Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (35 page)

That was
When Men Betray,
made in New York in early 1929, with a cast recycled from
The Wages of Sin:
Lorenzo Tucker, William A. Clayton Jr., Katherine Noisette, Alice B. Russell. Even the story sounded vaguely similar: two Chicago brothers, one a cad, fall in love with the same sweet girl; the young innocent chooses the cad, who deserts her on her wedding night, leaving her desperate and vulnerable to misfortune.

It would be Micheaux's last pure silent film. And what little is known about
When Men Betray
comes, not surprisingly, from the censors. The Pennsylvania State Board complained about Noisette's “nude form from waist up, after she has removed [her] pajama jacket,” the unsavory character of a “deacon,” and “close-up and near views” of two actresses clawing at each other's faces (the old, crowd-pleasing “catfight”). Micheaux agreed to make changes, but the print was seized and Micheaux fined after
When Men Betray
was discovered in theaters with an inauthentic Pennsylvania seal.

The mask he offered to the public might have been cheer and confidence. But Lorenzo Tucker also noticed how badly Micheaux suffered from the stress and strain. More than once, Tucker watched as the filmmaker stretched out on a couch, right in the middle of photographing a scene, sometimes lying there even while calling the camera takes. Among other ailments, he was beleaguered by chronic stomach pain. While on the set, Micheaux would swallow handfuls of raw starch from an Argo box, “keep tossing it in his mouth as if it were peanuts,” Tucker recalled.

“What's wrong with you?” Tucker asked him once.

“Oh, don't bother me,” the director replied. “Nervous indigestion. You make me nervous!”

“Everybody made him nervous,” Tucker concluded.

His money problems forced Micheaux to make films even faster, in the late 1920s, cutting back on multiple takes and rehearsal time. Tucker recalled pleading with the director for more rehearsal. “You young actors!” Micheaux would shout at him. “I don't know what I'm going to do with you. What's the matter, Tucker, you can talk, can't you? And you can walk, can't you? Well, then, let's shoot the scene!”

No matter how fast he churned out the pictures, there were never enough bookings. And Micheaux no longer had any sales force, only himself. True, his wife was able to help with practically everything else. Alice B. Russell was the perfect complement to Micheaux: A discerning reader, she listened to his stories as they evolved and edited his scripts. Well-organized, already acting as de facto producer of his films, she assisted her husband in every possible way on the set and whispered to the actors after he was done shouting. She was taking more significant acting roles. A natural diplomat, she could represent his films to censors, especially in all-important New York State.

But Micheaux knew best how to sell his pictures, and when he was on the road the finances were in suspense.

 

By mid-1929, only about 3,500 of the nation's twenty thousand movie theaters were wired for synchronized sound, but those 3,500 were doing about 75 percent of the box office.

Sound was the trend, and all the black theaters were mad to catch up. No race-picture producer had yet made an “all-talking” picture. Micheaux was the leading candidate, but he was daunted by the risk and expense. Quite apart from the costs, which he would have to shoulder alone, he faced all the transitional difficulties that Hollywood took years to solve: coping with an adjusted acting style that relied more heavily on dialogue; retreating indoors to controlled soundstages (Micheaux had always relished exteriors); restraining his camerawork, as his newly paralyzed actors hovered near the dangling overhead microphones.

In the chaotic wake of
The Jazz Singer,
Micheaux lit upon the same temporary solution as his Hollywood counterparts: His next two pictures would be “part-talkies,” with a few musical numbers spicing up the mainly silent stories.

Both would star Lorenzo Tucker. Micheaux was determined to build
up Tucker into “The Colored Valentino.” The mystique of Hollywood's dark romantic idol, who had died abruptly in 1926, was still strong.

Like other Micheaux regulars, Tucker was expected to make personal appearances at big-city premieres as part of his contract, with Micheaux paying train fare and other expenses. Often Tucker was sent to his own hometown of Philadelphia, where he'd take the stage to address the crowds and sign autographs before showings. Micheaux took a fatherly interest in the younger man, reminding him to visit his mother while he was in town. And if Micheaux was in Philadelphia without Tucker,
he'd
stop by and greet Tucker's mother, telling her, “Don't worry, I'm looking after him. He's doing well.”

