s why I just wanted to do what you did with this energy agreement.
Speaker Well, yeah, it took me into touring with that for fundraising for them, took me to working more and more to my own people, turning me to the edge. I should have on certain songs because it was about them and me honing that craft again, you know, and it led me up until finally my present manager, Sherman Snead, said to me, you just can’t stop singing because I said, Oh, well, I’m going to sit down now and not think about the stage.
Speaker I’m tired of it. He said, you’ve got to do something I led to later on music, the last show that I did.
Speaker Now, when you’re so sorry, when I what?
Speaker Started thinking about the lady and her music. Did you know what it was going to be?
Speaker No, I didn’t know. When I started to think about Layana music, it wasn’t a lady and a music. I was at Santa Barbara.
Speaker I was very happy. I had just finished working probably again in San Francisco. And Sherman said one day to me. Are you going to work again?
Speaker You know, I am, and I said, well, I’d like to do something on the stage. Why can’t some of these summer revivals and shows put me me on in those parts? I said, I don’t want to be hello, Dolly, and I don’t want to be whatever else was around. I said, I want to do something that I want to do it. New York. And so he kept on at me, and so I finally said, we’ll go to New York and find out if there’s going to be a summer reproduction of some show, some Broadway show and see if I can get a job in it. And I think that he went right to the Nederlander office. I guess he knew people up there and. He said he called me on the phone, he said, come on to New York because I think we may be able to get something. So I came to New York and he took me back up to Mr. Nader Landesa office. Nice man.
Speaker And said, have you got anything you want to do that he can ban? And he said, sure. I said, I’ll put you in one of my theaters. He had a lot of things on the line and he said, I’ll put her on with some Italian singer, Franco, somebody I don’t remember, a man singer. And I said, well, I don’t want to do that.
Speaker I’ve already sung with men, you know, and had been a long tour with Tony Bennett at that time.
Speaker So, Mr. Nader, Lando said, well, let’s get some people in here to think about what you could do, and he says, I’d love to do a show with one of my man singer and have it on Broadway, having on one of my theaters.
Speaker So Sherman and I went away and we talk some more to ourselves about it and went back and he said, I’m going to hire a writer to write a piece for you. And they got in a marvelous writer named Sam Williams, Sam, and he’s written so many beautiful things and.
Speaker He came out to back to California with me to see how I lived out there and everything, and the whole thing that I’m going through with you seem to be interesting to him. And he began to write.
Speaker And when they read it to read Alanda, he said, well, now that’s not very commercial, you know. And what’s he going to saying in this? So Sherman said, well.
Speaker To me, he said, why don’t we just go and work out some songs and you have all the material and. I said, say that to Mr. Lay the land, and I think he did. I mean, he just he was marvelous. He got it. So I was prepared to go and do a show on Broadway.
Speaker I was going to have. Some singers, maybe some dancers, I don’t know as it worked out.
Speaker I said the things that I’ve been saying all this time, all these years matches up at certain times in my life that I have lived through. So why don’t we say, well, it’s about you can you know, it’s about your life. And you’ll say, well, that was the year I sang so and so and so on. But that wasn’t quite right to me. And we began to rehearse with some kids and with a choreographer whose name I don’t remember. And I always talk a lot. I know you know this. I’m sorry. And I would talk while the thing with the number was being played, I say, oh, that was when I did so and so and so.
Speaker And they without my knowing it, they had somebody in that tape taping all the rehearsal times with what I was saying, which did become the libretto of the show, because it was anyway it was worked out so that Mr. Netherlanders said to me before the first day of rehearsal, he said, whatever you do and no politics, no politics. And he was probably remembering my read to all those. And it worked out amazingly enough. And we had I had great people with me and great musicians. And I always want an.
Speaker I thought I’d be there for weeks, a month, and likely ran longer than that. It was. It was a special time because they were like another family again and. I met people from all around and we had.
Speaker We had our share of fans who follow us from place to place and one besotted person who had to get the police, I shouldn’t even think about her. But the more I hear about I find that people are crazy now, as they were when I did that show obsessive things that they create about you.
Speaker And I had the.
Speaker Not talking about the show, but I had the same I had a girl who was my daughter, I had a son who was who even went around town getting money, saying he was Lennon’s daughter.
Speaker And I was I said everything was part the whole thing and a terrible way.
Speaker Well, you had another family with Jamaica.
Speaker Yes.
Speaker That was my first family out of the Cotton Club that Jamaica was with Bobby.
Speaker Bobby Lewis, my director. Yes, I like him very much. And I think he he knew just what to say to me and. Ricardo Montalban, who was in the show with me, was very nice, but the dancers and the singers and the musicians, that was it. We had Alvin Ailey, Claude Thompson, Louis Johnson, Nat Horn, all the great dancers, male dancers and female and. Not Pearl, I forget her name. Oh, she was wonderful, she became such a close friend. Anyway, I had that first family and that sort of cool me down for the next 10 years spent in spurts.
