Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (37 page)

Baptiste and Duval eventually quarrel over her plans to turn her mansion into a “social club” with recreational activities for the criminal element. Indignant, she brands him a sissified “Goody Man.” Armed with a land deed, the hero heads west. When the story picks up five years later, Jean Baptiste has established himself as a successful homesteader in South Dakota. Among the other settlers he is sometimes mistaken for white, though he doesn't hide his true identity and always tells the truth about himself.

One of his friends knows that Jean Baptiste is “colored,” but wonders about his relatively light complexion. “I understand that nig—colored people are smoky,” the friend stammers. “That is—black, you understand?”

“Yes, that is true,” Jean Baptiste answers, his reply summarizing the insistent problem of many Micheaux films, “but if you are part colored and part white it is all the same—you are considered all colored.”

Against his better judgment, Jean Baptiste falls in love with the daughter of a neighbor—still a Scottish girl from Indiana. He and the neighbor's daughter have the usual tortured romance, one that on the surface seemed to be an “egregious violation of racist guidelines concerning miscegenation,” in the words of scholar J. Ronald Green, “laid down by contemporary censorship boards throughout the United States.”

Jean Baptiste flees the prairie, returning to Chicago, again falling under the spell of Edith Duval. Her mansion is now a thriving cabaret complete with house band and nightly entertainers, frequented by drunks, reefer smokers, and gamblers.

When the vice queen is murdered, Jean Baptiste is arrested for the
crime. After a time, the real culprit is revealed, and when Jean Baptiste emerges from the D.A.'s office a free man, he finds the Scottish girl waiting for him, with news she has learned from her father: her mother was “of Ethiopian extraction.” The couple takes the train back to South Dakota, entwined in each other's arms, facing a bright future together.

 

The leading roles went to a set of fresh faces. Stanleigh Morrell, who portrayed Jean Baptiste, had played a small part in the Broadway musical
Green Pastures
(while also understudying the lead). Micheaux had first seen Morrell act (and play stomp piano) onstage at the Alhambra at 126th and Seventh in the 1920s, when that vaudeville and movie house hosted a stock company. Nora Newsome, portraying the Scottish daughter, was probably from Great Bend, Kansas; another Newsome from that family tree would figure significantly in later Micheaux pictures. Newsome was cast mainly for her creamy skin, which added credibility to her character's ability to “pass,” and for her long wavy tresses, which Micheaux photographed with a pre-Raphaelite luminosity.

Another newcomer to film, Carl Mahon, had a pivotal scene, playing the distraught former lover spurned by Edith Duval; when he threatens suicide, she hands him a gun, and instead he shoots her. Eunice Brooks played Edith, and the large supporting cast included Micheaux veterans A. B. DeComathiere, Lorenzo Tucker, and Katherine Noisette. Charles “Daddy” Moore even returned to reprise the role he had originated in
The Homesteader:
the white-haired Rosebud neighbor from Indiana who is slow to inform his daughter she is of mixed race.

Some of the actors tucked in their roles for Micheaux between performances in
Green Pastures,
which had opened to resounding acclaim on Broadway the previous February and was still drawing packed audiences. Many in the cast of
Green Pastures
—from Richard B. Harrison and “Daddy” Moore to J. Homer Tutt, Salem Tutt Whitney, Mercedes Gilbert, and Susie Sutton—were already well-known to fans of Micheaux films.

 

With the biggest, most secure budget of his career, Micheaux felt flush. This time his glee was genuine. He splurged on the singing-dancing se
quences, bringing Leonard Harper and Donald Heywood to Fort Lee to stage the film's cabaret interludes, and to help out with
Darktown Revue,
a short subject to accompany the feature.

Harper, a former vaudeville dancer, had become the premier choreographer of the stage spectacles at Connie's Inn, where he was the house producer. His revues were always fast-paced and witty; they boasted headliners, but were equally renowned for their skimpily clad chorus lines of young no-names. (Preachers, law enforcement officials, and puritanical critics regularly mounted attacks on Harper's risqué shows.) Along with his genius for staging musical numbers, Harper brought his “Hot Chocolates” over from Connie's Inn.

