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Lead man holler: Harry Belafonte and the culture industry

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Lead man holler: Harry Belafonte and the culture industry

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Content LEAD MAN HOLLER: HARRY BELAFONTE AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY by Karen Beavers ________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES, SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Karen Beavers ii Acknowledgements I feel very fortunate to have had the support of so many in the process of researching and writing this project. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee – Professors Dana Polan, Tara McPherson, Curtis Marez, and Alice Gambrell. They provided invaluable advice and direction. In particular, I have benefited from Dana Polan’s unwavering interest in my project. After I made a small comment in his historiography course, he told me my interests could make a good dissertation and I have been the recipient of his analysis, excellent book recommendations, professional advice, and precious time ever since. Tara McPherson’s wide-ranging scholarship and collegiality have been an inspiration for me. She was the first faculty member to welcome me to the program and she has continued to help me to find a place in the academic community. Curtis Marez’s interdisciplinary scholarship has set a standard that I try to emulate. His close reading of my manuscript at key times was instrumental to its development. Alice Gambrell helped me to see how my work connected to broader academic discussions. I am grateful for her willingness to read and comment on just about anything I submitted to her; her invitations to talk ideas out in her office hours felt heaven sent. I also benefited from a community of friends who helped me to maintain my sense of humor. Eating and talking with Mary Jeanne Wilson, Jaime Nasser, iii Elizabeth Ramsey, Stephanie DeBoer, Veronica Paredes, Danielle Rose and Mary Lynn Kittelson helped me maintain my sanity. And lastly, I want to thank my mother, Beverly Cannon, for her support during the whole process. She is the hardest working person I know and it meant a lot that she thought that my work was worth doing. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract v Prologue 1 Prologue Endnotes 30 Chapter One: 'Buked and Scorned: Belafonte’s Songs of Labor 34 Figure 1 68 Chapter One Endnotes 92 Chapter Two: Man Smart: Representing the Diaspora in 1950s Film 98 Chapter Two Endnotes 176 Chapter Three: Oh Let Me Fly: Belafonte and ‘50s and ‘60s Variety Television 186 Chapter Three Endnotes 271 Conclusion 277 Conclusion Endnotes 290 Bibliography 291 v Abstract My dissertation “Lead Man Holler: Harry Belafonte and the Culture Industry,” looks at how African Americans were able to represent a black aesthetic and politics in the music, film, and television industries of the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte’s position as a multimedia artist who was successful in using three branches of the mainstream media to communicate his particular aesthetic and political point of view offers a unique perspective on how each industry engaged with race and politics. I focus on Belafonte’s career to explore larger questions including the following: Why were certain black performers popular? How did they act as screens for mainstream cultural desires while also expressing the particular points of view of subaltern people? Belafonte is not technically an immigrant because he was born in New York City, but I believe the five years he spent from age eight to twelve with his mother’s family in Jamaica and his roots in Harlem’s West Indian immigrant community are central to understanding his work. His television, music, and film work can be seen as a series of immigrant acts in the way that Lisa Lowe has defined them: "the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification." For example, Belafonte’s concert and television performance of spirituals recalled the subjugation blacks endured in slavery and his chain gang songs and work songs (including calypsos) highlighted the exploitation that continued and was even fostered under European imperialism vi and American democratic capitalism in the period of his stardom. Belafonte’s work, while asserting a desire for full equality and integration into U.S. institutions, also manifests a longing for diasporic connections that can’t be fulfilled by entrance into the nation state. 1 Prologue When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, Harry Belafonte campaigned for him. He filmed a commercial for Kennedy that sold J.F.K. as the choice for Americans who were concerned with racial and economic equality. The following is the transcript for the commercial: BELAFONTE: Hi. My name is Harry Belafonte. I'm an artist and I'm not a politician. But like most Americans, I have a great interest in the political and economic destiny of my country. And seated here is Senator Jack Kennedy. As a Negro and as an American, I have many questions—and I'm sure everyone does—about civil rights, about foreign policies, about the economy of the country, and about things that will happen. KENNEDY: And I want to make it very clear, Harry, that on this question on the equality of opportunity for all Americans, whether it's in the field of civil rights, better minimum wages, better housing, better working conditions, jobs—I stand for these things. The Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt stood for them. BELAFONTE: I'm voting for the Senator. How about you? ANNOUNCER: Vote for a leader like Roosevelt. Vote for John F. Kennedy for president. 1 The commercial begins with a close up shot of Belafonte seated in a living room set, wearing a suit and tie. When he mentions Kennedy’s name we see a shot of Kennedy, who is seated to the side with his head turned toward Belafonte. When Kennedy beings to speak, there is a two-shot of Belafonte and Kennedy: Kennedy is turned toward and looking at Belafonte and Belafonte is looking 2 intently at Kennedy, first leaning forward and then leaning back. When Kennedy finishes his list of what he believes in, the camera returns to a shot of Belafonte who faces us when he tells us, “I’m voting for the Senator. How about you?” When the announcer wraps up the commercial, we see a photograph of Kennedy’s face with text superimposed that says, “Vote for John F. Kennedy for President. Presented by Citizens for Kennedy.” Belafonte calls upon voters to choose Kennedy for his stands on economic policy, foreign policy, and civil rights. He presents himself as a representative “Negro” and “American.” His phrasing recalls W.E.B. Dubois’ assertion that “African Americans sought no less than full U.S. Citizenship without sacrificing their ‘Negro’ identity.” 2 The 1960 campaign commercial touches upon the qualities that Belafonte became associated with: he presents himself as Black man who is suitable to be a representative American and he expresses a vested interest in civil rights, foreign relations, and the capitalist economy. The Star: Labor Writ Large Belafonte, the folk singer who traveled the world singing work songs and black folk songs was uniquely able to speak to the issues. To write about Belafonte’s star image I will begin with Richard Dyer. In Heavenly Bodies, Dyer argues that the national attention to stars underwrites a particular ideology of the individuals’ role in a capitalist society: 3 The notion of the individual continues to be a major moving force in our culture. Capitalism justifies itself on the basis of the freedom (separateness) of anyone to make money, sell their labour how they will, to be able to express opinions and get them heard (regardless of wealth or social position.) The openness of society is assumed by the way that we are addressed as individuals – as consumers (each freely choosing to buy, or watch, what we want), as legal subjects (able to make up our mind who is to run society). Thus even while the notion of the individual is assailed on all sides, it is a necessary fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in. 3 Dyer goes on to argue that all aspects of a star’s text reinforce the ideologies of democratic capitalism. Even a star’s outspokenness about political issues, according to Dyer, reinforces the notion that democratic capitalism works well because individuals are free to express their own opinions. Dyer also argues that as people view stars taking on different roles there is a perception that in each new role or job that the star takes on, s/he retains a visible or “feelable” essence that is separate from the work s/he takes on. This notion that there is a personal or private quality to the star, according to Dyer, reinforces the cultural notion that there is a distinction between the private person and the work they do – which he argues is essential to the workings of capitalism – lest people should carry their class identification to other parts of their life or seek to make their work life as satisfying as their personal/private life. The narrative of the star often involves a glimpse into the control the star has over his/her image. We often see how the star grapples with the control other people and institutions have on their lives (the role of journalists and their 4 employers: studio, record company, and television network workers) in producing their image. Dyer argues that witnessing how stars negotiate with their employers and the public underwrites a particular cultural idea of how individuals in the audience should exercise control over their own lives and conveys the message capitalism is the economic system that allows the most freedom for the individual. Dyer points out that while stars reinforce ideologies of democratic capitalism, they also trouble and make people question them. He uses Judy Garland as an example of a star whose job took a toll on her body, which, in turn, is manifested in her later work. The prescription pills that she became addicted to in the course of her film work, take a toll on her body that is visible in her later concert and television performances. Belafonte is a star who uses the media to argue for the relationship between his work and his personal politics. In interviews Belafonte speaks about his commitment to the labor issues that are the subject of his art. Biography: The Star as Consumer In Literature, Popular Culture and Society, Leo Lowenthal demonstrates how all mass-market periodical biographies participate in the production of ideology. Like Dyer, Lowenthal argues that mass-market biographies promote the ideologies of capitalism; however Lowenthal focuses on the ideologies that undergird the individual’s identity as consumer. Mass-market biographies, 5 according to Lowenthal, tend to play up the leisure time pursuits and extravagant purchases of the celebrity in an effort to make the celebrity to appear just like the fan or reader. 4 Popular biographies of Belafonte including Arnold Shaw’s Belafonte and a 1959 Time Magazine Cover story 5 played up Belafonte’s entrepreneurial success and highlighted the property he was able to buy and the gifts he was able to buy his wife [find a citation.] Each biography also chronicles the series of jobs (janitor, restaurateur, garment worker) that Belafonte held in order to provide for his wife and child in the period before his major stardom. The Time cover article even describes Belafonte’s performance outfit in consumer terms. It’s a Sears catalog-like description of each piece, complete with the price of the shirt: described Belafonte’s clothing or costume as they called it as the following: “a tailored ($27) Indian cotton shirt partially open, snug black slacks, a seaman’s belt buckled by two large interlocking curtain rings combines the dashing elegance of a Valentino cape with the muscled fascination of a Brando T shirt.” 6 The fan magazine notes that he likes “Italian styled and made trench coats” – of which he has nine or ten. 7 Lowenthal notes that biographies also reinforce the ideology of American individualism and exceptionalism. Biographies give lots of details about the parents and hometown origins of the famous person, thus suggesting that individual success is due to biological inheritance rather than social or political forces. Similarly, when a famous person’s childhood is represented it is 6 presented as the adult version in miniature: biographies fail to acknowledge the intervening political and social forces that make it possible for individuals to succeed or not. All biographies, according to Lowenthal, contain a “hardships and breaks” section; however, those hardships and breaks are presented as natural facts of life rather than products of structural social inequalities. Lowenthal’s content analysis of mass-market biographies shows how the repetition of these myths of the individual contribute to a particular ideological understanding of the relationship of the individual to the social which supports the status quo of U.S. democratic capitalism. Belafonte’s Stardom and The Fan Magazine: His Complete Life Story Dyer’s study of Paul Robeson asks, “How did the period [1924-1945] permit black stardom? What were the qualities this black person could be taken to embody, that could catch on in a society where there had never been a black star of this magnitude?” 8 He answers by exploring the following qualities of Robeson’s star text: “Essential Black,” “Black as Folk,” “Atavism,” and “Freedom.” Robeson as “essential black” perpetuates the notion that all black people share essential characteristics that make them black and that Robeson represented these qualities spectacularly. 9 Black as Folk and Atavism are related: each reflects the notion that “the black race is the repository of uncontaminated feelings”; black as folk envisions this feeling as simple and good like the Uncle Tom stereotype and atavism imagines the feelings as 7 animalistic and brutal like the “Black Beast.” 10 “Freedom” describes the “longing for and quest for freedom” manifested in the spirituals Robeson sang. 11 Dyer is interested in how black and white audiences read Robeson’s star qualities and points out that their readings are neither exactly the same nor totally different. For example, while white audiences’ embrace of Robeson as essential black and folk artist may seem patronizing because of the way it aligns blackness with simplicity and naturalness and whiteness with sophistication and intellect, Dyer argues black audiences also embraced these same essentialisms but saw in them a powerful critique of the repressive destruction of so called white intellect. Similarly, while the image of Robeson as Uncle Tom was a cruel stereotype, it also made a place for the representation of slavery in a popular culture that mostly wanted to look away from it. Dyer describes how Robeson was able to foreground the dignity and backbreaking labor that is often overwhelmed by the stereotype. In this dissertation I ask questions that are similar to Dyer’s: How did the period 1956 to 1968 permit black stardom? What were the qualities this black person could embody, that could catch on in a society that had only had one black multimedia star, Robeson, of this magnitude? I argue, that Belafonte embodied the following qualities: Black as Folk, Caribbean Exotic, Hard working Immigrant, Serious Artist, Family Man, and subject and object of interracial desire. A 1957 fan magazine lays out the terms on which Belafonte 8 was accepted as a mainstream multimedia star and reveals the competing and contradictory ideals his star text illuminates. The Fan magazine is a seventy- five page collection of articles about Belafonte culled from magazines, newspapers, and press releases. Exotic Caribbean As a West Indian-American, Belafonte occupies a unique position in relation to histories of colonialism and slavery: as a child of a Caribbean mother and Martinique father who both emigrated to the U.S., he participates in the immigrant narrative that is central to U.S. imaginary identities. But, since the Caribbean has its own history of imperialism and slavery and Belafonte chose calypso, spirituals, and chain gang songs to be a central part of his repertoire, he aligns himself with the history of slavery that is central to black American identity. The fan magazine elucidates both aspects of his black identity. Although the fan magazine documents Belafonte’s insistence that he is more than a calypso singer, the magazine promotes images of Belafonte as Caribbean exotic. The cover labels him “America’s King of Calypso” and includes an illustration (not a photograph) of Belafonte, his legs straddling a drum, wearing a straw hat and a vest with no shirt underneath. The fan magazine emphasizes his origins: his mother is Jamaican and his dad is from Martinique. The magazine credits his “bronze” skin color to his father’s ancestry: 9 Harry’s rare good looks and brunt amber complexion have their basic foundation in the blood strains of Martinique. On this little island in the center of the Caribbean archipelago, the mixture of French planters and negro women has produced some of the most beautiful and most interesting specimens in the Western hemisphere. 12 The paragraph describes Belafonte’s skin color by locating it in a vague history. It comes up with an origin story that elides the history of slavery and French colonialism in Martinique. All gets collapsed in presumably consensual sexual relations between French (white) men and Negro women. It also avoids the incendiary stereotype of Black men and French (white women.) Why is the French rather than British heritage emphasized? Perhaps the French sounds more exotic and their history of imperialism possibly unknown to most Americans. The description of his origin obscures the particular history of slavery: namely, the coerced labor demanded by French planters of Negro Women and Men. Black as Folk The story of Belafonte’s childhood emphasizes the folk culture he was exposed to during the time he lived in Jamaica as a boy. According to the fan magazine, Of his life in the islands, Harry says, “These were the formative years. Island life is closely knitted. The sense of values is different from what our culture teaches here. The community is more related. Also, there is where I had my first contact with folk music. 13 10 Articles on Belafonte continually rehearse this narrative of his growing up. It suggests that he has natural access to the calypso rhythm and words he sings. Because calypso music was seen as a fad that might rival rock and roll, an entire article in the fan magazine is devoted to explaining its folk origins. “What is Calypso?” by Anne E. Knoll elucidates the political and social history of calypso. Knoll details its origins as first slave work songs then critiques of British imperial rule, and, finally, playful boasts. Significantly she leaves out the more modern industrial context of the songs which function as critiques of U.S. and British oil and banana companies. 14 She then notes that “It wasn’t until after World War I that the white Islanders began to discover the magic of calypso,” and then chronicles the U.S. record buying public’s interest in Calypso from 1914 on. 15 Knoll’s article is accompanied by illustrations of several calypso albums but Belafonte’s Calypso album cover is the dominant one. Other parts of the fan magazine, however, devote time to Belafonte’s declarations that he is more than a calypso artist. In an article titled, “Balladeer, Folk Singer, Pop Singer”, Belafonte explains to a newspaper reporter, Listen, I’m a singer period. I sing all types of folk material – English, Irish, Israeli, from every section of the world . . . as a matter of fact, my two big records right now aren’t calypso at all – even though everybody seems to have hung that tag on them. “One, ‘Jamaica Farewell’ is a West Indian folk ballad. The other, “Day-O is a West Indian work song. 16 11 Belafonte presents himself as an authentic folk artist who brings out the folk origins rather than the fad of calypso. Though Belafonte argues for the authenticity of his folk singing, there is always a distance between Belafonte and folk. Folk music is presented as something he adopted in the midst of his burgeoning career. Many biographies note that he could have been a pop singer but he opted to sing the music of folk culture. The article “How Success Came to Harry Belafonte” recalls a brief period before Belafonte’s breakthrough success where he reportedly made a decent living as a pop singer but opted to stop, even suffering a brief period of unemployment, because he didn’t think that pop singing was serious enough for him. 17 The choice to sing at all is also discussed; it was a second choice to acting, Belafonte’s chosen vocation. Belafonte’ combines the two professions by singing theatrically: “I decided to bring out the dramatic import in music.” 18 In several moments of his career he foregrounds the gap between his folk image and his “actual” person – a scholar of folk music who acts out the songs. The idea that Belafonte has the natural background to sing black folk music, but that it’s a choice supports the selling of his story as an American success narrative. It underwrites the notion that the U.S. democratic nation allows all people, even black people, to express themselves and sell their labor freely. The distance between Belafonte the dramatic folk singer and the “authentic calypsonians” of Trinidad is reinforced by the pictures that accompany the fan 12 magazine article “Reluctant King of Calypso.” The fan magazine presents images of “authentic” calypsonians, nameless men and women who dance, sing, and drum, wearing traditional West Indian clothing and jewelry. American Success Story and Family Man The first page of text in the fan magazine reads: It took 10 years – 10 years of slinging hamburgers, working as a $47-a-week truck pusher in the garment center of New York City and studying dramatics – for Harry Belafonte to become an overnight sensation. Actor, Broadway star, balladeer, folk singer, pop singer, Hollywood star and finally as the reluctant King of Calypso, Harry Belafonte is an American phenomenon. 19 As I have noted above, every biography of Belafonte talks about the series of jobs he took on before the major period of his stardom. The section of the fan magazine entitled “How Success came to Harry Belafonte” is no different. It describes Belafonte’s concert touring in this way: “Harry, determined to make up for the many lean, hungry years, went to work fulfilling many engagements.” 20 The fan magazine implies that he inherited this work ethic from his immigrant parents. 21 Belafonte’s period of blue collar labor is motivated by his need to provide for his wife and young child. Interestingly, some of the photographs accompanying the article, depict Belafonte performing in a shirt and tie, rather than his trademark unbuttoned shirt, like some sort of singing office worker. The fan magazine contains the “hardships and breaks” section that is a staple of mass-market biographies. Belafonte’s well-documented commitment to 13 civil rights points to the structural and systemic issues that the natural presentation of hardships usually covers over. The fan magazine clumsily tries to skirt the contradictions between American Dream ideology and consciousness of racial inequality. In “How Success Came to Harry Belafonte”, we learn that Belafonte is a “guy with tremendous race pride, frustrated by the inequalities of the social system in which he lives, gasping for the break of life, Harry was searching in a labyrinth that seemed to have no way out.” 22 The fan magazine mitigates the acknowledgment of systemic racism in a couple of ways. First, by using the standard language of fate and destiny to tell his story. After we learn that Belafonte was frustrated by the social system, the fan magazine tells us that one day “while working as a maintenance man or plain porter, he was given two tickets to an American Negro Theater production.” This led to him taking a class at the New School, which moved him on the road to success. The magazine quotes Belafonte’s forthright lament that he ideally would have been a Broadway actor (which he trained for by taking classes at the New School with classmates like Marlon Brando, Elaine Stritch, and Tony Curtis) but that he found that there were few to none parts for black actors. In the section, “The Early Years”, he’s quoted as saying: It was impossible for me to get work in the theater after I finished the Drama Workshop,” says Harry. “The only thing they would let me read for was Uncle Tom parts. So I got a job in the garment district. 23 14 Almost immediately after this, however, we are told “But the strange turn of events which seem to be guiding Harry’s movements took place once more.” 24 We find out that a friend who owned as nightclub asked him to sing and the rest was history. The fan magazine also minimizes the focus on social inequality by telling Belafonte’s story through the grand narrative of American progress. “The Early Years” paints Belafonte as an American success story. It begins with strange efforts to place Belafonte’s life in various contexts. For example, “When young Harold was 20 days old, Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray killed Ruth’s husband and created the murder-trial sensation of the decade.” 25 And later: He “wasn’t even three months old when a U.S. pilot by the name of Charles Lindbergh flew his ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ non-stop from New York to Paris.” 26 The story then shifts to his “formative years”, the time from 1935 to 1940 (8-12 years old) Belafonte spent living in Jamaica with his family. When he goes back to the U.S. to live in the “city jungle” of Harlem, Belafonte falters, joins a gang but then is swept up in American identity and joins the Navy in 1943, the middle of World War II. He receives an honorable discharge and starts on his adult life. Belafonte is also presented as one who is committed to black American integration and, thus, progress toward citizenship in U.S. nation. The fan magazine tells us his father and mother are immigrants who work hard and it gives numerous examples of how hard Belafonte works as a manual laborer and 15 nightclub singer. His hard work brings him the mainstream success the magazine documents. While the magazine acknowledges that Belafonte must confront racism even as a star it argues that progress in civil rights is being made and racism is primarily a southern problem. The magazine tells us how Belafonte broke the color barrier at Northern hotels (the Palmer House in Chicago and the New Frontier in Las Vegas) but has to stay in “Negro only” accommodations in the South. 27 Of a tour of Three for Tonight Belafonte says, In consenting to tour the South with “Three for Tonight,” my motivation was to help bring about as much as any one could a greater feeling of respect for my race. I was determined to face whatever conditions existed in order to go out there on the stage and cause white Southern audiences to accept a Negro performer in a mixed cast. 28 And he later laments that, Millard Thomas, my accompanist and myself had to sneak into ‘white’ hotels by hiding in the middle of a group of white cast members. Nor were we happy at the Jim Crow rules in restaurants and elsewhere. 29 This passage again minimizes the conflict. It suggests that it is just a few white southerners who oppose desegregation. Belafonte is committed to using his celebrity for good - but the confrontation is minimized - made more palatable. Altogether, these stories cerate an image of Belafonte’s commitment to the progress of the civil rights movement. 30 The most awkward example of how the magazine presents racial problems within the framework of a progressive view of civil rights occurs in an 16 article that appears later in the collection which chronicles Belafonte’s Broadway successes. It tells us Belafonte was inspired to take on the hard work of stardom because the black Shakespearian actor Ira Aldrich inspired him: Belafonte says of him, “he was almost six feet tall, he weighed approximately 180 lbs., his color was black, and his occupation slave! Ira Aldrich stole books and precious moments to read them so that he could cultivate his active mind. With his great thirst for knowledge aroused, he turned his back on his ‘occupation’ and fled to Europe, and there became one of the greatest Shakespearian actors of his day.” This story is symbolic to Harry, for if a slave could make himself a great actor, why not Harry Belafonte? 31 This passage is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it invokes slavery - something continually invoked in his interviews and performances, either by journalists or by himself. This article’s juxtaposition of slavery with the status of black Americans in the mid 1950s is in keeping with the way in which the U.S. government sought to counter international criticism’s of the U.S. treatment of black Americans. 32 Aldrich is juxtaposed to Belafonte to illustrate the progress of black Americans. It strangely refers to slavery as an “occupation”, presumably to demonstrate that Aldrich is not contained by being a slave, but the phrasing also has the odd effect of obscuring the coerced nature and violence of slave work. Interracial Desire - Integration Belafonte is presented as a sex symbol in the magazine. When the first page hails him as a “bronze bombshell” we are confronted with another example 17 of his exoticism that utilizes a term usually applied to female stars. There is a whole article devoted to his sex symbol status called, “The Girls are Wild About Harry.” Early in the article we read: Negroes and whites both fall under his ‘valentino-like’ spell. This popularity is not based solely on an appreciation of his art form -- like, for instance, the great Nat [King] Cole. Belafonte’s singing has all the undertones of sexual attraction and many women make no bones about it. For any male performer this is terrific. 