The Butler: A Witness to History (6 page)

Why, Eugene Allen would have some mighty interesting stories to tell Helene.

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2012,
more than three dozen large trucks and trailers rolled through the narrow streets of New Orleans carrying all manner of film equipment. There was equipment to make it rain on a movie set when a scene called for rain. There were klieg lights powerful enough that, even at midnight, they could make it seem from inside a room as if it were daylight beyond the windows. The drivers parked in a huge lot, known as “base camp.” It would be the daily staging area over the next thirty-seven days for the stars, producers, and director of
The Butler,
a major motion picture to be directed by Oscar nominee Lee Daniels. The production office had been set up and staffed, weeks earlier, on Prytania Street. The actors and actresses who had signed on to the project had raised interest on both sides of the Atlantic. It was quite a starry cast, an eclectic assemblage of Oscar winners and nominees. Among them were Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, Robin Williams, Cuba
Gooding Jr., David Oyelowo, Mariah Carey, Vanessa Redgrave, and Terrence Howard.

When I first saw the rows and rows of trucks and trailers at base camp, I imagined that several movie productions must be headquartered there. “Nope, it’s all for
The Butler,
” Evan Arnold, a production aide, told me. Evan suggested I walk along the spaces that separated the rows of trucks; he told me to make sure I looked at the writing on the side of each truck. The movie’s title,
The Butler
—based on an article I had written—appeared on the side of those trucks. We were in New Orleans and Evan was allowing a “Welcome to Hollywood” grin. It was quite a scene to take in.

Movies are notoriously difficult to mount and get made no matter the subject. Turning the story of a black man who served as a White House butler for more than thirty years into a motion picture came with its own set of huge challenges, and it mirrors the story I hope to tell here, a look at blacks in cinema. It is a narrative that can often be aligned—when viewing it through a historical lens—with the struggle for equal rights. And in many ways, that cinematic struggle began, like a part of Eugene Allen’s life covered in this movie, also in the White House.

I
T WAS IN
1914 when film director D. W. Griffith set about making a film based on
The Clansman,
a novel written by Thomas Dixon. The
novel was a nasty piece of work; Dixon was an avowed racist, and his book featured nearly every imaginable stereotype heaped upon blacks at the time. The novel was set in the aftermath of the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and told of blacks pillaging, lunging after defenseless white women, engaging in corruption, and finally being rooted from their savagery by the “heroic” Klan. Griffith, the filmmaker—who was born in Kentucky and still harbored resentment that his father had been a defeated Confederate soldier—salivated over the novel’s brew.

A little more than a year after filming began, Griffith’s movie, titled
The Birth of a Nation,
opened in Los Angeles. Moviegoers sat and appeared amazed; their eyes glazed over. By movie’s end, those in their seats believed they had just watched an epic. The prolonged applause was deafening. Griffith quieted rumors that he himself was in attendance when he appeared on stage, an aging gnome of a man.
“He stepped out a few feet from the left, a small, almost frail figure lost in the enormousness of this great proscenium arch,” noted an account. “He did not bow or raise his hands or do anything but just stood there and let wave after wave of cheers and applause wash over him like a great wave breaking over a rock.”

Filmgoing at the time was relatively new, and this particular film ignited nationwide interest and abundant ticket sales. The news of the movie’s charged reception raced around the country via telegrams, newspaper reports, and movie magazines. It also swelled the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, whose members saw the movie as nothing less than
emblematic of their own sentiments and beliefs. The movie, however, alarmed NAACP officials, who organized boycotts. Some cities, fearing riots, refused to show it. Joel Spingarn, an NAACP official, told that organization’s board that
The Birth of a Nation
had helped to
“unloosen the energy and to stimulate the support of the colored people of this country as this attack [was] on their character and their place in history.” Editorialists from Negro publications castigated the movie, then watched their backs as they departed their offices, fearing attacks.