Early in his career, Heywood, a composer, lyricist, and playwright from Venezuela, had composed music for the Smart (and Smarter) Set companies. He wrote prolifically for Harlem and Broadway musicals; one of his hit songs, “I'm Coming, Virginia,” became a standard among jazz artists, and was recorded by Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Art Tatum, and Artie Shaw, among others. For
The Exile,
Micheaux asked for an overture of spirituals (to underscore the opening images of the film, a shimmering montage of Chicago buildings and street life) and dance music for the club scenes (“searing quotations of hot jazz,” in the words of J. Ronald Green). Heywood brought his own choir and band to the studio, and even appeared on-screen conducting the orchestra.

Micheaux's films abounded with performers obscure to white America, who were celebrities on the black show business circuit. During the silent era he had drafted the Lafayette Players and other stage idols and introduced them to big-screen audiences. In the sound era, his films were chock-full with black singers, musicians, cabaret entertainers, specialty acts, and kooky comedians who never hopped the Hollywood gravy train; these included every type of tap-dancer: twins, kid tappers, “muscle dancers,” dancers who tapped while jumping rope.

The highlight of
The Exile
's filming was the extended nightclub sequence from which Micheaux would carve out acts to interlard the story. The ruthless interspersing of these acts would become a fixture of his sound-era features: He'd cut to his leads sitting at tables for a brief exchange of dialogue, then back to the parade of performers.

Among the marvels in
The Exile
were Roland Holder, a buck-and-wing specialist, and Louise Cook, a sparkler from Connie's Inn, singing “Make Hay While the Sun is Shining” while doing her shimmy and
kootch. Leonard Harper's tap-dancing chorus girls took over here and there, exploding before the cameras with their big smiles, slivered outfits, and long legs. Nothing in Hollywood movies compared with the “Hot Chocolates” at their hottest: Micheaux knew he'd have to shuffle this sexy footage when facing the censors later.

Some of the best music and funniest comedy was squeezed into the two-reeler,
Darktown Revue,
which spotlighted Donald Heywood's Harlem Choir, lustily belting out their numbers around a piano. The small chorus was elegantly dressed, the tone was high-class and solemn. But there was also a mock spiritual, and songs ranging from “Watermelon Time” to “Jazz Grand Opera.”

High art often fused with low in a Micheaux production, and the choral concert was interrupted by the “coon comics” Andrew Tribble (from
Blackbirds of 1928
) and Tim Moore (later the Kingfish of television's
Amos 'n' Andy
series). The two rambled on-screen to discourse on work and ignorance (swiping “at the U.S. cult of personality and myths of upward mobility and individual self-reliance,” as film scholar Arthur Knight has observed). Their sidesplitting satirical exchange devolved into a lengthy haunted house anecdote.

Continuing the general heresy, Amon Davis materialized in blackface to deliver his uproarious send-up of a digressive, sanctimonious preacher, full of hot air and weird malapropisms.

Micheaux may have been the odd man out among his intellectual contemporaries, but “if one wants to get some idea of what the Harlem Renaissance looked like in motion,” in the words of film historian Clyde Taylor, for dance, music, and rough comedy, “Micheaux's movies are among the best sources available.”

 

It's likely that
The Exile
boasted two cameramen, because Micheaux had to divide the schedule around actors appearing nightly on Broadway. He had a fondness for newsreel photographers, because they came at a discount and weren't ruffled by mishaps. His team for
The Exile
was Lester Lang, who'd been shooting low-budget material in New York since the early 1920s, and Walter Strenge, a newsreelist who proved himself during a long career by winning Emmys and an Academy Award nomination, ultimately serving as president of the American Society of Cinematogra
phers. Both cameramen would work on Micheaux films intermittently throughout the 1930s.