33 This passage sets up a distinction between the darker skinned Nat King Cole, who is not a sex symbol and Belafonte. It also is clear that Belafonte is the object of both blacks and whites. Curiously, it isn’t until later that the subjects of desire are identified by gender. The article concludes with: Whether it’s his voice flexibility, his mobile yet handsome face or his magnificent muscular body that women seem to go for – one thing is certain - the girls are certainly wild about Harry. 34 In the first pictures accompanying this article, he is surrounded by groups of mostly black women: one shows him kissing a black woman on the lips and the next shows Belafonte surrounded by five black women and one white woman. Several photographs show him with Dorothy Dandridge. In many photos, however, the “girls” who shown to be wild about Harry are white. Many are celebrities including, Polly Bergen, Tallulah Bankhead, Barbara Bel Gedes, and Elsa Martinelli. In the last photograph of the article, he is with a mob of women who are mostly white. 18 The article attempts to explain his appeal as sexual but also wholesome: Let’s face it, there are a lot things going for Harry. First of all, he has a stalwart, handsome figure, standing six-foot-two, with a well distributed 175 pounds, a glowing bronze complexion, handsome head and smooth, even features. From his crew cut to his well molded legs he is a handsome man. His clean-cut appearance is enhanced by his vitality, his talent and rare intelligence. He also exudes an air of sincerity and integrity that is unusual in his business. Add to this the knowledge that the guy makes close to half a million dollars a year in record sales, TV appearances, movies and nightclubs, and you have a picture that is hard to beat. 35 It describes his physicality but immediately tempers our sexual imaginings by telling us that he is “clean-cut” and intelligent. Though it veers toward the atavistic image that Robeson inhabited, it is “the girls” who are wild, while Belafonte remains composed and contained. In fact, Belafonte, the magazine tells us, is savvy enough to use his sexuality consciously and subtly: Harry himself, fully conscious of his assets, has used them advantageously. His costumes underscore the virility that stands out in his appearance. His bright shirts have necklines that plunge almost to his navel, showing the big powerful, tanned chest. His trousers are practically molded to his thighs, reacting to every muscular movement. His movements – as he slaps his thighs and clenches his fist – employ every exciting subtlety. 36 The threat of his appeal, then, is tempered by the fact that it is a business decision rather than a native impulse. The threat is also mitigated by the fact that he is a commodity that the whole family can enjoy. The above passage continues: 19 In “Three for tonight,” hundreds of middle-aged women came again and again just to see him perform. One of them made the prize comment in a hushed theater: “Oh, what a man!” That statement alone indicates the thoughts of many women who see in Belafonte what they would most like to see in their husbands. Belafonte himself used to say: “The hardest job for me is to swing the male portion of my “in person audience.” Today even that’s changed. Men admire his singing but also see in him something of the he-man qualities of Clark Gable. 37 Belafonte, the article assures us, attracts middle-aged married women, who bring their husbands to the show with them. Even thought the word “swing” suggests something more transgressive, the article is quick to suggest that Belafonte’s masculinity can be appreciated by the whole family in heterosexual terms. Lest we still think that his sexuality is threatening, towards the end we find out: His sex appeal, enhanced by muscular body and his form-fitting clothes is of the quiet, non-glaring kind. He is still boyish in his appearance and many critics in show business feel that he will never lose that Gee Whiz” baby face effect. 38 The article also points argues that unlike Elvis Presley, Belafonte’s appeal is cross generational. Many of the women he’s pictured with are in their twenties, thirties, and forties, but the article also tells us that his fans include teenagers and “matrons.” It describes fan letters he has received from and “11-year old girl” and “a matron of 60.” 39 Though it tells us lots of women claim to have dated him, it emphasizes his commitment to family by featuring many pictures of Belafonte with his children, ex-wife Marguerite, and his second wife Julie. 40 20 Serious Artist Though it suggests that Belafonte could get away with skating on his looks, the magazine assures us that he is a serious artist with political commitment: Women are ‘wild about Harry’ for his vibrant manner they are wild, too, because the public has a way of seeing instinctively the basic talent and dedication of a true artist. And Belafonte is a man dedicated, with rare intelligence, sensitivity and insight into the social significance of the times and a verve and animation that are hard to match. 41 The magazine repeatedly reminds us of the frivolous pop career he threw away. In the article “Balladeer, Folk Singer, Pop Singer” we find out, “he was unhappy singing meaningless songs – it wasn’t the kind of life he wanted.” 42 He turned to singing folk music and presents himself as a sort of scholar of folk music: “Always,” says Harry, “I had been a collector of jazz and folk songs. All through the restaurant days, I had done much reading on folklore.” 43 Though in this article, as elsewhere, Belafonte insists that he is more than a calypso singer, he educates the interviewer about the underlying seriousness of calypso. He tells the interviewer that, “Calypso, true calypso, is a healthy music: “It treats topical events with a healthy irony and has a free-swinging style. It’s a kind of living newspaper.” 44 When the interviewer presumably suggests that not all calypso is so serious we get this description of Belafonte’s response: Belafonte bristles at the statement that it has blue material or dirty lyrics. 21 “Sure it contains blue material, but so does every other form of music. If you go looking for blue material, you can find it in Shakespeare. “But I think that when people object to dirty lyrics, what they’re really objecting to is the debasement of the original material – the same thing I object to. One thing I want to make clear. I’m going to go on singing true calypso as I see it – just as I intend to go on singing every other kind of music that carries truth in it.” “And even if phony, synthetic, cliché calypso material floods the market – and it looks like it might – they’re not going to get me to sing it or pose with one of those straw hats.” 45 This extended passage highlights a number of things that will repeatedly surface in interviews and biographies. Belafonte is committed to folk music, but he claims an almost scholarly approach to it. Though the banana boat song has been repurposed as kitsch, Belafonte is anxious to present himself as a “sophisticated” interpreter of folk music. His emphasis on the message that Calypso brings is vague: it communicates a truth, but he isn’t specific about what the truth is. I will argue later that this “truth” is the exploitation of black labor that occurs in slave, colonial, and capitalist economic systems. The magazine tells us that Belafonte’s sophisticated performances channel an anger that might otherwise be frightening to white audiences. We are told that before he became a successful singer, “his restless soul just screamed for expression. His hungry, haunting eyes were windows to the seething storm that raged outside of him, seeking a way to get out and tell, in some form, the things which his razor sharp mind was conjuring.” 46 Belafonte’s material political work is also discussed: The fan magazine tells us, 22 Harry’s many benefit performances and his eagerness to do something for a good charitable or race cause has been recognized in many quarters. He does these things because he believes in what they will do. Most recently, Harry was presented with the Annual Brotherhood Award by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. He is the first Negro to be so honored. Jack Warner, of the Warner Brothers Film Company, was honored at the same time for his distinguished civic service. 47 The passage is accompanied by a photograph of him standing next to Jack Warner; both are holding their award. Belafonte is presented as committed politically, but one who acts as a liaison between white and black communities. We are told that he has also received “the coveted James J. Hoey award for Interracial Justice from the Catholic Interracial Council in October 1956.” His ad for John F. Kennedy similarly suggests that he is a Negro who can speak to both blacks and whites. The magazine explicitly talks about Belafonte as a bridge between races: The Harry Belafonte nobody knows is, in reality, the Harry Belafonte everybody loves. As an artist, he has proven himself supreme. He is a leader among men, a champion among his race who rather be just another performer in a world of equality and dignity where there would be no need to champion a cause. This is Harry Belafonte. He is a performer who hasn’t lost sight of the fact that he is a human being; he is a human being who hasn’t lost sight of the fact that we are all equal children in the eyes of God. . . . The song he sings is that of the people – all people, that is why his repertoire, perhaps unknown to himself, is a bridge by which he reaches the million who find that gospel urge to listen to him. We repeat he is a Harry Belafonte, human being. 48 23 Though the passage reinforces the notion of interracial unity, it does point out that there is racial injustice in the U.S., which necessitates Belafonte’s political work. Of course, the magazines’ acknowledgement of injustice also affirms that the U.S. is a place where an artist, even a Negro artist, has the freedom to express his/her political beliefs. It suggests that Belafonte just had to find the outlet for his political anger, but once he found it, he was able to express it. In the course of the dissertation I will discuss the limits to this liberal freedom and how Belafonte continually points out the limits of democratic expression allowed by the culture industry. Lead Man Holler My project examines Harry Belafonte’s stardom and media work in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that while he was a crossover star who was palatable to mainstream audiences, he was also able to utilize his position to do politically engaged media work in the music, film, and television industries. I focus on Belafonte’s career to explore larger questions including the following: Why were certain black performers popular? How did they act as screens for mainstream cultural desires while also expressing the particular points of view of subaltern people? Belafonte was one of the most popular performers of any race in the 1950s and 1960s but there is surprisingly little critical work on him. His Calypso (1956) album was the first gold record ever. It contained the hit “The 24 Banana Boat Song” known as “Day-O.” His album Belafonte: Live at Carnegie Hall (1959) also sold a million copies. His music success led to many appearances on network television variety programs: for instance, he was one of the most frequent guests on The Ed Sullivan Show and guest hosted a week of The Tonight Show in 1968. Belafonte was on the cover of Time the week of March 2, 1959. He produced several television shows and films in the ‘50s and ’60s and, though he starred in few films, he reportedly was first offered but then passed on a few of the roles that Sidney Poitier took on. In short, he was a major media star of the ‘50s and ‘60s but his contribution has not been fully accounted for in media histories of the period. The work that has been done on Belafonte primarily focuses on how his media performances reflect ideas about racial integration shaped by the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Though civil rights discourse is an important way to view Belafonte’s work, especially since he was an active and visible movement participant, using it as a primary focus can prevent one from seeing how Belafonte resonated globally. My project will look at how Belafonte’s work engaged with international debates on race and politics by examining Belafonte’s work in transnational contexts. I will look at how he was mobilized by the U.S. government and media industries to promote democracy and capitalism abroad and how he used his access to mainstream media to reveal the diasporic connections among black American, West Indian, African, and Latin American struggles with imperialism worldwide. There is 25 very little work that considers the global meanings of black American television and film representations of this period. My dissertation also considers why a particular kind of masculine body was useful to U.S. media in the ‘50s and ‘60s and how black female stars that were contemporaries of Belafonte, like Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, were unable to represent the race or nation the way male stars like Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Louis Armstrong were called upon to do. Belafonte’s desirability gave him a platform on which to express political ideas that exceeded the intentions of the culture industries and the government. Belafonte is not technically an immigrant because he was born in New York City, but I believe the five years he spent from age eight to twelve with his mother’s family in Jamaica and his roots in Harlem’s West Indian immigrant community are central to understanding his work. His television, music, and film work can be seen as a series of immigrant acts in the way that Lisa Lowe has defined them: "the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification." 49 For example, Belafonte’s concert and television performance of spirituals recalled the subjugation blacks endured in slavery and his chain gang songs and work songs (including calypsos) highlighted the exploitation that continued and was even fostered under European imperialism and American democratic capitalism in the period of his stardom. Belafonte’s work, while asserting a desire for full equality and integration into U.S. 26 institutions, also manifests a longing for diasporic connections that can’t be fulfilled by entrance into the nation state. His musical repertoire included black American, West Indian, Latin American, and African folk songs which foregrounded the transnational connections among black Americans and blacks worldwide. Belafonte’s media work tried to imagine new domestic and transnational relations for black Americans that went beyond the corporate and government concessions to black American presence in the nation. I believe that this is only clear when one looks at the sum total of his work in music, film, and television. Consequently, while previous studies of Belafonte have focused on one of his modes of work – music or film or television – my project looks at his work in each medium and considers how one medium operated in relation to the others. His political and aesthetic project can only be understood by looking at the relationship among the three branches of the culture industry and their unique roles in shaping popular ideas about race and politics. Belafonte wrote newspaper editorials that complained about the proliferation of stereotypical images of blacks in film and television and gave interviews in which he defended his choice of musical repertoire as integral to his desire to communicate a particular black aesthetic and history that was missing in mass culture. Each medium placed limitations on the representation of race and Belafonte publicly chronicled bumping up against them by using newspaper, 27 magazine, and television interviews to speak out about the politics of dealing with television executives, film producers, and record companies. In effect, he used the mainstream press to practice a kind of media education for the public. To get at this, I will do textual readings of articles by and about Belafonte in the New York Times, Ebony, Time, and other magazines of the period. Together they illustrate the dialectical relationship between Belafonte and the mass culture industries. I am also doing close readings of his music and lyrics, film roles, and television productions. Previous studies of Belafonte have under read his media production, often presenting only a handful of material as representative of his work. I have been surprised at the amount and diversity of his work in each medium and am eager to reveal the depth and breadth of meanings his work constellates. Belafonte’s media work was closely connected to his political work and he consistently worked to demonstrate the relationship between the culture industries and politics. In interviews and editorials, he chronicled his attempt to articulate his aesthetic and political project in the film, television, and music industries and, in doing so, he calls attention to the ways the culture industries participate in ideological formations, by contributing to our common sense understandings of race, class, and gender (he was less interested in gender and sexuality). 28 Belafonte was politically engaged before he became a star, and his media success supported his continued political work. He raised funds for labor unions and schools by performing concerts, he participated in civil rights demonstrations, like the March on the Washington, and he contributed seed money to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and donated money to other groups working on behalf of civil rights and working class/labor issues. Historians of the Civil Rights movement have identified him as a liaison between the Kennedy Administration and the Civil Rights community. 50 Belafonte sought a central place in mass media. He capitalized on the interconnectedness of music, film, and television in the period. The 1950s was a moment in which each medium was dependent on the other. The music industry, promoted itself by placing songs and artists in television and film. The film industry sought stars proven in other mediums, to lure people away from the television set into theaters. And television needed content: there were many variety television programs on the air, that needed musical talent. Outline Belafonte achieved his most spectacular success the music industry. Chapter One, “'Buked and Scorned: Belafonte’s Songs of Labor,” looks at Belafonte’s recording career in the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the diversity of his repertoire and the marketing and reception of his studio albums and live recordings. The authenticity of Belafonte’s music, especially his calypso, was a 29 source of debates and critiques, and this chapter considers how his political and aesthetic project was enhanced rather than diminished by them. Chapter Two, “Man Smart: Representing the Diaspora in 1950s Film,” looks at three films Belafonte starred in, in the period after his musical success. Though critics, and even Belafonte, considered his films to be failures, this chapter considers how the films allowed a more complex depiction of black culture and history than other film representations of the period. Chapter Three, “Oh Let Me Fly: Belafonte and Variety ‘50s and ‘60s Variety Television” looks at the medium which in Belafonte arguably most realized his political and aesthetic project. Belafonte’s not only created a rich archive of television production, but his production and viewing experiences were well documented. Richard Dyer argues that all stars are multimedia stars but Belafonte was particularly savvy about mobilizing multimedia. Belafonte’s music, film, and television work reveals the connections and gaps among the industries: he exploits the possibilities and reveals the limitations of each medium. In Belafonte’s story is a kind of pre-history to media convergence. By looking at how a star knits together different mediums to articulate his full aesthetic and political project. In this dissertation I will examine Belafonte’s star image as created by record companies, popular newspaper and magazine writers, filmmakers, and television producers and how Belafonte mobilized his image in three branches of the culture industry, music, television, and film. 30 Prologue Endnotes 1 “Harry Belafonte (Kennedy), “The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004”, http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/support/pitch.php. 2 Kevin Gaines, “African”, in eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, Keywords for American Cultural Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 15. 3 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987), 9. 4 Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture and Society(Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1981), 113. 5 Arnold Shaw, Belafonte: An Unauthorized Biography (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1960) and “Lead Man Holler,” Time March 2 (1959): 40-43. 6 “Lead Man Holler”, 40. 7 Hy Steirman, Harry Belafonte” His Complete Life Story (New York: Hillman Periodicals, 1957), 63. 8 Dyer, 64. 9 Ibid., 69. 10 Ibid., 84-5. 11 Ibid., 100. 12 Steirman, 6. 13 Ibid., 16. 14 Ibid., 32. 15 Ibid., 33-34. 16 Ibid., 42. 31 17 Ibid., 7. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Ibid.,12. 21 His father is described as “a hard working chef.” Steirman, 6. 22 Ibid., 7. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid., 21. 25 Ibid., 21. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 150. 28 Ibid., 62. 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 67.Also adding to his serious credibility is his commitment to civil rights politics. It mentions that he is devoted to civil rights; but safely contains the threat to the south. In an article entitled “Belafonte and Hollywood: The Harry nobody knows” we find out, Harry Belafonte is man driven by fierce pride and integrity -- first in himself as a human being, and secondly, in human dignity which led him to tour the south after the Supreme Court ruling on desegregation in 1954. said he, “I thought I might so some good.” (62) And, “Under the guise of an entertainer I was able to make a few white southerners see a Negro as an individual for the first time in their lives.” (60) 31 Ibid., 26. 32 32 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.) In publications like The Negro in American Life, the U.S. State Department uses the difference in status of black Americans from Slavery to the 1950s to demonstrate the progress of U.S. relations. Intervening years of discrimination are skipped over. 33 Steirman, 45-46. 34 Ibid., 50. 35 Ibid., 46. 36 Ibid., 46-47. 37 Ibid., 47. 38 Ibid., 50. 39 Ibid., 49. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 5-6. 42 Ibid., 38. 43 Ibid., 41. 44 Ibid., 42. 45 Ibid., 42. 46 Ibid., 6. 47 Ibid, 65. 48 Ibid., 67. 49 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke, 1996), 9 33 50 See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1988), 810-811. 34 Chapter 1-- ‘Buked and Scorned: Belafonte’s Songs of Labor This chapter considers Harry Belafonte’s music career in the period when he was most popular, the ‘50s and ‘60s. I argue that while Belafonte was a crossover star who was seen as an exemplar of the black middle class produced by the nation's embrace of the Civil Right Movement, his concert repertoire and albums critiqued the exploitation of workers that continued even under the most liberal ideals of U.S. democratic capitalism. Belafonte’s political work has been largely forgotten. When he criticized the Bush Whitehouse’s plan to invade Iraq, many people thought it was incongruous for the “King of Calypso” to comment on government policy. He described Colin Powell’s work in making a case for war as “service in the master’s house.” Newspaper editorials focused less on his criticism of the U.S. invasion and occupation as empire building and more on his reference to slavery in our “Post-Civil Rights” moment. When critics demanded that he apologize to Colin Powell for using a “demeaning” epithet, Belafonte responded: Why are references to slavery demeaning? . . . Slavery is an important part of this nation's history. An absolutely critical part of any analysis that is done in defining black Americans. Not only the oppression and degradation of it. But our character, our courage, our spirit, our language, our songs and our culture are all born in that environment. This nation has never really confronted, debated or had any fair exchange on this issue of slavery. We went from the strict confinement of physical slavery -- with chains, shackles and whips -- to the spiritual and psychological chains of slavery in the following century of legal segregation in this country. 1 35 Like his critique of Powell, the songs Belafonte performed, including “Cotton Fields,” “John Henry,” and “The Banana Boat Song,” made mainstream audiences confront the history of U.S. slavery and the continued subjugation of workers of color. Belafonte recorded over thirty albums in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His music presented a range of diasporic black music including call and response spirituals, work songs, chain-gang songs, and calypsos (West Indian work songs.) In Historical Capitalism, Immanuel Wallerstein argues that capitalism sustains itself by recycling the myth that capitalism represents progress over all previous economic systems. Wallerstein doesn’t argue that people were better off under, say, feudalism, but that the progress myth, as expressed by the culture industries, often obscures how working people suffer the same brutal exploitation under capitalism that they experienced in previous systems. This chapter will look closely at how Belafonte was used by the music industry to perpetuate the myth and how he used the industry to critique the myth. Belafonte was a political singer. His repertoire was devoted to black folk music and is noteworthy for what it didn’t include: popular romantic ballads. He started out being a pop singer, but the story goes, that he got tired of doing songs that he felt were insubstantial, and decided to devote his repertoire to black folk ballads. Some critics accused him of being the Bill Bennett of his time, basically taking public domain songs, altering them a bit to copyright them, and then putting them on best selling albums. Belafonte, however, 36 presented himself as scholar and researcher who regularly went to the Library of Congress and spoke to laborers to uncover black folk music. His repertoire of slave songs, spirituals, calypsos, and work songs is filled with songs about the diasporic labor of black people. Belafonte repeatedly expressed a desire to act. After a stint in the navy, he used his GI money to pay for acting classes at the New School, where his classmates included Marlon Brando, Elaine Stritch and Tony Curtis. He did some theater with Negro theater groups, but was unable to sustain a career because, not surprisingly, there were few parts for Black actors. Later in his career he would bemoan the lack of quality film roles for black actors. In effect, Belafonte used his music success to perform a kind of media criticism 101 in the popular press, pointing out the limits of black representation in theater, television and film and discussing the kinds of things he would like to represent that only seemed possible in music. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were mentored by Paul Robeson, who, according to both, urged them to do political work but stay under the radar. 2 Belafonte’s performance style was an adaptation of Robeson’s, and both fit within a performance tradition of concertized spirituals, which adapted the African inspired rhythm of spirituals to European concert forms. Rather than the “authentic” performance of someone like Leadbelly (whose songs Belafonte often performed), Belafonte’s style was more produced and arranged: in many 37 concerts he would perform with a forty-seven-piece orchestra. This led to criticisms from traditional calypsonians and folk music purists. I will discuss Belafonte’s concert performances but I will focus on the albums that Belafonte produced in the period because in this period of the music industry, recorded music was the primary way that people experienced music. 3 Belafonte is also particularly important to the history of recorded albums because he is credited with creating the first gold record ever, Calypso (1956). Belafonte released thirty albums between 1956 and 1969. His albums Calypso, Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites, Belafonte, An Evening with Belafonte, Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, Jump Up Calypso, and The Midnight Special sold well and spawned numerous best selling singles. The Recording Industry Belafonte occupied a unique position in the record industry of the period. Belafonte was promoted to a general audience (young and old, white and black) at a time when most record companies were promoting their stars to particular demographics. In the 1950s, television surpassed the film and record industries in popularity. The film and music industries tried to increase their audiences by targeting more segmented demographics, rather than the general audiences they had targeted in the past. In addition, the four major companies, Columbia, RCA 38 Victor, Decca and Capitol began to lose their domination of the market to independent labels: From 1949 to 1955, the four major companies . . . placed over 75 percent of the hits on the Billboard top-sellers chart. In the first period of rock’n’roll, from 1954 to 1958, the so-called Big Four no longer dominated sales of records. In 1958 their releases accounted for only 36 percent of the Billboard charts, which were now full of the releases of independent companies like Atlantic and Chess. 