Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (42 page)

Micheaux was capable of writing nice guys who could win a stupid contest, and Johnson's character was one. The real spitfire of the film was Bee Freeman, who had appeared in
The Phantom of Kenwood, Harlem After Midnight,
and
Lem Hawkins' Confession.
Her part in
Underworld
was her biggest yet, as the hostess of a roadhouse called “The Red Lily.” At first her character shows some sincere affection for the educated Southerner, but after they quarrel over ethics and another woman, she conspires with the racketeer to rob the college kid. The robbery goes awry, the graduate is drugged into a stupor, and the vamp's jealous husband, guided by detectives who have been paid to trail her, shows up unannounced, threatening retaliation. The racketeer, always hovering about, shoots the husband.

When the graduate wakes up, Freeman tells Johnson that
he
murdered her husband. The police arrest him, but Freeman's maid (Amanda Randolph) knows the truth—a threat the vamp eliminates by strangling her. But then Freeman's head fills with accusing voices; insane with guilt, she drives her car into a speeding train.

It's a riveting scene, albeit low-budget. And Freeman acts her convoluted character to the hilt.
Underworld
had its share of such compelling moments, and when the action started to lag, the director waved on a kickline, a vocal trio of sisters, a rope dancer (tap-dancing as he twirls a rope), and the otherworldly hoofer Stringbean, whose loose-limbed footwork ranks among the weirdest spectacles in Micheaux's films.

Micheaux's weakness for such distractions confounded some of his players. “I said to him once, ‘Why are you doing that? It has nothing to do with the story,'” remembered Lorenzo Tucker, whose role in
Temptation
was his most minuscule yet. “He said, ‘The poor guys down South want to see some pretty legs—dancing and beautiful girls. We've got to satisfy them.'”

For
Underworld,
Micheaux bypassed Connie's Inn in favor of a dance band and floor show imported from the Kit Kat Club on East Fifty-fifth Street. Freeman was billed as “The Sepia Mae West,” and Oscar Polk ad
vertised as “Angel Gabriel from
Green Pastures
” (he'd go on to Hollywood and play a servant in
Gone With the Wind
). Ethel Moses, the sexy star of
Temptation,
this time took the role of the good-girl, a beauty parlorist who saves the college man from a life of decadence.

“One of the most stirring and unusual stories” of the year, wrote Hugh Thornton in the
Chicago Defender.
But Moses kept her clothes on, and
Underworld
didn't draw quite the same crowds as
Temptation.

 

When Micheaux wasn't filming, as always he was traveling and selling his films. Heading to South Carolina by train in the mid-1930s, the young artist Elton Fax sat down beside a man “dramatic looking” and “dramatic in his manner.” The man leaned over and introduced himself as Oscar Micheaux. Fax was awed; he had enjoyed
The House Behind the Cedars
and other Micheaux pictures during his Baltimore childhood. Micheaux started in talking—about his latest film, and his next film, and the one he planned after that. “You couldn't sit near Micheaux without his talking,” recalled Fax. “He talked and talked and talked. That's where I first saw him and got the feel of his personality. He was a supersalesman of his own wares, and, I was thinking to myself, something of a Phineas T. Barnum in general manner—bombastic.”

But the supersalesman needed to sell to theaters, not fellow train passengers. And the number of theaters for “sepia pictures” wasn't mushrooming. In 1937 Sack Amusement Enterprises released a list of “Movie Theaters Catering to Negroes,” identifying 389 in the United States: 142 in the South Atlantic States, 68 in the Middle Atlantic, 54 in the East North Central and West South Central, 47 in the East South Central, 16 in the West North Central, with the remaining fifty-plus strung out in the Mountain and Pacific states.

That was “about 400 of the 16,000 movie houses” in America, according to
Time
magazine.

The
New York Amsterdam News
said the number of “so-called Negro theaters” was always inflated, “owing to certain competitive theaters that squawk about first-run pictures.” These theaters refused to exhibit a “sepia picture” if they couldn't claim exclusivity; the same self-destructive competitive spirit prevailed that Richard E. Norman and George P. Johnson had bemoaned in the 1920s. The
Pittsburgh Courier
put the national
total at closer to 270, once the houses in major cities that welcomed a “mixed population” (that is, mixed-neighborhood theaters willing to play a few race pictures, usually at midnight shows) were eliminated.

