Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (39 page)

Micheaux was working frantically, aware of the disaster awaiting him back in New York. Mahon struggled with pages of cumbersome dialogue handed to him at the last minute. At one point in the finished film, the director can be heard off-camera, urging Mahon to hurry as the actor waves him off. At the end of another scene, Micheaux shouts “All right, cut!” But he couldn't lose the take without forfeiting the dialogue, so into the picture it went. Such crudeness in technique—along with awkward plot contrivances—had become all too common in recent Micheaux films.

Got to keep going!

He finished up back in New York, packing a remarkable half dozen musical acts into the Harlem half of the film, which takes place at “The Radium Club.” Micheaux's fast-fading budget limited him to tight shots of a quintet and a mere handful of extras. The entertainers included the top-hatted Tyler Twins, who execute a sly shadow dance. But the performers were sprinting, the chorus girls trying to synchronize their kicks with fur-and-fabric costumes pasted all over their bodies, a hedge against the censors. It was a far cry from the full-throttle Harlem of
The Exile.

“Harlem and the good times!” reads the intertitle, when the story shifted to the capital of black America. Yet for the picture's main title, Micheaux looked in a different direction: since the no-good Liza turns out to hail from his old stomping ground, Micheaux decided to retitle his remake
The Girl from Chicago.
The last production under the Brecher-Schiffman regime, it was barely released to the public; the few reviews were harsh, and what critics there were belittled the “misleading” title.

 

Nineteen thirty-two was the year Micheaux touched bottom. His litany of misfortune began with the death in Great Bend, Kansas, of his 85-year-old father. Calvin Swan Micheaux passed away in late January, from the lingering effects of a paralytic stroke. “A hardworking, industrious man, and a good citizen,” read his obituary in the
Great Bend Tribune.
“He was the father of a large family, and he had the joy in his late years of knowing that each son and daughter had received a good education, and were successful, prudent, and saving.”

Juggling so many problems in New York, Micheaux couldn't even afford the trip to his father's funeral. Ever since his bankruptcy in 1928, he had been racing—lurching, some might say—from picture to picture. His business dealings were a rickety house of cards. In 1932, the whole house caved in beneath a series of lawsuits, some more crushing than others.

Among the first to sue was a married vaudeville team known as Hooten and Hooten, who filed papers against Micheaux in Baltimore in late 1931. The duo charged that Micheaux had stolen their well-established comedy shtick, “The Alphabet Sermon,” recycling it as preacher Amon Davis's hilarious sermon in
Darktown Revue.
*

In May 1932, he was sued by a real “girl from Chicago.” Lucille Lewis, the virgin star Micheaux had “discovered” for
Veiled Aristocrats,
had never been paid for her emoting in the film. Lewis filed in court to halt the screening of future Micheaux movies in Chicago, and the
Chicago Defender
reported that “other creditors” were lining up behind Lewis.

Micheaux had long since learned how to evade attorneys, and even in New York it took a while for his chief financier, Frank Schiffman, to catch up to the race-picture pioneer with a lawsuit of his own. Charging angrily that his partner had “collected money which he failed to turn into the company offices,” and continually “issued checks without permission,”
Schiffman first filed suit early in the fall of 1932. Micheaux simply ignored the claim, skipping the court hearing.

But on November 26, 1932, around the time he was finishing
The Girl from Chicago,
Micheaux was arrested and arraigned in a Washington Heights courtroom on charges of “petty larceny.” The complaint alleged that Micheaux had stolen $83.91 from Schiffman, who added that “this is but one of a series of larcenies totaling several thousand dollars.” Micheaux borrowed five hundred dollars for bail, jumped the bond, and then promptly ignored a series of court dates.

Almost a full year went by before the system finally caught up with him. In October 1933 Schiffman instigated another arrest, and this time his complaint was joined by the bondsman whose security Micheaux had forfeited. His bail was set at $2,500: Now Schiffman had Micheaux in a vise.