4 Belafonte’s label-mate, Elvis Presley, is an example of a performer who was targeted to a particular demographic (white teenagers.) Belafonte’s early success in film (Carmen and The Bright Road) and Broadway made him an attractive artist to RCA: the music industry in this period became dependent on stars who could promote their albums in other mediums. 5 The music industry before World War 2 was organized “around the manufacture and distribution of songs” while the music industry in the postwar period “was organized around the marketing of stars and star performances.” 6 Belafonte was probably also an attractive artist to RCA because his repertoire of folk music, rather than pop music, gave the record company a lot of promotional angles. Belafonte was appealing to women of all ages, but his music could also be promoted as an educational middlebrow product that exposed the whole family to the folk music of cultures around the world. Belafonte may have found the recording industry an attractive medium because it allowed him produce and control the final product (if not the 39 marketing of that product), a freedom that was more difficult to find in television and film. In the prewar period, the Record Company Artist and Repertoire (A&R) people were in charge of choosing the material recorded by singers under contract to the record company. In the post-war period, singers had more control over the choice of repertoire: many wrote their own songs, and, as in the case of Belafonte, chose which songs to perform and decided on their arrangements. In a 2001 interview, Belafonte discussed how he brought the idea of doing the Calypso album and other albums of folk music to then president of RCA records, George Marek. 7 Belafonte promoted himself as a scholar of folk music: interviews and record company biographies played up his self described excursions to the Library of Congress to find new music and his “research” among the people he met while on tour around the world. In addition to bringing international songs to the attention of the mainstream, Belafonte brought international musicians into the spotlight, including Odetta, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela. Music’s place in black culture and history was certainly also appealing to Belafonte. Music has always been central to social protest, especially in black communities. Slaves used spirituals to convey multiple emotions and ideas: they expressed their religious devotion and longing for spiritual freedom, as well as despair over their material conditions. Historians have documented that slaves also sang songs to covertly communicate plans for secret gatherings and even 40 slave revolts. Work songs and chain gangs songs have been sung by black laborers to describe and protest their working conditions. Calypso music originates in the songs of slavery and the protest of oil industry and agricultural laborers in the West Indies. 8 Black artists and intellectuals have had complicated relationships to black folk music. On the one hand, writers like W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Gilroy, and Sadiya Hartmann, have pointed to the way in which singing and dancing to sorrow songs has provided a place for diasporic black people to occupy outside of the constraints of inhumane economic and political conditions. U.S. blacks who were laborers during slavery and post-reconstruction as well as West Indian, Latin American and African blacks who labored in European Colonial systems have a rich history of using music and dance to express despair about and protest their conditions. On the other hand, some black artists and intellectuals are wary of mainstream interest in black folk cultures because it may fosters the image of blacks as primitive. Belafonte sings folks songs that have their origin in the past, but records, arranges, and performs them with all the technological marks of his time. There is a constant tension in the recorded albums between the authenticity of the folk material –which is sometimes described as being rooted in Belafonte’s childhood – and the way in which the material is produced – with the latest stereophonic technology. This tension works for Belafonte by suggesting a link between the folk past and the modern 41 present. Hartmann argues that the singing and dancing of the songs of slavery after emancipation called attention to the ways in which the labor exploitation and curtailment of individual rights of blacks during slavery continued after emancipation. Similarly, Belafonte’s performance of slaves songs during the 1950s, called attention to the labor exploitation and curtailment of civil rights that continued in the period of his stardom. Many of the folk songs he sang were meant to be sung in groups, Belafonte sometimes took these choral songs and sang them alone, though he also employed the Belafonte Singers, who helped him sing the songs in the call and response way in which they originated. Even when Belafonte sang the songs in a more popular music style, he would often narrate the origin of the songs, giving his audiences a sense of the particular history in which the songs were created. Belafonte’s recording and performance style, which translated the sounds of labor into the studio, stripped it in the eyes of some, of the folk cultural context captured in the recordings of John Lomax and others. Though in later interviews, Belafonte stated his disinterest in authenticity, the recorded albums manifest a tension between authentic folk and mass culture produced music which is never totally resolved. Though some see this as a weakness of Belafonte’s recorded output – and tend to praise those records which try to approximate the original context of the material – I read the tension or gap between the authentic rendition of folk music and the mediated, mass produced 42 products of Belafonte’s recordings as a powerful manifestation of his politics. By translating the particular history of the diaspora into contemporary modern technologies, Belafonte shows the connection between the past and the present – suggesting, as Sadiya Hartmann has argued, a relationship between the past of exploited labor under slavery and colonialism and the present economy of stratified labor in democratic capitalism. Belafonte’s repertoire is best understood in relation to Stuart Hall’s definition of black popular culture. Hall writes, “By definition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a sight of strategic contestation” and goes to say: However deformed, incorporated, or inauthentic are the forms in which black people and black communities and traditions appear and are represented in popular culture, we continue to see, in the figures and repertoires on which popular culture draws, the experiences that stand behind them. 9 In other words, though the mainstream versions of black forms may seem divorced from their origins, the traces of the particular come through. Because the product Belafonte offers is mediated, it offers a glimpse of the complicated history of black culture and labor in particular places and moments of the past and present. In his choice of repertoire, Belafonte draws a parallel between the intellectual and cultural labor he engages in and the material labor of workers throughout history. In this sense, Belafonte can be considered an organic 43 intellectual. Stuart Hall argues that popular culture is an important “arena” for the development of political consciousness and suggests that the job of the activist and intellectual is to bring political consciousness to members of all classes. Belafonte’s interventions in popular music contribute to his audiences understanding of politics and economics; popular music and popular culture are important sites of struggle for the organic intellectual. His folk music repertoire reminds the U.S. nation of the important labor that black people have contributed to the nation and reminds black people of their diasporic connections that transcend the nation. Belafonte saw both as being integral to political work on behalf of black people. He wanted mainstream audiences to recognize the particular history and culture of black people and wanted black audiences to understand their own complicated history. Of course, the culture industry can commodify almost anything, including politics. Belafonte’s political seriousness was used as a promotion point by record companies. Numerous biographies and interviews recounted how he began as pop singer but wasn’t satisfied by its insubstantiality. He was sold as an “important” and “political” singer and his seriousness, and politicalness became a mark that distinguished him commercially from artists like his label mate Elvis Presley (similar to how Bruce Springsteen and Bono, to take more recent examples, have differentiated themselves from other popular singers,) 44 Recorded sound, like film and television, has been used to entertain, educate, and archive. Belafonte’s recordings draw upon all of these histories. His albums of the ‘50s and ‘60s were immensely popular but he and his record company RCA, also marketed them as documents of an international folk culture of which all American should be knowledgeable and appreciative. Rather than do an exhaustive analysis of each record Belafonte made in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I will look at some of the albums that best represented Belafonte’s music output. First, I will look at the albums that are devoted to the calypso genre he was most associated with, including the best selling Calypso, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, and Jump Up Calypso. I will then look at recordings that represent other aspects of his broad repertoire, including My Lord What a Mornin’ and Swing Dat Hammer and finally I will look at the live concert recordings that capture his entire repertoire and his concert performance style, Belafonte at Carnegie Hall and Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall. The King of Calypso Belafonte began his career as a singer of popular ballads, however, by the time he began recording for RCA records, he had decided to concentrate on singing folk ballads. His albums Mark Twain, Three for Tonight, and Belafonte all contain a mix of folk songs from around the world, with an emphasis on work songs and chain gang songs. Belafonte’s first great commercial success came with the Calypso album released in 1956. Though Belafonte’s repertoire 45 was always more diverse than just calypso – and he tried to space out the Calypso devoted albums to this day he is primarily identified as a Calypso singer. 10 Calypso’s origins The word calypso has kitsch connotations in U.S. popular culture but it is a music that is linked to a very specific place and cultural history. 11 Calypso has its origins in the West Indies, specifically Trinidad and Tobago. It is comes out of a carnival tradition tied to Lent that has taken place since the 1600s. During slavery, planters and slaves would celebrate separately. French planters celebrated the Sunday before Lent with masquerades and processions while slaves celebrated with their own processions. After slavery, the traditions merged. All processions contained an element of singing, but by the 1930s singing separated a bit from the processions and there would be competitions among singers in tents in which a winner would be crowned “The King of Calypso.” Calypso music has its origins in West African work songs and Brazilian sambas. “Calypso songs generally have four short verses that alternate with four-line refrains; they are in duple meter (rhythmic meter divisible by two) and the accompaniments are usually highly syncopated and based on simple tonal progressions.” 12 Bands of men and women playing flutes and steel drums would accompany singers. The steel drum is derived from African drums. In the 1890s, the white ruling class banned the use of African drums, but 46 undeterred Calypsonians improvised by using bottles and eventually, after World War II the “discarded American 55-gallon oil drums littering the island” 13 – the oil drums that were discarded by one of the major employers of black labor on the islands. The content of calypso songs is wide ranging; they include boasts with playful sexual content, news accounts of social life, and protests against colonial authorities and commercial employers. Belafonte’s popular West Indian recordings are stripped of the carnival context. In fact “The Banana Boat Song,” which is based on Jamaican traditional lyric isn’t even technically a calypso. Some critics, in fact, argue that the Calypso album is more related to the Jamaican work songs tradition, called Mento, “which blended African, Latin, French and British influences” to make music differed from calypso both in terms of the kinds of instruments that were used (mentos used guitars, maracas, the washboard, and a kind of African piano called “the rhumba box”) and the content sung about (mentos were usually less political and more “ribald.” 14 In a 2001 interview, Belafonte claimed that he shunned the label “King of Calypso” which his record company used to sell him, because he had never participated in any of the tent competitions in Trinidad that conferred the title by true calypsonians. Carnival, in which there is a state sanctioned reversal of power relations for a limited period, also didn’t accurately describe the effect that Belafonte wanted to have (though it perhaps did describe the effect the 47 record company and mainstream venues wanted him to have – a moment in which they could acknowledge black power without having to relinquish their control. Belafonte was after more concrete and enduring power.) Belafonte sought material power in the mainstream of the culture industries and he tried to cement it in the creation of Belafonte Enterprises, his company that produced his own and, eventually, other artists concert performances, television appearances, and films. Day-O Belafonte blamed his record company, RCA, for dubbing him “The King of Calypso” and continually promoting him as a calypso singer in record company ads and fan magazines, but Lisa McGill argues that Belafonte himself capitalized on his Caribbean heritage to further his commercial appeal. She writes: The Caribbean othering of Belafonte’s body and ‘calypso’ music partially removed Belafonte from the racial baggage of the United States and placed him and his audience in a new, although unexplored, field of cross-cultural politics.” 15 His exotic identity gave him access to the mainstream and his success made a case for more participation by blacks. In effect he is able to make an argument for black inclusion in the nation because of his perceived distance from what black American signified in U.S. culture. Audiences, in turn, were given the chance to experience the pleasure of black American culture and a black male body without being immediately reminded of the tangled history between U.S. 48 black and white Americans. More importantly, according to McGill is that his “provocative stage, television, and film performances” 16 makes a space for black male sexuality that was not deemed palatable for most black performers. I would add that it was a space that was only available to Belafonte in the music industry. What was Belafonte doing? McGill suggests that he’s strategically using West Indian identity to create a space for Black American presence in the nation. Belafonte insists he’s showing Black Americans their connection to the diaspora. His assertion in the Kennedy Campaign commercial is that he is Negro and American. His calypso music explores one aspect of that complex black identity. To extend McGill’s argument, Belafonte uses the Caribbean to make black Americans visible but in doing so argues for the relatedness of the black American, the West Indian, and the African. The strategy not only argues for the inclusion of the black in the mainstream industries of the nation, but also recognizes black American belongingness to a vast diaspora. Manhattan Calypso I will focus on Belafonte’s Calypso but Belafonte recorded three Caribbean themed albums in the ‘50s and ‘60s: Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean and Jump Up Calypso. Belafonte had recorded West Indian songs which had appeared on earlier albums like Mark Twain and Belafonte but this was the first album that was devoted to West Indian music. Despite the title of 49 the album, the songs aren’t all calypsos, it’s more accurately described as an album of West Indian traditional or folk music. The album’s liner notes, written by Belafonte’s close friend, collaborator, and lyricist, William Attaway, promise an album that is steeped in a West Indian tradition that Belafonte knows well. Attaway is careful to point out that the songs are “based on the traditional melodies of the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean” since the lyrics and some of the melodies are attributed to Belafonte, Attaway. and Irving Burgie (Lord Burgess), another second generation West Indian American. He also points out that the West Indian songs represent a range of topics: “Day O” and Star-O” (both are sung in the persona of a laborer working on the banana boats) 17 , “The Jack-Ass Song” (about a laborer taking care of a work animal), and “Hosanna” (about house-builders) are songs of labor but there also love songs including “I do Adore Her,” “Jamaica Farewell,” and “Come Back Liza,” and playful, if not quite signifyin’ songs including “Dolly Dawn” and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter).” Interestingly, not mentioned on the album notes is the song “Brown Skinned Girl” which is a song that directly references the U.S. Occupation of the Caribbean: Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby Brown skin girl stay home and mind baby I'm goin’ away, in a sailing boat And if I don't come back Stay home and mind baby Now de Americans made an invasion 50 We thought it was a help to the island Until they left from here on vacation They left de native boy home to mind their children Now de Americans all have their pleasure While the music played to their leisure Everybody there they were jumpin' To hear the sailor boys in our chorus singin' The West Indian singer Geoffrey Holder described the original song on which Belafonte’s version is adapted as follows: [It’s] nothing more than a West Indian version of ‘Madame Butterfly,’ but here [presumably in Belafonte’s version] the words had to be changed since their meaning was all too shockingly apparent. The American came; they took over the island; there was lots of money; some of the islanders gave up their virtue easily for that money (some might have, anyway, I must admit) and found themselves with blue-eyed babies. The American soldiers had to go back on a battleship and cruelly, cruelly, they told the Brownskin Girl that if they didn’t come back, why, throw away the baby, the damn baby. Those are the real words; in the American rendering, The Brownskin Girl is requested to stay home (kindly) and mind the baby.” 18 Holder’s reference to the “American rendering” is most likely Belafonte’s version, which retains the reference to U.S. occupation but omits the nasty American attitude. Holder also suggests that the original song is a strong critique of U.S. occupation and Belafonte’s version points to but covers over the negative impact of the U.S. on the Islands. The U.S. Occupation of Trinidad RCA presents Belafonte’s album as if it were the first encounter U.S. audiences had with calypso music. Holder points out that there were several moments in the past where calypso became popular in the U.S. and references 51 the period the U.S. occupied Trinidad from 1941-1947. Americans were in the audience of the famed carnival tents in Trinidad in this period, and, according to Harvey Neptune, their presence influenced all aspects of Island life, down to the lyrical content of calypso music. Neptune chronicles the complicated relations among black Trinidadians, White British Colonists and predominately white working class U.S. military men. He argues that the U.S. occupation of Trinidad differed from its occupation of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, because the U.S. came to Trinidad while it was still a colony of Great Britain, and consequently black Trinidadians’ sometimes treated their occupier as an ally in, or at least a better alternative to, their antagonistic relationship to Great Britain. 19 His account also challenges the notion that the circulation of Trinidadian culture was one way - from Trinidad to the U.S. U.S. culture circulated to Trinidad in the period of the occupation, and it affected everything from film viewing, to clothing styles, to calypso music. 20 The U.S. began constructing military bases in Trinidad in 1941, but the Island had had to contend with the U.S. since the 19 th century because of its proximity to the U.S. and its mineral wealth. 21 The Island became dependent on U.S. investment and technology to develop a minerals based economy that would replace its lagging sugar economy. 22 In the period of U.S. occupation, Trinidad was still a colony of 52 Great Britain and Neptune describes the relationship between Trinidad and the United States as “dichotomous . . . at once friend and enemy” 23 The wealth of the United States and its proximity to the Island also led to the immigration of many Trinidadians to the U.S. Neptune contends that, while there are no statistics that break down Caribbean immigration by Island, “Of the more than 100000 nonwhite Caribbean people who relocated to the United States between 1900 and 1930, approximately 80 percent originated in the British West Indies, and within this group, Trinidad’s contribution might have been bested only by those of Jamaica and Barbados” 24 He also points out the majority of those who came to the U.S. were from the working class, like Belafonte’s mother and father and that their cultural contributions to the U.S. and the Caribbean were shaped by their working class identities. Neptune suggests that by the 1940s there was really no truly “authentic” calypsonian culture untouched by the U.S. Further, he explores the way that notion of calypso as an authentic, folk music was the result of competing nationalist projects on the island that sought to create an identity for Trinidad in anticipation of a post-colonial existence. 25 Black radicals argued that calypso was primarily African in origin and was an important and valuable contribution of oppressed black people to the culture of the Island. Some Creoles on the Island argued that calypso was more a product of syncretism: blacks, European whites, and the Trinidadian Indians all contributed to the art form. Calypso, 53 then, was seen by some as inherently about resistance to White Europeans, and by other as inclusive of White Europeans. At the root of each history of calypso, was an idea of who was central to the identity of the Trinidadian nation. Neptune notes that the American presence in the Calypso tents also shaped lyrical content. Many of the songs that became popular in the U.S. like “Rum and Coca Cola” and “Brown Skin Girl” (which I will discuss shortly) were originally written in Trinidad with an eye toward American audiences of the occupation. Neptune contends that, while those songs seem to be critical of U.S. occupiers, those very occupiers found them very entertaining. On some level, they just enjoyed hearing themselves in the center of a song. CLR James envisioned local Trinidadian culture, including calypso, as a vehicle for the creation of a West Indian identity. James, who immigrated first to London and then to the U.S. was originally from Trinidad. He praised calypso singer Mighty Sparrow for articulating the value of black identity to the black masses who bought his albums: His talents were shaped by a West Indian medium; through this medium he expanded his capacities and the medium itself. He is financially maintained by the West Indian people who buy his records. The mass of people give [sic] him all the encouragement that an artist needs. Although the calypso is Trinidadian, Sparrow is hailed in all the islands and spontaneously acknowledged as a representative West Indian. Thus he is in every way a genuinely West Indian artist, the first and only one that I know. He is a living proof that there is a West Indian nation. 26 54 James’ vision of the calypso singer at the singer of West Indian culture and nation attests to the diverse ways black artists and intellectuals used calypso. Belafonte was undoubtedly aware of this history, or, at the very least, conscious of the diverse uses of calypso. Belafonte’s Calypso Attaway describes Belafonte’s choice of repertoire as courageous: Behind him are the years of struggle and raw courage which are necessary when the artist must fight his way out of the progressive grip of tenement and slum. But he grew up with his art; it was as much a part of him as his hand . . At an early age his road led to the West Indies, crisscrossed back through the states, curved through Mexico . . . It led him back to a variety of experiences and jobs in New York City; and it is a tribute to his sense of integrity that he won the fight to keep his road from stopping at Tin Pan Alley. Perhaps this explains his ability a the age of twenty-eight to bring us a truly mature gift – this album – a really definitive work in the field of West Indian music.” 27 Attaway describes Belafonte’s connection to West Indian folk music and songs of labor as organic, as if he developed his repertoire from infancy to young adulthood. Belafonte is accompanied by Tony Scott and his Orchestra and Millard Thomas on guitar, however, to add to the sense of the album’s authenticity, Attaway tells us the drums on the album recreate traditional West Indian syncopation and, Attaway writes, “The keening flute tones are actually produced by a tin penny-whistle, a versatile instrument in the hand of a Jamaican.” 55 The success of the Calypso album led to a Calypso craze in 1957. Day O (The Banana Boat Song) was recorded by Steve Lawrence, Sarah Vaughn, “country duo Johnnie & Jack,” and the Tarriers with great success. 28 Contrary to the album’s liner notes, the lack of authenticity of Belafonte’s calypso was the subject of many popular and academic articles. Articles in popular and academic press sought to explore “authentic” calypso from Belafonte’s. Geoffrey Holder’s analysis of “Brownskinned Girl” appeared in a 1957 New York Times article entitled “That Fad from Trinidad.” 29 Holder, a Trinidadian, informed New York Times readers that there were two kinds of calypsos: Calypso and “Manhattan Calypso.” He traces the history of calypso from the African slaves who were brought to Trinidad by the Spanish through the occupation of the Island by the Dutch, English and the French. The calypso, according to Holder, bears the traces of each nation’s language while retaining the rhythm of its African origins. He also maintains that calypso, like jazz, is improvisational, made up on the spot to critique slaveholders, colonialists, and romantic rivals. He describes watching calypso performed in carnival parades as a child in Trinidad and seeing people play calypso music on instruments made out of everyday objects including, “nutmeg grater, spoon, [and] bottle and spoon.” “Manhattan Calypso” is what he tags Belafonte’s calypso; he describes it as “slicked up, prettied up, and sophisticated up. It is not spontaneous; it is calculated.” 