The Measure of a Man Read online

  There was, of course, no city or state that didn’t have its atmosphere of racial attitudes. Black artists traveling could still have problems with accommodations, for example—and that, of course, was nothing compared to the struggles of millions of ordinary black folks in this country who were having a very hard time. Love for Duke Ellington or Nat Cole couldn’t obscure the shameful treatment of others.

  But it was out of that persistent set of difficult circumstances that the student activists came. It wasn’t the artists who carried the day; it was these brave young people who said, “Wait a minute. We’ve come to the table with all the respect we can muster, and you’ve done nothing. Now you will pay attention to us. How much more you gonna do to us? You can kill us. You can turn dogs on us and beat us, but you’ll have to drag us away ten at a time, and there will be hundreds more to take our place.”

  The country just couldn’t fathom it. To many, this upheaval seemed to come out of nowhere, because for such an unbearably long time no attention had been paid to problems of racial inequality.

  Sammy Davis, Jr., Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lena Horne, Sidney Poitier—we weren’t leading the charge. We weren’t at the forefront, getting our heads cracked open, though our careers were a reflection of what was possible when attention was paid. Twenty-five years earlier it hadn’t been widely expected, with opportunities so meager, that blacks could be scientists, statesmen, artists. Every time I stepped out, I felt the responsibility to do whatever I could to make pending successes seem a natural expectation.

  During the mid-sixties I was approached for another project by Pandro Berman, the filmmaker who had produced Blackboard Jungle. Now, ten years later, he wanted to do something called A Patch of Blue.

  Guy Green was to be the director. An English film editor who had gone into directing and had done some really impressive films, he had fallen in love with this material. I don’t recall whether he had brought it to Pandro Berman or Pandro Berman had brought it to him. But when I was approached about a part, I read the script very, very carefully before having a talk with Guy Green as to how he saw the material. Because this was a delicate matter, though a wonderfully original idea—a blinded white girl and a black guy who comes into her life. You know, it was pregnant with all kinds of interesting possibilities, but it was also very tricky in terms of how society would receive it. There were many, many miscarriages that would have to be avoided in order to make something that was not only entertaining but useful.

  I came away with the sense that this guy might have a good fix on the subject matter. Why did I feel this way? Was it because he was English? I don’t think so, because the English are no less subject to frailties on questions of race than anybody else. But there was a humanity to the guy—I mean, I got really good vibes from him about how he saw the world—so I signed on.

  I went to rehearsals in the prefilming preparation period and met a young lady named Elizabeth Hartman. She was a plain-looking, warm, delicate, and apparently fragile person, ideal for the part. I wasn’t aware then, when I met her, that she had dressed herself down for the role. She was quite an attractive girl. She was also a well-trained young actress who had developed a strong technique.

  We started rehearsing, and I was struck by the magnificent work Elizabeth did. As for myself, I was traveling over ground I had never covered before—you know?—and I was dipping into emotional pockets that were new to me. This was a white girl, and we were in 1960s America. This was a revolutionary attempt at filmmaking, so I was mentally awake in every way. I had my eye out, my ear out, and I was quite primed to make sure that nothing untrue, uncomplimentary, or stereotypical occurred. I wanted to make sure that the story was told with dignity and respect for the questions involved. This wasn’t the story of an interracial couple, mind you. This was simply a guy trying to help a young girl who was in need. It was a very human story.

  But this was also the time of the March on Selma, the first Civil Rights Act, and the sit-ins. A lot of stressful stuff was coming down. The question of race was rattling the country to its very foundation, so everything in me was on the lookout. I had already predetermined what my character should look like from my point of view. I could be honest to my craft, and I could deliver this character in full. I mean really in full, including all of his weaknesses and all of his shortcomings. He would be a human being in total, not a one-dimensional cardboard replica of a human being, as is the case in too many movies—particularly movies about racial questions in America.

  I couldn’t control how the rest of the movie would go. I didn’t know how Shelley Winters was going to sketch the character of the girl’s mother, for example. It was none of my business. I could raise objections only if I saw something that struck me as totally off the mark. But Shelley was a professional, and not only did she bring to bear all the shortcomings of that character, all the prejudices of that character, all the imperfections of that character; she added more. And the more she added included character details of a fairly despicable person, but none of the characteristics were completely foreign to other human beings as well.

  The part of my brother was played by Ivan Dixon, a tremendous actor. He sculpted that part beautifully, so that all the things I wanted to come out of the sequences between the two of us, Dixon and myself, they just flowed. And then there were, of course, peripheral characters, such as Elizabeth Hartman’s grandfather.

  So everyone in the cast was doing super-duper work. And then, about a third of the way through, I really tuned in to where the director was coming from, and I relaxed completely. I knew that I was in good hands. I knew that his take on the material was such that he was going to be absolutely faithful to the story, but he was also going to be absolutely faithful to the humanity that was implied in the story.

