Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (33 page)

The middle Russell child of five was Julia Theresa, who was twenty-seven when she appeared in
Body and Soul.
There were two boys: Robert Jr. (b. 1893) and Albert (b. 1898). The youngest Russell was Blanche, born in 1899, shortly before her father passed away. Alice B., whose middle name Burton was in honor of her father (a family name passed on to the eldest), was the oldest of the Russell children, born in June 1889.
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As the oldest child, Alice B. Russell likely stepped in to help her mother after her father's untimely death, filling in with household and maternal duties, nurturing her younger siblings. After graduating from high school in Montclair, she went on to study music in college. Her obituaries, which her younger sister Blanche—her only surviving sibling at the time of her death—helped prepare, state that Alice graduated from Columbia University, but there is no record of her enrollment at Columbia in New York, or any other Columbia, as far as can be determined. Blanche, who was ten years younger than her sister, may have been mistaken about the details. But Alice was well read and, like her father, a good writer. Her erudition and refined diction were obvious markers of education. “Alice was so damn polished that you thought you were talking to a dictionary,” recalled Carlton Moss, a family friend from nearby Newark who acted in two Micheaux films in the early 1930s.

Like her sister Julia, Alice earned a living as a teacher, giving private voice and music lessons in the Montclair area. She sang at church occa
sions, and at least one account suggests she gave community recitals. All the Russell girls were “pretty and charming,” remembered Hortense Tate, a Montclair activist who knew the family; and Alice was the prettiest, the most charming. Five years younger than Micheaux, Alice turned thirty-seven in 1926. She was tall and light-skinned, womanly rather than girlish, with dignity and manners: an elegant lady with a smile as persistent, as enigmatic, and as endlessly adaptable, as her husband-to-be's.

Montclair had a close-knit black population, and the Russells were prominent in church and civic activities, especially the (colored) YWCA. The family's Greenwood Avenue home was one hub of black Montclair's social—and political—whirl: When Edwin Barclay, the Liberian foreign minister and secretary of state, made an official visit to the United States in 1925, for example, the Russells hosted the local reception for him there.

In his Pullman porter days, Micheaux had been a ladies' man, and he seemed to have a woman at every port of call. Since the death of his first wife, however (and the abandonment, perhaps, of his second), he had kept his distance from women. Truth be told, he hadn't had much free time to pursue romance. And although the “casting couch” was already a notorious practice in show business, Micheaux was that rarity among motion picture producers, known for behaving in fatherly or gentlemanly fashion toward the many actresses he knew. “I liked his approach,” recalled the sexy Bee Freeman, who met Micheaux in the early 1930s, when he was casting a new film. “He was very businesslike—didn't make a pass, which was surprising. I didn't know whether to be insulted.”

Micheaux was drawn to the Russells, a family of hard workers and achievers like himself. He was drawn especially to Alice, and as he quietly courted the music teacher throughout 1925 and early 1926, their mutual affection grew. Micheaux was welcomed into the Russell household; he became a frequent guest at Sunday supper and was made to feel at home. Indeed, Montclair would become his real second home, more a refuge and sanctuary for him than anywhere else; Mrs. Mary Russell would become a kind of second, surrogate mother.

Their romance reached fruition on Saturday, March 20, 1926, when Oscar Micheaux and Alice B. Russell exchanged vows in the living room of 55 Greenwood Avenue. A Baptist minister presided. Alice's sisters were maids of honor. The marriage of black America's most famous filmmaker was reported in the black press from coast to coast. “It was quite a social event and was attended by hundreds,” according to the
Chicago Defender.

The newlyweds probably indulged in a brief honeymoon, like the just-married couple Carl Mahon and Starr Calloway at the end of Micheaux's 1932 picture,
The Girl from Chicago,
who sail to nearby Bermuda.

Though it became the cornerstone of his books and films, Micheaux's first marriage had proven disastrous. His second union may or may not have been legally formalized. But he couldn't have acted more wisely in choosing the One True Woman who became the third Mrs. Micheaux.

 

Got to keep going!

