THE WOMAN WHO WAS MAMMY

by Dibri L. Beavers

for American Legacy, Fall 2001. Pp.65-78.

Hattie McDaniel's funeral, on November 1, 1952, was a genuine Hollywood spectacle. The hearse bearing her body snaked its way through the streets of Los Angeles, leading a line of limousines more than a mile long. Along the route, thousands stood and watched the procession pass. The Angelus Funeral Home needed two dozen of its largest vans to transport the tons of flowers sent by the likes of Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Shirley Temple, and Walt Disney. At the funeral, 5,000 mourners overflowed the church's sanctuary and spilled into the streets, blocking traffic for four blocks.

In her own humble way, McDaniel would have been pleased by the fuss. In an almost 45-year career that spanned vaudeville, radio, motion pictures, and television' she had created a lot of firsts, known the heights of success, and faced a full share of sorrow. "It was ironic that at her death, the love she had always wanted, and felt lacking in her life, came with such great force and intensity," wrote Carlton Jackson in his 1990 book Hattie, the only comprehensive biography written about the actress. ''It would have thrilled Hattie to see all the outpourings of affection for her." McDaniel's death marked the end of an era. She was the last of that breed of actress known as the "kitchen mammy." And no one played the part better.

She was born on June 10, 1895, the thirteenth and youngest child of Henry and Susan McDaniel. Henry McDaniel had been born a slave on a plantation near Richmond, Virginia, where his mother was the plantation's cook and mammy. After being freed, he had continued to work there as a field hand. In 1875 he married a Nashville religious singer named Susan Holbert. Feeling life would be easier out West, the couple moved their growing family to Wichita, Kansas, where Hattie was born, and where Henry's talents as a Baptist preacher and banjo picker, and his wife's as a singer, made them minor celebrities in the black community. They moved on to Fort Collins, Colorado, and then, when Hattie was around five, to Denver, where working and living conditions were better.

Little Hattie was a happy child. A born entertainer, she started singing at an early age, and her habit of doing so loudly around the house often prompted her mother to say, "Hattie, I'll pay you to hush," and to give the girl dimes. As one of a handful of black children at Denver's integrated Twenty-fourth Street Elementary School, she was a good student and popular. Later, at East Denver High School, she won a speech contest sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, giving a moving recitation of the Alexander Murdoch poem "Convict Joe," which described the tragic downfall of a man ruined by drink. Convinced she had real talent, she ignored her mother's objections and dropped out of school after her sophomore year to pursue a fulltime career in show business.

She had been performing in local minstrel shows since 1908, when she was 13, and in 1909 she had received featured billing on the Red Devils' minstrel program as "Denver's favorite soubrette." And the show-biz bug bit other members of the family as well. In 1910 Hattie's father started his own minstrel group, with her brothers Otis and Sam. The Henry McDaniel Minstrel Show became an immediate hit, touring to Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Boulder, and Fort Collins. Hattie begged to go with the troupe, but her mother refused, wanting to spare her the burden of one-night stands, exhausting travel, and segregated, substandard rooming houses. She eventually gave in, though, and over the next three years, Hattie traveled from Colorado to the West Coast with the show and wrote most of its songs and material.

In 1916 her brother Otis died at 35 of an undiagnosed illness. He had been the driving force behind the troupe, and without his guidance the show slowly fell apart. With bookings dwindling, his sister had no choice but to seek employment in Denver as a cook, clerk, and washerwoman. She would have to fall back on domestic work so often during her early career that she would later joke,"I washed three million dishes on my way to stardom."

Her big break came in 1920 (she was 25), when "Professor" George Morrison, one of Denver's most popular black musicians' hired her as a featured performer with his traveling "Melody Hounds." This "large, Negro woman who sings jazz songs," as one critic described her, was soon a headliner. Unfortunately, her father wouldn't have much time to enjoy her success. He died on December 5, 1922, at 82. And she experienced another loss just a few months later when her young husband, George Langford, whom she had married earlier that year, was shot and killed in a fight. She would remarry three times: to Howard Hickman, in 1938; James Lloyd Crawford, in 1941; and Larry Williams, in 1949. She divorced all three and later quipped that she'd had so much trouble keeping a husband because she couldn't find one who believed he should support her.