Dixon, the novelist, had reached out to President Woodrow Wilson, bragging to him about the movie’s popularity. He found in Wilson, also a southerner, a receptive audience. Wilson decided to show it at the White House, making it the first movie to be screened there. Wilson watched with eyes widening. A learned man who had been educated at Princeton, the first president to possess a PhD, he was, nonetheless, absolutely uncritical of the cinematic vision before him. As the credits rolled, he gleefully claimed he had never seen anything like it.
“It is like writing history with lightning,” he said. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Thus, a movie that pilloried black Americans had been praised at the White House itself by the president of the United States. Cinema for and about blacks as an art form was truly light-years away.

Black Americans, well aware of the imagery on the big screen, made efforts in the early twentieth century to effect their own cinematic
history. In 1915 George and Nobel Johnson formed the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. They aimed to tell stories about black Americans and to counter the popularity of
The Birth of a Nation
and other filmed treatments such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, How Rastus Got His Turkey,
and
Coon Town Suffragettes.
But the filmmakers were done in by disease: the spread of influenza across the country kept theatergoers away and their business was forced to shutter.

Oscar Micheaux was close behind the Johnson brothers. A son of former slaves, he lifted himself up into the world of show business. Micheaux went from shoeshine stand owner to Pullman porter on trains, then landowner in the American West. He started writing, newspaper articles at first, then autobiographical novels, including one entitled
The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer.
He had enough chutzpah to sell the book door to door. But Micheaux also wanted to make movies, and when no one would give him a deal to turn one of his novels,
The Homesteader,
into a picture, he decided to direct and produce it himself. A quick thinker, he vowed to recruit investors, telling them that black-oriented movies could turn a profit. (Black filmmakers today, Lee Daniels among them, often adopt the same strategy.) In an effort to fill seats in those theaters, Micheaux wrote his own ads:
“Every Race man and woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro’s ability as a motion picture star, and go.”

Throughout the 1920s Oscar Micheaux was the most prolific
black filmmaker in the country, though it was a fraternity so thin as to be mostly invisible. He showed no hesitancy in courting controversy, making movies about lynchings, miscegenation, and skulduggery in the Negro church. Recognized as someone who had an eye for scouting unknown talent, he promoted Lorenzo Tucker as “the black Valentino” and gave Paul Robeson his first film role in 1925 in Micheaux’s
Body and Soul.
Against a backdrop of inequality and desperate times—though he seemed blessed with heaps of hubris—it’s a wonder Micheaux even got his more than forty films made. They were largely devoid of stereotype, though they were rarely mistaken for art; it was Micheaux’s grit that was heroic.

Other movies of the era could not escape the dagger of stereotype when it came to blacks. Black women were seen as either housemaids or taciturn nannies. A good many family acts managed to make it on screen. In 1933 an aging vaudevillian by the name of Will Mastin hustled one of his little dancers over to a soundstage in Brooklyn. The little dancer, Sammy Davis Jr., had gotten the lead role in the movie
Rufus Jones for President.
(Back to the White House!) In the short, which also featured Ethel Waters, the little child dreams of being president. The dreamscape unfolds and the cinemagoer sees it all: The cute child is seen prancing about, a chorus of singers and dancers around him, uttering jokes about watermelons and pork chops being given away freely. There is a sign near a doorway in the dream: “
VOTE HERE FOR RUFUS
JONES
—Two Pork Chops Every Time You Vote.” When the child Rufus walks by a Senate door, he sees another sign:
CHECK YOUR RAZORS.
In the dream the child becomes the president. Of course, in the dream, he has a vice president. As the movie shows, the vice president is his “mammy”! In real life, removed from a dream, stage appearances could be just as wicked for little Sammy Davis Jr. Sometimes, on stage, he wore blackface. Thus he was a black child, in whiteface, pretending to be a white man in blackface—all for the laughter of white film audiences.