Audiences were happy to meet Tucker, but it was just as vital for black exhibitors to shake his hand. They might shell out bigger advances if “The Colored Valentino” was going to star in the next Micheaux film.

“In those days, Rudolph Valentino was very, very popular,” Tucker recalled in one interview. “They said I looked like him. I did look a little like him, but to me, personally, I didn't think so.”

“If you really want to know,” the actor mused another time, “I was even lighter than Valentino himself.”

The irony was bittersweet: Tucker was “lighter than Valentino,” but his light skin prevented him from getting higher-paying jobs in Hollywood pictures. The white studios had what film historian Donald Bogle has called a “blackface fixation.” Thus Micheaux's “passing” theme had a professional corollary in the Hollywood system; and other Micheaux actors like ex-Lafayette Players Andrew Bishop and Charles Moore ran into the same dilemma as Tucker. They might have played “white” characters in Micheaux films, but they were considered “too white” for the Hollywood studio producers “searching for dark subjects with bulging eyes and thick lips,” according to Chappy Gardner in his
Pittsburgh Courier
column.

“I never got any white press at all,” Tucker recalled, “and very few people outside of the black community ever heard of me.”

Then, when someone like William Fountaine, who had a medium complexion, lucked into a Hollywood part, his background with Micheaux was trivialized. Though he had been the leading man in Micheaux's
The Dungeon
and
The Virgin of Seminole,
the MGM press release for
Hallelujah!
claimed that Fountaine was “discovered on the street” in New York by King Vidor, who promptly “sent him to have a
screen test.” Fountaine would be cast as the shady gambler Hot Shot in Vidor's “all-Negro” feature, a rarity from a major Hollywood studio.

“Lorenzo Tucker's light complexion was perhaps the central anomaly of his life,” wrote Richard Grupenhoff in
The Black Valentino: The Stage and Screen Career of Lorenzo Tucker.
“Although he had black blood in him, he was light-skinned, and he could have chosen to pass as white and hide his ancestry. Instead, he remained true to his heritage, a decision that often left him stranded between the two worlds of black and white.”

Micheaux never found another leading lady with the histrionic talent and marquee wattage of Evelyn Preer. But under his rough tutelage, the dapper, likable Tucker emerged as his most reliable leading man.

 

The two “part-talkies” were
Easy Street
(which some scholars believe was a remake of Micheaux's earlier “ghost” film, “Jasper Landry's Will”) and
A Daughter of the Congo
(Micheaux's adaptation of Henry Francis Downing's Liberian novel). Their filming was spread out over late 1929 and early 1930.

Easy Street
was a Harlem story involving a gang of city slickers who swindle an old man. The oldster was played by Richard B. Harrison, a son of fugitive slaves, born in Ontario, who had toured Canada and the United States as early as the turn of the century, presenting recitals of Shakespeare, literature, and poetry. Once again Micheaux's casting acumen was ahead of the white world, which didn't hear about the sexagenarian actor until February 1930, when the musical Biblical fable
Green Pastures
opened on Broadway. Harrison's bravura performance as De Lawd, which led an all-black cast, convinced many critics he was actor of the year.
*

Besides Tucker and Harrison, the cast featured William Clayton Jr. as a sinister criminal and member of the gang—which was headed by Alice
B. Russell, proof that Mrs. Micheaux's parts were growing and branching out in variety.

If
Easy Street
was a kind of chamber work,
A Daughter of the Congo
was a grandiose project, a loose rendition of Henry Francis Downing's 1917 novel
The American Cavalryman,
which required an exotic “African” setting, a large cast of principals and extras, aerial scenes, and singing and dancing numbers. Katherine Noisette would head the cast as a beautiful mulatto, lost as a baby in Africa. Her father was Charles Moore, who makes a fortune as a New York banker “passing” as white. (When his sister tells the banker that he should be ashamed of his racial deceit, he blithely explains, “There are thousands of Negroes doing the same thing.”) Comes word from Liberia that the mulatto child has been identified as a female Tarzan, brought up by natives, now grown into a beautiful jungle woman. On her way to marry a powerful tribal chief (Salem Tutt Whitney), the mulatto and her female companion (Wilhelmina Williams) are captured by Arab slave traders. Her father will pay anything for her rescue. The heroics fall to a U.S. cavalry officer (Lorenzo Tucker) loaned to the African republic.

