Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (18 page)

All these ensembles, but especially the Lafayette Players, were renowned for the versatility of their talent and the range of their shows. The Lafayette Players performed everything from light opera to the heaviest Eugene O'Neill tragedy. They presented original plays about black life, and frequently mounted Broadway plays or evergreens as interpreted by all-black casts. They prided themselves on being able to deliver any type of entertainment. And as they began to tour widely, introducing legitimate theater to black audiences in provincial parts of the country, the Players became “in a special way educators as well as entertainers,” in the words of Sister Francesca Thompson, who has definitively researched the history of the group.
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The Lafayette Players had come to Chicago for the first time in the spring of 1918, and even as Micheaux was finalizing his casting a second company of the celebrated all-black troupe was finishing a lengthy summer run at the Lafayette on the Stroll. They had taxed the theater's capacity with constant overflow crowds, with the audience at some of the acclaimed plays “at least forty per cent Caucasian,” according to Tony Langston in his
Chicago Defender
column.

The Lafayette Players were seasoned performers, whom a novice director didn't have to worry about guiding through tricky emotional scenes; such veterans could virtually “direct” themselves. And the black press had already made the Lafayette Players into celebrities, another valuable asset to Micheaux: They were already marquee names.

Casting the principal roles was the final hurdle, and Micheaux seesawed between candidates. What he looked for in a leading lady was another One True Woman, an actress whose beauty was matched by her intelligence. Of course she had to have ability, and she had to appeal to audiences. For his leading man—not just in
The Homesteader,
which was expressly autobiographical, but for most of his films—Micheaux would look for another archetype: a tall, handsome variant of himself.

To play the Scottish maiden Agnes (“The Tenderest Little Heroine Ever Created,” as he would later advertise her), Micheaux settled on Iris Hall, a petite, fair-skinned ingenue who had come to Chicago with the New York road company of the Lafayette Players. She played French maids and other supporting parts. But the young actress was “sweet, tender, vivacious and clever,” Micheaux explained to Clarence Brooks, plus she “can pass for white and is just the size.” Besides the Lafayette Players, Micheaux told Brooks, Hall “has worked in movies as a maid with [Famous Players–Lasky star] Pauline Frederick—can make up fine.”

When Jerry Mills didn't work out as the Reverend, Micheaux replaced him with Vernon S. Duncan, a Kentucky-born, Chicago-based actor who had the required size and power. For the “despicable” sister Ethel, the first of many “bad girl” or “vamp” characters in his films, Micheaux picked a Harlem actress, Inez Smith, “a striking, highly educated girl from New York that appears to me as having been made for the part.”

At first he had a different actress in mind for the Orlean McCracken character, but when she failed to jell Micheaux switched to Evelyn Preer, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but reared in Chicago. Just twenty-one, Preer was not yet widely known, though she had been performing in local shows since graduating from high school. Micheaux spotted the light-caramel-skinned, straight-haired beauty on a street corner, where she was using her histrionic talents to help her mother, a devoted Pentecostal, preach and raise money for building a church. “Preer, young, vivacious, and extremely attractive, was capable of drawing crowds to hear and watch her as she made a tearful plea, crying ‘Sinners, oh sinners, come home!' with her arms outstretched wide in supplication,” wrote Sister Francesca Thompson.

Beautiful
and
intelligent: Preer was an inspired choice. Over the coming years she would develop an impressive range, able to play for laughter or tears, in subtle or dynamic register. Also an exquisite singer, Preer would record blues as “Hotsy” Jarvis (her real last name). In the theater she took leads for the Lafayette Players and appeared in hit Broadway shows. She eventually came to be considered the “Colored Queen of Cinema,” for her small Hollywood parts and for her recurrence as Micheaux's most frequent, favored, and greatest female star.