30 He 56 reminds his readers that the Belafonte craze isn’t even original because it had previously been popular in the U.S. before World War II. A less lively two-part academic article on Calypso’s origins appeared in 1959 issues of the Ethnomusicologist. Daniel Crowley begins his article by posing Belafonte’s popularity as a problem: The Problem: The popularity of such songs as “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell” sung in pseudo-West Indian dialect and called “calypso” requires a fresh investigation into this traditional Trinidadian musical form.” 31 He then goes into more detail than Holder’s popular article, telling us about several moments in the past that Calypso became popular in the U.S., including 1914, 1925, the late ‘30s, and the 1942 recording of “Rum and Coca Cola” by the Andrew Sisters. He also chronicles the specific moments in the slave and colonial history of the music, which I’ve summarized in my overview of calypso music. Crowley describes “the elaborate dress” of calypsonians and claims that “nearly all calypsonians are dark skinned Negroes” though they come from “various backgrounds and traditions, such as Creole-speaking or Spanish- speaking communities, Barbadian or other “small island” origins, or have part Chinese, Portuguese, Syrian, or East Indian ancestry.” Unlike Holder, Crowley maintains that improvisation is not central to Calypso. They both agree, however, that Belafonte’s calypso is a problem. Belafonte’s “slicked up” calypso caused anxiety among many, but, Belafonte never claimed that his music was authentic. He was unapologetic 57 about the commerciality of his music. He disclaimed the title “King of Calypso”, but it appears that his reasons are noble and troubling. As I stated earlier, he has said that didn’t want to claim a title that was actually decided in contests in Trinidad tents that he never participated in but he also expressed some distaste at the sexual and boastful nature of calypso: I find that most of the culture coming out of Trinidad among calypso singers is not in the best interest of the people of the Caribbean community. I think that it’s racist, because you sing to our own denunciation on color. You sing about our sexual power, and our gift of drinking, and rape, and all the things we do to which I have, and want, no particular claim. What I sought to do with my art is take my understanding of the region and put it before people in a positive way. 32 Belafonte’s conservative approach to Calypso is clear in the interview, but, to be fair, there would have been no way for him to have sung the sexually aggressive and essentialist songs in his period that rap, blues and R&B singers can get away with today. In his New York Times article, Geoffrey Holder indicates that for the West Indian listener in the know, the sexual content of calypso lyrics would be obvious. “Marianne” a popular calypso number in the 1950s, which was not recorded by Belafonte until 1971, is an example he uses of a tune which seems clean on the surface but is suggestive to those in the know. These lyrics were sung by Belafonte and others U.S. singers: All day, all night, Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand Even little children love Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand. 58 Marianne, Oh, Marianne Oh, won't you marry me? We can have a bamboo hut With brandy in the tea Leave your fat old mama home She never will say yes If your mama don't know now She can guess (it's in the mail now!) All day, all night, Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand Even little children love Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand. When she walks along the shore People pause to greet White birds fly around her Little fish come to her feet In her heart is love But I'm the only mortal man Who's allowed to kiss My Marianne (Everybody!) All day, all night, Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand Even little children love Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand. And when we marry, we will have A time you never saw I will be so happy I will kiss my mother-in-law (Phooey!) Children by the dozen In and out the bamboo hut One for every palm tree And coconut (Don't rush me!) All day, all night, Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand Even little children love Marianne Down by the seaside siftin' sand. Down by the seaside siftin' sand... 59 And this is Holder’s analysis of the song, based on his knowledge and experience of Trinidadian music and history: As to the lyrics. My, My! To the West Indian in America, who understands these lyrics and who has been exposed to the dos and don’ts of radio and television recording, it is a shock to know that some of these songs are allowed to be sung. They are a scandal! No one has ever stopped to ask what “Marianne” does, do you realize that? Here is how the lyrics say it: “All day, all night, Marianne/ Down by the seaside siftin’ sand.” Marianne is a woman of the streets and she has been working all day and night at her ancient trade. I want to get that point over. And the sand she sifts is men – men, like grains of sand, one or another doesn’t make very much difference. 33 According to the Bear Island box set that collected all of Belafonte’s recordings, 1949 to 1957, Belafonte did apparently record at least one song that bordered on the sexually explicit in his Calypso sessions but opted not to include it. 34 His presentation of sexuality was carefully calculated to be family friendly – of appeal to young girls and middle-aged women. As I indicated in the introduction, the fan magazine devoted to Belafonte also documents the differences between Belafonte and traditional calypsonians. The pictures which accompany the text of the magazine present various images of Belafonte in his concert attire along with images of the traditional Calypsonians who wear more elaborate jewelry and costumes and expose even more skin than Belafonte was teased about doing. In an interview with Belafonte, Michael Eldridge describes Belafonte’s attire – his “satin shirts” and “tight trousers” – as “a challenge to one of the folk-purist articles of faith: it 60 implicitly questioned the notion that ‘the folk,’ particularly ‘the black folk,’ made no distinction between their lives and their art.” 35 In other words, Belafonte’s non-“authentic” presentation style pointed to the distance between Belafonte and the West Indian and other folk personas he took on. Indeed, Belafonte’s repeated assertion in interviews that his first love was acting, and his description of his performance style as theatrical, makes room for reading his music as theater. Belafonte, made no claims to authenticity, and in fact shunned it. There is a constant reminder that he is trying on the garb of the calypsonian – a playing of/passing as that is legitimated by his second- generation status but he does not come out of the Trinidadian tradition of carnival, which is at the root of Calypso. In his book The Last Darky, Louis Chude Chokei talks about Bert Williams’s performance of black face – he is a West Indian performing as a black American –as a strategic performance similar to Belafonte’s. He writes: Williams maintains a very clear sense of his own Caribbean otherness, which allows him to function and perform as “black” but with an escape clause: a space between performance and authenticity in which the black diaspora is itself employed as cultural praxis. 36 Something similar is going on in Belafonte’s performances of Calypso. Lisa McGill correctly points out Belafonte’s strategic use of his Caribbeaness for commercial and political currency, but describes his performances as if he is 61 trying to fool his record buying, television, and film audiences into thinking he actually is a calypsonian or first generation West Indian. The recorded albums, concert performances, and fan magazine, in fact, all point to the gap between Belafonte and an authentic Caribbean identity and it is in this gap that Belafonte to asserts a black diasporic identity – he makes a case for his identity as black AND American, which allows him articulate his complex political and aesthetic project of declaring his right to citizenship in and his right to critique the U.S. nation. Belafonte’s Calypso was the first album ever to sell over a million copies. Its success moved people to buy previous releases of his and paved the way for a successful recording career that included many top selling albums and singles in the 1950s and 1960s. It also gave him a platform on which to expand in the television and film industries. In later chapters, I will discuss how his film and television performances both built upon and expanded the star image he created in his record and concert performances. Belafonte made two more albums devoted to West Indian folk music, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean and Jump Up Calypso. Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean featured two songs from the motion picture he starred in, Island in the Sun. He released Jump Up Calypso in 1961. The rest of his recorded output in the ‘50s and ‘60s showcased a range of diasporic black music. 62 . . . And Stereophonic Sound Though Belafonte as “King of Calypso” is seared into the national consciousness about him, his repertoire, as he pointed out time and time again, was much broader than calypso. This section will examine two albums he made in 1959 and 1960: Swing Dat Hammer and My Lord What a Mornin.’ The albums reflect his interest in presenting diasporic music to his audience and also allow him to perform multiple identities which were not available to him in the acting profession that he has always stated was his first choice career. His commitment to representing black Americans as both black AND American was summarized in a 2001 interview: “His whole career, he [Belafonte] says, has been an attempt to reconnect African Americans to their diasporic heritage , while insisting upon their central place in American culture.” 37 Both albums can be categorized under the genre folk music, and before I talk about each I must say a bit about what the contested term “folk” really means. The New Grove dictionary discusses “folk” as a cultural construct which has been used for a” variety of political agendas including nationalism, communism, fascism and colonialism.” 38 Political movements have promoted folk as the culture of “the people” and used mobilized it as proof of their legitimacy. Artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were involved in a folk music revival in the 1960s, after the height of Belafonte’s mainstream popularity. They claimed they were producing “pure” folk music in service of a left (anti- 63 war, pro-civil rights) agenda. Their spare performance style (acoustic guitar, minimal production) was a reaction to the corporate, “overproduced” folk style of Belafonte’s generation. Though artists of the folk revival believed that their form of folk music was a purer protest against hegemonic institutions, Belafonte’s folk style, which has all the marks of the tensions between artifice and purity reveals the hybridity of black American identity. Robin D.G. Kelley argues that there is no authentically pure folk culture: ’Folk culture’ – especially during the past century - is actually bricolage, a cutting, pasting, and incorporating of various cultural forms that then become categorized in a racially or ethnically coded aesthetic hierarchy. As Andrew Ross pointed out recently, most critics of African American music have ignored or played down its cultural hybridity in order to demonstrate the presence of some pure ‘Negro’ or African essence untouched by commercial or Western influence. 39 The songs on Swing Dat Hammer and My Lord What a Mornin’ reflect the hybridity of black diasporic identity. Swing Dat Hammer Swing Dat Hammer (1960) is an album of chain-gang music. Chain gang music is an important folk music in the lives of African Americans. They are kinds of work songs that often follow the same melodies and lyrical content of spirituals. Like calypsos, chain gang songs or prison songs are rooted in a particular time and place. Prisoners became an important labor source in the South in both agriculture and industry. The songs had a similar function as the 64 songs sang by slaves: they helped set the workers pace and also expressed agony and anger at their bosses and the entire system of coerced labor. In Twice the Work of Free Labor, Alex Lichtenstein argues that the prison labor system was integral to the post-slavery, modern economy of the “new south.” He also demonstrates how the penal system functioned as a way of controlling and disciplining the labor and behavior of blacks after slavery. Belafonte’s album of chain gang songs foregrounds the inhumane treatment of black laborers under this system. Belafonte’s album contains ten chain gang songs which express a range of feelings and experiences. “Look Over Yonder”, is the song of a prisoner chronicling the exhausting labor of working in the sun. “Bald Headed Woman” begins like a light-hearted ditty about sexual desire but ends with a description of the shackles around the male prison laborer who is imagining his ideal woman. “Grizzly Bear” compares the prison guards’ behavior to violent grizzly bears. In “Diamond Joe”, a prisoner talks about the subsistence food he’s forced to eat, the bloodhounds that surround him, and the fact that two of fellow prisoners, who have been framed for crimes they didn’t commit, have tried to escape their captivity. The title song, “Swing Dat Hammer” is a work song which expresses the shame of a man feels because of he’s in a prison in a chain gang Yes, yes but I'm back in dear ol´ Georgie And I got to serve this time 65 Swing it high boys, swing it low boys Swing dat hammer till you dead Swing it high boys, swing it low boys Swing dat hammer till you dead Mama, mama, mama, mama Ain't you ´shamed of your dear son Ain't you sorry that you born me When you see what I've done done Swing it high boys, swing it low boys Look a here ma what I've done done “Rocks and Gravel” is another song on the album that expresses the exhaustion of a man who complains, “I got aches and pains lordy mama/Makes a man want to die.” The songs present a different view of black prison labor than had been seen in mainstream venues; in motion pictures black prison laborers had either been represented as masses of anonymous men or, most famously, in the form of Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (1957). Poitier’s character doesn’t display any of the shame, rage, or sexual desire expressed in these songs. The stories on the album represent a range of black masculinity that is not represented in film and television of the period. The lyrics reflect the humanity though not necessarily the nobility of black men. All in all the album presents a stark depiction of the inhumanity of prison punishment. Whether this sonic representation contains the same impact as a visual representation is debatable. Belafonte did perform a few of the songs in his 1959 special Tonight With Belafonte, but they were performed in the midst of his diverse concert repertoire. The images we do have – one on the album cover 66 and one on the back of the album – resemble the images contained in Belafonte’s television performance of the prison/chain gang songs. On both the album and the TV show, Belafonte is dressed in his trademark silk shirt and black pants. A prison setting is created by scaffolding that is clearly made of theatrical stage material. The scaffolding theatrically suggests rather than accurately represents prison bars. In the cover image, Belafonte stands in the foreground, while the his back up singers, The Belafonte Singers, stand in the background behind faux prison bars. The back cover image features a photograph of Belafonte’s up against the bars of a faux prison. The same tension between authenticity and commercialization that’s on display in the Calypso album is manifested in this album. The notes by Bob Bollard make a case for authenticity. He writes, Technically, there are no splices or electronic subterfuges; each selection is a complete and revealing performance. Artistically, the album is a powerful exploration of naked emotions and basic rhythms. And there is an added dimension in the awareness that this is a folk music of our time, from real situations, expressing elemental yearnings we all know. In his testament to the album’s authenticity, Bollard points to the lack of technical intrusions and its basis in the “real” experiences of black men. He also suggests that the particular feelings and experiences of black male laborers have a universal appeal. Though Bollard creates a picture of unmediated access, the album notes draw attention to the state of the art technology that is responsible for the clear sound we have. In the right hand corner of the back of the album is 67 an ad for the latest RCA technology: This is a “New Orthophonic” High Fidelity recording, designed for the phonograph of today or tomorrow. Played on your present machine, it gives you the finest quality of reproduction. Played on a “Stereophonic” machine, it gives even more brilliant true-to-life fidelity. You can buy today, without fear of obsolescence in the future. When the listener takes out the sleeve that holds the vinyl album s/he is presented with a detailed description of what Stereophonic sound is, complete with diagrams. [Figure 1] The contradictory notion of the real that is made available by the miracle of modern technology is at the heart of the recording industry’s promotion of stereo (and almost every industries promotion of new technologies.) 40 Stuart Hall sees contradiction as being at the heart of black popular culture. He writes, By definition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a sight of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic, experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization. There are always positions to be won in popular culture, but no struggle can capture popular culture itself for our side or theirs. Why is that so? What consequences does this have for strategies of intervention in cultural politics? How does it shift the basis for black cultural criticism? 41 I am interested in the way the tension between the real and the folk allows Belafonte to not only make his audiences knowledgeable about a particular 68 history of black people, but also suggests a connection between the exploitative conditions of black male laborers and the modern. 42 Figure 1 Though the album doesn’t explicitly connect the convict labor system to the exploitative conditions of contemporary capitalism, Belafonte has been more explicit in his other media projects and his political work. In Chapter Two, I 69 will look at how Island in the Sun and Odds Against Tomorrow question the condition of black laborers in modernity, and Belafonte’s commitment to advocating for labor and speaking out on the modern prison industrial complex has been well documented. My Lord What a Mornin’ My Lord What a Mornin’ is another album by Belafonte and the Belafonte folk singers that is devoted to one genre of black music, spirituals. It is a kind of archive of breadth and diversity of the spiritual genre. The fact that Langston Hughes penned liner notes add intellectual heft to the album. Hughes describes the origins of the spirituals as both religious and political. He tells us they began as the songs of slaves in the south which expressed their emotions about their bondage and hopes for freedom in the spirit. He also reminds us that they had a double function as political songs that protested coerced labor and articulated a desire and, sometimes even, covert material plans for freedom on earth. The link between religious expression and political expression is articulated in Hughes description of the way religious gatherings were outlawed after slave rebellions in South Carolina and Virginia made slave owners nervous about the slaves coming together. There are songs on the album that praise God (“Wake Up Jackob”, “My Lord What a Mornin’,” “Ezekiel,” and March Down to Jordan); songs that express sorrow and despair (“Buked and Scorned,” “Swing Low,” and “Steal 70 Away”) and songs that make direct references to the conditions of slavery (Oh Freedom). All the songs are “traditional,” unlike the calypsos on the Calypso album, which were largely based on traditional songs but given new lyrics and arrangements. Once again, the liner notes trumpet the authenticity of his recording: Choral in origin, the spirituals are essentially group songs. Yet at times they may be sung by one man or one woman alone. That Harry Belafonte chooses to sing most of them on this record with choral accompaniment is in the true tradition of the folk who make of their sorrow and their joys a sharing, of this sharing a togetherness a common strength. The other singers “bear up” the song leader, while the leader in turn extracts from them an ever swelling wave of melody. Nobody sings alone.” Walk together, children, don’t get weary! Get you ready, children, don’t get weary! There’s a better day a-coming in the Promised Land!” When Harry Belafonte asks everybody to sing with him as he shouts in the revival manner, “Oh Freedom,” he is merely asking for that togetherness which imparts strength and vitality to a people. Hughes attests that the album is an accurate reflection of the materials’ origins and performance history. In The Black Atlantic Paul Gilroy discusses the premium black cultural critics and record company executives put on authenticity in. He proposes that rather than looking for the transmission of an essential black vernacular, that doesn’t exist, that we look at the black vernacular as a “changing same” which is fully transmitted in the technological and economic vocabulary of the moment. 43 Elsewhere in the liner notes, Hughes acknowledges that spirituals have more than social, education, and historical value. Belafonte and other popular 71 performers sing slave songs as entertainment rather than history lessons, but he doesn’t discount entertainment. He highlights the global interest in the spirituals which has allowed black singers to travel around the world: “Regional in origin but universal in meaning, the spirituals have gone from the American South around the world to find audiences.” Hughes doesn’t go into details about how performers like Belafonte gained access to international audiences, but these tours were often sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Historians have chronicled how African American performers were especially singled out by the state department in the 1950s, because the U.S. was eager to counter the criticisms the Jim Crow south engendered in the international press. Mary Dudziak’s book Cold War Civil Rights Movement chronicles how the “negro problem” in the U.S. became a liability for U.S. Cold War foreign relations and the American propaganda campaign in Europe, Asia and Latin America which had the goal to at least paint a picture of a government that was working toward equal rights for black Americans. The propaganda campaign included brochures like the Negro in American Life, press releases that featured successful black American business leaders and tours of Europe and Africa by prominent black Americans on behalf of the state department. The State Department, eager to present an image of U.S. racial progress, looked for traveling African American celebrities to spread the good word about the U.S., though, according to Dudziak, not all traveling African Americans 72 communicated the party line. William Patterson, the chairman of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) presented a petition at the U.N. that charged that “American racism was manifested both in its toleration of racial brutality at home and in its support for colonial regimes abroad.” 44 After he submitted the petition, his passport was seized. Paul Robeson was probably the most famous target of “cold War travel restrictions.” 45 Robeson made a series of critiques of U.S. foreign policy; his passport was finally revoked when he “criticized President Truman’s decision to send troops to Korea, arguing that ‘if we don’t stop our armed adventure in Korea today – tomorrow it will be Africa.” 46 According to Dudziak, “Talking about progress, and embodying black middle- class status, helped reinforce the United State’s Information Agency’s message.” 47 The U.S. didn’t want citizens to critique their allies in fight against communism; and didn’t want them to make connections between U.S. treatment of black Americans, and their foreign policy or colonialism worldwide. Belafonte was a perfect figure for these U.S. efforts. Articles that appeared in fifties issues of publications like Time, Look, Life, and The New York Times all offer the same story. His parents were immigrants from the West Indies. He was born and raised (mostly) in New York City. He joined the Navy when he was sixteen years old. In his early twenties, he married an upper middle class black woman and started a family. He and his family lived in Harlem. He was poor but worked hard and had lots of jobs. 73 A legendary story that is oft told involves his days of working hard in Harlem. Belafonte had a janitorial job at night, but got a part in the play so he paid another person to cover for him so he could go on stage. One night the guy who covered for him was sick so Belafonte had to work his janitorial job and let his understudy go on instead of him. His understudy was Sidney Poitier. The night Poitier went on there were some Broadway scouts in the audience who gave Poitier a part in a play that ended up leading to Poitier’s first film role in No Way Out. Whether it’s true or not, it’s a story that makes Belafonte seem like a very hard worker, the perfect embodiment of American Dream ideology. 48 The U.S. State Department understood Belafonte’s symbolic value when they asked him to represent the U.S. in the Brussels’s World’s Fair, and sponsored stops on his subsequent European tour, in 1958. Eleanor Roosevelt attended Belafonte’s performance at the World’s Fair on September 6, 1958 and wrote the following rave review of his performance in the New York Post: After the concert we went to a reception . . . I think every American there wanted to tell him how proud we were of his accomplishments. He is showing Europe on his present tour, just as William Warfield [another black singer] is, that at least artists in the U.S. can come to prominence and be popular regardless of race or color. Someday we hope it will be true that all our citizens will share in equal opportunity and recognition in any field where they can use their abilities. And we are glad to have the Europeans know that even though we have not yet reached our goal we are struggling toward it and in some ways do succeed. 49 74 In his liner notes, Hughes also suggests that international audiences respond to the music as more than U.S. propaganda. The despair, hope, and struggles reflected in folk music reflect the despair, hope, and struggle felt by people worldwide. Certainly, anyone who listened to the music closely would hear or feel the tension between the notion of the U.S. as champion of individual freedoms and Belafonte’s and other folks singers’ representation of struggles that occur within U.S. democratic capitalism and even state sanctioned institutions. This tension is especially potent Belafonte’s recordings of prison chain-gang songs. Hughes describes how a black art form that is rooted in particular place and time had become global, however he doesn’t talk about the way in which U.S. black activists looked to the sorrow songs to articulate their own despair and hope. W.E.B. Dubois begins each chapter of The Souls of Black Folks with an excerpt from a spiritual, for example, and spirituals were sung by activist during the sit ins and marches of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Activists utilized the music and lyrics of the sorrow songs to articulate protest and their choral structure to build community. Belafonte’s repertoire and star power made him an appealing figure to U.S. civil rights groups as well as the U.S. government. He was one of many celebrities who participated in the March on Washington, he contributed seed money for the Student Non-Violent 75 Coordinating Committee, and he was enlisted by the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership group to raise funds. Prior to 1957, the U.S. civil rights movement had a more international orientation and aligned itself with struggles against western hegemony worldwide. Black stars were an integral part of the civil rights movement in both before the Cold War and during the Cold War. In Black is a Country, Nikhil Singh argues that black stars (writers, performers and black intellectuals) were integral to the circulation of early civil rights discourse. He writes that the civil rights movement of the 20s and 30s: would have been impossible without the work of the first significant intergenerational cohort of black artists, writers, and intellectuals, including Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, Paul Robeson, Walter White, and others who started to command the attention of both a black public as well as national and international publics. 50 Paul Robeson was an important figure in the early civil rights movement - and in the postwar period he would become a mentor to both Belafonte and Poitier. Robeson was committed to both making political art and doing political work. He was involved in a variety of civil rights and African political movements between 1937 and 1957. These include the American Crusade to End Lynching, South Africa’s Ciskei area famine relief campaign, the Henry Wallace campaign and the South African Mine Workers strike. Penny von Eschen describes Robeson’s commitment in the following passage from Race Against Empire: 76 Robeson connected his own life and history not only to fellow Americans and to his people in the South but to all the people of Africa and its Diaspora whose lives had been fundamentally shaped by the same processes that had brought his foremothers and forefathers to America. . . . [he] forcefully argued that their struggles against Jim Crow were inextricably bound to the struggles of African and Asian peoples for independence. 51 Robeson did his international work in this period with The Council on African Affairs of which he was a founding member. The “CAA embodied a militant and explicit Diaspora consciousness” and it aligned itself with labor struggles around the world. 52 Robeson’s and the civil rights’ movements interest in labor issues made them open to aligning themselves with the communist party: something that was obviously a problem during the Cold War Period. Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte became stars in the Cold War period. Civil Rights in the Cold War era took on different parameters than it had in the ‘20s and ‘30s. In the 1950s and ‘60s, black American activists debated the advisability of linking the U.S. Civil Rights movement with international black struggles for independence. In Race Against Empire Penny Von Eschen documents how the more conservative leaders of the movement defined their struggle within the context of the U.S. nation state because they were afraid of being labeled anti-American and, therefore, communists – which was obviously a dangerous tag in this period. Paul Gilroy argues that the conservative civil rights members were also hesitant to represent black Americans as abject figures: they framed their struggle in the “positive” narrative of black integration 77 into citizenship rather than the melancholy recognition of the shared subjugation among black Americans, West Indians and Africans. 53 Poitier and Belafonte were perfect figures for the cold war period: the mainstream press, the government and the civil rights movement all mobilized their star images for their own agendas. The mainstream civil rights movement also distanced itself from communism and the left in this period. Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Dubois found themselves on the outside of the movements they had been at the center of before World War II. Poitier and Belafonte’s status as “safe negroes” made them ideal figures for mainstream civil rights groups like the NAACP. Nikhil Singh writes about a moment that signaled Robeson’s banishment from the mainstream civil rights movement: “In an appearance arranged by the Urban League’s Lester Granger, (Jackie) Robinson himself agreed to rebuke Paul Robeson in front of HUAC, and respected black leaders lined up behind him affirming that Negroes would not succumb to ‘any siren song sung in bass.” 54 I would argue that in spite of this cold war emphasis on the nation – and its emphasis on showing how black Americans could demonstrate to the international community how their struggles strengthened the U.S. nation rather than offered a critique of western democracy and capitalism – Belafonte’s media work actually demonstrated the connections between west Indians, Africans and black Americans – and their shared struggle against western 78 hegemony. I believe that Belafonte’s work constitute immigrant acts in the sense that Lisa Lowe has discussed them. In her book Immigrant Acts Lowe argues that Immigrant acts foreground the contradictions in the U.S. commitment to both democracy and capitalism. Democracy argues that all citizens are equal; capitalism depends on cheap/unequal labor markets and racism is a tool that makes the unequal labor markets of capitalism possible, by allowing some people’s labor to be valued more than others. Historically African Americans and other U.S, born people of color and immigrants have made up the labor pool accorded less value. Belafonte’s work does reveal the fissures in the promise of equal citizenship to all – in contrast to their popular media biographies. The hopeful tune of U.S. propaganda - that citizens in the U.S. are working toward equal rights and representation covers this over; immigrant acts make this contradiction visible. Belafonte’s work is more easily understood as a series of immigrant acts. Lowe argues that immigrant acts “retain precisely the memories of imperialism that the U.S. nation seeks to forget.” 55 Belafonte’s concert repertoire and television production was committed to documenting and representing black cultural memories of U.S. imperialism. His concert performances in the U.S. and abroad largely consisted of a mix of black musical genres including Negro Spirituals, folk songs, and work songs. In the next section I will look at two of the 79 recordings that brought his live performances to audiences at home: Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall and Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall. The Live Albums The songs on Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall were recorded on April 19 and April 20 th 1959, and released in October of 1959. Each concert raised money for schools: the April 19 th show for a scholarship fund for the New Lincoln School, a school his daughter attended, and the April 20 th show for The Wiltyck School for Boys, “an interracial interfaith treatment center [that] cares for more than 100 emotionally disturbed New York children between the ages of 8 and 12.” 56 The final album features a sampling of songs from both nights. According to the All Music Guide, “Belafonte at Carnegie Hall was an anomaly at a time when only comedy albums were recorded outside of the studio environment. It wasn't the first live album ever made, but it was certainly the first to be a major financial and artistic success. It stayed on the best-selling album charts for over three years, and remained in print until RCA discontinued pressing LPs.” 57 Anecdotally, this is the album that many people have told me was in their family record collection when they were kids – it’s not the album they listened to in their rooms alone or with friends, it’s the album enjoyed in the living by the whole family. The whole concert – from its original performance to its recording - has a family friendly stamp. Though Belafonte was involved in a number of left political causes including supporting labor 80 union strikes and later providing seed money for the founding of SNCC, the cause of this concert furthered developed his image as an upstanding Negro family man. Popular articles from Look to Time magazine usually portrayed Belafonte as a devoted father who was able to rise above the poverty of his childhood spent in Harlem and Jamaica to provide a lovely “normal” middle class family life for his wives and children. These same articles and bios occasionally mentioned that his mother and step-father worked as a domestic and janitor respectively but the implication was that Harry had used his talent had risen above them. The Carnegie Hall album is essentially a family friendly introduction to music around the world. As such, it’s a middlebrow cultural product similar to the kind of works that Christina Klein talks about in Cold War Orientalism. Klein argues that many of the popular middlebrow cultural products of the 1950s helped the U.S. public construct a national identity that included global interests. Because the U.S. rise to world power occurred in a period when Asian and African nations were throwing off imperial ties to Europe, Klein writes, “The political and cultural problem for Americans thus became, how can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?” 58 Klein looks at a series of popular novels and films that do the cultural work of defining the US as a non-threatening and non-imperial world power and much of 81 Belafonte’s television, film, and music work – and really overall – stardom can be considered in this light. 59 The Carnegie Hall album presents Belafonte as a musical ambassador. It is divided in three acts that emphasize its trajectory of global music: "Moods of the American Negro," "In the Caribbean," and "Around the World." “Moods of the American Negro” contains the work songs “Darlin’ Cora,” Cotton Fields,” and “John Henry”; the southern chain-gang song “Sylvie”; and the spirituals “Take My Mother Home” and “The Marching Saints.” “In the Caribbean” contains the songs, “Day O,” “Jamaica Farewell,” “Man Piaba,” “All My Trials,” “Mama Look a Boo Boo,” “Come Back Liza,” and “Man Smart.” “Act III – round the world” contains the Israeli hora “Hava Nageela,” the Irish Ballad “Danny Boy,” the Haitian song “Merci Bon Dieu”, which was written by one of Belafonte’s guitarists, Frantz Casseus; the Mexican folk song “Cu Cu Ru Cu Cu Paloma,” the American folk song “Shenandoah,” and the Venezuelan folk song “Matilda.” Belafonte in effect acts as ambassador or bridge to the world in ways that he was called upon to do in state department sponsored world tours, worlds’ fair performances, and later in his work for UNICEF. Belafonte’s involvement with the U.S. government and his reputation for performing “slicked up” folk music tagged him as a sell out. He was perceived as someone who sang faux calypsos and acted as an apologist for past U.S. discrimination. The third 82 section of the live album– the international folk music section seems to support these perceptions. For a performer who repeatedly said he was committed to representing the black diaspora, Belafonte’s recordings of these songs form other cultures, may have been perceived as a move toward the universal and perhaps a dilution of the particularity of black life and labor on display in the first sections and the bulk of his repertoire. I would argue that first, the totality of the repertoire doesn’t nullify the specificity of songs and secondly that the movement from the particular to the universal in Belafonte’s repertoire models Belafonte’s political philosophy. He believed that his and black people’s particular experience enabled them to speak to the universal: to criticize U.S. imperial policies in the world. And that it was important to recall the history again and again in order to recognize different but similar imperial practices in the present. By taking on the personas of people of other races and ethnicities, one could argue that Belafonte was asserting his ability, at least in song, to take on the performance of identities of people around the world. When one considers how white performers have had the luxury of performing the identities of multiple races and ethnicities, not only in music but also in theater, film, and television, Belafonte’s assertion of his universality seems radical. Indeed, given the limitations placed on Belafonte when he appeared in films in 1959, his concert performances are liberating. 83 The constant tension between authenticity and artifice on display in the studio albums is showcased in the concert. Belafonte makes lengthy introductions for all of his songs, and presents many songs, especially for the West Indian section, as if they sprang naturally from his boyhood. In a funny moment that he leaves on the record, however, he repeats an introduction for a song that he’s already provided for another song. It’s a mistake from one of two recorded concert performances, I think, but he includes it on the record even though he presumably had another version of the song and introduction on the other night he sang it. He begins his performance of “Jamaica Farewell” with this introduction: As a small boy I spent many many years down in the West Indies. And of the many hours of the many days of the many weeks that I was there I spent most of my time down at the docks, swimming with the other boys mainly, but also listening to the songs and the stories that the sailors used to sing and tell. Many of them I will never ever be able to repeat [laughter] but of the ones that I can I can always remember that whenever the sailors were leaving for another island, or for some far off country, they would sing the “Jamaica Farewell.” The next song he sings is “Man Piaba” and he begins his introduction with “As a small boy I spent many many years down in the West Indies.” There is then a long pause, as Belafonte presumably realizes that he’s repeated the opening lines to his introduction of “Jamaica Farewell” and then he says, “I already said that” to which the audience laughs. He continues, “Well, I’ll tell you, uh, . . . I wasn’t always a small boy in the West Indies, I was a small boy in New York first” and 84 then he goes on to introduce “Man Piaba”, which he laughs through. The audience laughs and applauds throughout his “mistake.” Belafonte can’t keep a straight face through the rest of his introduction of “Man Piaba.” He claims the song came out of actual conversations with his father which took place when he traveled from New York City to the West Indies at the age of seven with his parents, but he keeps drawing attention to the theatricality of his recitation. 60 After a few guitar strums and some more laughter he then launches into “Man Piaba.” The “mistake” could have been edited out of the sessions. I doubt that he made the mistake both nights he performed. If he did, then the artifice was built into his concert performances – if one wasn’t convinced by the slicked up “cotton Fields” rendition that Belafonte wasn’t going for authenticity then this moment would. The repetition of the introduction calls attention to the constructedness of Belafonte’s Island persona. The song “Man Piaba” is self-consciously faux calypso which invokes Belafonte’s West Indian father, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud as storytellers. It is a playful song written by Belafonte and his then manager Jack Rollins; its invocations humorously reflect the diverse influences of a modern black man: When I was a lad of three-foot-three Certain questions occurred to me, So I asked me father quite seriously To tell me the story 'bout the bird and bee. 85 He stammered and he stuttered pathetically And this is what he said to me. He said, "The woman piaba and the man piaba and the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass, The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm, And the famous grandy scratch scratch. It was clear as mud but it covered the ground And the confusion made the brain go 'round. I went and ask a good friend of mine, Known to the world as Albert Einstein. He said "Son, from the beginning of time and creativity There existed the force of relativity Pi r square and a minus ten means a routine only when The solar system in one light year Make the Hayden planetarium disappear So if Mt Everest doesn't move I am positive that it will prove That the woman piaba and the man piaba And the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass, The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm, And the famous grandy scratch scratch. It was clear as mud but it covered the ground And the confusion made the brain go 'round. I grabbed a boat and went abroad In Baden Baden asked Sigmund Freud He said "Son, from your sad face remove the grouch Put the body down up on the couch I can see from your frustration a neurotic sublimation Hey love and hate is psychosomatic Your Rorschach shows that you're a peri pathetic It all started with a broken sibling In the words of the famous Rudyard Kipling That the woman piaba and the man piaba And the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass, The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm, And the famous grandy scratch scratch. 86 Belafonte points out the gap between who he is and a fantasy of a native giving unmediated access to his story in both the introduction and the song itself. He calls attention to the stilted language of his canned introduction, by laughing all the way through it and yet still sets the expectation that we are going to hear a simple song about a child learning about life on the Island. We are surprised again by the songs’ equation of the stories told by his West Indian sailor father and two representatives of modern thought, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. The subject of the song looks to each as a father, and in this way, Belafonte points to his own hybrid identity. Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall Belafonte At Carnegie Hall was so successful that RCA asked him to make another live album. On Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall, Belafonte shared the stage with Miriam Makeba, Odetta, The Belafonte Folk Singers and The Chad Mitchell Trio. Like the first live album, Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall was a recording of benefit performance for the Wiltwyck School of Boys held on May 2, 1960. According to the album notes, the program for the concert was “entirely new.” Belafonte performed a new mixture of international folk songs and assembled a diverse collection of folk singers. Belafonte sang the West Indian songs “Jump Down Spin Around,” and “Suzanne,” the Langston Hughes penned “A Little Lyric of Great Importance,” the U.S. song “Chickens,” the Israeli song “Hene Ma Tov,” the British songs “I 87 Know Where I’m Going” and “Old King Cole,” and the Mexican song “La Bamba.” In the only overtly political gesture on the album, Belafonte introduces the Chad Mitchell Trio in this way “their main concern is staying out of the United States Army.” A diverse group of folk singers took the stage. Belafonte. The three clean cut, white young men that formed the Chad Mitchell Trio, the interracial (made up of black and white men) Belafonte Folks Singers, the black American Odetta and the South African Miriam Makeba. The Chad Mitchell Trio performed the Israeli folk song “Vaichazkem,” the calypso “I Do Adore Her” and “The Ballad of Sigmund Freud.” Odetta performed the U.S. folk songs “I’ve been Driving on Bald Mountain” and “Water Boy” and a duet with Belafonte of “A Hole in the Bucket.” Miriam Makeba sang the South African folk song “The Click Song,” and the Austrian song “One More Dance.” The Belafonte Folk Singers sang the U.S. folk song “The Ox Drives,” the U.S. Mountain song “The Red Rosy Bush,” and the gospel song “Didn’t it Rain.” All the performers had ties to Belafonte offstage. Belafonte signed the Chad Mitchell Trio to Belafonte Enterprises. The Belafonte Singers were originally formed as a back up group for Belafonte but recorded and toured on their own as well. I am especially interested, however, in the presence of Odetta and Makeba, because they illustrate how Belafonte’s patronage of musicians complemented his own star text 88 Odetta and Miriam Makeba Belafonte introduces Odetta as “the first lady of folk song.” Like Belafonte, Odetta was a singer and actress who found success in a theatrical presentation of folk music. She was unique among female folk performers of the time because she accompanied herself on guitar. Belafonte performed with her several times in concert and on his television special Tonight with Belafonte. Like Belafonte, she was known as a kind of archivist of U.S. folk music, who researched her repertoire in the Library of Congress. She was also known for collaborating with diverse including “Count Basie and Bob Dylan and writer Langston Hughes and in various genres, including blues and gospel.” 61 Miriam Makeba was a South African singer who was first introduced to U.S. audiences by Steve Allen, but it was Belafonte who became her chief patron. Makeba was a jazz singer in South Africa, but found success as a folk singer in the U.S. Like Belafonte she sang folks songs from many nations, but she was most known for singing songs in her native Xhosan and Zulu dialects. She was especially known for her “click” songs, an example of which is on this album. Her nickname “Mama Africa” reflects what she represented in the U.S. Her U.S. stardom gave her a platform on which to talk about Apartheid, which eventually led to the South African government revoking her citizenship. For many years, Makeba recorded on RCA, the same label Belafonte was under 89 contract to, but they canceled her contract when she married activist Stokely Carmichael, who they deemed too controversial. She introduces her song on the album as follows: “In my native village in Johannesburg there is a song we always sing when a young girl gets married it’s called the click song in English because they can’t” speak her native language. Her presence, as well as Odetta’s, points to an absence on Belafonte’s albums: the perspective of black diasporic women. Women abound on Belafonte’s recorded songs and albums, but they are usually mothers, wives, and other objects of male desire. Belafonte pointed to his preoccupation with masculinity when, in an article in the fan magazine, he bemoaned the kinds of calypsos that were popularized by other singers in the U.S., by describing listening to them as bearing witness to “the gruesome site of calypso being emasculated.” 62 Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall’s inclusion of the songs of Odetta and Makeba puts black women’s laboring at center stage, and therefore deepens Belafonte’s representation of the laboring diaspora. Makeba’s presence also reflects another component of Belafonte’s musical work: his commitment to “discovering” and supporting young diasporic talent. Belafonte Enterprises mentored several young musicians. It gave them small stipends and financed their recordings, and Belafonte often invited the artists to go on tour with him. According to a 1963 NY Times article Belafonte mentored the following musicians: Hugh Masekla, an African trumpet player 90 that Miriam Makeba introduced him to and Valentine Pringle, a singer Belafonte heard in Washington. Conclusion The music industry in this period allowed black performers like Belafonte to represent the particular culture and history of black people. Belafonte is also allowed to represent the universal – by representing the U.S. nation on world tours and singing the folk songs of cultures around the globe, including the folk culture of white Americans. He achieves this position, not by stripping himself of the particular (which singing romantic pop songs would have done) but by representing first, the diversity of black music and culture and its relationship to U.S. modernity. Critics have commented that his audience was mainly middle class whites, though Belafonte contends that he got feedback from middle class blacks of the period. Presumably the pleasure in Belafonte’s music for the black listener is that they are connected to a fuller identity – that is central to the U.S. (American) and connected to the diaspora (negro/black). Some black and other non-white audiences might even see his music as critique. He safely contains his portraits of black life in the past but I think what is potentially radical about his repertoire is that at a moment when Belafonte was promoted as the emblem of the racial progress that was possible thanks to democracy and capitalism, he was foregrounding the exploitation that capitalism allows and even encourages. He 91 insisted that this exploitation, even if it was historical (though his references to prison labor were and still are contemporary issues) were at the core of black identity in his contemporary moment. But, what is the pleasure for the white listener? White audiences certainly found pleasure in his black voice and body: we are reminded of that pleasure in countless articles that describe his body and the screaming women in his audience. It’s also possible that some liberal listeners found pleasure in thinking of themselves as enlightened enough to appreciate and even enjoy international folk culture. The popularity of a music that expressed the plight of the black worker was part of a complicated romantic view of labor and the folk in a period in which middle class white masculinity is bemoaning the post World War shift in the economy to more service oriented jobs. In the next chapter I will explore how Belafonte’s black folk aesthetic was mobilized in film. 92 Chapter One Endnotes 1 “Belafonte Won't Back Down from 'Slavery' Comment: The Singer Says There is Nothing Wrong With Political Debate Framed in Civil War-Era Language,” Vancouver Sun, October 23, 2002m, Lexis-Nexis http://www.lexisnexis.com.libproxy.usc.edu. 2 See Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Belafonte's Balancing Act. Singer and Activist Harry Belafonte," New Yorker v72, n25 (26 August 1996): 132. 3 Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xix. 4 A.J. Millard, America on Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 229. 5 Anderson, xxxii 6 Simon Frith quoted in Tim Anderson’s, Making Easy Listening, xxxii. 7 Michael Eldridge, “Remains of the Day O: A Conversation with Harry Belafonte,” Transition 92 (2001): 124. 8 See Thomas Owens and Howard Rye, ”Calypso,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008) <http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=jazz.072900>, Harry Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and Helen Myers, “Trinidad and Tobago, Creole music: Calypso and social commentary,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008), http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.44477.3.2 9 “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 470. 10 According to the entry on the Calypso album in the allmusicguide.com: “Resisting the impulse to record an immediate follow-up album, Belafonte instead spaced his calypso albums apart, releasing them at five-year intervals in 1961, 1966, and 1971. “Calypso,” allmusicguide, http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:gpfoxqe5ld6e. 93 11 See Thomas Owens and Howard Rye, ”Calypso,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008) <http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=jazz.072900>, Harry Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), and Helen Myers, “Trinidad and Tobago, Creole music: Calypso and social commentary,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008), http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.44477.3. 12 Thomas Owens and Howard Rye, ”Calypso,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008), <http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=jazz.072900>) 13 Helen Myers, “Trinidad and Tobago, Creole music: Calypso and social commentary,” Grove Music Online (Accessed 18 March 2008), http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.44477.3.2 14 Colin Escott, “Calypsos: a Brief History,” Harry Belafonte: Island in the Sun. Bear Island Box Set, 11. 15 Lisa McGill, Constructing Black selves : Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation (New York: New York University Press, 2005): 51. 16 McGill, 57. 17 The inclusion of Star-O is interesting too – because it’s essentially the same song as Day-O only he says “Star-O” implying a very long day and night of labor indeed. Also, it’s impossible not to listen to the song and think of star in the sense of the famous person Belafonte is – another way in which he argues for the conflation between his position and the manual laborer’s. 18 Geoffrey Holder, “That Fad from Trinidad,” New York Times Magazine April 21 1957, 14. 19 Harry Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 12, 52. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Neptune discusses U.S. interested in mineral deposits in Trinidad vs. fruit in Jamaica on pages 54-56. 94 22 Neptune, 51, 64. 23 Neptune, 64. 24 Neptune, 65. 25 Neptune, 131. 26 James, Party Politics in the West Indies, p. 160 quoted in Kent Worcester, CLR James: A Political Biography, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 12. 27 Harry Belafonte, “Calypso.” 28 Ray Funk and Donald R. Hill “Will Calypso Doom Rock’n’ Roll? The Calypso Craze of 1957” in Harry Belafonte: Island in the Sun, ed. Colin Escott, Bear Family Records Box Set, 2002. 29 Holder, 14. 30 Ibid. 31 Daniel J. Crowley, “Toward a Definition of Calypso Part I,” Ethnomusicologist v. 3 no. 2 (May 1959): 57-66. 32 Gates, 132. 33 Holder, 14. 34 Colin Escott, Harry Belafonte: Island in the Sun Harry Belafonte: Island in the Sun, Bear Family Records Box Set, 2002. 35 Eldridge, 114. 36 Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei, The Last "Darky" : Bert Williams, black-on- black minstrelsy, and the African diaspora(Durham North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2002), 37. 37 Eldridge, 112. 95 38 Carole Pegg, “Folk music: Politically Ideological uses”, Grove Music Online (Accessed 13 September 2007) http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=music.09933. 39 Kelley, Robin D. G. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Folk'." American Historical Review 97.5 (1992): 1402-3. 40 See Tim Anderson, “Stereo, Hi-Fi, and the Modern Pleasures of Easy Listening,” in Making Easy Listening, 104-178. 41 Hall, 470. 42 For a more detailed argument see Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor (London: Verso, 1996.) 43 Gilroy, 101. 44 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65. 45 Dudziak, 62. 46 Ibid., 62. 47 Ibid., 61. 48 Gates, 136. 49 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Belafonte at the Brussels World’s Fair,” New York Post, September 7, 1958, Schomburg Center Clipping File. 50 Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200), 69. 51 Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire : Black Americans and a Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2 52 Eschen, 20, 56-7. 96 53 See Paul Gilroy, “Masters, Mistresses, Slave, and the Antinomies of Modernity,” in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 41-71. 54 Singh, 167. 55 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant acts : on Asian American cultural politics (Durham : Duke University Press, 1996), 17. 56 “Belafonte Concert to Help Wiltwyck” NY Times 4/5/59 and ad for “The New Lincoln School presents and Evening with Belafonte”, Schomburg Center Clipping File. 57 Cary Ginell, “Belafonte at Carnegie Hall”, All Music Guide http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:wpfpxqe5ldhe. 58 ); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003), 9. 59 “The texts that I look at performed a certain kind of cultural work: they helped to construct a national identity for the United States as a global power. Although the United States had been a world economic power since the end of the nineteenth century, and a world political and military power since the end of World War I, not until after World War II did it displace Great Britain as the world’s most powerful nation. Because this was a new role, and because it required repudiating a long-standing intellectual tradition (if not a political reality) of isolationism, this rise to power demanded a reworking of national self-definition. The task of national identity formation was complicated by the fact that this rise to global power took place at the very moment when nationalist leaders throughout Asia [and Africa and the Caribbean] were in the process of throwing off Western domination. The political and cultural problem for Americans thus became, how can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization? This was also a problem of collective subject formation: How can we transform our sense of ourselves from narrow provincials into cosmopolitan citizens of the world who possess a global consciousness.” Klein, 9. 60 In his introduction to “Man Piaba,” Belafonte says that one day he and his father were “drifting along the beach together. And one day I turned to him and I said, I said, ‘Father’” and then Belafonte just starts laughing which he explains by then saying sarcastically “I always called him Father” – in fact pointing out 97 how stilted the story sounds. “I said father tell me about the story about man and woman, man to man[ more laughter] I was seven, He got that glazed look over his eyes and I realized then and there I had to rephrase the question so I turned back to him and I said ‘Father’” and Belafonte almost stutters over this – again pointing out the absurdity of the construction ‘ same fellow” tell me this story about the birds and the bees if you please.” 61 "Odetta," In Biography Resource Center (Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, 2008), http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. 62 “Reluctant King of Calypso,” in Harry Belafonte: His Complete Life Story , Ed. Hy Steirman(New York: Hillman Publications, 1957), 31. 