All this, however, would have to be realized on a rock-bottom budget. Micheaux had to trick up a faux Africa inside a studio, and shoot his aerial scenes over Long Island. “We spent hours taking off and landing in those old biplanes,” recalled Tucker. “It was dangerous, but it was exciting too. And we flew all over Long Island, as another plane followed alongside us with a camera and shot us looking over the side, like we were searching the jungles below.”

A Daughter of the Congo
was shot at warp speed and then propelled into theaters in the spring of 1930. Micheaux was desperate to pump up his cash flow, now down to a trickle. He was also desperate to circumvent the hassles of censorship. Censorship entailed costs, delays, and inevitable deletions of the very un-Hollywoodlike highlights that Micheaux had embedded in the African film, to stir what he liked to call “mouth to mouth advertising”: the scene straight from Downing's novel, for example, where the mulatto and her friend take a dip in a jungle pool, “with breasts unduly exposed,” in the words of the eventual censorship report.

The opening was set for April 5 at the Renaissance, the only major Harlem theater run by black men, the Charity brothers. But state censors shut the picture down after two days, insisting that
A Daughter of the Congo
did not have an up-to-date approval seal. In fact, the new film was
affixed with a seal left over from
The Millionaire;
Cleo Charity, the theater's manager, claimed that Micheaux had assured him that the correct seal was forthcoming.

The morning after
A Daughter of the Congo
was pulled, agents for the state censorship board arranged to meet with Micheaux at the Renaissance. The race-picture pioneer “admitted that he rented this picture to Mr. Charity, and also admitted freely that he was entirely in the wrong in having rented for exhibition this picture before it was licensed. He and Mr. Charity agreed to take the picture from the screen that day.”

When the suspicious agents returned later in the afternoon, however,
A Daughter of the Congo
was still on the marquee, and still playing to audiences. This time, when they tracked Micheaux down, he claimed that he'd spoken personally with the head censor in Albany, who gave him special permission for temporary exhibition. The agents tried to contact the head censor, who was on a train, incommunicado. They didn't sort it out until April 10, and when they did they concluded that Micheaux never had spoken with the censor.

The unlicensed film was ordered withdrawn, and Micheaux was forced to make cuts. In the meantime,
A Daughter of the Congo
had sold to capacity in Harlem for five days.

Audiences lapped it up, but this time the critics ganged up on Micheaux with a vengeance, calling his latest production cheapjack and humdrum. The black press charged that
A Daughter of the Congo
fell down on all levels, from its story elements to the “part-talkie” technology to its cultural sensitivity. In their eyes, the film lagged far behind the burgeoning achievements of Hollywood, and they blamed the lapse on Micheaux.

“Most of the actors overact, and Mr. Micheaux has succeeded again in distorting a story so that intelligent continuity is destroyed,” wrote John Mack Brown in the
Norfolk Journal and Guide.
The musical turn of Daisy Harding, a soprano familiar at Harlem church functions, was singled out by Brown as the film's “one bright spot.”

The widely read Theophilus Lewis was even more scathing in the
New York Age,
one of Harlem's two principal newspapers. Though he'd been impressed by Micheaux's previous productions as “the work of a man of remarkable personal ability, handicapped only by a lack of financial resources,” Lewis noted, he had been brought up short by the “unpardonable” offenses of
A Daughter of the Congo.

“The picture is thoroughly bad from every point of analysis,” wrote Lewis, “from the continuity, which is unintelligible, to the caption writing, which is a crime.”

The crowd scenes were directed as though the performers “had been cautioned to be careful and not knock the camera over,” Lewis said. He offered some praise for the intelligent emoting of Salem Tutt Whitney, but dismissed the overall production quality as vastly inferior to Hollywood.