Through the rest of the 1920s she sang on Denver's KOA radio station, the first black ever to do so. She also got work on the road in black vaudeville tropues. In 1929, after a touring production of Show Boat she was in went bankrupt in Chicago, she found work at Club Madrid in Milwaukee. She auditioned as a singer, but the only job available at the mostly white club was as an attendant in the ladies' washroom. Still, it was work, and she sang and danced in the washroom so often that female patrons started pestering the owner, Sam Pick, to let her perform on stage. Legend has it that she got her chance on a particularly slow night. McDaniel took the stage and belted out a rousing "St. Louis Blues" that got a standing ovation from the sparse crowd.

People started coming to the club just to hear her sing, and what began as a lucky shot stretched into a successful two-year run. But by 1931, McDaniel felt it was time to move on. Her brother Sam and sisters Etta and Orlena had moved to California years before and seemed to have prospered. When they urged Hattie to join them, she didn't need much convincing. She arrived in California carrying a cheap purse that contained $20 in cash and a lucky rabbit's foot.

She soon found that Hollywood was not a friendly town. She made the rounds of the studios, but while several producers assured her that she had talent, none was willing to give her a job. Down to her last dime, she hired herself out as a domestic. When she finally did get an acting gig, it wasn't on the big screen but in radio. Her brother Sam was a performer on The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, a local program sponsored by a bakery. He finagled a spot for her on the show, playing the cook in a sketch called "Miss Ann's Kitchen." She was an instant hit and soon had her own show. Thousands of listeners tuned in every Friday morning to hear The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour now "starring Hi - Hat Hattie McDaniel." Her popular on -air nickname was earned after she showed up for her first broadcast dressed in a formal gown. The other cast members teased her about trying to act the road with black vaudeville troupes. In high - hat, and the name stuck. Still, the five dollars she got for her weekly performance weren't enough to live on, so she had to continue working as a domestic. But no matter how dejected she felt, but the only job available at the mostly McDaniel never discussed her troubles. A friend had counseled her, "Look breezy ladies' washroom. Still, it was work, and and people will think you are!" She followed that advice to the letter and passed often that female patrons started pes- it on to other struggling hopefuls.

With the country staggering under the weight of the Depression, 1930s movie goers flocked to theaters for escapist fare. Lavish musicals, screwball comedies, and dramatic tearjerkers captivated audiences whose nickel and dime admission fees added up to millions in profits for the studios. What few roles there were for black actresses mostly mirrored those available to them in real life-as cooks, maids, and mammies. A pool of talented women owned these parts, including Hazel Scott, Ruby Dandridge, Theresa Harris, Lillian Randolph, and Ethel Waters. McDaniel joined the group when she landed her first bit appearances in 1932 and 1933, in films such as Hypnotized, The Golden West, Erich von Stroheim's Blonde Venus, with Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West's I'm No Angel. In each one she played a maid, house servant, or cook and received no screen credit at all. Her first credited role wasn't until 1934, as Aunt Dilsey in the Will Rogers movie Judge Priest.

As the decade progressed, she became a regular screen presence, often alongside some of Hollywood's biggest stars: Shirley Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (The Little Colonel, 1935), Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray (Alice Adams, 1935), and Irene Dunne and Paul Robeson (Show Boat, 1936). Although she was cast as subservient, she did not present herself that way. Her sassy, offhand delivery, rolling eyes, and exasperated expressions often made it seem that she, instead of her white mistress or master, was in charge. In Alice Adams she plays a hired maid whose couldn't-care-less attitude and shoddy table service make a mockery of the Adamses' fancy dinner party. The film's director, George Stevens, recognized her gift and gave her free rein. Her slouching entrances into the dining room, punctuated by vigorous gum chewing and a haphazardly donned maid's cap that keeps falling over her eyes, are hilarious. She brought a more subtle humor to her role of Isabel McCarthy in MGM's China Seas (1935), with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In one scene, Harlow, who plays a spurned girlfriend, asks her maid, "What's that snotty English dame got that I ain't?" McDaniel's Isabel, reclined on a divan, replies coolly: "She's more refined-like. She would never wear that dress with all them shiny beads, like you got. That dress is more my type." The grin that accompanies the line lets her mistress know that she's not the only woman in the room with a love life. McDaniel's brashness caused some white moviegoers to complain to the studios that the actress was too uppity.

