Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (45 page)

 

Micheaux had been making films for the same dirt cost, flirting with courts and collapse, for twenty years. In that period he had managed to write, direct, and produce at least forty films—more than any number of famous directors doing the same job in all-expenses-paid Hollywood; more, for example, than Cecil B. DeMille.

The Notorious Elinor Lee
would hark back to one of Micheaux's first pictures, 1921's milestone black vs. white boxing film
The Brute.
Where
The Brute
had traded on the mystique of Jack Johnson,
The Notorious
Elinor Lee
would make its allusions to the currently reigning heavyweight champion, Joe Louis.

Once an amateur pugilist (if the Rosebud stories were true), and always a knowledgeable fan of boxing, Micheaux had followed Louis's career from the start, exulting when the “Brown Bomber” was crowned champion of the world in 1937. In one novel Micheaux offered high praise for Louis, not only as a tough fighter, famed for his stunning knockouts, but as a role model for the race, a black man who wasn't afraid to boast his greatness.

Micheaux would pluck several cast members from the rival “sepia picture”
The Spirit of Youth,
in which Louis had acted his own life story. Like
The Brute,
however,
The Notorious Elinor Lee
would be set mainly in Chicago, Micheaux's home of the heart. “A Chicago girl, huh?” one of his characters asks another in the script. “By adoption, yes,” she replies. “Most of us over twenty, likewise,” the first comments knowingly.

Micheaux's script would weave topical, autobiographical, socially critical, and folkloric elements into an alternative Joe Louis “biopic,” complete with musical numbers. The hero of
The Notorious Elinor Lee
was Benny Blue, known as “The Bombshell,” whose boxing contract has been taken over by the crooked Elinor Lee. Unbeknownst to Blue, Elinor Lee has made a pact with gangsters, promising to build Blue up into a contender for the championship. But when he fights for the heavyweight crown, the match will be secretly rigged in favor of organized crime.

Blue stacks up the wins, and his popularity soars. Success goes to his head; he neglects his old friends and is beguiled by a mystery girl named Fredi (her name intentionally evoking Fredi Washington, the actress who “passed” in
Imitation of Life
). Fredi is reluctantly working off an obligation to Elinor Lee, a relative. She is trying to leave behind a checkered past that includes shoplifting and a prison stint. Fredi hails from Paducah, Kentucky (across the Ohio River from Micheaux's birthplace) and is the daughter of the notorious “Stacker Lee,” who made headlines by killing a person during a crap game, with a talking parrot as his only eyewitness.
*

Blue's manager is the honest and educated Haywood (“he has just been graduated from the University of Chicago”), who has his hands full
trying to shield the fighter from corrupting influences. “The Bombshell” has a white archnemesis, a German Superman named Max Wagner (read: Max Schmeling), who fights in a “funny sideways” manner and harbors an implicitly racist disdain and fear of Blue. The two slug it out early in the story, but Wagner wins (as happened to Joe Louis, when he fought Schmeling for the first time in 1936). When the rivals meet again for the championship, Blue is told to take a fall, or else.

True to his word, Micheaux gave Robert Earl Jones the starring role as Benny Blue. Carman Newsome would play Haywood. Edna Mae Harris, appearing in her second Micheaux film, was Fredi, while Gladys Williams portrayed Elinor Lee. There were never very many white performers in Micheaux films, but the number multiplied in the late 1930s, peaking at “18 whites” for
The Notorious Elinor Lee
(an exact number supplied to
Time
magazine by Hubert Julian). Most of the colorful types in
The Notorious Elinor Lee
came straight from the boxing world—among them Harry Kadison, a former Golden Gloves boxer turned character actor, who had the most substantial white part as the German Superman.

The Notorious Elinor Lee
was shot mainly in and around Chicago's Black Belt in the fall of 1939. Micheaux was able to draw on his connections with local hangouts and boxing personalities.

Haskell Wexler, who would go on to become an award-winning Hollywood cinematographer, was working at the time as a teenage assistant in the processing laboratory of a cheap Prairie Avenue studio, where Micheaux was filming the interiors. The Prairie Avenue facility was used mainly for industrial filmmaking, not feature motion picture production, and the developing rooms shared a wall with the principal sound stage; the chemical smell of nitrate film was constantly wafting onto the stage where Micheaux was working.