That was Micheaux's motto. Anything for the sake of his work, his career, his art. Some scholars emphasize the scoundrel side of his character, but at times he suffered more than anyone he disappointed. After his marriage, months passed before Micheaux was able to muster the funds to produce another film. At one point he was down to five cents in his pocket, recalled actress Shingzie Howard, who was still helping out in the Harlem office.

Micheaux was traveling frequently between Chicago and New York in this period, and at a certain point he found himself on a train to New York without enough money for food. Some children a couple of rows away from him had an apple and an orange, and when the train lurched, a piece of fruit fell to the floor and rolled toward Micheaux. He snapped it up when no one was looking; it would be his only nourishment on the trip. “When he got to New York,” recalled Howard, “all he had was a nickel, and he called his wife and she came to the station to get him.”

Micheaux was pitching investment in his future to doctors and lawyers, with one hand; with the other he was borrowing pocket money from friends for daily needs. “He'd borrow from anyone he knew,” the actress recalled. “He'd borrow from me. He had an awful hard time.”

In public Micheaux always seemed a big, cheerful man, made of India rubber. But his good humor was a pose as well as a philosophy, and the strapping physique was deceptive. Because Micheaux never had money to spare, “his eating habits were poor, very poor,” Howard said, and that contributed to chronic health conditions—stomach and digestion troubles, terrible hemorrhoids, lingering attacks of the blues.

Micheaux spent most of late 1926 and early 1927 in Chicago, se
questered at the Alpha Hotel on the South Parkway, where, according to newspaper reports, he was confronted by “pressing business” of an unspecified nature. While there, he put the finishing touches on a fresh script set partly in Chicago's Black Belt.

It's ironic that, at this juncture, Micheaux concocted his archetypal fantasy involving a black millionaire—a man who has dared to venture “far from the haunts of his race,” according to publicity synopses, landing in Buenos Aires, where Micheaux himself had visited in his portering days. Land is tamed, fortune acquired. After fifteen years in a foreign land, “his heart anxious and hungry for that most infinite of all things—woman,” the newly wealthy black adventurer returns to America to search for his One True Woman. Unfortunately, the woman he finds, a beautiful cabaret dancer, also happens to be the concubine of an underworld beast known as “The Lizard.”

Micheaux shot the bulk of this production, which could have been titled “The Homesteader Goes to South America,” in and around Chicago early in 1927, staging the musical sequences at the famed Dreamland Gardens on State Street—the dance hall that was home to Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and other stellar performers—and at the Plantation Cafe, where the house band was Dave Peyton's Orchestra.

The new project would star J. Lawrence Criner, a stalwart character man for the Lafayette Players; Criner often played heavies onstage and in race pictures, but Micheaux cast him against type here as Pelham Guitry, the heroic South American fortune-seeker. Grace Smith, who had made her first appearance for Micheaux in
The Spider's Web,
was an all-around entertainer who danced and sang with her own vaudeville act, the Four Buddies; here she'd portray the oppressed cabaret dancer. The villainous Lizard was portrayed by the Venezuela-born Lionel Monagas, who had just scored a career breakthrough as a bellhop falsely accused of raping a white woman in
Appearances,
a meaty drama that was among the first Broadway plays written by a black playwright.
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Cleo Desmond, William Edmondson, S. T. Jacks, and E. G. Tatum had supporting parts in the picture, which also boasted walk-on appear
ances by
Chicago Defender
publisher Robert S. Abbott and his wife, Micheaux acquaintances since his homesteading days. As Micheaux foresaw, the Abbotts' cameos garnered the film plenty of free publicity in the
Defender.

Though the main photography was finished by spring, theaters wouldn't get the new Micheaux offering until Thanksgiving 1927. The intervening six months were consumed by a “seven-thousand mile trip by auto through the South,” according to the
Defender,
where Micheaux “lined up the bookings of his films for the coming season.” Winding up his trip in Chicago, where he showed local theater owners his first new picture since
Body and Soul,
Micheaux paid another ceremonial visit to the
Defender
offices. “The motion picture magnate was somewhat gleeful over the outlook for the coming season with his master photoplays,” reported the paper in September 1927.