Still, 1930s Hollywood was, for better or worse, the golden age of the black servant. No other period in motion picture history would see as many black actors cooking, cleaning, carrying, kowtowing, and cutting up-or getting steady work. There was little long-term success to be had playing a role beyond the stock servant. Nina Mae McKinney and Fredi Washington were proof of that. McKinney, hailed by MGM as the screen's "first Black Love Goddess" for her starring role in the all-black Hallelujah in 1929, saw her promising career languish as producers balked at the idea of a black glamour queen. And Washington won acclaim in 1934 for her role as Peola, the tragic mulatto daughter in the first version of Imitation of Life, but was afterward deemed too light-skinned for the standard maid roles. Unable to get work, she left Hollywood altogether for a career in journalism. McDaniel had no such problems, but in early 1939 she landed a part in a film that would bring her both worldwide acclaim and lingering criticism from some within the black community.

From the very start, black America had taken an interest in Gone With the Wind. Even before the movie went into production, Selznick International was deluged with letters from black organizations calling Margaret Mitchell's novel "anti-Negro." A number of black leaders opposed making a film version outright. Others felt it offered an opportunity for black actors and actresses to participate in one of the most important productions of the time. As the controversy raged, the film's producer, David O. Selznick, auditioned more than a hundred black performers for the five major servant roles.

Among the several actresses trying out for the role of Mammy, Louise Beavers was the front-runner, with Hattie McDaniel, who was favored by Clark Gable, a close second. Beavers, who had given a moving performance as the long-suffering Aunt Delilah in Imitation of Life, was the best- known black actress of the day, and industry insiders were certain she'd win the role of Mammy. She showed up for her audition decked out in her finest furs, but the flashy display put Selznick off. McDaniel, on the other hand, arrived in period costume, looking every inch the antebellum Southern mammy. After hearing her read a few lines in the thick Georgia accent she had acquired for the audition, Selznick canceled the rest of the tryouts and signed McDaniel to a $450-a-week contract.

Selznick wanted to remain as faithful to Mitchell's book as possible, but he had to deal with the author's liberal use of the words nigger and darky, which had also been written into Sidney Howard's original script. The NAACP, an unofficial "adviser" on the film, and the principal black actors-Oscar Polk, Butterfly McQueen, and McDaniel-pressured Selznick to remove the language. He compromised by deleting nigger but leaving in darkies and inferiors.

Gone With the Wind was a box-office sensation. The critics praised not only Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, but also Hattie McDaniel for her stellar performance as the feisty, loyal Mammy. As Oscar time approached, Selznick became sure she would receive an Academy Award nomination. Even though most black newspapers had panned the film for its suggestion that blacks had actually enjoyed slavery, and some had even called for a boycott, the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Baltimore Afro-American all ran stories promoting McDaniel's Oscar nomination. The Academy's voting members obviously agreed and made her a candidate for Best Supporting Actress.

On the big night, McDaniel, escorted by her friend the actor Wonderful Smith, strolled into the Coconut Grove ballroom at Hollywood's Ambassador Hotel draped in an ermine cape over an aqua-blue gown; her corsage matched the gardenias in her hair. Guests rose and applauded as she was shown to her table at the rear of the ballroom. This was not only the first time a black performer had ever attended the awards ceremony, it was the first time a black person who wasn't a cook or a waiter had ever been inside the Coconut Grove. When the actress Fay Bainter and the director Frank Capra took the stage and announced Hattie McDaniel as the winner for Best Supporting Actress, one observer noted, "En masse, the entire audience, stars in every place, stood and cheered their beloved Hattie McDanieL" With a shout of "Hallelujah!," a triumphant McDaniel swept up to the stage and in a studio-written acceptance speech thanked the Academy and her fellow actors for her award.