If any proof is needed that Micheaux was
cinematic
when he had the means and opportunity,
The Exile
is Exhibit A; the film would boast a textbook array of shots and angles, and an intimacy in the staging that benefited from superior studio lighting. Micheaux used smoke and mirrors cleverly. And unlike most Hollywood directors, who were forever relegating musicians to the background of club scenes, diminishing their numbers by excerption, he showcased his performers' at length, with attentive framing.

The filming was over by the end of February; thanks to Micheaux's rejuvenated finances, his editing bills were paid ahead, and
The Exile
was completed by mid-March. A special midnight preview was planned for the Odeon, with
Darktown Revue
to be screened as a prologue. The advance publicity stirred anticipation in Harlem, and the full house for the preview included members of the national black press.

The midnight audience enjoyed a production that was sumptuous by previous race-picture standards. The detail lavished on the decor and costumes was extraordinary, the musical sequences extended and vibrant. If the story was improbable, it was also deeply sincere and steadily involving, entertaining even as it touched astutely on sensitive issues—prejudice (in the character of a nefarious homesteader from Arkansas who brags that he doesn't like “coloreds”), intermarriage between the races, even “white flight” before that phrase existed.

True, some of the dialogue seemed to be spoken in slow motion—partly because Micheaux wrote speeches that spelled out every hint of meaning, and partly because the actors, unaccustomed to microphones, were overenunciating their every syllable. And, true, some of the novice players—particularly Nora Newsome—seemed inept. But Micheaux's casting was hardly infallible, and wordy scripts and clumsy technology also were common among many Hollywood studio films, during the bridge years of sound.

Micheaux's preview was greeted as “a wonderful effort” by George Tyler in
The Afro-American.
“Some good acting is done in this picture,” Tyler noted, while also praising
Darktown Revue.
The
New York Age,
as usual, offered a more measured reaction. “It is by far the best picture Mr. Micheaux has ever turned out,” wrote W. E. Clark in the
Age,
“genuinely entertaining in spots.” Nevertheless, he found that
The Exile
evinced
“many obvious faults,” especially weak acting by the female leads.
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And Micheaux couldn't hope to woo New York sophisticates, Clark tsk-tsked, when he used “the outside of the famous Charles W. Schwab mansion on [New York's] Riverside Drive as a notorious house in the Windy City.”

The Exile
wouldn't have its official premiere for another two months, suggesting that there may even have been extra in the budget for fine-tuning after previews—another Micheaux first. But the dream of opening one of his films in a theater on the aptly named Great White Way was still elusive.

Instead,
The Exile
opened at the Lafayette in May 1931—to overflow crowds and triumphant notices. The “first Negro all-talking picture” was completely ignored by the white press, but covered as an historic occasion in papers like the
Pittsburgh Courier,
which hailed the story, acting, musical sequences, and a “portrayal of Negro life in a city that no one but a Negro, who has traveled and lived in cities, could tell.”

Micheaux immediately hit the road, traveling to black theaters in the major markets of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C, and Chicago to personally arrange key bookings. Everywhere he went, he met with the press. He couldn't be blamed for sounding a note of vindication in his interviews.

In a career of switchback reversals,
The Exile
was the miracle comeback, a rebound for the ages. “Micheaux studied hard and waited a long time for the breaks,” declared the
Pittsburgh Courier;
“his
Exile
now is a credit to him.” No other race-picture producer from the silent-film era—not a single one—broke through all the barriers and crossed over into the sound age. Micheaux was the first and only.

They were white and Jewish—Jews with money that Micheaux desperately coveted.

An Austrian immigrant, Leo Brecher was the man with the deep pockets. Frank Schiffman, from the Lower East Side, was Brecher's manager and enforcer. Together they were the gods of Harlem show business.