Later, in the 1930s, Micheaux would hire white actors for the occasional role in his productions. But for most of his career even the “white” characters were played by light-skinned black actors. That was the case
with
The Homesteader
: local thespian William George played Agnes's white suitor, while the beloved former Pekin Player and current Lafayette Player Charles Moore portrayed Agnes's Scottish father. He was nicknamed “Daddy” for his many white-haired roles, in which he invariably smoked a cigar or pipe.

It wasn't until the eleventh hour that Micheaux settled on the man who would portray Jean Baptiste, the character based on himself. Originally he had been enthusiastic about a Chicagoan named E. Bismarck Slaughter for the role. “He is intelligent, 6 feet, 200 pounds, good face—bright complexion with good hair and my kind of Chin—we will boil him into the part,” Micheaux wrote Brooks early in the casting process.

But Micheaux was fussy about who played his alter egos, and Slaughter could not be boiled into the part. So the director gravitated to a newcomer with relatively little professional experience. His films often left the heavy emoting to the actresses and villains, anyway; it was enough for the heroes—such as Charles D. Lucas, who was ninth- or tenth-billed in the Chicago company of the Lafayette Players—to be tall, good-looking, and strong-jawed. Lucas, whom the well-informed George P. Johnson dismissed as a virtual “unknown,” was cast as “the colored homesteader.”

 

News of the production didn't travel far. Not yet alert to what Micheaux was doing, or the budding phenomenon of race pictures, the black press overlooked the actual filming of
The Homesteader.

For the earliest glimpse of Micheaux as a filmmaker, we have an advertisement he placed in the 1923
Simms' Blue Book and National Negro Business and Professional Directory.
The ad features a photograph of three men posed outside a small cabin, a setting for one of his earliest films. On the right stands an unidentified actor in the costume of a uniform. On the left stands a photographer next to his camera, which rests on a tripod. The cameraman appears to be a white man. (As far as is known, all of Micheaux's principal cameramen were white. White cameramen were likely to have had more experience, and later the all-white unions would preclude hiring black ones. White cameramen also had the requisite relationships with the white-owned photographic laboratories and postproduction facilities.)

At the center of the photo stands Micheaux himself. He is perched on the steps of the cabin, dressed in the standard outfit of an important Hollywood director during that era: white shirt, necktie, hat, and jodhpurs. Gripping a leather megaphone in his left hand, he is reaching out with his right as though to stroke the hood of the camera. He cuts a commanding and enigmatic figure, radiating power but also warmth and ease on the job.

It had been almost twenty years since Oscar Micheaux had left home in Metropolis to seek his fortune. He had worked and worked as a shoeshine boy, farmhand, factory drudge, coal miner, and Pullman porter—the job that had yielded him savings and inspired higher yearnings. Micheaux had risked all to become a homesteader in South Dakota, and in the end he had lost all. His habit of sending letters to newspapers, to share his perspective on race, class, and the world around him, had evolved into writing books of stories drawn from his own life. Wherever he went, he had always talked people's ears off, impressing upon them his ideas, his opinions, and the lessons he felt were implicit in his life. Now, with his evolution from self-published writer to self-produced filmmaker, he had finally found the combination of autobiography, social criticism, fiction, and show business that was his natural calling.

Yet Micheaux was no longer a young man. He turned thirty-five as he finished
The Homesteader.
By comparison John Ford directed his first feature at twenty-two; Alfred Hitchcock was twenty-five. Micheaux would have to make up for lost time.

This much is known: Interior scenes for
The Homesteader
were filmed in a Chicago studio. A few exteriors were filmed near Sioux City. But some outdoor scenes were also photographed in South Dakota, where Micheaux, the white cameraman, and the three leads made a whirlwind journey in an open-top Dodge Roadster. Back on familiar ground, the former homesteader met up with old acquaintances and, against the backdrop of the Rosebud, directed the group of actors he had hired to play the Scottish girl, “Orlean McCarthy,” and himself.

The filming, amazingly, was completed by Christmas 1918. Micheaux had written, directed, and produced his first race picture. And he wrapped up postproduction in time for a February 1919 premiere.