Micheaux became a fixture of the tiny-print proceedings and judgments itemized in the
New York Times.
(Ironically, this was the first time he was ever
mentioned
in the
Times,
which had never reviewed any Micheaux book or film. As far as the “paper of record” was concerned, race pictures didn't exist.) The levies against Mr. and Mrs. Micheaux, who was named as a co-defendant, ranged above $3,000.

More humiliating was the headline coverage given to Micheaux's lawsuits, arrests, and downward spiral of legal entanglements in the black press. Even some usually friendly critics piled on with their grievances. Ralph Matthews of
The Afro-American
had been a Micheaux enthusiast, but he was repulsed by
The Phantom of Kenwood
when it was screened for him in May 1933, and over time his misgivings had mounted. “I admire your determination to pioneer in your chosen field,” Matthews addressed Micheaux in the Baltimore-based newspaper, which circulated widely in black belts throughout the East, “but, sir, I confess I abhor your technique.”

The Phantom of Kenwood
“seemed to lack direction,” Matthews wrote. “It seemed jumpy and undecided as to whether it wanted to move forward or backward, and your actors seemed to be held in check. Their actions were too studied, the natural spontaneity seemed suppressed.”

Matthews made it clear that he had followed Micheaux's career from the start, and with appreciation; his astute analysis of the filmmaker's auteurist body of work led him to a stern critique of its repetitive nature.

“Forget for awhile that colored gentlemen go West, or North, or to
South America, and become millionaires,” Matthews urged Micheaux. Forget the “social justice” crusades, too, and the obsession with “passing” and miscegenation. “Not every black man wants to cross the [color] line to get a wife,” Matthews wrote. He pleaded for Micheaux to consider scripts by other writers once in a while, to find urgent material in real-life news events, for instance. He asked for stars who could really act, role models audiences could “imitate and emulate.”

“You have plugged away where others have tried and failed,” Matthews ended his column. “You have striven to succeed where others have retreated in despair. Your future, sir, lies with the youth, both in the studio and in the box-office. They are pulling for you. Give them themes they can take to their hearts.”

Yet Micheaux was in no position to reply. It would be at least a year before he made another picture—the first in fifteen without a Micheaux production. Instead he spent this ghost year drifting in and out of courtrooms, seemingly defeated.

 

Micheaux eventually paid his court fees and fines, as well as the money he owed Frank Schiffman. But his pictures were henceforth banned from the Brecher-Schiffman empire—the five largest theaters in Harlem, the city within a city where Micheaux lived, the nation's single most concentrated market for race pictures.

This was the blow that should have destroyed him. But what had Booker T. Washington said? That it was good to start from the bottom of life? Belief was willpower, and Micheaux swore by the words of the Great Educator. He had scraped through before. It was good to start from the bottom.

He was an expert at many things, and among them were destitution, deprivation, and ignominy. He had been fired for thievery as a Pullman porter, and then learned to be a frontiersman the hard way, dragging a plow through acres and acres of tough ground in South Dakota. His baby had died in childbirth; his wife had left him; his personal humiliation had made headlines in Chicago; even his land had been stolen out from under him. The banks had reclaimed his beloved homestead. Censors had mutilated and repossessed his films. Critics of his own race had savaged some of his best creations. His own brother had betrayed him. Some of the pic
tures he had worked hardest to produce had been frozen in labs, sold at auction. Everywhere he went, he was trailed by lawsuits.

Through it all, he had had to contend with racism and segregation and Jim Crow.

Through it all, America's mainstream film industry remained oblivious to his work.

Yet Micheaux's motivations as a filmmaker went beyond those of his Hollywood counterparts, and this extra dimension compelled him to persevere. Film was a storytelling medium, but for Micheaux it was also a pulpit. He wanted to show life the way he alone saw it. He was determined to bear witness, to
testify.
“He was zealous, full of zeal,” recalled Shingzie Howard. “He wanted to get across a message.”