The race-picture pioneer had turned fifty-five in January 1939. These days he eschewed hard liquor, but ate profusely. As he wrote of Sidney Wyeth, his alter ego in his 1945 novel
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
“When he [Wyeth/Micheaux] goes to dinner, he goes to eat. Throws formality and ostentation out the window, eats his fill and enjoys it.” In his fifties his weight ballooned ominously. Now it was Micheaux's size and girth, as much as his commanding air and charisma, that awed people.

Though he looked like a ponderous giant, Micheaux was still a man with energy to burn. As always, he was a speed demon on the job, scrambling all over the set, climbing ladders to check on lights. He'd strut and
bop along with the musical numbers, or watch the actors from his chair, his body twisting in anguish if he didn't like what he heard or saw.

Micheaux exuded the firepower of youth, Haskell Wexler recalled. The handful of crew members, all white, hustled to follow his barking orders. His speed was amazing. “Change the pictures!” rumbled between scenes.

The principal photography was completed by Christmas, and the postproduction that followed was a whirlwind.

 

Micheaux and Hubert Julian pulled out all stops for the mid-January 1940 “world premiere” of
The Notorious Elinor Lee,
which took place at RKO's Regent Theatre on Seventh Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem.

Julian mailed out gold-embossed “free” invitations with “semiformal” dress and R.S.V.P. advised. The general public paid as much as forty cents, or as little as twenty (“the last eight rows in the balcony”), for tickets. An hour before the first show, “hundreds of curiosity seekers crowded around the roped-off, spotlighted square,” according to one account, with arc lights and a camera trained on a hired master of ceremonies.

At 7:15
P.M.,
a siren-blaring police radio car escorted the arrival of a shining black Cadillac. Out stepped the film's associate producer, Colonel Hubert Julian, magnificently adorned in top hat, tails, white silk gloves, and an Inverness opera cape draped around his neck and secured with a silver chain.

The Black Eagle spoke briefly into a microphone. “I am proud to be associated with Mr. Micheaux, veteran motion picture producer, who has gone through twenty years of personal sacrifice to give Negroes good, clean entertainment.” Promising an excellent film, Julian added cautiously, “Don't expect the perfection of a Hollywood picture.” Micheaux also briefly addressed the crowd, which was dotted with Harlem celebrities like jazz virtuoso Louis Armstrong, recording artist Maxine Sullivan, and the black magistrate Vernon Riddick.

Before the screening Julian hosted the gold-invitees in private in the manager's office, where he served “the choicest” of champagnes, scotches, ryes, cognac, and port, according to one press account. “This is the greatest thing that has ever been done in Harlem!” the beaming theater manager, Max Mink, told reporters.

At the appointed hour Micheaux and Julian took the stage together to introduce
The Notorious Elinor Lee.
Micheaux said little, deferring to the Black Eagle, who basked in the attention. “Darken the theater, and on with the show,” Julian finished his short speech, to cheers and applause. “Let joy be unconfirmed!”

Micheaux liked to sit off to the side when watching his own movies with the general public. He spent part of the show pacing around the lobby. Inside, the crowd talked back to the screen, laughing and applauding, by all evidence enjoying themselves immensely.
The Notorious Elinor Lee,
wrote the representative of the
New York Amsterdam News
afterward, “was really something to see.” “It was colossal,” the white columnist H. Allen Smith of the
New York Herald Tribune
chimed in (perhaps tongue in cheek; one never knew with him). “It was very gripping and held the interest, and I laughed until I got a pain in my side.”

After twenty years in the limelight, explaining and defending his pictures, Micheaux seemed content in Julian's shadow. The partners and special guests celebrated into the wee hours that night, backstage in the manager's office. Even Micheaux, a virtual teetotaler at this point, may have joined in the champagne toasts to the future. Julian kept proclaiming they were entering a new golden era of Negro moving pictures. “My life work in aviation is done,” he told
Time.
“I am going to devote my life now to improving the place of the Negro in motion pictures.” According to his authorized biography, “For weeks the film played to packed audiences.”

