Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: 'Bright Boulevards' tells of segregated Hollywood
Bruce Calvert
'Bright Boulevards' tells of segregated Hollywood
By Roger K. Miller
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, February 27, 2005
"Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood," by
Donald Bogle, One World/Random House, $26.95, 382 pages.
A little-known black actress, remembered by few whites and probably not
many more blacks, who went by the stage name Madame Sul-Te-Wan may
fairly be said to bracket the beginning and ending of black Hollywood
as Donald Bogle describes it in "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams."
Born Nellie Wan in Louisville, Ky., in 1873, she received her first
film role in 1915 from another former Louisville resident, D.W.
Griffith, in "Birth of a Nation," the first American cinematic epic --
and a film about race. Five years after playing one of her final roles,
in "Carmen Jones," she died in 1959, the year of "Porgy and Bess" -- a
film about race that was also the era's last all-black spectacle and
that symbolically, Bogle says, "marked the close of the old black
Hollywood."
In between was nearly a half-century of black Hollywood. That, too, is
a story about race -- the integration of blacks into the mainstream of
moviemaking and America.
There are two interlinked black Hollywoods here, a physical, geographic
one that revolved around Central Avenue in Los Angeles, where black
nightclubs and other entertainment venues flourished and the Dunbar
Hotel served as a kind of headquarters for peripatetic entertainers. It
died "in the post-World War II era as America saw the rise of the civil
rights movement and as Hollywood became more integrated."
Then there is the black Hollywood that is at one and the same time both
metaphoric and real: the struggle of African-Americans to forge careers
in movies. For similar reasons it too has changed beyond all
recognition.
Bogle, who is black, has written several other books about blacks in
entertainment, most notably "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks:
An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films," that focus on
their struggles and progress as professionals. Here, however, he looks
at their domestic and social lives.
"I wanted to look at what happened just before the cameras rolled -- or
once the performers left the studio to go home," he writes. "I wanted
to see how people lived and socialized."
To a fair degree he has succeeded, particularly if we bear in mind that
he must rely to a great extent on the oral and written recollections of
a group of professionals who, no matter their race or color, have
always had a vested interest in embellishing their lives with little
regard for the facts. The story, more competently than engagingly told,
is given at times to a boosterish tone and marred by occasional loose
or cliched writing ("dressed to the nines"; "but not chopped liver
either").
The book is divided into decades, the teens through 1950s, and
sprinkled throughout with lots of lovely illustrations. It is filled
with countless odd and compelling moments.
For instance, consider servants: When blacks came to California they
obtained work more often as cooks, maids and butlers to white movie
folk than in the movies themselves. Actually, this tended to give them
a measure of subliminal power, since they knew the gossip about the
stars, and even status: Working for a major star might give a black
more status than a movie role.
Servants even social-climbed their way to bigger and bigger stars. They
held elaborate balls and parties. Sometimes a lucky break would get
them an acting role that led to a career, as happened with Louise
Beavers.
The author says the ascendancy in the 1920s of Stepin Fetchit (real
name: Lincoln Perry), "more than any other personality, really led to
the growth of black Hollywood, the idea that a colored actor could have
a highfalutin' career in the movies -- and could be every bit as
flamboyant, as reckless, as talked about, even as rich as his white
counterparts." Of course, Fetchit's very name has become synonymous
with degrading portrayals of blacks.
He does not pinpoint the decline of black Hollywood as specifically,
but it began with the arrival of such actors as Dorothy Dandridge and
Sidney Poitier, whose names became synonymous with dramatic portrayals.
When Poitier came to Hollywood in 1949 to make "No Way Out," he was
able to stay at a white hotel. Still, there was a disjunction between
the anti-racist message of that movie and, as Ruby Dee said, "the
reality of racist discrimination on the lot."
Yet nothing is gained without some loss. One woman recalled wistfully,
"In those days, we only had each other." Another said her parents
remarked that "integration was great. But we didn't have our own hotels
anymore." And the late Ossie Davis, Dee's husband, lamented that "the
sense of community" had completely disappeared.
Roger K. Miller is a Janesville, Wis., freelance writer for the
Tribune-Review.
lzcutter
LA Times Book Review.
Lynn in Sherman Oaks
"As We Knew It: The Story of Classic Las Vegas"
Saving Las Vegas History one interview at a time
mikeg...@gmail.com
be Tavis Smiley's is, he was quite interesting about the private life
sides of people like McDaniel.