Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (28 page)

From left: Hazel Diaz, the too-easygoing Carman Newsome, and Ethel Moses in a scene from Micheaux's 1939 sound version of T. S. Stribling's anti–Jim Crow novel
Birthright.

One of the last known photographs of Micheaux (seated), surrounded by the staff of Harlem's M.O.W.M. Bookstore at a spring 1947 autograph party, probably for his final novel,
The Masquerade
.

The two Roanoke crowd-pleasers,
The Dungeon
and
The Virgin of Seminole,
gave the Micheaux company a temporary injection of cash. Sadly, both Shingzie Howard-William E. Fountaine vehicles are “lost” today.

 

The summer of 1922 was hard on the race-picture business. Richard E. Norman, the white producer Micheaux admired, was already thinking, “Negro pictures have lost their novelty.” A flu epidemic kept audiences away from theaters for much of the year, and many theaters shuttered. The flu slump hurt Hollywood too, but the drop in income was devastating to race-picture makers, who depended on a smaller number of constantly floundering theaters.

“There are about 354 Negro theatres in the United States (many now closed) scattered over 28 states,” Norman estimated in a January 1922 letter. “Eighty five per cent of these theatres (showing race films) have an average seating capacity of but 250.”

Between censorship fees and the “graft” customarily handed over to censors and theater-owners, the costs of doing business on the race-picture circuit had risen prohibitively. In Chicago, O. C. Hammond was breaking up his chain, which had been a safe haven for Micheaux pictures. Some of the theaters were sold to independent management, and the biggest and best theater in the city's Black Belt, the elite Vendome, announced a policy of booking only “high-class” Hollywood fare. Hollywood movies with marquee names “pack them in,” according to Norman, who was having the same problems in Chicago as Micheaux, “and the reason is that these pictures have ran for months at downtown white theatres and the negros [sic] are crazy to see what the white people are crazy over, and as the pictures have been well advertised before, they do business.”

Micheaux told Norman, “Chicago is a dead one [as a market] and we will have to pass it up for the present.”

Norman struck out for nearby Gary, Indiana, a predominantly white
city. He tried to fast-talk his way into a mixed theater called the Broadway, which “was not a negro theater and there is no negro theater there [in Gary],” according to Norman, from a letter sent to his brother. The Broadway “had tried a couple of Michaux's [sic] films to attract negros and they did not go over. They cater to less than 3% negros.”

Another negative factor was the “opposition and petty jealousy among the Negro theaters,” in Norman's words, which further hindered prospects. The all-black theaters competed fiercely for the first bookings of new race pictures, and tended to punish distributors, declining parallel or second runs, if another area theater was favored for a given film's premiere. Norman estimated that such rivalries had the effect of limiting his first-run playing field to 86 of the existing 354 Negro theatres.

The exhibitors made exorbitant demands, but they had the upper hand. Micheaux closed with an exhibitor on
The Dungeon
for two hundred dollars for rights to
all
showings in both Kansas Citys (Missouri and Kansas), Norman wrote disbelievingly to his brother, and then Micheaux agreed to stand “half of censorship” costs besides.

“It is a hard proposition to book these birds here,” Norman wrote in September 1922. “I am good and tired of Kansas City. I certainly walked my feet off and spent half my time riding the street cars keeping appointments that the exhibitors did not keep, and then when I got rentals—it was another thing to get the dates so arranged as to play all at one time and it took me a good two days to do that. Business is bad with these fellows and they certainly sing the Blues. I fought from two to four hours on every contract and then had to go back a couple of times and fight all over again. I got the films censored in both Kansas Citys without a cut and it cost $38.”

Continuing on to Omaha, Nebraska, Norman bumped into Swan Micheaux, Oscar's younger brother, who was tracing the same route with much the same disheartening results. “He was playing
The Dungeon
on per cent and not doing much,” Norman wrote to his own brother, adding, “Omaha is on the bum.”

Inevitably, such helter-skelter business arrangements, built on a quicksand of handshake agreements, shoestring finances, and precarious logistics, were constantly going awry. Micheaux's P. T. Barnum-like side was not above big talk and broken promises, but some mishaps were inadvertent, and they affected Micheaux's reputation as well as his resources. The relentless D. Ireland Thomas extended his public criticism
of Micheaux to business matters, suggesting in one
Chicago Defender
column that Swan “not make another bad deal in New Orleans, like he did the last time he was there, with a certain theater.” Then, donning his exhibitor's hat, he chastised Micheaux's Roanoke office, which after making extravagant promises to his Charleston theater, “slipped up again. No advertising matter except 2,000 heralds and you want me to pay big rental and play the picture. Wake up and do as you agreed to.”