In reality, however, the film played to few audiences outside of Sack theaters, and the partners were broke on opening day.
The Notorious Elinor Lee
could barely claim to exist. “After we made all these pictures we had no place to show them!” recalled Edna Mae Harris, years later. Robert Earl Jones never got his salary.

The theaters were slipping away. After
The Notorious Elinor Lee,
Micheaux even lost the Sack chain in the South and Southwest.

Alfred and Lester Sack had seen the handwriting on the wall:
Elinor Lee,
they told Micheaux, would be their last race picture. They would no longer be investing in production, and they were getting out of the distribution end entirely. Sack Amusement Enterprises had quietly begun to sell off its theaters, keeping only select houses in Dallas, where the company switched to showing foreign-language films.

As he recounted in his 1945 novel
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
when Micheaux learned this news he had several future scripts prepared, with two actually rehearsed and ready to go before the cameras. The first would have been expensive: a sweeping biographical picture, this time with Micheaux's partner Hubert Julian, the pioneering aviator, playing himself. “It will tell the story of my career,” Julian informed
Time
magazine, “my crackup when I tried to fly to Europe, my parachute jumping over the city, and my triumph in getting the Army to have Negro aviators.”

Then Sack Amusement Enterprises pulled the plug on the budget, and Micheaux made a decision. “I don't feel like going out here begging a lot of Jews to put up money to make pictures with, any more. Just don't feel like it.” Or at least that's the explanation given by Sidney Wyeth, Micheaux's alter ego, in
The Case of Mrs. Wingate.

The Sack brothers' desertion revived Micheaux's lifelong struggle to come to terms with his feelings about Jews. And yet he had to admit that
it was another group of Jews—other prosperous acquaintances—who quickly stepped up to replace the Texans, advancing the relatively small sums of money Micheaux needed to forge a new path.

In truth, it was an old, familiar path, requiring less investment and risk: Micheaux would return to self-publishing. He would convert his unfilmed scripts, and other, earlier projects, into novels. At least a part of each of the four novels he wrote after the failure of
The Notorious Elinor Lee
would be, in some sense, a “remake.”

He might miss filmmaking, but really, he wouldn't miss the
ordeal
of filmmaking.

“There is hardly enough money in it [producing race pictures] to justify the cost and effort,” Wyeth/Micheaux muses in
The Case of Mrs. Wingate.
Though at times he had managed to live well and maintain a few regular employees—always a secretary and sometimes a driver—Wyeth/Micheaux admitted that he never made any “Big Money” in all the twenty years he'd been writing, directing, and producing films.

In
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
Micheaux offered a sophisticated analysis of why race pictures were dying while Hollywood got richer and richer all the time. “Publishing a book is simple, a simple procedure compared with making pictures,” Wyeth/Micheaux explains. “The major picture business has long ago been taken over by Wall Street. It is a huge and gigantic industry and trust, operated through about a half dozen or more what you call ‘major' film companies, who own or control all the best theatres not only in this country, but in Europe, especially England and South America. These big film companies reciprocate their pictures with each other. ‘I'll play your pictures, in the theatres we control' they say, in effect, to each other, ‘If you'll play ours in those you control.' And so it goes. If I spent a million dollars to make a colored picture and if it was as good as the best picture ever made, I couldn't play it anywhere except in what they call Negro theatres, unless I could persuade one of the major companies to release it, and they're not that interested that much in Negroes….”

He wouldn't abandon the field entirely. He'd continue to book his old pictures into theaters whose owners he could count on; the best-known Micheaux films would crop up across America throughout the 1940s. And as he worked to circulate his old pictures, he indulged his lifelong love of travel, crisscrossing the land, researching his books, visiting friends and old haunts. Ernest Jackson, one of the three wheeler-dealer brothers who had shown him generosity in his homesteading years, was
by now living in Chicago, and the two men had stayed in touch. Back in South Dakota, they heard tell that the ex-homesteader was shuttled back and forth between Harlem and Chicago in a sixteen-cylinder car driven by a white chauffeur. By this point Micheaux weighed “over 300 pounds,” reported the
Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader
in 1940.