Even the grown-up black actors who found occasional film work in the 1940s—Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson—had to endure humiliating slights from which some never recovered. Though lighter-skinned black women such as Horne appeared more palatable to white film audiences, they had no easy time of it. In 1954 Dorothy Dandridge, for her performance in
Carmen Jones,
became the first black woman to garner a best actress Oscar nomination. But the acclaim seemed just a torturous tease: despite the recognition, the studios did not send her challenging scripts, nor did white male actors lobby for her to appear alongside them. She eventually vanished from the movie screen, suffering from depression and an overdependence on pills. She died broke in 1965. Lena Horne seemed to weather her relationship with Hollywood better than Dandridge simply because, for a while, she was nowhere in Hollywood to be found (though she did return to the big screen in 1969). She was blacklisted
from both movies and television work during the fifties. Not a soul in Hollywood challenged Horne’s banishment, though there were those who pointed to her friendship with activist Paul Robeson as the reason she was shunned.

In a child’s mind, the movies do not easily take on deep social significance. The child goes to the movies to be transported and to look for heroes. Writer James Baldwin was no different from any other child who was growing up, watching tall figures on the wide movie screen. “I did not yet know,” the great writer would recall about being a twelve-year-old, “that virtually every black community in America contains a movie house, or, sometimes, in those days, an actual theater, called the Lincoln, or the Booker T. Washington, nor did I know why; any more than I knew why The Cotton Club was called The Cotton Club.”

Movies are wedded to the American psyche, Baldwin eventually figured out. They are weekly destinations; they are a belief system at work. As an American populace, we go to the movies because they feed our collective imagination. (In my Columbus, Ohio, hometown, the Lincoln Theatre—now wondrously restored—sat right there on Long Street.)

And yet if there was no equality on the streets—as the foot soldiers in the marches and protests of the next decade, those in Birmingham and Selma, the night riders, and the vanguard students sent in to integrate schools illustrated—how could there have been equality in the
selection of movies that got made? Positions both in front of and behind the camera seemed closed to blacks, with the exception of movies that starred Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier. When the sixties were rounding the corner into view, the whole time line of that epoch, with all its leading men—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Belafonte, Poitier (both of whom were delivering bail money to the protesters across the South), J. Edgar Hoover—something happened up in the Hollywood Hills: the men who ran the movies realized that America was passing them by. The birth of a nation, all right—but with afros and Black Studies programs, civil rights bills and martyrs. It certainly appeared that the Hollywood power brokers had missed a whole movement. Which is why the story of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier—who knew well the struggle of those artists flattened on the roads behind them—is so potent: they broke through before the streets caught fire. Their very presence couldn’t help but to nick at the conscience of Hollywood, a place far enough from the murderous small towns of the Deep South as to seem almost in another world.

One can only imagine the amazing and yet lonely trajectory of Sidney Poitier, the first black male movie star in the Hollywood studio system. Poitier honed his skills at the American Negro Theater in Harlem in the 1940s; Harry Belafonte was a fellow acting student and had starring roles in
Carmen Jones
and
Island in the Sun.
Poitier went west, and small movie roles led, in 1958, to a costarring turn in
The Defiant Ones
opposite Tony Curtis, for which Poitier became the first black man to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor.

Looking back at the American calendar and the role Negroes—the popular term used then—played in society in 1963, one finds more than a few freeze-frame moments to seize upon. That year—Eugene Allen the butler would have been on his job for eleven years—marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of American slavery. There was an Emancipation Proclamation event in honor of the occasion at the White House. It did not get much attention in the mainstream media, however, because its lens was focused instead on Birmingham, Alabama, where on September 15, at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Klansmen had set a bomb in reaction against the settlement between the city and the demonstrators who had fought against segregation with protests and boycotts. Four girls, in their Sunday finery, were killed. Martyrs in the struggle, they joined the likes of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and all the other foot soldiers on the march toward equality. They became sad emblems of the struggle for equal rights in America. Real-life America was just too dangerous for Hollywood’s fictions.