"I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may do in the future," she said tearfully, and "I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the I motion-picture industry." On the way back I to her seat, she received exuberant congratulations from Selznick and her co-I stars Gable and Vivien Leigh (the actress had won earlier for her performance as Scarlett O'Hara). Olivia de Havilland, nominated in the same category, was so overcome by her loss to McDaniel that she bolted from her table in tears and ran to the hotel's kitchen.

After McDaniel's Oscar win, producers all over Hollywood clamored for her services, and during the next decade she appeared in more than 20 movies, including The Great Lie (1941), In This Our Life (1942), Since You Went Away (1944), Song of the South (1946), and Family Honeymoon (1948). At the height of her success, she had earned enough money to buy a 30-room mansion in an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood known as Sugar Hill, into which she moved with her third husband, James Lloyd Crawford. A superstitious McDaniel, however, worried that she had become too successful. She was a woman of deep religious faith who would often say of her good fortune, "I did my best, and God did the rest." Her biographer Carlton Jackson wrote that her accomplishments seemed to give her a sense of guilt, "as though she constantly asked in reference to success, 'Why me?'"

In 1944, while filming Janie for Warner Bros., a 49-year-old McDaniel announced to a stunned Hollywood that she was "taking time out to welcome the stork!" She had always wanted to have a baby, and in preparation, she canceled a planned publicity tour to South America, turned down several lucrative movie offers, and settled in to await the birth of her child. But it was not to be. She had, it turned out, suffered a false pregnancy, mis-diagnosed, her doctors claimed, because of her large size. She refused to see anyone for weeks, and for a time seemed to lose all interest in living. She eventually returned to her career but would be plagued by depression for the rest of her life. Making matters worse, her marriage to Crawford soon dissolved, and a longsimmering feud with the NAACP president Walter White erupted, threatening to destroy everything she had worked for.

The NAAC P had been at war with Hollywood almost since the organization's inception, in 1909. It had protested D. W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation for its racist stereotypes, and had since then continually pressured the major studios to put more positive black images on the screen. But its harshest criticism was reserved for the black actors and actresses who played roles the organization considered demeaning, and its most frequent target was Hattie McDaniel. In the mid1930s White began assailing her "grinning, darky stereotypes." She was stunned by the accusations. She couldn't understand how the same comic antics that had led to her earlier success were now seen as shameful. She considered White a spiteful, meddling hypocrite and called him a "one eighth Negro" who resented dark-skinned blacks. (White was very light-skinned and frequently "passed" in order to infiltrate white organizations.) On the subject of her work, McDaniel said she'd rather make "$700 a week playing a maid than $7 a week being a maid!" She had always been concerned with Hollywood's screen images of blacks and had frequently protested various scenes and lines in the scripts she was given. That she often got the changes she requested was a tribute as much to the esteem directors had for her
work as to the forcefulness of her personality. White, however, was relentless.

During the war years, his crusade against "mammyism" reached its most fervent, with McDaniel still his primary target. While serving as a correspondent in the Far East from 1944 to 1945, White is said to have encouraged Black troops stationed in the Pacific to write letters of protest against her. To McDaniel, a die-hard patriot who was active with the USO, the Hollywood Canteen, and the war-bond effort, the letters were a painful blow.

By the time the war ended, Hollywood was becoming aware that if it wanted to win the sizable black audience, plantation films would have to go. The studios, wary of race controversy, simply discarded scripts or eliminated black parts altogether. Casting directors refused to hire some black stars, including McDaniel. During the first five months of 1948, she had just two weeks of movie work. The following year, she made her last film, The Big Wheel. Her trademark mammy roles had all but disappeared.

As her film career waned, McDaniel turned her attention back to radio, and in 1947 she become the first black actress to playa black character on the nationally syndicated radio program The Beulah Show. Until then, the parts were usually played by white men. Told they did not sound black enough, many African-American actors were passed over for whites who had mastered the inaccurate and humiliating gobbledygook the scriptwriters called Negro dialect. If blacks were hired and, in the end, refused to speak it, they were fired. McDaniel's seven-year contract called for an incremental salary that went up to $2,000 a week, with provisions that freed her from ever having to speak in "Negro dialect." She also had script approval.