98 Chapter Two - Man Smart: Representing the Diaspora in 1950s Film In Jailhouse Rock (1957), Elvis Presley plays Vince Everett, an ex-con turned singer who embarks on a recording career. In a pivotal scene in which Vince records his first single, he struggles, as all movie singers do, until he finds his voice – his authentic singing style. During the scene the camera tracks around the recording studio and as he finds his voice the camera pans across photographs of other artists who presumably have recorded in the same studio. Included among the portraits are Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte. 1 Jailhouse Rock is a movie about rock and roll in which black people are mostly absent. The only black character in the film is a maid whose voice we hear but whose face we never see. When Vince finds his voice in the recording scene, however, blackness enters the frame as a symbol of the authenticity that Vince and the record company are looking for. The way Jailhouse Rock uses Belafonte (and Horne) to invoke authenticity is consistent with how Belafonte was used by the film industry in the 1950s. Filmmakers were interested in Belafonte’s star persona, which combined a Caribbean exoticness, a commitment to black folk culture, and an interest in interracial relationships. Belafonte starred in The Bright Road (1953) and Carmen Jones (1954) before his Calypso album became the first album to sell over a million copies. Both films featured an all black cast and starred Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge. This chapter will look at the films Belafonte made after his gold 99 record. I argue that the film industry was interested in capitalizing upon Belafonte’s stardom and that Belafonte was interested in using films to expand upon his star text. I will look at Island in the Sun, (1957) Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and The World the Flesh and the Devil (1959) with an emphasis on how each film was in dialogue with Belafonte’s star text. Belafonte has deemed all of his films failures. I believe that with several of his films he was able to make an intervention in the presentation of blackness in a medium that seemed uninterested in the particular history and culture of black people. Belafonte starred in films made in the Hollywood system and produced his own films through his production company HarBel. His participation in mainstream films of the 1950s revealed the medium’s inability to fully deal with race and interracial antagonism and desire but these forays were valuable because he did make interventions into the system which at the very least made the limitations of the medium’s ability to deal with race strikingly visible and at best allowed black audiences a space to critique the status quo and see black identities not previously represented in film. Belafonte’s film career was short. In a 1996 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Belafonte explains that he turned down many of the roles that Sidney Poitier made famous in the 1950s and 1960s because the representation of race and racial relations in the films conflicted with his own politics. He explains why he turned down the role that Sidney Poitier won an Oscar for: 100 When I read ‘Lilies of the Field’ I was furious. You’ve got these nuns fleeing Communism, and out of nowhere is this Black person who throws himself wholeheartedly into their service, saying nothing, and doing nothing except being commanded by those Nazi Nuns? He didn’t kiss anybody, he didn’t touch anybody, he had no culture, he had no history, he had no family, he had nothing. I just said, ‘No, I don’t want to play pictures like that. 2 Belafonte argues that Poitier’s roles were just the starring versions of the transhistorical roles that blacks have always played in Hollywood film: the maids, mammies, cooks, and performers who have existed at the periphery of Hollywood narratives; the characters who embody stereotypes that don’t have the particular qualities of fully fleshed out human beings. Belafonte attempted to choose film roles that allowed him to represent the particular culture and history of black people’s lives. The quote from the Gates interview illustrates that it’s almost impossible to talk about Belafonte’s film career without talking about the other major black star of the period, Sidney Poitier. Consequently, while I am focusing on Belafonte, I will also look at some of Poitier’s roles in the period. Though Belafonte is not alone in suggesting that Poitier’s roles represented mainstream white rather than black interests, I believe that Poitier and Belafonte’s mainstream roles have moments of exceeding the intent of the Hollywood machine. Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, and Mulattoes, dominates every discussion of black film images. Bogle’s thesis that Hollywood films have 101 replicated stereotypes of blacks established in nineteenth century popular culture is persuasive. Bogle argues that Poitier’s ‘50s and ‘60s roles were updated Toms; and that Hollywood was interested in Belafonte as a buck character but was so uncomfortable with black male sexuality that it never fully exploited his potential. James Snead argues that because black characters usually reflect stereotypes that have been with us for centuries, they appear to be unanchored in a particular time and space. Snead uses semiotic analysis to investigate how black figures are coded in film history. 3 He writes: One of the prime codes surrounding Blacks on screen, then – one much at variance with the narrative codes that mandate potential mobility for other screen characters – is an almost metaphysical stasis. The Black – particularly the Black woman – is seen as eternal, unchanging, unchangeable . . . The code of stasis arises in order to justify Blacks’ continuing economic disadvantage . . . Blacks’ character is sealed off from the history into which whites have trapped them. 4 Snead distinguishes his critical interests from Bogle’s and other black film historians he pegs as having a more sociological interest in assessing how characters reflect the reality of black life. For Snead, the representation of black people in film is troubling, not because they express negative images that don’t reflect the reality of black life, but because they are depicted as people who transcend history. Belafonte was similarly concerned with how black characters were coded. He critiques Poitier’s Lilies of the Field character because “he had no culture, he had no history, he had no family, he had nothing.” 5 Belafonte, like Snead, was not so much concerned with black characters as negative role 102 models (he was willing to play murderers, gamblers, and thieves on screen) but was interested in historicizing black folk; showing that they had a particular culture and history. This chapter will examine Belafonte’s career in the context of the history of black representation. I will examine how his film roles reinforced stereotypical and ahistorical notions of black people and how they challenged them. The party line on both his and Poitier’s career is that they failed to overcome the stereotypes. Most critics believe that Poitier never exceeded the stereotype of the Uncle Tom who was eager to be a part of, and was often in service to, dominant white culture and that Belafonte’s attempts to exceed the Uncle Tom and Buck stereotypes were noble failures. Belafonte starred in several Hollywood films of the period, all of which he declared were disappointments to him. 6 In 1957 he formed HarBel Productions so that he could have more control over his film image. This chapter will examine the two films Belafonte produced with his production company HarBel and one of the films he starred in before he formed his production company: The World the Flesh the Devil, Odds Against Tomorrow and Island in the Sun, respectively. I have chosen these films because I think each draws upon yet also offers a counter image to his star text. Island in the Sun capitalizes on Belafonte’s music success and Caribbean ancestry yet, perhaps inadvertently, offers a counter image to the happy integrationist he was called upon to represent by the U.S. 103 state department and culture industry. In The World the Flesh and the Devil, Belafonte plays a character that exhibits all of the multimedia talents that made Belafonte successful, yet his character suffers from the diasporic inferiority complex Frantz Fanon examines in Black Skin, White Masks. Odds Against Tomorrow presents Belafonte as a criminal who, like other film noir characters, rejects the masculine norms of capitalism, the economic system that Belafonte the entrepreneur (owner of at different times a restaurant, a music publishing business and a production company) actually seemed to thrive in. 1950s Film Industry: The Rise of the Independent Producer Belafonte’s success as a film actor and producer was possible because of changes in the film industry in the 1950s. Filmmaking in the 1950s differed from the filmmaking of the ’20s, ‘30s,’ and ‘40s in a number of ways. The 1950s saw the end of the studio system. The Paramount Decision of 1948 resulted in studios selling their movie theaters and the competition form other leisure pursuits, like television, recreational sports, and travel caused studios to cut their production expenses. Independent production flourished in the period. Partly as a result of the Paramount Decision and partly as result of a decreased demand for films 7 , studios began to make fewer pictures and to distribute pictures made by independent producers. According to Tino Balio, in 1949 “20 percent of the 234 pictures released by the eight majors” were produced by independents while “in 1957, the majors released 191 productions, of which 170 104 (58 percent) were produced by independents.” 8 The three films I will focus on were independent productions distributed by studios. Island in the Sun was produced by Daryl F. Zanuck and distributed by 20 th Century Fox. Odds Against Tomorrow was produced by HarBel and distributed by United Artists. The World the Flesh and the Devil was a co-production between HarBel, Sol C. Sigel Productions and MGM/Loew’s, and was distributed by Loew’s. Other characteristics of 1950s filmmaking included filming outside of Hollywood (sometimes on-location) and the use of widescreen and color technologies. Balio and Murray Pomerance have argued that these practices were a response to competition from television and other leisure pursuits that were increasingly popular in the ‘50s (like traveling and shopping.) In order to attract moviegoers, many of whom had moved to the suburbs away from the downtown/urban locales of the movie palaces, Hollywood filmmakers tried to give viewers an experience that couldn’t be replicated on a small, black and white screen. Island in the Sun was a cinemascope production shot on location in the West Indies and promotional material for The World, the Flesh and the Devil described the on-location New York City shoots at odd hours that were required for the desolate post-nuclear cityscapes. Hollywood turned to lavish productions to lure people from other leisure activities, however, in order to hedge their bets, filmmakers often tied their productions to properties that already had built in audiences. Many films, for example, were adaptations of 105 best selling literary works. All of the Belafonte films I will talk about in this chapter were based on popular novels. In addition, the ‘50s saw the beginning of the demise of the Production code. 9 The HUAC hearings prompted studios to stay away from controversial topics, but many independent production companies took advantage of the loosening of censorship and made films with mature subject matter in order to distinguish themselves from the regular studio fare they competed against. All three Belafonte films I will talk about, deal with race and sexuality in ways that were not possible during earlier periods of strict enforcement of the production code. Island in the Sun is an example of the kind of sensational and “controversial” films that distinguished Daryl Zanuck’s productions from the films made by rival producers while Odds Against Tomorrow and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil were able to depict interracial intimacy because of a shift to adult rather than family entertainment in mid-‘50s filmmaking. The same conditions that allowed filmmakers to tackle “controversial” topics allowed for the stardom of Belafonte and Poitier. The ‘50s was a moment in which motion pictures were interested in featuring black bodies. Black actors appeared in the studio films of the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s but their presence was usually marginal. Many of the social problem films of the late ‘40s and ‘50s (e.g. passing dramas) featured race at the center. Poitier became a star in social problem films like The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Edge of the City (1957), and 106 The Defiant Ones (1958). Many of the films Belafonte starred in during the period promised that audiences would confront dramatic issues related to race, violence, and sex. Since Belafonte and Poitier were usually the lone (or, more rarely, one of a few) prominent black figures in films featuring many white actors, their presence also suggested that interracial desire and antagonism would be part of the content. Balio argues that stars were still a if not the key ingredient to ‘50s filmmaking: “Stars, in fact, became more important than ever; in this era of retrenchment, financing a picture of any consequence without a name of proven box office worth would have been unthinkable.” 10 Belafonte was able to leverage his music popularity to become an actor and an independent producer in the period. Star O: Slavery and Modernity in Island in the Sun Island in the Sun came out in the summer of 1957 and was one of the films Life Magazine pointed to when it noted a shift away from the “frivolous, lighthearted musical – comedy” of the previous summer’s films to films “using adult themes.” 11 Belafonte was a natural choice to be the star of Island in the Sun. The film came out in 1957, a year after the phenomenal success of his Calypso album. He lent the film a Caribbean “authenticity” and promotional possibilities in music and television: he wrote and recorded songs for the film, which appeared on a soundtrack album, and he performed songs from the film 107 on the Ed Sullivan show to promote the film. That Belafonte was an important commercial lynchpin for the film is confirmed by the fact that, although he really only had a supporting role, he was paid more than any of the other stars of the film. 12 Though the film plays up Belafonte’s sex appeal and was promoted and noticed for its promise of interracial romance, the film actually questions whether any true reconciliation can occur between blacks and whites. What is striking about the film is that it doesn’t argue that blacks and whites can’t be together because of immutable differences (as many passing dramas like Pinky or Imitation of Life argued for example.) Instead, it locates the barrier between blacks and whites in the particular history of slavery and colonialism. Slavery and colonialism are presented as traumas that blacks and whites will never overcome. My analysis of the film will consider how Belafonte’s performance and star persona in particular trouble the fantasy of interracial unity on display in other films of the period. I will begin with a brief synopsis of the film. A New York journalist, Bradshaw, travels to the fictional Island of Santa Marta to bring stories about the West Indies back to his U.S. readers. Bradshaw is interested in finding answers to two questions: Are the black people of Santa Marta, who were once ruled by the French, and are currently ruled by the British, ready to govern themselves? And is there much discontent felt by the blacks toward the whites? Bradshaw is 108 introduced to Santa Marta by its Governor, who governs the island at the pleasure of the British Prime minister. Bradshaw writes a series of articles that focus on the Fleurys, a family that inherited land from ancestors who employed slaves. He becomes especially interested in Maxwell Fleury’s rivalry with a black trade union activist, David Boyeur (played by Belafonte) whose ancestors worked the Fleury land, first as slaves then as “free” laborers. Fleury and Boyeur are each running for election to the same seat on the legislature. In order to demonstrate to his readers how complicated “the race issue” is in the West Indies, Bradshaw reveals in one article that Maxwell Fleury’s great grandmother was partially black. His article is reprinted in the local Santa Marta paper and the “shocking” news precipitates a number of dramatic events, including a murder. While the film is framed through a series of political and racial questions, the murder plot, as well as several interracial romances, provides the meat of the entertainment. There are romances between Jocelyn Fleury, Maxwell’s sister (played by Joan Collins) and Euan Templeton, the Governor’s son (Stephen Boyd); David Archer, the Governor’s assistant (John Justin) and Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge); and Boyeur (Belafonte) and Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine.) The film concludes with the resolution of the murder and romance plots. Jocelyn and Euan, and Margot and David Archer end up marrying and leaving the island, while Mavis and David Boyeur end their 109 relationship. Bradshaw leaves the island having written a newspaper series that confirms that black Santa Martans are discontent with their present conditions and desirous and ready to rule themselves. Though it takes place on a fictional West Indian island that shares many characteristics with Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad, the film is arguably as much about U.S. racial issues. Lisa McGill has pointed out that when Daryl Zanuck attempted to get the film shown in the U.S. South by proclaiming that “The problems that arise in the British West Indies because of racial issues are not at all comparable to the color problem in the United States today” 13 he was in fact betraying how much the film was about United States racial issues. 14 This is true both because his statement draws attention to the obvious similarities between the history of black/white relations that began in slavery in the West Indies and slavery in the U.S. but also because, as many scholars have pointed out, in this period of the cold war when the film came out Americans’ understanding of themselves as a democratic nation was wrapped up in their relation to West Indian, Latin American, African, and Asian countries going through the process of decolonization. 15 There is no question that the film was read as a commentary on U.S. racial relations: segregationists managed to get the film banned in Memphis and fought to have it banned in New Orleans, South Carolina, and Minneapolis. 16 For this reason, analyses of the film have tended to focus on what the film says 110 about interracial romance in the U.S context. 17 Though the U.S. informed analyses are important, they often dismiss or ignore that the film is about colonial relations and that U.S. racial issues cannot be separated from colonial issues. U.S. Imperialism Although the film tries to distance the U.S. from histories of colonialism by representing it as a British and French problem with the U.S. as an interested but objective party, the U.S. has had a long history of its own colonial interventions in West Indian nations. Anthony Maingot has characterized the U.S. attitude toward the Caribbean as an imperialism that is distinct from British and French colonialism because, for the most part, the U.S. has been interested in maintaining control over the Caribbean seas rather than Caribbean land. The U.S.’ relationship to the Caribbean has been articulated by the notion of “spheres of influence” established by the Monroe Doctrine which asserted U.S. control over the “western hemisphere.” Maingot writes, President James Monroe’s 1823 Annual Address to Congress unilaterally declared that ‘the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power.” Additionally Monroe warned that any European intervention, in any part of this hemisphere, was to be regarded as the ‘manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the U.S.’ In return, in a clear recognition of the existence of spheres of influence, the Americans vowed not to interfere in European internal affairs. 18 111 Thus, the U.S. declared an end to further European expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean while aligning their security with the security of Latin America and the Caribbean. The U.S. conceived of its interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean as different than European imperialism because it did not occupy land (though it did establish military bases) and its occupation of Caribbean water was articulated as a matter of security rather than empire. Maingot, points out, however, that the U.S. attitude toward Latin America and the Caribbean had much in common with European colonialism and was in fact a form of imperialism. He writes, Imperialism is more than the sum of conquered territory and commerce, it is also an attitude, a perception of how the world is, or should be ordered. In that sense it is crucial to understand that even as the Americans were not interested in territorial expansion but rather were reaching for influence and bases at strategic locations, they did enter the twentieth century with a well- developed imperial attitude. It was this attitude, loaded with feelings of racial and cultural superiority, which engendered the most enduring resentment and hostility. 19 The U.S. had the imperial attitude and it did expand its territory into Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; it also physically occupied Haiti from 1915-1940. The security language of U.S. interest in the Caribbean covered over its economic interests. In fact, the U.S. used its security interest in the area as a justification for its continual intervention into the Caribbean economy. Before the Revolution, U.S. businesses dominated the Cuban sugar industry and exercised control over Cuban exports; the Panama Canal was an instrument of 112 U.S. national security and global commerce; and United States acquisition of Puerto Rico was driven by its interests in making over its agriculture industry into a chief exporter of sugar rather than coffee, which had dominated its agriculture previously. 20 In spite of all this evidence of a U.S. imperial attitude and effect, that attitude was disavowed. It is the assertion and disavowal of a U.S. imperial attitude that is on display Island in the Sun. The film allows audiences to contemplate U.S. imperial relations with black nations as well as racial relations between blacks and whites within the U.S. 21 The Alec Waugh book the film is based on, in contrast to the film, is explicit about U.S. interests in Caribbean nations, though, of course, it stops short of describing the relationship between the U.S. and the Caribbean as imperial. The book makes a case for the importance of West Indian nations to American security and identity. In the book, Bradshaw’s editor introduces his series of articles with this admonition: Some readers may contend that the domestic fortunes of a small British colony are no concern of ours. To that we would retort that anything that happens in the Caribbean is our concern. The Caribbean lies at our back door; by examining this present situation in Santa Marta we can better gauge not only the problems that await us in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, but problems that we cannot ignore in Jamaica, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Anarchy in that area is a menace to our own security. We trust that the charming little island of Santa Marta will not become the victim of the explosion of which our correspondent has heard the rumblings. But even so his diagnosis 113 of the various ingredients of these inflammable conditions has a meaning and significance for us all. 22 The book, then, acknowledges U.S. territorial expansion in the Caribbean and U.S. strategic interest in the region. In addition to its material interests in the Caribbean, the U.S.’ sense of itself as the leader of the free world caused it to closely watch the changes in previously colonized nations lest they should align themselves with the U.S.S.R. by adopting socialist governments rather than choosing U.S. supported democracies. The book Island in the Sun is a cold war text in the sense that Christina Klein discusses them in Cold War Orientalism. Klein argues that many of the popular middlebrow cultural products of the ‘50s helped the U.S. public construct a national identity that included global interests. Because the U.S. rise to world power occurred in a period when Asian and African nations were throwing off imperial ties to Europe, Klein writes, “The political and cultural problem for Americans thus became, how can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?” 23 The U.S. wanted to assert some kind of influence on the policies of African and Asian countries without being perceived as imperial. David Waugh’s book was popular: it was serialized in Ladies Home Journal and, in its final form, was a Book of the Month Club selection. In the book and the film it is the American Bradshaw who stirs up and reveals the racial antagonism that is ready to explode on the island. In this way 114 Americans are characterized as having a more direct and honest relationship to racial issues that is contrasted with the British desire to sweep things under the rug. The film is especially careful to contrast the brash American Bradshaw who asks the hard questions about racial antagonism on the island with the British colonists who wish to skirt over any animosity between themselves and the black residents of Santa Marta. It is the American Bradshaw who makes them face the biracial blood that links the entire island together and it is Bradshaw who prompts them to admit that the black islanders want to rule themselves. So, while Zanuck may have wanted audiences to conflate U.S. racial relations with Caribbean racial relations, the film also tries to distinguish them. While Zanuck defended his film against the controversy in the manner I discussed above, it was no secret that Zanuck courted controversy. In a newspaper interview, he stated, “Controversial pictures, because they stir the public conscience and set people talking, even wrangling, can be pretty good for box office.” 24 Zanuck and the Production Code Administration (PCA) anticipated that white and black audiences in the U.S. would see themselves reflected in the British and West Indian characters. The PCA told the producers that they needed to be careful about suggesting that the characters were engaged in interracial sexual affairs and forced them to cut a scene where Mavis and David Boyeur (Fontaine and Belafonte) kiss. After reading an early treatment of 115 the film, the PCA also worried that black people might object to some of the black characters in the film. 25 While they were correct that U.S. audiences did see themselves in the film, it’s a mistake to diminish the West Indian content of the film. The popular success of the novel on which the film is based attests to mainstream audiences’ interest in Caribbean issues, or at least entertainment with Caribbean content. Alec Waugh’s novel Island in the Sun is filled with details about colonial government on the island: the back and forth between the local British governor and the Prime Minister; local council meetings; and court cases. Black audiences had their own investment in the Caribbean. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the U.S. black community in the ‘50s was made up of many who had emigrated from the West Indies, including Belafonte’s parents and Sidney Poitier. In addition, the U.S. Civil Rights movement was inspired by and in dialogue with participants in independence movements in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The PCA and the film producers were interested in black audience reactions even before the script was filmed. When the PCA asked the producers not to incite “Negro” protests to the film, the producers asked a black lawyer, Truman K. Gibson, to read the screenplay and assess whether it would be offensive to black audiences. Gibson’s written response to the script concedes 116 that the film has a few objectionable black stereotypes but that it is generally uncontroversial. The following is an extensive excerpt of his letter: In my opinion the treatment is not objectionable from a racial point of view. In this connection I hasten to add that no one can set himself as an absolute judge of Negro opinion because there is no such animal. However there are universally objectionable racial stereotypes which Negroes generally object to. When these are avoided, or if employed used in a context that does not make them focal points, Negroes, by and large react to the overall material in the same manner as other of similar economic, educational and geographical backgrounds. Since the writer of the screenplay and Waugh himself has [sic] viewed a minimum of what might be termed racial stereotypes, the screenplay is not one that could be condemned on this score. A few stereotypes appear. Among these are the steel band players, the Calypso singers and the “forelock pulling “typical” [sic] peasant who retrieved the murdered Colonel Carson’s wallet;” they are all well integrated into the plot and hence are not used for the purpose of portraying all natives as being stupid, singing Calypso dancing dwellers of a beautiful semi-tropic paradise. Just as I do not assume to be a final authority on Negro opinion, I likewise can make no serious pretensions as a script critic. However, I did have a feeling of disappointment in the character development of Boyeur. Since the lawyer was omitted from the screen play, the development of Boyeur as a cynical exploiter of his people diverts attention from some of the basic reasons why people in that area now are actively and rapidly pushing toward dominion status; and also why the Caribbean World has so radically changed in the last few years. 