The Homesteader
was booked to debut at the Eighth (Colored) Regiment Armory at Thirty-fifth and Forest in Chicago. The armory had a seating capacity of eight thousand, and in half-page newspaper advertisements Micheaux promised a film as monumental as the facility: a “Mammoth Photoplay…destined to mark a new epoch in the achievements of the Darker Races.” Micheaux's name was set in large type, his photograph included along with the principal players.

“Every Race man and woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro's ability as a motion picture star,” said the ads, “and go and see [the film], not only for the absorbing interest obtaining herein, but as an appreciation of those finer arts which no race can ignore and hope to obtain a higher plane of thought and action.”

The premiere, held on February 20, 1919, was just the kind of road show-style gala Micheaux had envisioned—and it was packed. An orchestra played music composed especially for the film by Dave Peyton, a jazz bandleader who was also a
Chicago Defender
columnist; the celebrated tenor George R. Garner Jr. sang selections from
Aida.
There was an extra treat: Micheaux had organized a special newsreel documenting the homecoming of the Illinois Black Devils, the all-black infantry unit that had recently returned from action in World War I.

Then the main event: the world premiere of the first full-length, “all-colored” motion picture.

One thing is safe to say: No moviegoer had ever seen anything like
The Homesteader.
It was not exactly a Western, not merely a love story, but a fundamentally serious, truthful drama about one black man's troubles, addressing issues that were both singular to Micheaux and general to the race. The audience was electrified.

But they would be the last to see Micheaux's pioneering film for days.

Whether or not the Reverend Newton J. McCracken mingled with the armory crowd, he certainly knew he was the villain of the picture, as he had been the villain of Micheaux's novel. After the premiere, the A.M.E. Elder and two other ministers filed a complaint with the Chicago censorship board, accusing Micheaux of vilifying preachers. The board decided to ban future showings, citing the film's purported “tendency to disturb the public peace.”

Yet Micheaux was a veteran of legal skirmishes with his ex-father-in-law, and he had anticipated a brouhaha. Now he went to work orchestrating its resolution. He organized a protest against the board's decision, and used the protest publicity to pressure the censors into soliciting an outside opinion from prominent Chicagoans.

When the group of chosen outsiders convened to reconsider the banning of
The Homesteader,
they happened to include several appointees firmly in Micheaux's corner:
Chicago Defender
publisher Robert S. Abbott and his wife, along with the newspaper's entertainment columnist, Tony Langston; the crusading journalist and civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells-Barnett; city councilman Oscar DePriest, who would go on to become the first black person elected from a northern state to the U.S. Congress; Colonel John R. Marshall, a leader of the Eighth Regiment in the Spanish-American War; and Bishop Samuel T. Fallows, an Elder of the Reformed Episcopal Church. After watching Micheaux's film, the group voted to override the censorship board.

All of which improved the advertising. “Passed by the Censor Board Despite the Protests of Three Chicago Ministers,” subsequent ads boasted, “Who Claimed That It Was Based Upon the Supposed Hypocritical Actions of a Prominent Colored Preacher of This City!” Rubbing salt in the Reverend McCracken's wounds, the ads quoted the liberal Bishop Fallows: “I can see no just cause for the personal objection to this [photo] play. Every race has its hypocrites. Frequently they are found in the churches.”

And the censorship fracas would pay other dividends: Micheaux filed away the incident—and later battles with Chicago censorship authori
ties—for another day, when they would become the basis of another thinly veiled motion picture about the vicissitudes of his life.

A week after the ban was overturned,
The Homesteader
was launched in the new 1,300-seat Vendome Theatre, the most commodious and prestigious of all Black Belt venues. Lines of eager viewers began forming on the morning of opening day; by the time the theater closed for the night, 5,700 people had seen the once-banned film, “at an advance in price of 10 cents over our regular admission,” according to owner O. C. Hammond.