  I’m not always satisfied with my work in every scene in every picture. But in A Patch of Blue I was coming from a different place, and the performance, by my measurement, was absolutely on target; and I felt that all the way through. Much of this had to do with what I was getting from the other actors. They really kept me reaching for something that I hadn’t even been aware was in me. I saw the movie, and by God, it was a picture, a performance that was better than I thought I could manage.

  I mean, it was good work. The actors around me were really cooking, and much of their brilliance reflected on my performance, whether it was deserved or not. It had to reflect on my performance because I was the central character with this girl, and how things were with me and her, collectively and individually, was what those other characters were about.

  I played a likable guy. I played a good, decent, useful human being—and mind you, much of what was being made in Hollywood at that time, with very rare exceptions, wasn’t complimentary from the black perspective. It was a proud moment for me, especially when I thought back to Butterfly McQueen, Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and Mantan Moreland.

  The Hollywood of an earlier day had made questionable use of such fabulous talents as Lena Horne and Rex Ingram and Ethel Waters—talents that were never given the respect of a truly objective evaluation. I mean, these were actors. I had been introduced to many of them when I was a youngster starting out. I had met Louise Beavers. I knew something of Mantan Moreland; I had met the man. I knew Rex Ingram, Bill Walker, Juanita Moore. I knew so many of those people. I had met them and found them three-dimensional human beings. Some were articulate, some were very ordinary in their speech patterns, some were quite erudite, some were just plain interesting people—but they all were reduced by the requirements of a racist society and an industry that knew how to reflect the society racially in only that one way. I mean, there were no parts for black schoolteachers, for example. And if there were schoolchildren, they were all pickaninnies with their hair combed upwards as if their scalp had been electrified, and giggling and rolling their eyes like Buckwheat in the Our Gang comedies.

  Back in Los Angeles, in the bowels of the film industry, these people were close at h
and, right over there in West Los Angeles toward the Central Avenue area, Adams area, Crenshaw area. And I saw the dignified homes they lived in, and I was in some of those homes, and I gotta tell you, it had to have been some massive negative attitude operative in society (and, consequently, in this industry) to characterize a people without the slightest acknowledgment of their humanity anywhere evident.

  These artists were very much like the black actors and actresses I know today, only they were chained to stereotypes when many of them had the wherewithal to soar. They simply got no chance. They lived and died, lived and died, never having had an opportunity to express their genuine talent.

  I’m not racially sensitive to the point that I want to foist untruths on my history. As a matter of fact, I’m more inclined to critically examine that which I know to be the truth. So when I look at my history through the black actors and actresses who preceded me, I need to be fair to those actors and actresses, but I also need to be fair to the society, you know? What good did the participation of blacks in the movie industry do for the actors and actresses who represented their race, and to those actors and actresses. What harm did it do to them and to generations unborn? I put all that in the mix, and even so, all I can conclude is that Hollywood was a really insensitive place when it came to black people.

  We needed alternatives. In New York City there were people like Oscar Micheaux, a black man making movies there—but he had to put the finished product under his arm and go around from place to place to find cinema houses for black people, and there weren’t very many of those. He was on the road all the time. Whenever he finished a picture, he went off traveling, putting his work in black theaters. He has become a kind of a father figure for the current black filmmakers in America, though of course they know of him only through the legend of what he did.

  There were other black film personalities making black pictures. There was a guy named Ralph Cooper in New York, who was a very, very big film personality. He was an actor who played all kinds of parts, including romantic parts and gangster parts. There was even Herb Jeffries, the black singing cowboy.

  The studios wouldn’t go near that kind of stuff in those days. So Mantan Moreland, Stepin Fetchit, Butterfly McQueen, and Hattie McDaniel—they could only dream of a time when there would be a Denzel Washington, a Wesley Snipes, an Angela Bassett, a Will Smith, a Samuel L. Jackson, and a Morgan Freeman, when there would be an invention called television to harbor a legend named Bill Cosby. They would have to stretch their imagination pretty far to be able to dream in those terms.

  So I look back on those people who came before me, and I owe them a debt, you know? Yes, sometimes I squirmed when I watched what they had to do. Sometimes I applauded when something they did really touched my heart. But I knew when I came on the scene how painful it had to have been for them sometimes. Certainly not all the time, but sometimes it had to have been a bitch for them to say some of those words and behave in some of those ways. So I look back on them with respect and appreciation. They were our predecessors, and they endured. They were the ones that life and nature and history required to walk that road.

  They gave birth to me, because a part of what I do, a part of what Denzel Washington does, a part of what Angela Bassett does is to respectfully reflect on the endurance of those people. We were, and are, as they would have wished to be, but we could not be as we are without their having paid a price.

  SIX

  WHY DO WHITE FOLKS LOVE SIDNEY POITIER SO?

  NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT was a time of incredible conflict and contrast. It was the year when both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, the year Lyndon Johnson succumbed to the cultural clashes over Vietnam and gave up the presidency, the year of the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But for me personally it was also a year of tremendous professional satisfaction. I had the number one box office success, as well as numbers two and three: To Sir, with Love, with Lulu and Judy Geeson; In the Heat of the Night, with Rod Steiger and Lee Grant; and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. And I think we did work that has more than stood the test of time.