From his perch in Omaha, George P. Johnson tried to rally Micheaux, Richard Norman, and other struggling race-picture producers into forming a national organization to distribute all their films. “One good releasing organization can release all Negro films at greater returns and cheaper cost than any single firm can release his own productions,” Johnson argued in a letter. But periodic attempts to organize just such a race-picture alliance were doomed by the fragile economics, the complicated logistics, and the intense rivalries.

 

One bright spot: Over the summer of 1922 Micheaux was able to make good on his third and fourth rights payments to author Charles W. Chesnutt. The fifth and final hundred dollars was still outstanding. But Chesnutt remained faithful, and by early October 1922, having polished the scenario during his trips to line up showings of
The Dungeon,
Micheaux finally called action on his adaptation of
The House Behind the Cedars.

From Roanoke, where he would shoot the bulk of the picture, Micheaux wrote to inform the author of details of the final script. The novel's end, with Rena dying a pathetic death, had been changed as Micheaux envisioned. Now “the young white lover reaches the house in time to see her [Rena] coming down the steps of the house behind the cedars on the arm of Frank Fuller, evidently at the end of the wedding,” as Chesnutt later summarized it.

More surprising, Micheaux had changed the famous story's Reconstruction-era setting. The realities of the race-picture business persuaded Micheaux to set the story in “the present day, which was not as difficult as it might seem,” as Micheaux informed Chesnutt. “The point being that it is an intricate task, not to say a most expensive one, to film periods gone by.”

He wouldn't be able to construct vintage interiors in a studio,
Micheaux explained, nor traipse around the South snapping footage of buildings that accorded with the period. “We are not financially able to do that,” Micheaux said. Though he had pulled together the funding for this major production—setting aside pivotal interiors, and the expensive storm sequence that climaxed the story, for studio manufacture later in New York—he was still scrimping. “In the meantime, I cannot pay that [final $100] note,” he told Chesnutt.

From the very beginning of his correspondence with Chesnutt, Micheaux had talked about advertising his film as “Oscar Micheaux Presents
The House Behind the Cedars,
A Story of the South by Charles W. Chesnutt, featuring Evelyn Preer.” At the moment, however, his originally intended leading lady had decided that she favored the stage over film, and Micheaux was unable to offer Preer a competing salary.

So for the part of Rena, the “bright mulatto” who is encouraged by her brother to “pass,” Micheaux turned to his protégée, Shingzie Howard, who had blossomed in
The Dungeon
and
The Virgin of Seminole.
This would be Howard's most demanding role yet. The sly, adaptable Lawrence Chenault would play her “passing” brother, while Andrew Bishop was imported from New York to play “white” (as he often did onstage), the Southern aristocrat who doesn't fathom Rena's true race. The suave Bishop, who had developed from an engaging juvenile to a compelling leading man for the Lafayette Players, often boasted of never darkening his skin with makeup. Later in his career, in fact, he would be passed over by Hollywood as “too white” for their trivial Negro parts, a common tragedy among the race-picture actors whom studios decided couldn't “pass for black.”

The Roanoke troupe had grown close-knit, almost like a family, and they were full of affection for their father-figure boss, who could be a tough taskmaster. Sometimes Micheaux had a sunny disposition, but he was also capable of tyrannizing them; he inspired his crew but also amused them. He had “great big hands,” recalled Howard, always gesturing vividly when giving directions. He would even “show you how to walk, and he was pigeon-toed and couldn't walk himself,” the actress recalled. “We'd go into hysterics behind his back.” The director made them perform scenes “over and over again” if he wasn't satisfied. “He was patient with us,” Howard said, “and we were long-suffering with him.”

The film's four-week shooting schedule was slightly longer than usual, but by Thanksgiving, incredibly, Micheaux had finished his third pro
duction of 1922, all shot largely in Roanoke. Chesnutt wrote letters pleading for his final hundred dollars. Ever optimistic about getting his pictures into white theaters, Micheaux tried to mollify Chesnutt with his vow to get
The House Behind the Cedars
“distributed by one of the large white distributing concerns.”