The Micheaux film “played five additional days at this theater,” according to Hammond, going on to book dates and return engagements at the other four theaters Hammond operated in the Black Belt, “and I am glad to say that not only has our houses been crowded at each and every evening performance, with a rebooking at each house, but the play has so fully pleased everybody that it has been a great pleasure to exhibit the same.”

By all accounts, the Chicago audiences, many of whom were likely drawn to the film because of the controversy, were overwhelmed by the quasi-autobiographical race picture. Local critics raved:
OSCAR MICHEAUX'S FAMOUS STORY MAKES GREAT PICTURE,
read the headline in the
Chicago Defender.
“Every detail of the production has been given the most minute care,” enthused the
Defender
reviewer. “Many scenes,” said
The Half-Century Magazine,
“rank in power and workmanship with the greatest of white western productions.”

In the reviews, the film sounds surpassing. That it was pathbreaking is inarguable. Yet today it is a “lost” work, one that should be ranked, along with, say, Alfred Hitchcock's first film, among the Ten Most Wanted.

It was a triumph on every level: artistic, commercial, and personal. Micheaux had routed the devil McCracken in his own lair and conquered the Black Metropolis.

 

Making films was only half of Micheaux's genius. The other half was his P. T. Barnum–like salesmanship.

As soon as he decided against the Lincoln partnership, Micheaux had begun urging George P. Johnson to move to Chicago and become the general manager of the Micheaux Book and Film Company, offering the
Omaha postal clerk a munificent salary of fifty dollars per month. Later Johnson would do some work for Micheaux, covering black-only theaters in the Omaha vicinity, but he never could bring himself to break away from the financial security of the post office and go full-time into the race-picture business.

Johnson was envious of Micheaux's success, and he followed his erstwhile associate from a distance. Finally, his curiosity led him to subterfuge. On fancy stationery he had dummied up for the purpose, Johnson sent Micheaux letters from a nonexistent brokerage house inquiring about his corporate records, trying to extract information about his investors and perhaps buy out or undermine the ex-homesteader. When Micheaux told Johnson he was looking for reliable employees, Johnson recommended two men, one of whom was a close friend and the other, his brother-in-law Ira McGowan. Micheaux hired both candidates, who then secretly funneled Johnson intelligence about Micheaux's operations, sometimes writing their tattletale letters from their Chicago desks while the boss was out to lunch. In many ways the business of race pictures was as cutthroat and insular as Hollywood.

Through such skulduggery, Johnson managed to monitor the film company he had helped to father. Yet Micheaux too continued to benefit from the apparently cordial ongoing relationship, extracting information and advice about national distribution from the more experienced Johnson.

Micheaux hired a small staff, including a secretary and financial manager, to anchor his office in the Loop while key salesmen traveled with the prints. But with
The Homesteader
Micheaux also made a policy of going on the road with the premiere print. He liked the opportunity it gave him to mentor sales agents, forge relationships with theater owners and managers, and supervise the quality of crucial screenings. (
The Homesteader
contracts tried quixotically to enforce a standard rate of projection, stipulating that the film “shall not be projected at a greater rate of speed than 1,000 feet in 15 minutes.”) Above all, he preferred to collect the fees in person.

In May, with the print under his arm, Micheaux embarked on a six-week swing through the Midwest and South.
The Homesteader
had its second premiere in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a tour to Wichita and Topeka, Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; Florence, Sheffield, Decatur, Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Bessemer, Alabama; Chat
tanooga, Memphis, and Nashville, Tennessee; Shreveport, New Orleans, Alexandria, Monroe, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Spartanburg and Columbia, South Carolina; and Reidsville, North Carolina.

The showings were for one, two, three nights at most. With its unusual length (when the eight-reeler was projected in some theaters,
The Homesteader
ran for more than two and a half hours), Micheaux's film was shown twice daily in the bigger cities. Tickets for a local premiere might sell for as high as twenty-five or fifty cents, but usually the charge was much less, ten or fifteen cents.
*
Micheaux's company furnished heralds for mailings to area residents, posters and advertisements for local newspapers, and sometimes a hired car to cruise black neighborhoods trumpeting the film through a loudspeaker.