  Yet given the quickly changing social currents, there was more than a little dissatisfaction rising up against me in certain corners of the black community, a cultural wave that would crest a few years later when the New York Times published an article titled “Why Do White Folks Love Sidney Poitier So?”

  The issue boiled down to why I wasn’t more angry and confrontational. New voices were speaking for African-Americans, and in new ways. Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Black Panthers. According to a certain taste that was coming into ascendancy at the time, I was an “Uncle Tom,” even a “house Negro,” for playing roles that were nonthreatening to white audiences, for playing the “noble Negro” who fulfills white liberal fantasies. In essence, I was being taken to task for playing exemplary human beings: the young engineer turned schoolteacher in To Sir, with Love, the Philadelphia homicide detective far from home in In the Heat of the Night, and the young doctor who comes courting the daughter of Tracy and Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

  Now, admittedly, the young teacher I portrayed was the epitome of virtue. Elegant and well-spoken, intelligent and kind, he was also courageous and steadfast as he stood up to abuse and maintained his commitment to the students under his charge. Police Detective Tibbs, likewise, was a man of great courage and intelligence, as well as admirable restraint. And the young doctor in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—aside from being a charming suitor, an exceedingly courteous guest, and a paragon of a son—had academic credentials a mile long and spent his time saving mankind for the World Health Organization.

  So the question being raised was, What’s the message here? That black people will be accepted by white society only when they’re twice as “white” as the most accomplished Ivy League medical graduate? That blacks must pretend to be something they aren’t? Or simply that black society does—of course—contain individuals of refinement, education, and accomplishment, and that white society—of course—should wake up to that reality?

  The heated tempers of that time have long since cooled, and ideological fashions have come and gone. But the fact remains that in the late sixties civil disobedience gave way to more radical approaches. The angry “payback” of the black exploitation film was just around the corner, and my career as a leading man in Hollywood was nearing its end.

  Even so, I think it’s all too easy for anyone not a participant in the cultural clashes of that era to unfairly dismiss films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, forgetting just how revolutionary they were in the context of their times.

  This was another Stanley Kramer picture, of course, and he’s the kind of filmmaker who had always asked, “What can I do that will be daring, interesting, and necessary?” In 1967, when he had me read the script for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, I was very impressed. Stanley knew that the country wasn’t ready for this one, but his attitude was—well, we’re going to do it anyway.

  One sign of the times was that he decided not to tell the folks at Columbia Pictures what the movie was about initially, and for good reason. He had a production deal with them for a certain number of pictures, so (for a while, at least) it was enough for him to say that he was going to make the next one with Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier. But that’s all he told them.

  “Sounds great,” they said. “Go ahead and develop the script.”

  And so he did. But after a certain point he had to go to Columbia again, and he said, “We’re really okay. We’ve come a long way, and I would just like to start putting this thing together.”

  And they said, “Okay, now let’s get this straight. It’s Poitier and Tracy and Hepburn, and we’re doing this movie. But what’s it about?”

  “Family stuff,” he said. “You know, this is family stuff.”

  And the guys at Columbia nodded, and Stanley said
, “It’s gonna be warm, it’s gonna be human, and it’s gonna be—” whatever. He still didn’t really lay it out.

  But after a certain point, before the serious money was committed, the folks at Columbia had to see the script; they really had to know what they were buying.

  So Stanley said, “Look, I’ve got these three people. I’ve got Tracy and Hepburn. Do you know what that combo is? Do you know what that means?” And he’s selling, and he’s telling them they’re running out of chances to get this team, because Tracy isn’t a young man. But the fact is once they got their hands on the script, they really didn’t want to go down that road. They felt that the subject was simply too much for an American audience, and they felt that the risks were too great.

  So they were squirming and they were dodging, and finally someone came up with what Columbia thought could be the loophole in their commitment. Tracy’s health prevented the studio from getting him insurance coverage for the production. Legend has it that they tried to use that as an excuse for halting production, but then Tracy refused to take any salary until the film was over, which undercut that argument. So, reluctantly, they acquiesced and let the picture proceed.

  Here’s the story of how I was taken to Miss Hepburn’s house so she could check me out. When I arrived at her door and that door opened, she looked at me and didn’t say a word and didn’t crack a smile. But that was her M.O. After the longest while she said, “Hello, Mr. Poitier,” and I said, “Hello, Miss Hepburn,” and the conversation began. I could tell that I was being sized up every time I spoke, every response I made. I could imagine a plus and a minus column, notations in her mind. That’s how big a step this was for her, at least to my mind.

  After that first meeting, Stanley took me to Tracy’s house on Doheny Drive for a little dinner party with the two of them and some other guests. This time Miss Hepburn was much more natural and at ease, but it was still obvious that I was under close observation by both of them.