But the filmmaker's gleeful public façade was as far a cry from his fragile reality as the final title he chose for his latest film:
The Millionaire.
By the end of 1927, Micheaux was practically drowning in debt.

 

Three unrelated factors had converged to threaten Micheaux's future in film.

The first was the October 10, 1927, premiere of a motion picture Micheaux had nothing to do with. Warner Bros.'
The Jazz Singer,
the first feature-length “talkie,” was the opening shot of a show business revolution, as Micheaux would have appreciated instantly. (He knew the lead actor, the blackface performer Al Jolson, from his own theatergoing.)
The Jazz Singer
was a milestone “fraught with tremendous significance,” as Robert Sherwood proclaimed in
Life.
“The end of the silent drama is in sight.” And with it, no doubt, the end of silent race pictures.

Micheaux, who had to finagle bookings in the best of times, now had to scurry around frantically to get his silent pictures into theaters before they switched over entirely to sound. Silent films were not yet dead in the fall of 1927, but they had received a terminal prognosis with only months to live. Micheaux's old pictures, which he constantly (and profitably) recycled to black theaters, were about to lose all their future value.

The second circumstance also involved Hollywood and black faces.

Although Evelyn Preer long had a career independent of Micheaux, in
recent months she had taken steps that would finally put her beyond his reach for good. After finishing
The Spider's Web,
the multitalented actress had been cast by David Belasco in his extravagant production of
Lulu Belle,
a much-ballyhooed play about “colored life” that opened on Broadway early in 1926 and then ran for a year. Preer was acclaimed for her featured role but also for understudying the lead, Lenore Ulric. Following that triumph, Preer joined her husband Edward Thompson (a fellow
Lulu Belle
alumnus) in another smash hit, the musical revue
Rang Tang.

Preer's first loyalty was to the stage. In early 1928, when she learned that Robert Levy was organizing a company of veteran Lafayette Players to go to Los Angeles, Preer and her husband were among the first to volunteer for the adventure. Others heading west included Cleo Desmond, J. Lawrence Criner, Laura Bowman and her husband Sidney Kirkpatrick. All the “new” West Coast Lafayette Players had appeared in “old” Micheaux films.

The Players took up residence in the new Lincoln Theatre on Central Avenue in Los Angeles in April 1928, opening with a production of
Rain.
Preer starred in the part Jeanne Eagles had immortalized on Broadway. “It was the dawn of a new day for the Negro in Hollywood,” Ina Duncan, the famous musical revue dancer, told the black press. The West Coast Lafayette Players became an instant sensation: Charles Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Harold Lloyd, and other Hollywood worthies were spotted among the capacity crowds who came to cheer the performances and line up backstage afterward to congratulate the troupe. And before long the Players' dressing-rooms were thronged with casting agents from the major Hollywood studios.

Sleepy Hollywood was slowly waking up to black America. When an actor whose name was known to black audiences played even a minuscule role in a major studio production, no matter how caricatured the part—even a maid or shoeshine “boy”—black fans streamed to white theaters in Northern cities, and the sub-run theaters dotting black neighborhoods further augmented the studio's box office. Character parts that didn't rub up against the tender sensibilities of Southern whites were becoming more common, almost fashionable in Hollywood.

Micheaux couldn't compete with the Hollywood offers, which were lavish by his standards and which came in urgent telegrams accompanied by travel vouchers. Ida Anderson, who had performed in
A Son of Satan
for Micheaux, wrote to the white race-picture producer Richard E. Nor
man in 1923, declining a role in one of his planned productions. Anderson was currently receiving forty dollars per day, “including concessions,” from the Lasky and Selznick studios, she told Norman. “If you could get $45 or $50 a day [in race pictures] you were getting big money!” recalled actor Leigh Whipper, who appeared in films directed by Micheaux. “We used to go over to Fort Lee, N.J. and work there for $5 and $10 a day.” Lawrence Chenault, who often starred for Micheaux, received $75 to $125 a
week.