Yet his company was still scrounging. Micheaux had more than one picture hovering in the laboratory, he had stacks of unpaid bills, and he intended to put extra time into the editing of the story he had adopted as his own favorite child. Two years would elapse before
The House Behind the Cedars
was ready for release.

Micheaux was averaging two pictures a year, censors and critics—never mind profits—be damned. Hollywood directors, by comparison, were fast and fortunate if they could make two a year, and they had all the luxuries of time and money that came with studio overheads and guarantees from banks and theaters.

In 1923, another rough year for race pictures, Micheaux would make another two pictures.

Or three. Maybe four.

One of the riddles of his career is the number of projects Micheaux announced to the press, whose titles he emblazoned on his company stationery, whose casts included actors who later remembered participating in the filming—movies that left behind a paper trail suggesting that the finished product was licensed for exhibition by one state or another—even though no clear proof exists that some of the films were ever exhibited, or even completed.

Micheaux may have made as many as four films in Roanoke in 1923.
Billboard
(which intermittently touched on black show business), the
Chicago Defender,
and
New York Age
all reported on the filming of a picture called “Jasper Landry's Will,” said to star Shingzie Howard and William E. Fountaine, early in 1923. Yet no researcher has found a single subsequent review or advertisement for the film.

“A Fool's Errand” was another of these shadowy films, this one based on an anonymously published 1879 bestseller. The author, later revealed
as Albion W. Tourgee, a Northerner of French ancestry, had drawn on his experiences in the South after the Civil War for a quasi-autobiographical novel, which wove together tract and melodrama into a story that excoriated racial intolerance in the South and the failure of Reconstruction. Micheaux was said to have begun filming “A Fool's Errand” shortly after completing “Jasper Landry's Will,” in Roanoke, Norfolk, and Nassau in the Bahamas.

Or perhaps “A Fool's Errand” was not based on Albion W. Tourgee's novel. Perhaps it was an original by Micheaux, as he hinted later, using the title as the novel his alter ego Sidney Wyeth writes in
Lem Hawkins' Confession.
Scholars love this aspect of Micheaux films: the teasing self-references and autobiographical allusions.

Were “Jasper Landry's Will” and “A Fool's Errand” simply exaggerated public relations? Or were these genuine Micheaux productions, started and then shut down for lack of funds? Were they abandoned for laboratory costs? Seized by creditors? Spliced together with other unfinished films to create patchwork new ones?

The scholars and educators who formed the Oscar Micheaux Society in 1993 have coined a term for these projects: “ghost films,” a subcategory of the “lost” films because they led a phantom existence.

 

There were also bonafide Micheaux films
about
ghosts.

Micheaux was in New York for much of the winter of 1922–1923, trying to straighten out his finances, and he had time to catch up with the hit shows, including the rollicking musical
Shuffle Along (of 1921),
written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, with lyrics by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Miller and Lyles were among the onstage entertainers, as was Paul Robeson briefly. The multifaceted Miller and Lyles were longtime performers who once wrote plays for the Pekin Stock Company in Chicago; over years of incessant touring, they had perfected a host of blackface routines that sold out theaters. While “their comedy was invariably stereotypical,” in the words of black show business historian Bernard L. Peterson Jr., it also commented wickedly on the stereotypes.

Shuffle Along
delighted Micheaux so much that he vowed to shoehorn elements of it into his next project: a haunted-house comedy in the tradition of certain Hollywood films that mingled spooky hijinks with
singing-dancing numbers. “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” was announced as the first in “a series” of four planned Micheaux productions, according to company publicity. “On August 1 a big white association will begin the handling of their product,” according to
Billboard,
and “the premiere of the ‘Ghost' will be in a Broadway theater.”

“The Ghost of Tolston Manor” concerned the spirit of a murder victim that was said to inhabit an old haunted house, and a black man who is trapped inside that house by an evil hooded organization, led by a vicious mulatto. The mulatto and his hooded followers convene a wild conclave on the premises, amusing themselves at their terrified prisoner's expense. The mulatto's goal is to instigate a race riot.

