The Butler: A Witness to History (7 page)

In that very year, Sidney Poitier appeared in
Lilies of the Field,
in the role of Homer Smith, playing an itinerant, out-of-work construction worker who helps a group of German nuns build a chapel. The movie opened on the big screen. And for many families—especially Negro families, mine included—it would become an annual staple of family
television time, the rare movie with a black lead that had become a rite of cinematic passage. Not unlike
The Wizard of Oz
for so many other households.

The script of
Lilies of the Field
grew out of William E. Barrett’s lovely little 127-page novella of the same name. The
New York Times Book Review
described the book, which was published in 1962, as “a contemporary fable.” Fable or not, black America now saw a figure on screen who wasn’t kowtowing, a man who set his own hours in the world, a man who seemed to roam the earth free and easy. Poitier received an Oscar nomination for best actor for his performance in the movie. His fellow nominees in the category were Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Paul Newman, and Rex Harrison.

Poitier did not dare imagine he could win, and when Anne Bancroft opened the envelope on Oscar night and uttered Poitier’s name, it cascaded far beyond the confines of the Santa Monica Auditorium that evening. No one was more surprised than Poitier. This was cinema and history and a breakthrough, but also a balm for the pain in the streets.
“It has been a long journey to this moment,” Poitier said from the podium, in words that seemed to swoop up an entire race of people.
“We black people had done it,” he would later write of that evening. “We were capable. We forget sometimes, having to persevere against unspeakable odds, that we are capable of infinitely more than the culture is yet willing to credit to our account.”

Did the moment foretell better days ahead for blacks in Hollywood movies? One might fast-forward to this revealing fact: it would not be until 2001 that another black male actor—Denzel Washington, for his magnetic and controversial performance as a corrupt detective in
Training Day
—would be seen holding the Oscar for best actor, almost four decades after Poitier’s history-making win. Blacks, who have long been quite vocal about cinema in America, found it hard to believe the long gap between Poitier and Washington had been just misfortune. The gap summoned up overlooked performances from the past, such as Paul Winfield’s in 1972 in
Sounder
alongside an equally amazing Cicely Tyson; Ivan Dixon in 1964 in
Nothing But a Man
; James Earl Jones in
The Great White Hope
in 1970. Many in America, especially blacks, seemed to have their fingers crossed especially tight in 1993, hoping Denzel Washington would win for his nominated performance in
Malcolm X.
There were reasons to be hopeful: there had been a long battle waged by filmmaker Spike Lee to get the movie made, and Washington did win a slew of other industry awards for the performance that season. But not the Oscar.

History, however, seemed to be quite sweet the night of Washington’s best actor win for
Training Day:
Halle Berry also was named best actress, in a role that was seen as controversial. Portraying a poor southern woman with a husband on death row, she conducts an affair with a white man, and in one scene she strips naked for the camera, a move
that prompted many black actresses to question her decision to play a part they thought demeaning.

Even today, the conversation about a lack of richly drawn characters for the gallery of black acting talent still seems to haunt Hollywood, when studies still show a paltry number of blacks filling leading roles in mainstream films. When it comes to directing, the recognition from the Academy for blacks is paltry indeed. In the history of American cinema, only two black directors have ever been nominated for a best directing Oscar: John Singleton, for
Boyz n the Hood,
and Lee Daniels, for
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire.

It remains worth noting—to turn the camera back to the 1960s—that Sidney Poitier’s historic achievements in film played out in the full gallop of the civil rights movement. The boulders were rolling through the cities and they could not be turned back. The movie camera kept churning, and it would not lose sight of Poitier, which gave blacks a reason to hope and pray when it came to celluloid imagery.

In 1967 Poitier would appear in two much-talked-about films,
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
and
In the Heat of the Night.
Both made vivid allusion—especially in the impressionable minds of many white moviegoers who lived in a segregated nation—to what it was like to be a black man navigating the shifting social terrain in America during the push to integrate. Poitier the actor felt it up close. Art didn’t imitate life. Life reshaped the art.

The plot of
In the Heat of the Night
has Poitier playing a northern police officer who gets stranded in Mississippi. While there, he is talked into helping solve a local murder. Before filming started—verisimilitude be damned—Poitier let director Norman Jewison know he was not going to film in hostile Mississippi. Civil rights workers had been murdered in that state, after all. So the production filmed in Illinois and Tennessee. While the actors were in Tennessee, however, after hearing some rednecks spew epithets, Poitier let it be known he was sleeping with a gun beneath his pillow.

Poitier’s other film that year was
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Romance or marriage across the color line was still quite taboo. Even the hint of interracial sex was considered risky in film. So it cannot be underestimated just how novel, even radical,
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
seemed in 1967. It was a mainstream film, opening up the no-no subject of interracial sex to the American public. The story line revolved around a black man (Poitier) and his girlfriend (played by Katharine Houghton) who must tell her parents (screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) that she is marrying a black man—a Negro. By the time the following year’s Oscar telecast was shown, the nation had days earlier been delivered the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. Anger was now everywhere in urban America. Guess who’s coming to the White House? Marchers and protesters got within a block of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (The butlers and maids, Eugene Allen among them, had clear views from the upstairs windows.) That
very year the Kerner Commission, ordered to investigate the 1967 riots, had concluded that America was
“moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Hollywood—it was not so subtly reported in the Kerner Report—had helped perpetuate such a society.

Where did that leave Sidney Poitier? There were many, especially figures associated with the black power movement, who thought him too acquiescent to Hollywood for taking on the kind of role he did in
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
But Poitier was a touchstone for black America; from White House butlers to factory workers to schoolteachers to sports heroes, he had garnered wide respect. Still, this dynamic of how young and old blacks viewed Poitier created lively conversation from barbershops to dinner tables in the orbit of black America. It is also expressed in an emotional late-1960s scene in
The Butler.
The family—Cecil (modeled on the butler Eugene); Gloria, his wife; and Louis, their son who’s rebelling against all that his father stands for—are sitting around the dinner table. Gloria has just told Louis she recently saw Poitier’s
In the Heat of the Night.