26 Gibson’s letter illustrates several possible reactions to the film. He maintains that blacks generally have the same opinions as whites of the same class background, except when it comes to the representation of racial stereotypes. And, though he highlights the impossibility of there being one universal Negro 117 reaction to the film, he does point to shared black concerns toward racial stereotypes. The stereotypical presence of black singers and dancers and primitive peasants is worrisome to him. He also foregrounds the film’s potential transnational resonances. He states that he was disappointed by the development of Boyeur as a cynical exploiter of his people because it “diverts attention from some of the basic reasons why people in that area are now actively and rapidly pushing towards dominion status; and also why the Caribbean world has so radically changed in the last few years.” His comment points to the distinct yet closely aligned identities of U.S black Americans and Caribbean blacks: Gibson, a U.S. black American, admired the radical Caribbean independence movements which had and would continue to inspire the U.S. civil rights movement. As Gibson indicates, the book has two particular characterizations that offset the tendency toward generic stereotypes on display in the film. The book features two black characters: David Boyeur, who is a cynical trade union leader who takes money from the union dues to buy himself new clothes and Grangier Morris, an earnest lawyer who has recently returned from being educated in England in order to be an advocate for the people. Each character is interested in political change, and, because there are two West Indian characters represented, there is at least a hint at the diversity of motivations – and therefore a more fully rounded representation of black characters. In the book it is the earnest young lawyer Grangier, not Boyeur, who develops a friendship with 118 Mavis. In keeping with the Hollywood tradition of there being only one black male star allowed on the screen at a time, the two characters were combined into the David Boyeur Belafonte played. The producers seem to have taken Gibson’s comments about the film’s Boyeur to heart, however, because the David Boyeur Belafonte plays in the film is not the cynical manipulator that Gibson describes reading about in the initial script. The change in Boyeur’s characterization was probably more driven by the producers’ desire to capitalize on Belafonte’s earnest star persona than motivated by Gibson’s critique. Gibson concludes the letter by praising 20 th Century Fox for being brave enough to present the interracial drama: 20 th Century Fox is due tremendous credit for courage in tackling the ticklish issues in the screenplay and for demonstrating an increasingly evident maturity in the selecting and treatment of screen material. 27 His praise may be a little excessive, but I agree that the film tackles “ticklish” issues head on. The rest of my discussion will examine how the film offers a unique window on black-white relations in the period. Interracial Antagonism and Desire Belafonte considered Island in the Sun to be a failure. 28 It is true that it does not offer a trenchant analysis of colonial politics or black-white relations as he surely hoped it would. The film is noteworthy, however, because it does not offer the false hopefulness that relations between blacks and whites can be easily overcome or bridged. The impossibility of reconciling black and white versions 119 or narratives of history is clear in the beginning of the film. There are essentially two openings to the film: one in which Belafonte introduces the island and another in which the Governor of Santa Marta introduces the island. 29 Belafonte shows what life is like for the black islanders while the Governor gives the version that tourists get, told from the point of view of the colonists. In the course of the film it becomes clear that these two points of view cannot be integrated or reconciled. The film begins with the credit “20 th Century-Fox by arrangement with Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, Inc. presents a CINEMASCOPE PRODCUTION.” The screen then goes black and we hear the beginnings of Belafonte singing “Island in the Sun.” As he continues singing we see a shot of the island: the camera pans from far away and then close up on the island. We see the water, the sand – the picturesque – then, as the camera moves to the village, we hear Belafonte sing “Island in the Sun,” a song he wrote for the film: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun I may sail on many a sea Her shores will always be home to me Oh, island in the sun Willed to me by my father's hand All my days I will sing in praise Of your forest, waters, your shining sand As morning breaks the heaven on high I lift my heavy load to the sky Sun comes down with a burning glow Mingles my sweat with the earth below 120 Oh, island in the sun Willed to me by my father's hand All my days I will sing in praise Of your forest, waters, your shining sand I see woman on bended knee Cutting cane for her family I see man at the waterside Casting nets at the surging tide Oh, island in the sun Willed to me by my father's hand All my days I will sing in praise Of your forest, waters, your shining sand As Belafonte sings we see images of black men loading bananas onto a boat and black women washing clothes on the rocks. As he sings about the women working the cane fields and the men casting nets we see images of black people doing those chores. The sequence closes with Belafonte walking along the shore away from the camera, a shot that is repeated at the end of the film. When he begins singing the last verse of the song the credits continue. The song was popular. As with many Belafonte songs it is vague enough to be read as both a political close-up on black labor and an idyllic song about island life. A line like “Where my people have toiled since time began,” for example, refers to the centuries legacy of slavery but also elides the particular history of the Caribbean. The Carib Indians were actually indigenous to the area but the song doesn’t mention them nor how exactly the black laborers ended up on the island. 121 The first credit after the images of the island is “Island in the Sun by Alec Waugh” and the credits continue to show the actors, writers, producer, directors, etc. As the credits continue, Belafonte’s song is supplemented with instrumental steel drum music. After the credits finish, we get our second introduction to the island. This introduction is delivered by a voiceover: The Island of Santa Marta is not very much different from any of the other smaller islands in the Caribbean. Towering mountains, white gold beaches, coconut palms, and hot tropical sun. It has a population of about 100,000; nine-tenths of it colored or of mixed blood. It’s main interest is raising sugar, COPRA, cocoa, and exporting them. Originally a French island, its laborers were brought in slave ships from the gold coast of Africa four and half centuries ago. And now it’s a British Crown Colony. This introduction, like the musical introduction, begins with a shot of the island waters and shores. Then, when we hear about the population of the island, we see a shot of a group of people, mostly black people, in a marketplace. When the male narrator tells us that nine-tenths of the population is “colored” we see a black military band marching and playing in the street. When he begins to talk about the main crops grown on the island, we see the boats that presumably export and import the crops, but they are emptied of the laborers that we saw in Belafonte’s introduction. When the voice tells us how the island laborers came to the island, we have a shot of black people walking in the street, but again there is no visual indication of the labor spoken about (nor does the narrator indicate who brought them to the island.) When he tells us it is now “the British Crown Colony” we see black military men raising the British flag. The film then 122 cuts to the Governor, who we discover has been narrating this introduction. He is in conversation with the visiting journalist Bradshaw. He finishes his introduction by saying, “Well that about sums up all the facts you’ll find in the tourist guides Mr. Bradshaw. Of course, as a journalist you’ll want to see as much of our island as possible.” Many of the images of the Governor’s introduction, in contrast to Belafonte’s, are picture postcard shots of scenic beaches evacuated of any human figures, particularly the black laborers contained in Belafonte’s. When black people are shown they are happy participants in the rituals of the colonial nation. The absence of laboring images of black people that filled Belafonte’s introduction marks the governor’s introduction as the tourist version. In the course of the film, Bradshaw tries to uncover the relationship between the two views of the island: the colonial guidebook version and the black laboring version. It is important to note that neither version mentions the indigenous people of the island, the Carib Indians. It is significant that the black version of the island is delivered via song and music while the colonial point of view is transmitted via regular dialogue. Just as I’ve argued that Belafonte was able to insert a subtle political message in his musical recordings and performances, music in this film is the container for any possible critique of the status quo. Belafonte’s introduction reveals the laboring black body that is central to island politics and economics. Though the Governor introduces the island to the American journalist Bradshaw through a 123 progressive narrative of slavery to colonialism to the current struggle for democracy, Belafonte’s musical introduction focuses on the black labor that has remained a constant in every economic and political mode. As Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, it is this narrative of progress – told by conservatives and liberals alike – that has served to cover over inequities (racial, gender, and class) in capitalism. 30 The Governor’s introduction invites the tourist/viewer to look at the beauty of the island and his simplistic summary of the movement from slavery to impending democracy seems as natural as the scenic beaches and water. Belafonte’s version, in contrast, points to the labor involved in maintaining the island, and by extension, the fiction of progress that covers over the unequal power relations – black laborers and white owners – that have been a fixture of each political and economic transition. Music rather than narrative communicates a critical politics. Though one might read this as a classic film strategy of including blacks in films only through their music – just as Lena Horne and the Nicholas Brothers were always kept at the margins of classical Hollywood films -- in Island in the Sun, Belafonte’s musical sequences threaten the narrative cohesion of the film in a way that Horne and the Nicholas Brothers weren’t permitted. If the narrative proposes that Americans are helping black people toward decolonization and civil rights the music questions the narrative at crucial moments. In some ways the stasis that James Snead believes black characters represent puts them in a 124 unique position to illustrate the fallacy of the progress narrative of history and economics. Another sequence of the film features another Belafonte penned song. The sequence begins with David Boyeur taking Mavis on a tour of his island. They begin in the marketplace (featured in the opening colonial version of the history of the island) where they buy sodas. They leave the marketplace on a bus that seems to take them further into the black community of the island. As they go, they pass black people doing labor: cutting trees into wood, cutting stone, harvesting sugar, and hauling bananas. Every black person we see except for Belafonte’s David Boyeur does some kind of laboring. The scene then segues into a musical sequence that features a work chant the laborers perform. Belafonte and Fontaine walk through the same scenery shown as a place of leisure in the opening, but now it is a place of work, filled with black laborers. Belafonte sings “Lead man Holler” with the workers who are hauling in nets. Belafonte is not doing the labor. He stands and sings while looking at the camera. The camera cuts back and forth between Belafonte and the laborers. The shots of Belafonte get closer and closer until we are right up against him. Though he is singing in character – the islander who is showing off his home to the woman he wants to impress – we also see the Belafonte who was popular on the concert stage. He is wearing a version of his concert uniform: a yellow 125 shirt, unbuttoned to his chest and blue pants. Joan Fontaine is our designated fan girl who looks at him admiringly as he sings. Lisa McGill reads this sequence as an allegory for Belafonte’s own position in the U.S. political and cultural system. 31 According to McGill, the vision of Belafonte singing with the black laborers serves to distinguish his beautiful body meant for consumption and pleasure from the rest of the black men whose bodies seem meant to do labor. She argues that Belafonte asserts his stardom by proclaiming himself as a new black body, distinct from the black bodies that have come before him – the stereotypical black bodies seemingly only built for labor. I think her argument is convincing. Though Boyeur is a labor organizer who, like his real life counterparts, may have leaned toward socialist and/or communist principals, having Belafonte – a star who has made the most of capitalism – play him minimizes his threat as an anti-capitalist symbol. Yet one could also read the sequence as an insistence – or at least an unconscious acknowledgement – that these two bodies, the black singer and the black laborer, can’t be disconnected. Belafonte’s inclusion of slave music in his concert repertoire has always insisted in the inseparability of the two. Belafonte’s music reflects the complicated ways that black Americans, Africans, and West Indians have used music to express sorrow for and to protest against unjust racial and economic structures. He seems to be saying, “You can enjoy 126 my body but you can’t do it without acknowledging the particular history of my people.” In fact the film can be read as attempting to reconcile the two bodies. Music is what links the histories of the black laborer and the black performer together. Music contains an affect and political resonance that cannot be communicated through words alone. The presence of Belafonte with the black laborers also reinforces that Belafonte comes from a community of laborers. A criticism leveled at Poitier’s screen roles was that the absence of any other black actors in his films made it appear as if Poitier had no community or history. Not only does Belafonte/Boyeur belong to a community of black people in the film but also that community is represented as a laboring one. There is another sequence in the film that uses music as critique. Late in the film Maxwell Fleury makes an election speech to a labor union that is drowned out by the protest strains of steel drums. Maxwell makes several attempts to speak to the audience of black laborers but is interrupted by a calypso band (the one Gibson, the black lawyer who commented on the original script, objected to.) In this scene Fleury and Boyeur essentially face off on what it means to be black. After a few exchanges between Fleury and the calypso band, Boyeur intervenes and asks the crowd to quiet down; telling them, “We’ll exercise our right to vote and now let him use his right to speak.” Fleury then begins his speech to the laborers. He tells them: You’ve cut my sugar cane and harvested my . . . I’ve not known you – you’ve known me. I’ve passed you in the sheds – and 127 you’ve just been a face or a number in a book. Shadows to be feared. I’ve now lived in the two worlds of Santa Marta. I know they cannot exist if they are cut off from each other in suspicion and fear. Fleury, having found out his great-grandmother was partially black now proclaims some empathy with the black laborers. And Boyeur retorts, Does he think the only issue here is one of color? In your heart don’t you still think of us as slaves? As a stupid ignorant people? Who loves them the best? Who feels for them the most? . . . Now you may answer Mr. Fleury. Boyeur, then, becomes a supporter of the democratic process, much as Belafonte was called upon to do in U.S. Culture. Lisa McGill points out that, though Boyeur gives the floor to Fleury, the act actually asserts Boyeur’s power. Belafonte’s Boyeur is a commanding presence and James Mason’s Fleury practically cowers, stooping over the table he stands behind as he speaks. At the same time that he upholds the democratic process, Boyeur complicates the notion of race, or more specifically skin color. It is not important that Fleury shares black blood with the audience; his position in the economic system is a more important determinant of his relation with the black islanders. Boyeur’s vision of race wins over Fleury’s. Boyeur’s body seems confident and strong. He is dressed in short sleeves and the form fitting slacks that were a staple of Belafonte’s concert attire. His body contrasts with Fleury’s/ Mason’s weak body which is totally covered in a suit. As Boyeur continues to criticize him, Fleury stoops over and then covers his ears as the 128 crowd shouts approval at Boyeur’s words. When he can’t take it anymore, Fleury stops up his ears, bends his head, and then admits his disgust with the black laborers, shouting, “You are right. I never wanted to be one of you!” He effectively proves Fleury’s argument. It is true that Boyeur distinguishes himself from the laborers at the same time he expresses his solidarity with them. When he asks, “who loves them the best?” and “who feels for them the most?” he betrays a patriarchal feeling toward the group. But, like the scene in which he engages in the call and response song with the island laborers, I would argue that Boyeur/Belafonte is insisting on the inseparability of his power and the condition of the black laborers. This is a moment, like the “Lead Man Holler” sequence, in which Belafonte is closest to his star persona: the black American who is a symbol of racial progress, suitable to represent the U.S. at the World’s Fair. But, at the same time he is expressing the values of democracy, he is insisting on the importance of the colonial history and the economic inequality that persists. Belafonte did a lot of advocacy work on behalf of labor. His mother was a domestic and his stepfather was a janitor with whom he worked before he became a successful singer. Belafonte used his stardom to shed light on labor issues in ways I’ve discussed in the first chapter. Belafonte does appear in a few of the narrative sequences in the film and when he does he also threatens narrative coherence. He is only a supporting 129 player but he participates in two very awkward exchanges with his love interest Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine.) The conversations between Fontaine and Belafonte bring the narrative to a screeching halt. In the first scene, they visit Mavis’ family’s plantation and we hear strains of “Island in the Sun” in the background. Mavis tells Boyeur, “This plantation used to belong to my family. It was destroyed during a slave uprising in 1843, during French rule. I wonder what could have caused it.” Boyeur understandably has little to say in response, just as we in the audience have a hard time understanding why Mavis can’t see why the slaves would have revolted. We are tempted to ask, “What part of ‘they were slaves’ do you not understand?” To her credit, Fontaine delivers her lines with a notable lack of affect. The film points toward but can’t articulate or fully acknowledge the violence of slavery and the revolutionary demands for freedom it inspired. The scene picks up again when Mavis asks Boyeur “Do you know what happened to the owners?” David nods but says nothing. We never hear the full narrative of the slave uprising nor exactly what happened to the owners in the film but in Alex Waugh’s novel we are told that the slaves beheaded the plantation owners during the revolt. Instead of delving into the details of that history, the film has Mavis and Boyeur have the following exchange: Mavis: That was more than a hundred years ago and now you are here and I’m here. Do you still feel like anyone whose skin is different than yours is an enemy? Boyeur: Do you think I do? Mavis: You hate Maxwell don’t you? You think of him as an enemy. 130 Boyeur: I think of him as a snob; as an arrogant plantation owner. Mavis wants to explain the antagonism between Maxwell and Boyeur as an expression of universal race hatred but Boyeur locates their antagonism in the specific labor history of the island, in Maxwell’s position as a plantation owner and Boyeur’s position as a laborer. Mavis then walks away from Boyeur and stands against a rock. We hear strains of “Island in the Sun” and see a black laboring couple: the man leads a donkey cart and the woman carries fruit on her head. Boyeur goes over to Mavis and it looks like they will kiss but they don’t. (What is missing is probably the kissing scene the PCA asked the filmmakers to remove.) The contrast between the two couples is striking. The black couple share race and class positions; their coupling involves mutual laboring. Mavis and Boyeur are different from the black couple because they are from different races and classes: Boyeur identifies with the black laborers and Mavis identifies with the colonial plantation owners. Ultimately, the film makes an argument that Mavis and Boyeur can’t be together because they can’t reconcile their racial and class positions. Unlike many interracial romance dramas in which couples can’t overcome racial differences that are abstracted from class hierarchies, this couple’s differences are shown to be caused by a complex combination of racial, class, and gender relations. Mavis’ inability to understand the slaves’ desire for freedom and the film’s unwillingness to tell the story of that violence, let alone represent it, is in 131 keeping with the dearth of representations of slave revolts in American popular culture. It also supports the film’s presentation of Americans as representatives of democracy and modernity. The journalist Bradshaw is depicted as an ambassador of the new world who visits Santa Marta in order to bring back to U.S. readers primitive stories of violence and desire on an island hampered by its colonial past. Bradshaw’s revelation of the Fleurys’ tainted blood sets off a chain of events that enables the black laborers to assert political control. In short, the democratic scrutiny of the American brings the black islanders closer to autonomy. The notion that the black islanders would need to look to outsiders for inspiration is disingenuous. The very slave revolt that the film is reluctant to examine closely would be a more likely inspiration. Caribbeans, in fact, have a spectacular history of revolution as evidenced by the Haitian revolution. The specter of slave revolts is a structured absence in the film. In thinking through how interracial relationships are represented in the film, it is necessary to consider what the film can or will represent and what it can’t or doesn’t seem able to represent. Psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on how texts “both silence and articulate, suppress and memorialize, disavow and assert” is useful for this project. 32 Island in the Sun manages to represent colonial relations between blacks and whites but is not able to show how the U.S. participated in colonial exploitation or how black West Indians revolted against colonialism. Sibylle Fischer writes that C.L.R. James turned to 132 the Haitian revolution in order to examine black Caribbean antecedents for the diasporic revolutionary movements of the 1950s and 1960s. 33 In addition, James and Fischer use the Haitian context to demonstrate how the economic system of slavery was not in opposition to capitalism – as U.S. progressive narratives of histories argue – but that the systems shared things in common. James writes, that the Caribbean plantation was an intrinsically “modern system” and the slaves led “from the very start . . . a life that was in its essence a modern life.” 34 Though slaves practiced subsistence agriculture by growing their own food that was not offered on the marketplace, the slave plantation exhibited the trends of migration from remote regions, stratification of labor, and large-scale industrial practices, which were consistent with capitalism. 35 While the film suggests that the slave past has repercussions on the present it also suggests that black Santa Martans will be helped into the freedom of modernity under the watchful eyes and care of U.S. North Americans. This ignores the U.S.’s own colonial occupations of Caribbean nations and the spectacular slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, which is a more likely yet underexplored inspiration for Caribbean and African Independence movements. Fischer argues that in this way the Europeans claim modernity for themselves only. 36 The film exposes the European investment in colonialism but reserves modernity for Americans by presenting Americans as somehow separate from the colonial problems and 133 refusing to fully acknowledge how the “modern” desire for freedom was exhibited by revolutionary slaves. A second strained conversation between Mavis and Boyeur takes place at the end of the film. After the other, happier, interracial couples leave on a plane to live in the liberal mother country, the film goes back to Boyeur and Mavis who sit underneath a palm tree on the island watching the plane fly overhead. Mavis, hinting at the fact that the two interracial couples that have embarked for England feature a white woman and black man, asks Boyeur if, when it’s a white woman and black man, “When it works the other way around, does it make any difference?” He answers that on the island it does. She suggests that they could live in another country and he replies, “My skin is my country.” He goes on to admit that while black women like Margaret may be appreciated for their exoticness in England, he, as a black man, would not be so appreciated. When Mavis urges him to ignore the ignorance of others, he counters that it isn’t so much the racism of others that would be a problem but that “inevitably” there would be a “night that she’d forget herself and call me a nigger.” Mavis is angered by his accusations and the two proceed to have a conversation that is full of accusations followed by retreats and starts and stops. After he accuses her of harboring unvoiced racism she says “you can’t possibly mean that” and he unconvincingly responds, “No, I don’t.” When she accuses him of being more interested in securing power for himself than helping “his people” he responds, 134 “you can’t mean that” and she, devoid of affect responds, “No I don’t, you’re right and I’m wrong. I’m wrong and you’re right.” He asks “and that’s the end?” and she responds, “Yes, that’s the end” and walks away. He starts to follow her but then she stops and he stops. She finally walks off and he stays and begins walking on the beach in a sequence that echoes the way he walked on the beach in the film’s introductory sequence. This last scene points to many of the tensions Belafonte’s presence in the film ignites. Fontaine essentially asks is it different for black men and white women? Is Caribbean culture, British culture and, the American moviegoing audience as comfortable with the pairing of a white woman and black man as they seem to be with the black woman/white man couples that have embarked for the mother county? This question, of course, points to concerns about casting Belafonte in the film with a white woman as his love interest. The casting of Belafonte was surely meant to give the film a West Indian resonance; though it also blurred the lines between U.S. and West Indian meanings in ways I’ve discussed previously. Belafonte’s participation was also crucial because of his multimedia appeal. He wrote two songs for the film, which became quite popular (“Island in the Sun” and “Lead Man Holler”) and these, as well as an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show where he sang the songs, helped publicize the film. As I mentioned before, Belafonte’s importance was confirmed by the fact that he was paid more than any other actor on the 135 film. Though James Mason and Joan Fontaine were bigger film stars than he, their stardom was on the wane in the 1950s. Also, as I discussed above, film’s place as a popular leisure activity was in question in the ‘50s so producers turned to stars of other mediums to bring in audiences. In short, the film needs Belafonte’s multimedia appeal: he can bring record buying fans to the movies and advertise the film via the television and music industries. The final scene demonstrates, however, that the film can’t fully use him. The film needs his multimedia appeal and his stamp of authenticity but he can’t participate in the logical trajectory of the Hollywood romance plot. The inability of the film to use him fully, however, has an interesting effect on the narrative. Mavis and Boyeur end up having a fairly honest conversation – in fact one of the most honest conversations I’ve seen between a man and woman onscreen – about the racial and sexual politics of their relationship. But, just as in the scene on the plantation, the characters’ conversation stops and starts, disrupting the narrative flow. As soon as Boyeur makes a declaration, Mavis asks if he means it and he says no, disavowing what he says. And when Mavis critiques Boyeur, he asks her if she means it and she says no. The scene is a series of stops and starts and declarations and disavowals. At the end the narrative comes to a standstill and the two go back to their respective communities. Of course, Boyeur can’t join Mavis and the white islanders for the 136 practical reason that their union is not possible in the racial climate of the time – the MPAA objected let alone white segregationists. The film could have ended Mavis and Boyeur’s relationship in other ways. One or both of the characters could have found more appropriate partners or the filmmakers could have killed one or both, as many interracial narratives did. However, the filmmakers let the relationship play out and let the production code and societal limitations be represented on screen. The scene itself is distinct from other parts of the film: there is no underscore (heard in the rest of the film); we simply hear the sounds of the island. The narrative reason given for their inability to be a couple isn’t lack of desire on their part. But, in a line that is invented for the film (it is not in Waugh’s book) Boyeur tells Mavis “Sooner or later you would call me a nigger.” In other words, in the midst of desire, racism would still persist – the two can coexist and are, perhaps, even mutually constitutive. I am not arguing that the film has a radical politics. Susan Courtney has written about how Belafonte hated the film and was censored by the filmmakers from even mentioning the excised interracial kiss between he and Fontaine in his nightclub act. 37 Instead I am suggesting that the very limitations imposed upon Belafonte by the film producers and the PCA allow for another, more complex, representation of interracial desire. Michelle Stephens argues that the cultural work Belafonte performs in the film is as a black figure who both forgives 137 whites for their role in U.S. race relations and their occupation of the Caribbean. 