By late March, Micheaux was shooting initial sequences for this fascinating-sounding project in places around New York, including establishing footage at a suitably creepy, two-hundred-year-old mansion in Clason's Point. The musical routines were filmed inside the rented space of a Warner Brothers studio in the Bronx. Micheaux veterans Andrew Bishop (prisoner of the haunted house), Shingzie Howard (his sweetheart), and Lawrence Chenault (villainous mulatto) were joined by Miller, Lyles, and the
Shuffle Along
chorus.

After the studio photography in New York, the principals took the train to Roanoke to finish up scenes, and by the first week of May all the footage was on deposit in a laboratory. There it would sit for a few months while Micheaux figured out how to pay for the processing and editing. Never idle, in the meantime he would shoot another entire film, and “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” would gain a new title:
A Son of Satan.

 

The haunted-house comedy was intended as a crowd-pleaser. The adaptation of T. S. Stribling's
Birthright
would be more of a test for audiences, and for Micheaux. Like
The House Behind the Cedars, Birthright
was a serious, acclaimed novel that was interpreted by its admirers as a postmortem of slavery and an indictment of Jim Crow. Stribling was a white Southerner, and
Birthright
was the only time Micheaux embraced the work of a white author (and, along with
Cedars,
one of the rare instances of his filming
anyone else's
story). But Stribling's fiction appealed to Micheaux: It took place in a segregated enclave in a sleepy river town that evoked memories of Metropolis, Illinois; and it had an idealistic hero,
the product of miscegenation, who was made-to-order for a Micheaux message.

Micheaux may not have known (or cared) about the color of Stribling's skin. When
Birthright
was originally published in 1922, the author was flooded by letters from readers. People from the North generally praised his book, Stribling said later, while Southerners usually abused it, asking “to my astonishment,” in his words, “if I myself were not a Negro.” Also from the South came “many letters from colored people themselves,” the author said, which “as a rule, were bitter and condemned my novel.”

Before
Birthright,
Stribling's byline had appeared mainly in pulp magazines and Sunday school publications. Before writing the novel, his second, Stribling, born and raised in Tennessee, had looked upon black people “precisely as the great majority of Southerners looked upon them, as a slightly subhuman folk,” in his words, “not much, perhaps, but just a little ‘sub.'”
Birthright
caused him to reexamine his upbringing and recognize the immorality of slavery and the Jim Crow system that was its replacement. He resolved to make
Birthright
the first of a trilogy, exploring “the social injustices suffered by black people in the South,” in his words.

It wasn't hard for Stribling to understand why white Southerners didn't like the book. He had depicted the imaginary river town of “Hooker's Bend” as a microcosm in which whites were poisoned by their own mistreatment and degradation of blacks. His story offered many negative examples of white Southern “inhospitality” to “colored people”: everything from blanket search-warrants wielded as racial intimidation, to the “Negro-stopping” clauses in real estate contracts that permitted blacks to purchase land but not to build on or inhabit it.

Yet it took him a while to figure out what offended the black readers: not his depiction of Hooker's Bend, but the attached hamlet of “Niggertown,” the home of the book's hero, Harvard graduate Peter Siner. Returning home with dreams of founding a colored school, Siner befriends a “bright mulatto” named Cissie—whose ingrained servitude and inability to break away from her misery is heartbreaking. The sharply drawn residents of Stribling's “Niggertown” speak in a crude dialect, riddled with uses of the n-word, and the author's portrait of life in “Niggertown” was uncomfortably close to the bleak reality of the segregated South.

Though
Birthright
merited “great critical acclaim,” as Stribling noted, it also drew condemnation from some critics and readers. And “poor ac
tual sales” smothered any hopes for a trilogy. The poor sales and the difficult subject matter of the novel—of no interest to Hollywood—undoubtedly explain why Micheaux was able to pick up the rights for a song, less than half of what he paid for
The House Behind the Cedars.

But Micheaux was far-sighted in admiring Stribling. The author would go on to write many other books set in rural Tennessee and Alabama, often touching sensitively and intelligently on race issues. In 1933 he would win the Pulitzer Prize for
The Store,
the second book of a different trilogy about the Old South. What many readers saw as repellent in Stribling's work, Micheaux recognized as true to life. Stribling's “Niggertown” was objectionable to some, but to him it was “a sort of colored
Main Street,
” as the
New York Age
wrote of the film eventually. The story's idealistic hero, its lowborn slang, its Jim Crow details—all of these were grist for Micheaux's creative mill.