For this premiere tour, Micheaux preserved the road-show concept at a lower budget. The filmmaker himself took the stage to host some of the major theaters, and singer George Garner Jr., traveled with the print as well, performing operatic passages to add to the evening's entertainment. Where possible, small local orchestras or a piano man played Dave Peyton's music.

Micheaux had another important reason to travel with the premiere print: to cope with local censors. Though he'd won his first battle in Chicago, the war against race-picture censorship had many fronts, and for Micheaux it would be a lifelong struggle.

Hollywood itself was still young, and throughout the 1920s produced a regular stream of so-called “pink slip” productions, films that, though they avoided race, flirted with risqué topics and broached sensitive social issues. When the Production Code was forced on the major studios in 1930, largely because of these “pink slip” pictures, there developed an intricate system of self-censorship. A small army of full-time studio executives and lawyers formed to collate the national and local censorship rules. By the mid-1930s, the morality of American movies was being enforced right at the source in Hollywood, by the studios themselves.

Hollywood would grow rich and fat perfecting its fantasy morality—a world where religion was rarely questioned, or politics seriously dis
cussed; where murder and other mortal sins (including adultery) never went without severe punishment, preferably death; where liquor was rationed; drugs didn't exist; nary a curse was uttered; and separate beds and bulky underwear were the order of the day. And where the few black people were window dressing at best, buffoons at worst.

Micheaux was determined to depict a different world, exploring forward-looking ideas and feelings about black America, at a time when that province was as foreign and remote to Hollywood as the planet Mars. Working, from the outset, as an artist
and
showman, as both a realist and a fabulist, Micheaux told stories that were both truthful and entertaining—but even the lightest of them challenged the complacency of censors.

Starting with
The Homesteader,
Micheaux's films routinely mocked organized religion and hypocritical preachers. His characters were comfortable in gin joints and flophouses. They gambled, drank to excess, and smoked reefer. The women wore sexy underwear or less, sometimes cohabiting with abusive men who had no intention of marrying them. Even his gangster films and nightclub musicals in the 1930s were flecked with the stark realities of black America.

Chicago's censorship board dominated and influenced other towns and cities in the Midwest. New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland censors guided the East Coast. The taboos were fairly consistent from place to place, but there were local variations, and entire regions, like the Deep South, where an “all-colored” film directed by an unapologetic black man was unwelcome. The possible transgressions were innumerable.

One controversial story point in
The Homesteader
was the scene where “Orlean McCarthy” was advised by her rotten sister to ingest a herb that will cause her pregnancy to abort. Just mentioning abortion was “immoral,” ruled the Motion Picture Commission of New York, and censors in other states concurred.
Snip, snip,
and the scene was gone.

Ironically, Micheaux's insistence on exploring the “passing” theme (in his own life story and in so many films) probably caused him more conflicts with censors, over time, than any other subject. Wherever
The Homesteader
went, North or South, censorship officials zeroed in on the fact that the film portrayed a “white” woman who
appeared
to be embroiled in a romance with a black man. Mingling of the races would be taboo in Hollywood filmmaking into the late 1950s. In Micheaux productions, again and again, it was a crucial part of the drama.

Once in a while—as in Chicago—Micheaux would encounter a
token black censor, but most were white, and Micheaux was forced to smile through their objections, misinterpretations, and paternalism, like the Pullman porter he had once been. After screening the film in Kansas, one woman on the Board of Censors handed Micheaux a written synopsis of
The Homesteader
she had prepared, proposing a number of minor cuts, and offering a suggestion: “You cannot imagine what a perfectly lovely and original [new] title I have given it!” she exclaimed. “A Good Old Darkey.” She “looked kindly up into my face for approval,” Micheaux recalled. The cuts had to be made, but he kept his own title.