One persistent problem was that fewer than half the Negro or “mixed population” theaters boasted black managers, and still only a fraction were owned by black people. Micheaux, who was banned from the Brecher-Schiffman theaters in Harlem, depended increasingly on a group of theaters controlled by black businessmen in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In burgs like Elyria, Ohio or Monessen, Pennsylvania, he had to settle for the one-shot end-of-day showings dubbed “Midnight Rambles.”

To shore up his bookings, Micheaux took scouting trips with a new Man Friday, Carman Newsome. Born in Kansas, Newsome was the grandson of a freed slave, an elderly rancher who had long been a neighbor of the Micheaux family. As a teenager in the 1920s, Newsome had moved with his family to Ohio, enrolling in Central High School, a black school famed as a hotbed of musical prodigies. Newsome taught himself to play the tenor saxophone and clarinet and formed his own big band, leading a shifting aggregation that, at one time, featured trumpeters Freddie Webster and Harry “Pee Wee” Jackson, both of whom later played with jazz great Jimmie Lunceford. Cleveland was one of those cities Micheaux passed through regularly, and on one trip in the mid-1930s he encountered the young musician leading the house band at the Cedar Gardens.

Micheaux told Newsome to look him up if he ever came to Harlem. When Newsome moved there in 1936, he found the music competition fierce and took the sales job offered to him by the race-picture pioneer.

Despite his traveling tutorials from Micheaux, Newsome, the world's most mild-mannered personality, didn't turn out to be much of a salesman. But Micheaux was keeping an eye on him for other reasons. The light-skinned Newsome was so tall and handsome, so physically striking that wherever he went, women fluttered and swooned. Micheaux was half irritated by his Man Friday's easygoing charm, and wrote him into his 1946 novel
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield
as his “Clark Gable–looking” employee Carter Thompson. “He didn't have two ounces of brains,” Micheaux wrote ungenerously of Thompson/Newsome.

But by the time Lorenzo Tucker quit again after
Temptation
—his tenth or eleventh Micheaux film, and his last—the newest graduate of Micheaux's school for stars would be ready for his close-ups.

 

Remarkably, in the following year Micheaux would dash off three more pictures:
Swing!, God's Stepchildren, Birthright.

Swing!
was a diverting piffle largely designed to launch Carman Newsome as “The Dark Gable.” The tale, which shifted between Alabama and Harlem, followed the fortunes of a goodhearted cook named Mandy (Cora Green), who is much in demand among white households but also dishes up “Chitlin' Suppers” for the Alley C and South Highlands neighborhood of Birmingham. Her husband is a hustler, chronically out of work. He's been two-timing Mandy with a “high yaller” named Eloise, who is cuckolding her own husband, a fireman. When Mandy finally figures out her husband's unfaithfulness, she abandons him for new horizons in New York.

Micheaux refocused the Harlem half of the story on an alter ego who reflected his own artistry and preoccupations: the tall, good-looking impresario Ted Gregory (played by Newsome). Ted is trying to launch a new musical revue, aided by his loyal secretary Lena (Dorothy Van Engle). The “high yaller” from Birmingham materializes as the show's lead, though, like certain actors Micheaux could mention, she “drinks like a fish” and has a habit of missing rehearsals. Something interesting happens with the casting when the action shifts north: Though the “high yaller” and her firefighter have different names in the Harlem scenes, both couples are played by Helen Diaz and Alex Lovejoy, and they seem to be the same characters.
*
Whether Micheaux was playing a “doubling” game with audiences, or simply giving two favorite actors a chance to “double” their performances (and low salaries), is unclear—but the double-casting adds to the fun.

The conflicts and crises continue. While inebriated, the “high yaller” breaks her leg, and without a guaranteed headliner the “colored” producers pull out of the show, plunging the impresario into despair. “This show can't get to first base with a Blues singer, a Mammy lead,” Ted says, voicing a Micheaux plaint on the history and pitfalls of black show business. “They look for it in this type of show…Of all the Colored shows that have gone by the boards, no Negro has ever produced one. From
Williams and Walker to
The Green Pastures,
they've all been sponsored by white men. No Negro has ever been in on the money, or the profits.”