Brecher and Schiffman ran the Odeon, the Roosevelt, the Douglas, and the Lafayette theaters. Brecher was also the landlord of the Cotton Club, upstairs from the Douglas. In 1934 the partners would launch the Apollo. In 1935, when they finally succeeded in buying the Renaissance from its black owners, they controlled Harlem's five largest theaters, offering movies and live entertainment to a combined capacity of 6,700 people. With four shows at each theater, they catered to a paying public of more than 25,000 customers daily.

Brecher and Schiffman also had theater interests in other East Coast cities—Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.—so performers in the popular Lafayette revues always followed up their Harlem engagements with a bus trip “Round the World,” as the circuit was called, before returning to rehearse the next show.

The balding, bespectacled Schiffman was the hands-on man who interacted with the public and the performers. Some who worked for Schiffman called him “Pops,” considering him a generous man who befriended black people and donated to Negro causes and benefits. Before the partners took over the Lafayette in 1925, after all, black customers
had been consigned to the famous theater's “nigger heaven,” just as they were in most places in America—even in Harlem.

According to “local legend,” on one occasion Schiffman even defended Micheaux's civil rights. “Frank was personally responsible for breaking down the color barrier that existed in many of the stores and restaurants on 125th Street well into the 1940s,” wrote Ted Fox in
Showtime at the Apollo.
“As the story goes, he and black film producer Oscar Micheaux went into Frank's Restaurant, a well-known Greek-run steak house, and ordered two steaks. When Micheaux's came smothered with pepper, Schiffman exchanged dishes with him, ordered another, and told the waiter if he ever tried that again, he'd have a hell of a fight on his hands.”

To others, however, Schiffman was no saint. By 1931 he was already a controversial power broker in Harlem—regarded by his detractors as a tough, cheap son of a bitch, a cutthroat who delighted in putting rival theaters out of business and blacklisting entertainers who accepted gigs from competitors. Record producer John Hammond, who knew Schiffman well from their mutual dealings with musicians, recalled Schiffman “talking about Negroes and using the word
shvartzer,
” a Yiddish pejorative.
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Micheaux eschewed pejoratives, but he harbored ambiguous feelings about Jews and a suspicious attitude toward Jewish producers of black stage shows and race pictures. But he had dealt with Jewish theater owners throughout much of his career, and was open-minded when it came to taking money from willing backers. And he was a magician with money.

Wags on Harlem streets gave the partnership long odds, and the wags were right.

 

What happened next can be pieced together from court records and newspaper items.
The Exile
may have been a hit in Harlem theaters, but the picture (especially the dancers' skimpily costumed scenes) rang the
usual censorship alarm bells, and the returns were slow from outside New York. Still, Micheaux had a line of credit from his well-heeled partners, and he was the new Fayette Pictures man on the road dunning theaters. He'd been skilled at knockdowns since his Pullman porter days, and for years he'd been juggling banks, lawyers, and debts in cities all over the country. It would take Schiffman at least a year to realize all the ways in which his money could be magicked.

During which time, incredibly, Micheaux would squeeze out five more productions.

The coming of sound offered many filmmakers an excuse to revisit their hits or favorite stories from the silent era, to remake and tinker with cherished ideas. What was true of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and nearly every important Hollywood director was also true of Micheaux. Remaking a silent picture took less time and money than creating an entirely new film, since the story was already largely conceptualized, a basic script in hand. Micheaux's first “talkie” was
The Homesteader
redux. Now, after
The Exile,
he'd remake
The House Behind the Cedars.

Never mind the minor detail that Micheaux had never made that last rights payment to Charles W. Chesnutt for his 1926 version. This time, instead of using Chesnutt's title, he would simply lift a different title from another source:
Veiled Aristocrats,
a 1923 “passing” novel by Milwaukee author Gertrude Sanborn, another story of interracial romance set partly in Chicago's Black Belt.

