The Measure of a Man (11 page)

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.

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.

The truth of the matter is that the formation of this business relationship was almost a literal “pre-enactment” of the situa
tion in the film we were about to make. The black man was coming for dinner, and we didn’t usually do that. Now mind you, these were good, enlightened, liberal people. These were major Hollywood stars putting their ideals to the test—but even for them, the fact still remained that “we don’t usually do that.” They were going to enter into an intense creative partnership with a black man—a partnership in which they would take on one of the primal taboos of our culture, interracial marriage—and “we don’t usually do that,” either.

Should I have felt condescended to by all the scrutiny from Tracy and Hepburn? Should I have been angry and confrontational? After all, they’d had ample opportunity to know my work. At that time I’d made over thirty films and had won the Oscar for best actor a few years earlier. If it had been Paul Newman they were going to do a movie with, would they have checked him out so thoroughly? But the fact of the matter is I’m not Paul Newman. If Paul had played the part of the young doctor coming to marry their daughter, there would have been no drama.

Having done
A Patch of Blue
, I had already crossed this societal boundary, but the culture at large, even the liberal and enlightened subculture, had not. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn were exceedingly decent people, and I think their politics were sound, but I still think asking them to be any more “liberated” in the America that we knew at that time would have been expecting a hell of a lot too much.

So I gave them the benefit of the doubt; I looked at them as ordinary, decent folks. And in fact they turned out to be that—
and a hell of a lot more. But they were anxious early on, for good reason, and they simply had to find out about me.

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, like most of their audience, lived in America. More important, they lived in Hollywood, and in their hometown the intrusion of an African-American suitor wasn’t a part of the daily practice of the hundreds of marriages that they were privy to in their lives and on the screen.

If they had known twenty-five or thirty black people, ten of whom were actors, three of whom were doctors, four of whom were maids, six of whom were schoolteachers, and some of whom were workaday people, then they would have come to the question informed on a certain level. But being Americans of the middle class or higher, the only black people they would have encountered were, for the most part, the servants in their home and at the studios—blacks who attended Miss Hepburn in whatever ways she required. And as for Mr. Tracy, he struck me as a very human guy who, if given the chance, would come down every time on the side of decency and fairness for all. Now, maybe I thought that in part because of the memorable role he played in
Bad Day at Black Rock
, in which he was wonderfully compassionate to a character played by a black actor named Juano Hernandez. I do know that they were demonstrably
independent
people. While I don’t know what the design of their social life was, I doubt that either one of them had ever had all that much social contact with people of color.

Obviously, Tracy and Hepburn knew Stanley Kramer; in fact, Tracy was Kramer’s favorite actor. The two men had
worked together on
Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg
, and
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
. Thus Tracy and Hepburn were obliged to bring to bear on me the kind of respect they had for Kramer, and they had to say to themselves (and I’m sure they did). This kid has to be pretty okay, because Stanley is nuts about working with him.

As for my part in all this, all I can say is that there’s a place for people who are angry and defiant, and sometimes they serve a purpose, but that’s never been my role. And I have to say, too, that I have great respect for the kinds of people who are able to recycle their anger and put it to different uses.

On the other hand, even Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, who certainly didn’t appear angry when they burst upon the world, would never have burst upon the world in the first place if they hadn’t, at one time in their lives, gone through much, much anger and much, much resentment and much, much anguish.

Anguish and pain and resentment and rage are very human forces. They can be found in the breasts of most human beings at one time or another. On very rare occasions there comes a Gandhi, and occasionally there comes a Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally there comes a guy like Paul Robeson or a guy like Nelson Mandela. When these people come along, their anger, their rage, their resentment, their frustration—these feelings ultimately mature by will of their own discipline into a positive energy that can be used to fuel their positive, healthy excursions in life.

It wasn’t imaginary circumstances or vicarious experiences
that engendered harsh emotions in the men I’ve named. It was real situation, for them and for the people around them. But they had some manna, some mechanism, some strength, some discipline, some vision that allowed them to convert that anger into fuel. Anger is negative energy—a destructive force—but they converted it into fuel, into
positive
energy. Their transformed anger fueled them in positive ways; in each case that’s exactly what happened.

Nelson Mandela—you think he loved the apartheid practitioners? Oh, no. You think he loved the guys who sentenced him to death and then put him on a rockpile, promising him that he would work there for six months, and left him working there for
thirteen years
, ruining his legs and his knees? Went in a robust prizefighter in the best of physical condition, and they worked him till his feet and ankles suffered lasting damage. But he came out of prison with a respect for himself, for his values, for his cause, and no hatred for the men and women who had spent a commensurate part of their lives trying to destroy him. He resented or disliked or hated what they
represented
, but he was human enough to see them, frailties and all, as human beings. As did Martin Luther King, Jr., who said as much. As did Gandhi, who said as much.

Well, I certainly don’t live this ideal every day, but I believe in it with my whole being. If I were asked for an evaluation of myself, I would readily admit to my sins, such as they are, to my weaknesses, my frailties, my shortcomings. I do that all the time, and the reason I can do that and not be ashamed is that I’m willing almost always to try my best. And when I fall short of
my reach for something after having tried my best—even when I fall so short that my attempt winds up in sinful behavior—or when my weaknesses tug at my ankles, I accept that. I mean, I accept that failing, but I
can’t
accept my sinfulness, my weaknesses, my frailties
unless
I’ve really tried to reach above them.

Wherever there’s a configuration in which there are the powerful and the powerless, the powerful, by and large, aren’t going to feel much of anything about this imbalance. After a while the powerful become accustomed to experiencing the power to their benefit in ways that are painless. It’s the air they breathe, the water they swim in.

The powerless, who
aren’t
swimming in that comfort and that ease, look at the inequity quite differently than the guy across town who’s in the comfort seat. But that goes for Japanese and Chinese, that goes for African-Americans and white Americans, that goes for Native Americans and white Americans, that goes for Hispanic Americans and white Americans. It goes for the British and their colonial possessions, many of which are now called commonwealth countries. However much prodding they get from the powerless or the disenfranchised or the slaves, those in power just aren’t inclined toward introspection or remorse.