Speaker Do you remember a OK?
Speaker Yes. I think the thing that was difficult in the beginning with Jamaica was it had been written for Harry Belafonte and he didn’t want to do it for some reason or other. And so they called me and I think I was living in New York then.
Speaker And then he was here and, uh.
Speaker They said you do this part, even though it was written for her, you have to change it into a girl’s part and we’ll write a great ballad for you. I never got the ballad, suffice to say. But but I didn’t know I hadn’t had been in a Broadway show before. And I didn’t know the the sturm und Drang, really, that there would be writers who don’t want a word taken out of their script. Choreographers who can’t work unless.
Speaker Everybody’s ballet trained stars on the show, I mean, I didn’t know about all that, it was fascinating to me.
Speaker And I mean, the writers went crazy, first of all, because they had written the guy, they had to make it feasible for me to do it. And that ain’t easy. And they had a whole concept that was about a male character. And so it wasn’t easy to get. And they wanted to get a strong box office name because I didn’t they didn’t think I had a strong name and they didn’t want a black leading man particularly, and which I said, now, wait a minute, we’ve got to get this straight if you’re not going to have a black leading man. That I like a new like, then you got to get an Hispanic man, you know, so they are decent people and I didn’t come around in the auditions, you know, and they even auditioned white leading men.
Speaker Well, that’s it. Now, wait a minute, if we don’t do this, then it’s got to have.
Speaker We’ve got to be an interracial show, and somebody that’s not white has got to be the leading man, I’m sure Ricardo didn’t think of himself in that manner, but I did. I know that a Latin was like me, like I am with the same problems, the same. I didn’t think he had a problem, but she probably didn’t, but he was happy to do the show. I think I don’t know what made him do it, but I was happy with him and.
Speaker We had an interracial we had Charlie Blackwell, my stage manager, was first black stage manager they had at that time and I had a black orchestra with some white men, members and Jamaica. And I had we had Oriental’s Spanish.
Speaker Island people also in the whole back and the whole chorus, you know, then I was happy to have them because I know a thing about they had they raised big advance sail, the biggest had ever been back. They were going to have it in Life magazine. But that’s the time they put up the first moon shoot. And so we were knocked off the front page, but we had an ideal beautiful company and we thought, you know, it would.
Speaker Happen more and more.
Speaker This family, yeah, I think for me, yes, she was in it, and rather like Hazel Scott, we became friends because she had her her Haitian Haitian beliefs and independent spirit and so forth. And I had my.
Speaker Thing and we were good friends because she she’s a very down to earth person, and she wasn’t one of those girls that said if I were you, I’d do this and that and the other. Can I give you some advice? She would just. Because she had been on the stage a lot and I had but she was.
Speaker On on the ball, and she encouraged me and helped me a great deal. Great performer, and we became good friends. She liked me. I met her husband.
Speaker I was there when her first child, I was overseas when he was born, when her daughter was born. And I knew her second child when he was a baby and taught how to burp the baby because she didn’t know that she was guilty. And in Rome and they Mallison and that he’s keycards. He’s so unhappy that Tom is bad. I said, well, you should put him over your shoulder and do that and burp him and he’ll feel better. And sure enough he did eating all that pasta.
Speaker You also like to follow my father, no, Josephine’s father.
Speaker Yes. Oh, great gentleman. Great gentleman.
Speaker And he had fled away from Haiti and her sister, very sweet, marvelous girl. And he liked me because, I don’t know, we talk to each other and I had manners for him, good manners for him, because that’s what he asked for. And he was the spirit of my grandfather sort of reminded me of him. Yes, I made friends in both both shows, and my manager was was right, he told me I should do the lady in the music.
Speaker I said, Well, you know, I’ll do it for a couple of weeks, four weeks, and then let me get out of here because. But he thought it would be better than that. I did. I said, I know. That’s it, you know.
Speaker That’s when you met I met her in Jamaica, I met Jeanne Noble and forget the other woman’s name is Patricia at, uh, at the same time, they came often to Jamaica and they finally came backstage and everything. And that’s when they said, you got to become a daughter. And I said, I didn’t go to college. I didn’t go to school. I said, but that’s all right. You win, you’ll be an honorary member. I said, I’m not a good club person. I don’t like things. I don’t like to play bridge. I thought they were just, you know, I don’t like to play bridge and have parties. And then I had that move in Brooklyn when I was a little girl. They said, no, it is like that. You’ll find out. I said, well, and there was also another friend that the same guy, Marietta Dockray, who wanted me to be an alpha because but my uncle had been an Omega and Delta, their sister organization, and my Uncle Burke and my Uncle Frank. And I said, all right, they kept and they began to embarrass me. They said, you know, you just can’t just know the people that you’re on the stage with. There are other people around.
Speaker I found it safer to be with real people than people in the outer world at that.