Never mind that Micheaux had no marquee name to play Rena, the young “bright mulatto” whose life takes a fateful turn when her brother persuades her to “pass” for white. Shingzie Howard, who had portrayed Rena in Micheaux's silent version, had starred in a couple of race pictures for other producers before quitting to become a schoolteacher. His latest “virgin star,” Nora Newsome, had been excoriated by critics for her weak performance in
The Exile
and never acted in another motion picture. Micheaux may have thought wistfully of Evelyn Preer, but the actress was far away in Los Angeles, pregnant with her first child. So while in Chicago for screenings of
The Exile
in mid-1931, the director attended a talent parade at the Regal Theatre on the South Side, and from the contestants chose Lucille Lewis as the next Rena.

He cast Lorenzo Tucker as Rena's brother John, and Laura Bowman as Mrs. Walden, Rena's mother. Carl Mahon, who had acquitted himself admirably in
The Exile,
would play Frank, the childhood friend in love
with Rena. Lawrence Chenault would play the white judge and benefactor of the family; nightclub singer-dancer Barrington Guy would portray Rena's white suitor.

Frank Schiffman couldn't have been pleased with Micheaux's new project. Fayette Pictures had pledged to make Northern Black Belt stories. But the Fayette banner didn't last much beyond the first Brecher-Schiffman-Micheaux production, and Schiffman himself was swiftly sidelined: One “A. Burton Russell,” also known as Mrs. Micheaux, would be credited as the producer of
Veiled Aristocrats.
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If Schiffman wanted to cut studio costs on a production for which he had little enthusiasm, Micheaux would find ways to cope: the “house behind the cedars” of the remake was actually the Homestead on Greenwood Avenue in Montclair, where Micheaux did most of the filming in the summer of 1931.

Micheaux's silent film script was hastily rewritten, substituting dialogue for intertitles. Although some in the ensemble, like Lucille Lewis, were amateurs, even the professionals were flustered by how fast Micheaux worked once he had a semblance of financing. “Sometimes we would get on the set and Micheaux would hand out scenes that he had written only the night before,” Tucker recalled, “so we had to memorize it quickly.” And of course there was never time or money for “cue cards,” which Hollywood actors took for granted.

Tucker and Micheaux didn't always get along. At times his mentor treated him in a fatherly fashion, but when they were with others on the set Micheaux would sting Tucker, calling him derisive nicknames like “Big Boy” or “Useless.” Like one of Micheaux's later actors, Carman Newsome, Tucker was handsome enough, but Micheaux sometimes found his performances lacking, especially in the strong jaw and backbone department. “When you finished you'd think he'd say to you, ‘That was wonderful,'” said Tucker. “Never. He'd look at you and say, ‘Huumpf! You hammed that one up for me.'”

With the silent era over and Rudolph Valentino long dead, Micheaux had to update his promotional strategies: Now Tucker would be billed as “The Colored John Gilbert.” At times the actor felt exploited. “I can remember going up to his apartment to see if he [Micheaux] had any work
for me,” Tucker reminisced in the Grupenhoff biography. “He showed me his next script. ‘My name's not in the cast,' I said. ‘I know,' he replied, and said nothing more. Later, when I got up to leave, he said, ‘Take a script on the way out—you're playing the lead.' That way he always had me at his mercy. ‘I made more money with you as my leading man than anybody else,' he once told me, but that's as far as he would go. He always paid me on time, and he even loaned me money at times, but he would never let me get too big.”

In any event, Micheaux's leads during the sound era were sometimes upstaged by the musical acts he shoehorned into the films. The singers and dancers were intended to leaven the drama, but they sometimes took over like houseguests who refused to leave, proving more engaging than the main story. One highlight of
Veiled Aristocrats
was an extended sequence at Rena's brother's house, when the homeowner's absence affords the maid, the cook, and the chauffeur an opportunity to break out in a little scat singing and tap dancing. (The full orchestra of
The Exile
was reduced here to a quintet for one party scene, and solo piano to accompany the servants).