Lena, who knows Mandy from Birmingham, finds her a job, sewing costumes. While Mandy is inept at costuming (most of the actual sewing is being done by Lena, played by the expert real-life seamstress Van Engle), she can torch-sing with the best of them. Lena urges Ted to take a chance on Mandy. Ted finds a rich white backer who agrees to fund a Broadway opening with Mandy as the star, and the show goes on—a quintessential Micheaux pipedream.

Newsome and Van Engle made a charming couple. The petite, dynamic Green, who played Mandy, had been in vaudeville since she was a teenager; during the making of
Swing!
she was being showcased in Leonard Harper's latest revue at Connie's Inn, where her act (just as in the film) combined comedy and torch songs. Hazel Diaz, the “high yaller,” was a nightclub singer turned actress. Micheaux filled out his cast with the usual parade of chorus girls, street-urchin tap dancers, a female trombonist, and muscle dancer Consuelo Harris, whose specialty was an acrobatic and licentious bump-and-grind.

“We don't have the money to spend on big sets and many retakes,” Carman Newsome, Micheaux's “road” ambassador and new leading man, told the Cleveland
Plain Dealer,
somewhat defensively, on a publicity visit to his hometown. “We mostly shoot with one ‘take' but if it isn't good or isn't what our director wants we have gone as high as seven ‘takes' for one scene. We try to make the very best pictures we can.”

Besides all the self-references,
Swing!
was sprinkled with Micheaux's social criticism, especially in the form of disapproving portraits of shiftless men, two-timers, gamblers, and welfare bums. And, if nothing else, the 1938 film is still worth watching today for a last look at the sweetly affecting Dorothy Van Engle, who got married, became a librarian, and never acted again.

 

As always Micheaux followed Hollywood trends, closely watching the movies that poached on his territory, sometimes reacting adversely to their fallacies, sometimes creating his own all-black variants. The self-important
Imitation of Life,
nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1934, particularly incensed him, as its story—about a lovable Mammy's daughter running
away from her true skin color—stole his “passing” theme and ideas and turned them around into a sheeny Hollywood soap opera. Not only was
Imitation of Life
more technically proficient than Micheaux could dream to afford, by the end the film had turned into a bathetic weeper.

Micheaux realized that he could turn a profit by making an imitation of
Imitation of Life.
After all, wasn't he the legitimate master of that theme? Weren't his films the most authentic account of the realities and texture of black America?

He would envision his next project,
God's Stepchildren,
as the ultimate “passing” story, reworking and critiquing the Hollywood clichés from his own unique perspective. Micheaux wasn't shy about citing the negative inspiration of
Imitation of Life,
identifying the 1934 film in the Sack Amusement Enterprises trailer for
God's Stepchildren
as one of two acclaimed and successful studio productions that had influenced his latest movie. The other was a product of white Hollywood that had nothing to do with race, a William Wyler picture from 1936 called
These Three,
based on Lillian Hellman's celebrated play,
The Children's Hour.

On crucial matters Mrs. Micheaux always concurred with her husband. And the script for
God's Stepchildren
was based on an unpublished short story, “Naomi, Negress,” again written by someone other than Micheaux. The publicity and advertising were coy about its source, but in one interview Carman Newsome allowed that the author was none other than Alice B. Russell, the first and only time she penned the story for a Micheaux film.
God's Stepchildren
would become a summary achievement for husband and wife.

The first part of
God's Stepchildren
was a riff on the Hellman play, which concerned a group of teachers whose lives are ruined by malicious students spreading lesbian gossip about them (the Hollywood version avoided censorship by leaving the lesbian undertones ambiguous). The Micheaux script would similarly start with “these three”: a middle-aged, upstanding seamstress named Mrs. Saunders; a distraught stranger trying to abandon her unwanted mixed-race baby; and the mixed-race infant girl, whom the seamstress agrees to adopt.