The Beulah Show was a hit, and its producers began to develop a version for the new medium of television. But McDaniel was not their first choice for the TV role; instead, Ethel Waters was signed. The show began airing in late 1950. Both programs were popular With black and white audiences, and by 1951 they ranked near the top of the Nielsen ratings, with the radio show alone garnering an estimated 20 million listeners a night. The program took audiences into the suburban world of the Hendersons, a white mother, father, and son, all managed by their ebullient maid, Beulah. The NAACP and the Urban League hailed The Beulah Show for its modern take on race relations. When Ethel Waters bowed out after the fIrst 15 weeks, citing "pressing commitments" elsewhere, McDaniel signed on as her replacement. She completed only six episodes (they were never aired) before ill health and exhaustion, from doing both the radio and television shows at once, forced her to withdraw. After it became clear that she was too ill to return, the television show's producers decided to replace her. Louise Beavers and then Lillian Randolph played the part until the show was canceled, in 1954.

During this period, McDaniel's life began to unravel. Always a consummate professional, she suddenly had difficulty remembering her lines; she began to lose weight, and a painful boil under her left arm worried her. Her fourth husband, Larry Williams, walked out on her four months after their June 1949 wedding.

After the divorce, she moved from her mansion into a modest eight-room cottage. Despite all her success, she had begun to feel herself a complete failure. She was alone and miserable. The broken marriages, the battle with Walter White, and her sadness at having been criticized by so many blacks had taken their toll. At her lowest moments, she often remarked, "Hell can't be any worse than what I'm living through right now." In 1949 she tried to end her life with a bottle of sleeping pills; only the timely visit of a worried friend saved her. As her health continued to decline, mounting medical bills ate away at her savings. At one point she couldn't even pay her secretary and best friend, Ruby Goodwin. But Goodwin had known McDaniel for 15 years (she had seen the actress for the first time in 1934, on the set of Show Boat, while covering the musical as a young journalist), and she refused to leave her side.

The boil under McDaniel's arm was ultimately diagnosed as breast cancer. Considering it a death sentence, she responded by giving away or auctioning off her most cherished possessions and selling her small cottage. In September 1952 she entered the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, California, the first black performer to be admitted. Barely a month later, at age 57, she was dead. But even in death she could not escape the bonds of racism. Her final wish was to be buried in Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, the resting place of stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., but because of her color, the request was denied. Instead, she became the first African-American laid to rest inside the front gates of the all-white Rosedale Cemetery, where, the Reverend H. Mansfield Collins of the Neighborhood Community Church pointed out, "All who pass will see her name, and where she will always be an inspiration to the young of our race for whom she has done so much." At the cemetery where she was turned away, today called Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a granite monument to her was erected in 1999, redressing the long-standing insult.

Hattie McDaniel's legacy lives on in the more than 300 films in which she appeared (though she was credited in only 70 of them), in her two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame-one each for her careers in radio and in motion pictures-and in her numerous honors and awards, including her triumph as the first black actor to win an Oscar, a feat equaled by only five since. Yet nearly 50 years after her death, her contributions to screen history are still being debated. For instance, the director Spike Lee recently said, discussing his film Bamboozled, a scathing satire of black movie stereotypes: "I don't fault Hattie McDaniel, Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland. They felt that they had to do what they did. . . . I think we should all just realize the choices we're making and the consequences of them." Perhaps the best perspective on her career was provided by McDaniel herself, when she told an interviewer in 1940: "The entire race is usually judged by the actions of one man or woman. . . . In playing Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character. . . the type of Negro of the period which gave us Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Charity Still; the brave, efficient, hard-working type of womanhood (that) has built a race." She ended her comments with a prophetic note: "To you young people who are aspiring to succeed in some line of endeavor' in spite of the troubles many of us have experienced, let me say this: There is still room at the top."

Dibri L. Beavers is a teacher and freelance writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. For further reading: Look for HATTIE: THE LIFE OF HATTIE McDANIEL, by Carlton Jackson, published by Madison Books, Lanham, Maryland,1990.