Fayette Pictures' “larger and more expensive scale” of production swiftly went the way of the company name. Only a deformed version of
Veiled Aristocrats
survives today, but the indoor scenery is spartan, with the actors statically posed around sofas or pianos in sparsely decorated rooms. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who began his career as a lowly film processing assistant on a Micheaux project in Chicago in the late 1930s, marveled at the man's expedience in such circumstances.

“I remember the exact expression he used, because I say it sometimes to myself nowadays, when people in show business are trying to do something cheap,” Wexler recalled. “He'd say, ‘Okay, boys, change the pictures on the walls!' Then they'd leave the lighting the way it was and move some of the furniture around—maybe put a piece of plastic on a chair or sofa to make it look different from the other apartment—while a guy changed the pictures.

“I remember [thinking], ‘Gee, this is
really
low-budget.'”

As was true of many early Hollywood talkies, the acting in
Veiled Aristocrats
ranged wildly. Laura Bowman declaimed to the rafters; Lucille Lewis floundered about with no discernible technique. Yet the outdoor scenes had an arresting beauty, the well-knit story still carried a wallop,
and, as contemporary critic Richard Corliss has written, “there's truth, power, and hurt—a hint of Emily Dickinson with a case of the emotional vapors—in Rena's big speech about passing for white while with her fiancé and his friends.” Writing in the
Chicago Defender
in 1931, Barbara Llorayne saw the same virtues in the picture, hailing
Veiled Aristocrats
as “far better than many [films] we have been asked to view and review the past season.”

Charles W. Chesnutt's daughter viewed the unauthorized remake at a Washington, D.C., theater in April 1932. “Rena, her brother, and Miss Molly took their parts very well,” Mrs. Ethel Williams reported in a letter to her father. “It was not artistic, like the story, however. Your beautiful English and the soul of the tale were lacking. It was a speaking movie, and the actors' voices were all harsh, as they probably are naturally. It was not so bad,” she added, “when you consider the handicaps colored actors have.”

Still, Chesnutt was incensed. If the Micheaux company had produced a talking remake of
The House Behind the Cedars
—without clearance, credit, or compensation—that was “rank plagiarism, and they would be liable in a civil action,” the author replied to his daughter, “if I had the money to bring one, and they had anything which I could collect.”

But Chesnutt had neither the means nor the opportunity: Broke and in frail health, he died later in 1932.

 

After finishing
Veiled Aristocrats,
Micheaux waited about five minutes before embarking on his next production. Schiffman's money burned a hole in his pocket. For the next year his speed would be frenetic.

The next was another “ghost film,” this one even sporting a ghost in its title.
The Phantom of Kenwood
was a perfect-murder mystery starring Frank Wilson, a sometime Lafayette Player and a well-known writer and director of Harlem plays; Babe Townsend, another Lafayette member who had triumphed as Mephisto in the company's production of Goethe's
Faust;
and Bee Freeman, the contralto whose first break had been in
Shuffle Along
(in which her signature tune was Sissle and Blake's “If You've Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin, You've Never Been Vamped at All”).
The Phantom of Kenwood
was certainly produced; it was screened once or twice for the press, then disappeared like the ghost film it was.

After another five-minute break came
Harlem After Midnight
(a story “built around Negro gangsters who kidnap a wealthy Jew,” as one review put it), starring Lorenzo Tucker, Lawrence Chenault, A. B. DeComathiere, and, again, Bee Freeman. There was also a pretty newcomer (Dorothy Van Engle) and a savvy old-timer (Rex Ingram from
Green Pastures)
. Micheaux himself played “a clever sleuth” who “breaks up the racket.”
Harlem After Midnight
was definitely filmed, circulated to some black theaters, reviewed in a few places, then “lost,” probably left behind at the last Midwest theater where it was booked.

The third quickie of 1931–1932 (the only one of the three that survives) was the big-city anthology
Ten Minutes to Live,
whose title was drawn from the second of two or three stories interwoven by a motif of vengeance.
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