Most of the time, however, Micheaux could be found in New York, living a more settled life. From his small office in Harlem, he concentrated on setting up his new business and writing his first novel in over twenty years. He wrote, as he had always done, in longhand on a cheap lined tablet. (Later, his secretary would do the typing.) He tried writing “a little every morning, a chapter mostly,” as Wyeth/Micheaux puts it in
The Case of Mrs. Wingate.
“On Sunday, I try to write more.”

Though he welcomed visitors, and never skipped a meal, Micheaux worked hard at constructing a novel based on a story he believed was tried and true, a story he felt he still could improve, but which still had the power to inspire his race.
The Wind from Nowhere
would “remake” two previous Micheaux novels:
The Conquest
and
The Homesteader,
which had also been the basis of his first silent and sound pictures.

His life story: the wellspring of all his stories.

By the day of infamy—the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941—he had finished a solid draft. Following his longstanding practice, he then delivered it to “some highly educated person,” as Wyeth/Micheaux conceded, whose job it was to comb the pages “sentence by sentence,” editing his sometimes ungainly prose into “perfect rhetoric and grammar.”

That was Alice B. Russell, Mrs. Micheaux, the One True Woman.

 

The Wind from Nowhere
had a more evocative title and was more smoothly written than its predecessors. The basic plot remained the same, varying only in its nuances. This time, those nuances revealed a man still searching the betrayals of the past for an answer to the quandaries of the present day. The humor of his early novels, in which a young man commented wryly on himself from the sidelines, was replaced by a lack of irony, a solemnity.

Micheaux's title was clever, a play on the grandiose Hollywood movie that sentimentalized the Old South at the time of the Civil War, which had just swept the box office and won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1939. He
even borrowed the phrase “gone with the wind” in the novel itself, wielding it in a scornful aside aimed at certain people and American cities, which he had come to see as cesspools. On a trip to Harlem, his alter-ego homesteader stands outside Marcus Garvey's headquarters and reflects on the failed promise of Garvey's crusade, and of Harlem in general. The hopeful, exciting Harlem of old, he muses, was now “gone with the wind.”

This time Micheaux christened his alter ego Martin Eden, in tribute to Jack London, whose rugged individualism had inspired him as a young man. Micheaux's Eden is “virile and a hard worker with a definite objective in life.” Reminiscing warmly about the white homesteading community, Micheaux wrote that Martin Eden had “almost never heard the ugly word of ‘nigger.'” Indeed, just about the only person to use that word in the novel is his wife's malicious younger sister, who sneeringly informs Linda Lee (the Orlean McCracken character) that Martin Eden is “your niggah.”

Micheaux assigned most of the wrongdoing to the younger sister, who grew more demented in each successive version of his life story. Martin Eden's wife, Linda, became a confused, sympathetic victim, who would never have forsaken her husband if her family hadn't kidnapped her and taken her back to Chicago. Her father, the Reverend Newt Lee in this telling, is still “vain to the core and full of ostentation” but not really evil or blameworthy. “Years later,” Micheaux wrote ruefully, Martin Eden “was sorry he had not been a bit more patient with the Elder.”

With each rendition, Micheaux further exaggerated his climactic encounter with his wife and her father in Chicago. In this third novel about his homesteading struggles, he really punishes the Lees/McCrackens: Near the end of the story, when Linda finally realizes how much suffering she has caused poor Martin, she grabs a long-bladed knife, stabs her father to death, stumbles outside her house in a dazed state (“in her orange colored negligee, spattered with blood, her brindlelike hair disarranged”), and is run over by a car.

Micheaux's most wishful addition to
The Wind from Nowhere
was his baby son, who, in this final version of long-ago events, survives childbirth and is spirited away to the Black Belt by the wife's meddling family. All along Martin Eden has been struggling with his affection for the apparently white Scottish girl, who is his neighbor on the Rosebud. As in
The Homesteader,
the Scottish girl follows Martin Eden to Chicago, where she meets up with her own relatives on Vernon Avenue and learns that she is a “bright mulatto.” Then, after Linda's death, she and Martin Eden re
claim his baby. They rush back to South Dakota in time to defeat a crooked banker and take up residence on their rightful land—where, conveniently, valuable manganese ore has just been discovered.