And so, slowly, Micheaux began to reinvent his future. He reached out to new investors and collaborators, talking up his ideas the way he always had. He found friends at the Empire Laboratories in Closter, New Jersey, one of the key plants serving the Fort Lee constellation of studios. The Empire Lab owners were willing to let Micheaux's processing bills slide in exchange for a percentage of anticipated returns on his next films. Then he wangled a substantial production investment from Sack Amusement Enterprises, a San Antonio, Texas, company that wanted a steady flow of race pictures for its small theater chain in the Southwest.

The South and Southwest were increasingly important to Micheaux now that he was blackballed in the major Harlem theaters. The West also held promise, and Sack Amusement Enterprises was exploring the market in California. In early 1934, Micheaux himself traveled to the West Coast. From his earliest correspondence with the Johnson brothers and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Micheaux had aspired to make a race picture in or around Hollywood. Over the years he had continued to float this dream in publicity releases. But Micheaux never found the means or opportunity, and this was probably his first and last visit to America's screen capital.

Micheaux had maintained a correspondence with the capable actor Clarence Brooks, one of Lincoln's founders. Brooks had developed a solid Hollywood career, recently playing a high-profile role in John Ford's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's
Arrowsmith.
Fifth-billed, Brooks portrayed a Howard University–educated doctor who aids the hero, Ronald Colman, in fighting disease on a West Indies island. Brooks's part made the picture a resounding success in black theaters, and his breakthrough was
widely heralded in the black press as “the most dignified part given a Negro in the films to date,” in the words of the
Atlanta Daily World.

Brooks met with Micheaux in California, and made a handshake agreement to star in the director's next two productions, the first to be shot back East. Micheaux also met with theater owners in central Los Angeles, which had a booming black population, taking pledges for the planned projects starring Brooks.

Micheaux's visit wasn't mentioned in the Hollywood gossip columns; nor did he apply for work at the major studios, where, he knew all too well, a man of his race was barred from
any
employment behind the camera. Film historian Donald Bogle cited these statistics from 1930: Of 4,451 actors in Hollywood, 128 were black. Of 2,909 actresses, 85. Of 1,106 “directors, managers, officials,” just three were black, none of course writers, directors, or producers. Micheaux couldn't have gotten a job operating the clapboard on a Hollywood set.

Yet would Micheaux have left California without stopping for a glimpse of one of the legendary studios, maybe MGM, not far away in Culver City? He loved motion pictures, he watched Hollywood movies whenever he could, and these days some of his old leads even had small roles in them. Sitting in a car outside a studio like MGM, his motor idling, Micheaux would have stared out at a mysterious, sprawling jumble of buildings, a foreign country for which he had no passport. The guard at the gates giving him the once-over would have seen nothing but a well-dressed, middle-aged Negro—a gawking tourist, not the pioneering director of African-American film.

Staring past the gates, only Micheaux could have imagined what he might have done at such a lavish studio, with all the budgets and personnel and opportunities a contract afforded. And only a man like him could have shrugged it all away, putting his car in gear and driving off, thinking:
It is good to start from the bottom.

 

Micheaux was accompanied by Clarence Brooks on a train heading East. They took their time, got off at points, hopped into a car and strayed from a direct route, staying overnight with sympathetic newspaper editors and theater managers, talking up their plans. Adding this stint to towns and cities visited later, when their film was released, a national
black-press columnist estimated the two covered 26,000 miles and 37 states, collecting bookings and earnest money.

While en route Micheaux polished the script he was tailoring for the actor, the first scenario he'd been able to schedule for filming in a year. In his lost year he'd had time for reflection, a luxury he rarely indulged. His next picture would be intricately wrought and deeply felt, with a superior script and cast. It would be his first masterwork of the sound era.

At this major crossroads, after having just been flogged by a Jewish backer in the New York courts, Micheaux returned to the true-life Deep South mystery that ended with a prominent Jewish businessman convicted of the slaying of a young white woman, on the testimony of a menial black worker.

Drawing on his 1915 book
The Forged Note
and his 1921 silent film
The Gunsaulus Mystery,
Micheaux plunged into an allegorical reexamination of the 1913 Mary Phagan slaying in Atlanta, and the conviction of factory-owner Leo Frank—a murder case that stuck in his craw.