Even so, Micheaux set about making changes that would relieve the book's despairing tone. Although later reviews of
Birthright
in papers like the
New York Age
suggested that he followed the novel “very closely,” the critics were fooled by the intertitles, whose dialogue was culled from the book. In fact, Micheaux added broad comedy to the story wherever possible, and changed the downbeat ending into one more in keeping with his own outlook.

Stribling's ending had Peter Siner convincing Cissie to leave “Niggertown” with him. By that point in the story Peter has failed to build his dream school, and Cissie is pregnant by another man. Both are shamed, defeated.

In Micheaux's version, Cissie wouldn't end up pregnant, and Siner's no-good nemesis, “Tump” Pack, would be dealt with decisively. Peter's dream of building a school would not be lost, merely deferred. The too-noble hero, the too-sweet ingenue, and the sugary finale were a recurrent flaw of Micheaux's films, but these contortions were no less typical of Hollywood productions of the period. And Micheaux's idealism was genuine—even if it was also genuinely at odds with his practicality and realism.

 

The cast Micheaux collected was cause for celebration.

At the heart of T. S. Stribling's story was Cissie, the cream-colored
beauty (she is “almost a white girl,” according to the novel) who is mired in “the uncouthness of Niggertown,” even though her instinctual intelligence sometimes trumps Siner's Harvard education. It was a job that called for a consummate actress who could convey levels of depth. Despite her talent and appeal, Shingzie Howard always had been a placeholder for Evelyn Preer. And now, after several years away from Micheaux and his films, Preer was once again available.

There were two important characters vying for Cissie's affections. One was Peter Siner, who aspires to edify his race, but who is cheated by a white racist banker and stuck with a “Negro-stopper” deed that makes him a local laughingstock.

The other was loud, burly Tump Pack, a decorated soldier on his way home from the war when Peter first meets him in a Jim Crow train car crossing the Ohio River. Though accorded a hero's welcome in Hooker's Bend, Tump is a brutal simpleton. Jealous over the friendship growing between Peter and Cissie, Tump attacks Peter, who is so startled that he flattens him with a wild, un-Harvardlike kick to the groin. After being arrested and released, Tump takes to carrying a gun, vowing to shoot Peter on sight.

Casting about for actors to play the rivals, Peter Siner and Tump Pack, Micheaux had a brainstorm. As the loutish Tump, he chose Salem Tutt Whitney; for the well-intentioned Peter, he picked J. Homer Tutt. It was a wonderful joke for knowledgeable audience members: In real life, Whitney and Tutt were brothers. Tutt was the younger, shorter one with a high-pitched squeak; Whitney the giant with a voice that shook the rafters. Veterans of black show business for a quarter century, they were top-drawer singers, songwriters, comedians, actors, playwrights, and producers of their own Smart Set revue (and many Smarter Set updates), touring widely with original musical shows of such high quality that even white newspapers sometimes took notice.

The fourth principal was the reliable Lawrence Chenault, playing the white Captain Renfrew, who is secretly Peter's father. Himself a Harvard man, Renfrew quietly pays Peter's tuition, and when Peter's mother dies abjectly, he brings the young man into his household under the pretext of having him edit his memoirs.

The cast came from New York to Roanoke for the filming, and principal photography began in July 1923. Micheaux had rewritten Strib
ling's story, opening up the novel to add some action. He gave Stribling's story a new ending that was not only more cinematic—including a long jailbreak sequence in which Cissie escapes after being arrested for larceny, and flees through a swamp with bloodhounds on her trail—but ultimately happier.

The chase sequence included a moment when the ever-plucky Preer had to cross “a swinging bridge made of board,” then climb a high hill, stumble and fall, rolling down the hillside. “I still have a scar on my ankle which lingers from the many bruises I got on this long roll,” the actress told the
Pittsburgh Courier
in 1927. “I am not complaining, because Mr. Oscar Micheaux, the director, wanted to use a dummy for the scene, but I said, ‘No.'” The bloodhounds doing the chasing “were brought direct from the police station,” Preer recalled, “but took a liking to me.” The only way Micheaux could coax the affectionate dogs into playing their parts was for Preer to hold out chunks of meat, call to the bloodhounds, and then sprint ahead of the animals yelping after her.