The Wind from Nowhere
was self-published in early 1943, with The Book Supply Company reincorporated at Micheaux's 40 Morningside Avenue apartment in Harlem. But the Harlem press, which had treated Micheaux's race pictures as beneath notice for most of the preceding decade, sniffed at his first novel since 1917. Constance Curtis, the book editor of the
New York Amsterdam News,
told friends, “I've reviewed a lot of books, but I've never reviewed one more aptly titled than
The Wind from Nowhere.”
Indeed, reviews of any kind were hard to come by, which infuriated Micheaux.

But the self-publisher advertised the book heavily in black newspapers and magazines throughout America, and it sailed through multiple editions, selling a reported 30,000 copies. That would have qualified
The Wind from Nowhere
for the bestseller lists, if Micheaux hadn't been working outside the mainstream New York publishing industry. “Undoubtedly,” conceded Carlton Moss, hardly a member of Micheaux's fan club, “he placed more books by a black author in more black homes in America, than any other fiction writer.”

Micheaux also traveled widely to promote the book in bookstores and libraries and schools, and as usual in person he was an irresistible salesman of his stories and ideas. Micheaux enjoyed his time on the road, giving talks and selling
The Wind from Nowhere
right out of his suitcase. He liked to inscribe copies: “To one of our group…”

While on the road, Micheaux always found spare time for reading and thinking. In 1943 the papers were filled with war news, and now the reborn novelist started jotting down ideas for his next book, one that would mingle autobiography with a modern plot—something to jolt his readers, remind them of Pearl Harbor, and rally black people to the urgency of World War II.

 

Micheaux spent the next two years selling
The Wind from Nowhere
and writing
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
which evolved into Micheaux's most elaborate and audacious novel, taking his longtime bugaboos about politics, Jews, and intermarriage, and weaving a pitched melodrama exploring “Nazi activity inside black America.”

Borrowing, liberally, from W. E. B. DuBois's
Dark Princess
—which at one time he had considered adapting into a film—Micheaux offered a story full of interweaving subplots and shifts in time and place.

Its true beginning was in the South, in Atlanta (“easily one of the freest towns in the South for a Negro”), where the reader was introduced to a young, college-bound black man named Kermit Early, who since high school has been pursued by a well-bred, coquettish white Southern classmate. After marrying a rich white man, this flirtatious woman, now known as Mrs. Wingate, stops by Kermit's shoeshine stand; as he polishes her shoes, she deliberately spreads her lower limbs and shows him her private parts. Though he tries to dodge her persistent sexual advances, she doesn't give up; she is drawn to the taboo of having sex with a black man. She successfully schemes to get Kermit into a spare room in her suburban home, then into her bed as her lover.

Mrs. Wingate tells Kermit that her husband (like Leo Frank) is “not a normal man” when it comes to sexual relations. (Then, for several pages, Micheaux reflexively revisits the true-life case that compelled his attention in a book and two films:
The Forged Note, The Gunsaulus Mystery,
and
Lem Hawkins' Confession.
Whether or not Frank was guilty, Micheaux in the end endorsed Negro janitor James Conley's views about the factory-owner's stunted sexuality. Frank could only be sexually aroused by having “unnatural relations” with women, Micheaux wrote; the Jewish factory-owner wasn't “built like other men” and “went down on women.”)

You'd think Micheaux would approve of a shoeshine boy with aspirations toward higher education, but his storytelling was iconoclastic to the end. Kermit goes on to college and life in Chicago, but Micheaux portrays him as weak-willed and pathetic. Despite his degree, Kermit becomes a “kept man” for Mrs. Wingate. His airy liberal education never leads him to meaningful employment, much less an ability to cope with the real world.

Kermit soon falls under the spell of a subversive group, operating out of Chicago and Milwaukee, which is building a fifth column of Negro Nazis who blame Jews for the problems of black America. Moving to New York, Kermit is assigned by his pro-Nazi handlers to approach the pioneering race-picture producer Sidney Wyeth, whose differences with Jewish producers and theater owners are widely known. Wyeth, by now, has gone broke making race pictures and retreated to writing fiction. As part of a pro-Nazi propaganda campaign planned for the United States,
Kermit offers to arrange funding for Wyeth to make a comeback, if he will agree to make a “hate movie” inciting Negroes to riot against Jews.