LOUIS

Sidney Poitier is the white man’s fantasy of what he wants us to be. Well behaved with no sense of his manhood as a sexual being.

CECIL

But his movies have him fighting for equal rights.

LOUIS

Only in a way that is acceptable to the white status quo.

It was impossible for Hollywood to ignore how this sentiment was expressed through the upheaval on the streets. In Los Angeles—the movie capital of the world—the community of Watts erupted in a riot on August 11, 1965. Thirty-four people died. The
Los Angeles Times,
a newspaper both rich and fat at the time, did not have a single black reporter on its full-time staff. They corralled a black messenger to get to the scene and take notes. In Watts, the world could now see, in newsreel footage, the painful woes of inequality that engulfed the country. Filmmakers in the land of sunshine seemed caught in a time warp and spasms of denial. Cinema was right out their front door. Directors were churning out big-budget flops like
Dr. Dolittle
while fires raged not many miles from the movie studios themselves.

What did slip through, though, as a kind of multicultural filmmaking moment, was the experimental era of so-called blaxploitation films. Beginning in the 1970s, those films landed in many urban theaters around the country. Nowadays many look dated and seem comically retro. The budgets were indeed low, but the films were imbued with an undercurrent of activism: the male and female stars were anything but
subservient or acquiescent. They were aggressive, cool, defiant. They were rebels with causes. On-screen, their afros bobbed in the wind. Their bell-bottoms flared. The dialogue—“whitey,” “hey brother,” “the man,” “dig it”—echoed the patter on the nearest urban street corner. Black moviegoers suddenly had heroes that looked like them, and they flocked to see the movies, among them
The Mack, Foxy Brown, Shaft, Truck Turner, Cleopatra Jones,
and
Super Fly;
the latter had a soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield that would become a classic. The films also provided work for a coterie of black actors who welcomed the opportunity, among them Calvin Lockhart, Ron O’Neal, Bernie Casey, Julius Harris, Sheila Frazier, Richard Pryor, Pam Grier, and Billy Dee Williams.

Then something mighty strange happened in the world of blacks in cinema. The latter half of the 1970s was barren. Blacks actually began to disappear from film. Years rolled by with large swaths of black talent on the sidelines or struggling to get television work. It seemed, in the land of so-called liberal Hollywood, that even the subject of blacks in movies was taboo. The editors of
People
magazine thought otherwise. Their 1982 article “Blacks in Hollywood: Where Have They All Gone?” flung the issue out in the open, where it could not be ignored any longer. The article was scathing and blunt: blacks, it charged, were being “whitelisted” from Hollywood motion pictures. (The term, of course, played on the infamous word “blacklisted” used to describe members of the Hollywood community denied work in the 1950s
because of alleged ties to Communist sympathizers.) Those black actors willing to be quoted in the article were incredulous that after the resounding success of the 1977 television miniseries
Roots
—which traced a black family’s journey from slavery to freedom in America—they were rewarded with nary a career boost. The Hollywood branch of the NAACP—the very organization that protested the screening of
Birth of a Nation
during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration—joined the outcry and also became vocal in bringing attention to the plight of black actors.

In subsequent years, there was only slightly more visibility by black filmmakers and actors in Hollywood. And much of that momentum flowed from the independent film movement, specifically Spike Lee’s movies. In 1986 Lee directed
She’s Gotta Have It,
followed three years later by
Do the Right Thing,
his seminal movie about simmering race relations in Brooklyn, New York. Lee’s films aside, independent films are often, by definition, not profitable in the terms the big studios expect.

T
HE GREAT AND
grand conversations about money and movies hark back to the moguls of the last century. Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn both wanted to make profitable pictures. As many in the Hollywood camp are fond of repeating, no business, no show.

When an American movie with a mostly black cast—or even a themed movie where blacks carry the arc of the narrative—comes upon the cinematic landscape, the dialogue heats up. Will the public attend? Will the movie only play in urban areas? There is always the hope for crossover appeal as was the case with Clint Eastwood’s
Bird,
which starred
The Butler
’s Forest Whitaker. If subject matter comes into play, slavery is a topic American filmmakers have uniformly shied from. There was Steven Spielberg’s
Amistad,
a film about a slave revolt and landmark court case. It was a stirring drama, with gripping performances given by Djimon Hounsou and Anthony Hopkins. Its domestic total gross was $45 million. That is nothing to snicker at, but hardly what a Spielberg film is expected to earn. So many simply concluded the scenes on screen—slaves drowning, shot to death, hogtied—were too tough to sit through. Much the same criticism greeted Quentin Tarantino’s
Django Unchained.
Nevertheless, that movie went on to be a robust hit and a prizewinner.

Sometimes a black-themed movie is so unique, so surprising, that the Establishment ignores grubby talk of gross receipts. One such movie was
Daughters of the Dust,
a 1991 movie set in the 1920s in South Carolina. It revolved around a group of women and their musings about migration. The film, directed by Julie Dash, had the sweep of a fever dream. It also did not have a single big-name Hollywood star in it. Aside from its ethereal quality, something else seemed amazing: it was the first movie to gain major distribution in this country that
had been directed by a black woman. It set no box office records. In 2004, however,
Daughters of the Dust
was chosen by the Library of Congress to be placed in the National Film Registry for preservation. Art doesn’t necessarily get moviegoers into seats, but it can very often be both a noble and an admirable undertaking. Whopping big-budget movies have fallen by the wayside; Dash’s small and intimate one will be remembered.