38 I believe that Belafonte occupies a more complicated place. Belafonte is available to us as an object to be looked at, however, he also makes us look at the economic and racial inequality that most Hollywood narratives cover over. Despite the image of Belafonte as the ideal Negro, promulgated by the state department and cultivated by mainstream civil rights groups, there is in this and other Belafonte characters a kernel of unwillingness to integrate. His character can’t be assimilated because he is always waiting for white racism to rear its ugly head. While Stephens sees Belafonte as offering forgiveness, I believe that that forgiveness is conditional: it’s as if he is saying, “I will forgive the U.S. if we can have an honest discussion about slavery and continued economic and racial discrimination.” This unwillingness aligns him with the masses of black people on the margins, like the laborers of Santa Marta. Their presence as laborers in an unequal system reminds us that slavery is a trauma that still informs present day political structures – the unequal racial, economic and gender hierarchies evident in slavery still persist. Without fully addressing the structures created by slavery we can’t recognize the structures that persist. And in the end, because Boyeur can’t have this conversation with Mavis or the American moviegoing audience, Boyeur goes back to the Santa Marta laborers not with the white islanders. 138 Belafonte was not happy with Island in the Sun. In a New York Times article, however, he admitted that “without Island in the Sun there would not have been Odds Against Tomorrow.” 39 Though Belafonte declared “the film ‘stinks’” 40 he went on to say that the success of Island in the Sun, along with the success of Carmen Jones, proved to producers and studios that Belafonte and black content were marketable. In another article he elaborates: When I read ‘Island in the Sun’ I knew it was not a good book or movie script. But in my opinion it had potential to be an economic success. It would weaken arguments against future artistic ventures in that area. It turned out to be one of 20 th Century Fox’s big grossers. I don’t think there could have been an ‘Odds Against Tomorrow” if there had not been an ‘Island in the Sun.’ 41 In the next sections I will look at what he is able to do in The World the Flesh and the Devil and Odds Against Tomorrow. HarBel Productions Belafonte blamed the elements of ‘50s filmmaking that I outlined in the beginning of this chapter for the shortcomings of Island in the Sun. In a New York Times interview, he complained about the high costs of making movies which include acquiring the rights to a proven literary property or play, paying stars and directors and giving them part of the gross, and special effects – all properties of ‘50s filmmaking. The article goes on to say, “Most aggravating of all is that to get the monster its huge profits, it requires a script that offends nobody,” he added. This conviction that as long as he remains with a major studio he would act in nothing up to his standard led him to join the parade 139 of independent companies. He formed HarBel in 1957 and agreed to produce six movies in as many years for United Artists starring himself. 42 The move represented an expansion of his parent company Belafonte Business Enterprises, which included his TV and concert production firms. In a 1959 Cue Magazine article Belafonte expressed his hopes for HarBel and his interest in making his own films: Why then bother to make movies? “I’ll tell you why,” said Harry earnestly. ‘”There have been too many films and plays picturing Negro stereotypes, and too few picturing him [sic] as he is. It’s ridiculous to have to keep hammering the point – but beneath his black skin the Negro is no different than his white brother. Or, let’s put it the other way: Beneath his white skin the white man is no different than the Negro. Does that make it clearer?” 43 Belafonte expresses his desire to make films that avoid stereotypes. He uses language that resembles the colorblind rhetoric that he employed in his examination of television images but questions the notion that white is normative by stating the equality between black and white men in one way and then reversing it. He goes on to elaborate upon his vision in a way that distinguishes it from the familiar colorblind rhetoric: he is interested in making films that don’t so much ignore race (the logical result of colorblind ideology) but films that look at the particularity of black life. He tells the Cue interviewer: I’d like to bridge the gap between the current crop of drama of interracial conflict, and simple straightforward dramas of comprehension – written around the everyday problems of Negroes as people. It’s as simple as that. I’d like to make films that show us just as we are – as we work, struggle, succeed, fail, live, love, and die. 140 No film has yet pictured the contribution of Negroes to the war – what they did, how they fought, how they died. I think it’s important that it be known that the Negro also contributed to the greatness of this country. He helped build it, helped win its freedom, helped preserve the Union. He fought to make the world ‘safe for democracy’ in the First World War and helped save it from destruction in the second. He battled up and down Korea, and now he’s all over the world doing his full share of whatever his country demands of him. We have our scientists, our artists, lawyers, judges, public officials, and fine Americans. The Negro doesn’t need to apologize, he doesn’t require an apology, and he asks for none. Just don’t ignore him, that’s all. 44 In spite of the clichéd language, Belafonte presents a rather complicated blueprint for black film representation. He is interested in making films in which black life is emphasized or presented as the norm. He is interested in interracial dramas 45 – in how blacks interact with whites – but he is interested in examining these interactions from the perspective of the black man, instead of from the position of the white man, which he implies is the defacto position of mainstream cinema. It’s notable that he repeatedly conflates “the Negro” with black men. Indeed, HarBel told stories that featured black men but not black women. HarBel’s films examined how black men dealt with white men and white women. There are industrial reasons for this, of course – his films are to star Belafonte and I’m sure this enabled him to secure the distribution deals he had with MGM and United Artists. The films forge new ground in their 141 presentation of black masculinity but are noticeably silent or even distressing in their depiction of black femininity. Newspaper articles, press releases, and production files suggest that HarBel had ambitious intentions. It distributed its first film The World the Flesh and the Devil through MGM and then signed a distribution deal with United Artists for six more films. A New York critic, Irene Thirer, reported on HarBel’s production plans: Belafonte plans six productions, to be released by United Artists, with Negro-white casts, which will supply Negro artists on all levels and with artistic expression not solely directed toward Negro-white conflict. Among these are “The Life and Death of Alexander Pushkin;” a film about the Haitian revolution; a Civil War story to be called “The Brothers”; a film about the Negro and his problems in the second World War – his worth and his struggle with fascism; and a light comedy. “I’ve always wanted to emote a la Cary Grant,” Belafonte confided. 46 Though there is archival documentation of work on some of these films, HarBel only released two films in the 1950s: The World, The Flesh, and The Devil and Odds Against Tomorrow. Neither were box office successes and HarBel didn’t release any films between the 1959 release date of both pictures and the 1970 release date of The Angel Levine. In a 1984 Washington Post interview, 47 Belafonte said that after making The World, The Flesh and the Devil and Odds Against Tomorrow he learned that “Blacks will go to white pictures, [and] very few whites will go to black pictures” and that it was impossible to make the independent films he wanted to make because Hollywood studios were not 142 interested in supporting that kind of content. He stopped making movies and started focusing on political work because he believed that he needed to create an audience for his films by changing “American attitudes” through civil rights movement work. For a brief period, however, Belafonte believed there was an audience for his films. In my examination of both The World, the Flesh and the Devil and Odds Against Tomorrow I will look at how Belafonte uses the “bankable” topic of interracial relationships to put black perspectives first and to explore the social, political, and psychological repercussions of the U.S. and International movements for civil rights and decolonization. Belafonte couldn’t sustain the kind of work he wanted to in the film industry; however, these films offer a unique view of black life not on display in mainstream filmmaking in the period. What Does the Black Man Want?: The World, the Flesh and the Devil In The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) Belafonte negotiates being the lone black man among whites, similar to Poitier’s usual film predicament. In this case, however, it is the end of the world and Belafonte’s character must learn to coexist with the two white survivors of a nuclear holocaust. I’ll begin with a synopsis of the film. Belafonte plays Ralph Burton, a Pennsylvania mining engineer who is in a cave working when the end of the world comes in the form of an atomic bomb. Ralph is trapped in the cave for a number of days before he emerges to find the streets deserted and learns of the 143 atomic explosion. He makes his way to New York City where he establishes a home. He uses a generator to get electricity into an apartment building he takes up residence in and loots stores for furnishings, canned food, and even companions: he takes two mannequins from a department store window home with him. Ralph keeps busy during the day by fixing up the apartment building he lives in and saving books and paintings from the New York museums and libraries he lives near. He also maintains hope that there are fellow survivors in other parts of the world so he fixes up a radio transistor and faithfully makes daily shortwave broadcasts in an effort to contact others. There is another survivor in New York City, Sarah Crandall, a white woman who watches Ralph from the shadows. She finally approaches him when she mistakenly believes he has committed suicide. The two become friends and she tries to establish a romantic relationship with him but he resists due (apparently) to their racial differences. A third survivor turns up later: Ben Thacker, a white man who arrives in Manhattan by boat. Ben is sick and Ralph and Sarah must nurse him back to health. Once Ben is healthy, he spends his days trying to woo Sarah. Sarah resists him because she really wants Ralph but she eventually gets frustrated and almost accepts Ben’s propositions. Finally she just explodes in anger at both men. Ben becomes frustrated with Sarah’s indecision and asks Ralph to leave them alone. When Ralph refuses, Ben challenges Ralph to a duel and the two run around Manhattan shooting guns at each other. Ralph ends up at 144 the United Nations and, inspired by the anti-war inscription on the building, approaches Ben without his gun. Ben reluctantly gives up his gun as well and Sarah approaches both of them. Ralph says he is going to leave them both in order to continue his work “saving whatever he can” but Sarah asks him not to go and takes his hand. They both walk toward Ben and Sarah takes Ben’s hand. The movie ends with the three of them walking in the empty city; a title that reads “the beginning” appears and the movie fades to black. On the surface, Belafonte’s Ralph Burton seems to embody many of the stereotypes that Belafonte and others criticized Poitier for playing. He has some of the “supernegro” qualities Poitier’s characters often had. He is incredibly, even painfully, industrious, economical, and moral. Ralph Burton is an enormously intelligent man. He manages to get lights on in his and Sarah’s apartment houses, sets up a telephone system between the two buildings, and utilizes a radio station to make contact with anyone else in the world who might be alive. He is a Pennsylvania mining engineer who, when faced with the end of the world, becomes quite diligent at living day to day. He leaves the small Pennsylvania town he worked in and takes a motorboat to New York City where he gets the city back up and running. In a nod to Belafonte’s own multimedia accomplishments, Ralph takes over several communication industries. He commandeers a New York Radio Station, WKYL: he listens to its news tapes to understand what caused the end of the world and uses its equipment to make his 145 shortwave broadcasts. When Sarah emerges, Ralph restores part of the telephone system so that he and Sarah can communicate to each other from their respective apartments. For Sarah’s birthday, Ralph uses a newspaper printing press to print a one-page newspaper with a headline announcing “Sarah Crandall Has Birthday. New York City Plans Huge Celebration.” He scrupulously avoids making any sexual advances toward Sarah (while Ben, in contrast, begins making sexual advances toward her almost as soon as he is conscious); he even trembles when he cuts her hair. And, as a film reviewer pointed out, he only takes what he needs from the empty New York stores: he refrains from looting the luxury items available in an empty New York, save for a ring he takes from Harry Winston’s for Sarah’s birthday gift. 48 In short, Ralph avoids acting in any manner that might invite critique. He cannot possibly be classified as a black stereotype: he is neither the lazy coon nor the licentious buck. Ralph exhibits many of the psychological attributes of the black man described by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks. 49 In his psychoanalytic treatise, Fanon describes the state of black male identity in the post-colonial nation, which he says is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the condition of black American men in the post-slavery United States. Fanon describes post-colonial black men as people who, when they comes into contact with whites, “want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.” 50 Perhaps Ralph 146 is so uncertain about his own worthiness that he “insist[s] that attention be paid not to the color of his skin but to the force of his intellect.” 51 Ralph seems pathologically committed to running around the city to prove he’s smart and industrious while Sarah and Ben deal with more material and physical desires. 52 Ralph is also preoccupied with archiving the dominant culture. In addition to taking over New York communication industries, he saves the artifacts of mainstream culture. He spends his days going to the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other cultural institutions to save books, paintings, and films. Ralph’s dedication to the preservation of the dominant culture’s heritage is difficult to understand. It isn’t clear what Ralph is archiving. He might be a character who has completely internalized the gaze and therefore the values of Western Europeans or someone who won’t forget the history of colonization. Rather than reading this film as another timid exploration of interracial relationships (though it is that), I’m interested in the way the film explores Fanon’s preoccupations: can a black man understand himself outside of his relationship to white people? In the beginning of the film, even while Ralph is the only body walking through the empty city, he imagines he is being looked at. On one of his first days walking around New York City, Ralph feels the eyes of someone on him. He shouts to the sky, “Come out. Come out. You’re crazy. Why are you hiding? You are staring at me. I can feel you there. Come out.” The next shot reveals 147 that Sarah IS in fact looking at Ralph from the shadows of the downtown buildings but she doesn’t reveal herself to him until she thinks he’s thrown himself off a building to commit suicide. When Sarah finally makes herself known to Ralph, she keeps trying to draw him into a sexual relationship but he is reluctant. The film doesn’t encourage the audience to imagine that Ralph is gay – they finally have him express his attraction to her in the midst of the film – but one can imagine that he’s interested in exploring who he is without being defined by his relationship to white people. Indeed, once Ben, a white man, comes into the picture Ralph seems intent on/content with marrying Sarah to Ben; but, Sarah won’t let go of Ralph. She asks him why he won’t act on his evident (at least to her) sexual desire and his response is that the atomic holocaust didn’t destroy racial issues. 53 Ralph doesn’t get to explore who he is without relation to whites for long. He is alone for the first third of the film but then Sarah and later Ben make themselves known to Ralph. Though Sarah and Ben dub him “the mayor of New York City” because of his command of the city’s technology and culture, Ralph continually makes reference to his more powerless role in the racial hierarchies of the pre-atomic city. Not only in the scene with Sarah I discussed above, but in several scenes later in the film. For example, when he invites Sarah to celebrate her birthday at a downtown club, Ralph acts as doorman, maitre d', waiter, and entertainer but refuses Sarah’s invitation to join her at the 148 table with this declaration: “Mr. Burton is not permitted to sit with the customers.” His comment is a mark of his internalization of the gaze – the dominant notion of his inequality – but it is also a weapon against Sarah. Sarah feels rebuked by his comments – she is clearly hurt by them. Ralph may suffer from the psychological effects of racism but his actions cause suffering for Sarah – and, judging from the reviews of the film, which criticized it for dealing with race at all, many reviewers felt wounded by Ralph and the film’s insistence that a Nuclear holocaust wouldn’t wipe away racism and race consciousness. Bosley Crowther expressed the views of many reviewers when he wrote: The racial conflict is downright puny when they do get around to it. Preoccupation with such a has-been problem in this crisis is a little absurd. 54 All three characters’ behavior exhibits traces of the racial hierarchies in existence before the atomic bomb. Sarah insists on a relationship with Ralph and downplays racial difference, though she has clearly unconsciously internalized racism. Ralph brings up their racial difference in ways I’ve discussed earlier. Ben assumes that once he arrives on the scene he has dibs on Sarah, presumably because he’s a white man. Though reviewers felt that this plot was silly – they believed racial difference would no longer matter after a nuclear holocaust -- the film insists that these differences don’t go away. Of course, this is partially due to the fact that the film was made and released in 1950s Hollywood. Its inclusion of a black character who insists on the permanence of racial 149 antagonism prevents the filmmakers from having to fully explore a romance between a black man and white woman. Belafonte has said that he wanted more romance between himself and Inger Stevens but that the distributor MGM wouldn’t let him. In fact, he walked off the set for a few days when he realized that this film, like Island in the Sun, wouldn’t develop a romance between a black man and white woman. 55 I argue, however, that like Island in the Sun, the limitations allow the film to convey a more complex view of interracial relationships from the psychological perspective of a black man. Belafonte’s apartment woes Ralph stores the cultural artifacts he collects in a luxury apartment building he lives in. We know he lives in a luxury apartment because of a sign that appears in front of the building which reads “Two bedroom apartment – Exclusive Agent.” This sign would be especially meaningful for those who followed Belafonte’s housing search in the latter part of 1958. An October 1958 NY Post article entitled “Belafonte: The Doors Slammed Shut” chronicles the Belafontes’ inability to rent an apartment in midtown New York City. Belafonte and his wife wanted to move from an apartment in the West ‘70s to an apartment in midtown Manhattan but experienced the housing discrimination that countless less famous black men and women experienced in the U.S. The article states, “The Negro singer returned late Friday from a triumphant tour of 150 Europe to New York, the city he likes to call ‘the most liberal center of the U.S.’” It goes on to quote Belafonte: “The turn-downs were very systematic,” said Belafonte, who’s outgrown his two-room apartment in the West 70s. “Apartments would be available till it was time to sign a lease. Then when it was discovered the apartment was for me something would happen – a deposit by another tenant had been forgotten or a partner had promised it to his cousin – all kinds of shenanigans.” “The awful part is that some of the people involved belonged to organizations with the highest ideals of human existence – the professed liberals. And they were so terribly regretful.” 56 Belafonte’s apartment search began after he returned from the world tour that included his appearance at the Brussels Worlds Fair. On that tour, as I’ve discussed in the first chapter, Belafonte was promoted as an emblem of the U.S.’s commitment to racial equality. In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a rave review of Belafonte’s World’s Fair performance for the New York Post, offered to buy a building with Belafonte, which he could in turn sublease. 57 He refused; wanting instead to document his troubles and eventually bring a lawsuit against the perpetrators for violating the Browns Barkley Isaacs Bill, which outlawed discrimination in private housing. A November New York Post article reported that the Belafontes were finally offered an apartment to lease by a lower West End Management company. Belafonte, the article reported, still planned on filing discrimination charges: “His attorneys have been working with both the American Jewish Congress and the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing on Belafonte’s house-hunting experiences.” 58 151 In interviews about his housing troubles, Belafonte emphasized the fact that he was experiencing discrimination in a Northern city (not the South) that was supposed to be a bastion of liberal thinking people. He notes in the October New York Post article that some of the very people who denied him housing sat on the boards of liberal organizations. This is an important backdrop for the film. Though Sarah and Ralph are the only two survivors they (and we) know for the bulk of the picture, Ralph resists Sarah’s advances. There are many reasons why this might be possible. Ralph could be gay. But, unlike Odds Against Tomorrow, the film doesn’t encourage this reading because Ralph eventually confesses his desire for Sarah. The film suggests that Ralph is a slave (pun intended) to racial propriety and doesn’t trust Sarah’s avowals of liberal ideas regarding race. When Sarah asks Ralph to cut her hair he does so reluctantly and nervously, apparently he is unnerved at being so close to her. She challenges him to couple with her by telling him, “It’s taking too long for you to accept things Ralph. This is the world we live in. We’re alone. We have to go on from there.” When Ralph feigns ignorance of her meaning they have the following exchange: Sarah: You know me well enough to be honest with me. Ralph: Don’t push me. I’ll be so honest it will burn you. Sarah: I know what you are if that’s what you’re trying to remind me. Ralph: That’s it all right. If you’re squeamish about words then I’m colored. And if you face facts I’m a Negro. And if you’re a polite southerner then I’m a nigra. And I’m a nigger if you’re not. 152 Ralph implicates Sarah in the racism of the desecrated civilization. When she insists that she harbors no prejudice, Ralph reminds her of a phrase she tossed off in an earlier conversation in the film: “I’m free white and 21.” Ralph tells her, “A little while ago you said I’m free white and 21. That didn’t mean anything to you. Just an expression you’ve heard for a thousand times. Well to me it was an arrow in my guts.” Sarah, in other words, is a liberal who bears some of the same racist sensibilities Belafonte was subjected to in his New York housing search. Sarah looks ashamed at hearing her comments repeated back to her and asks Ralph to forgive her because she knows he’s “a fine decent man.” Ralph replies, “In that world we came from you wouldn’t know that. You wouldn’t even know me. Why should the world fall down to prove that I am what I am? That there’s nothing wrong with what I am?” Swords Into Plowshares The filmmakers, of course, were probably also uneasy about presenting an interracial romance. Just like Island in the Sun, the film flirts with and then runs away from the possibility. Both films express desire for and anxiety about interracial unity. The movie frames the atomic destruction as a result of the failure of a utopian international unity. When Ralph goes to the New York newspaper office to find something that will explain why everyone has disappeared, he comes across the following headline: “UN retaliates for use of atomic poison.” If the UN’s mandate is to “maintain international peace and 153 security” 59 then the movie shows what happens when/if the UN fails. The film never makes it clear who or what country is responsible for dropping the bomb but it expresses a Cold War anxiety over the destruction that could result from international conflict. The ending of the film in which the black man walks hand in hand with his white brother and sister mirrors 1950s and ‘60s’ U.S. efforts to create a unified front among blacks and whites so their civil struggles wouldn’t leave the nation vulnerable to Soviet attack. The first third of the film represents how a black man functions alone in the world, the second third looks at how he adjusts to the presence of the white woman, and the last third focuses on how he adjusts to the presence of the white man. Publicity material for the film plays up the story of male rivalry. One ad contains the headline “Which one Gets the Last Girl on Earth?” 60 Another features the copy, Talk about something NEW on the screen. It’s the most unusual story ever told. What would You do if You were this girl alone with two men? Who wins when these two stalk each other through empty streets, over roof-tops with rifles in hand and lust in their hearts? 61 Interestingly, the second ad puts the audience in the position of the desired woman, rather than either of the two men. Though both ads sell the rivalry between Ben and Ralph, with Sarah as the passive prize, in the film it is Sarah who won’t give up on Ralph and urges Ralph to fight for her. In fact, it is possible to read Ralph’s rejection of Sarah as a refusal to be the object of desire 154 of a white woman; another rejection of being a black object subject to the white gaze. Ralph does finally fight for Sarah, but his motives aren’t entirely clear. He may decide that he truly desires Sarah or he may be acting to frustrate Ben’s desire – to refuse to submit to Ben’s demand that Ralph leave Sarah alone. In some of the final sequences of the film, Ralph and Ben run around New York City, fighting for Sarah and brandishing guns. Ralph is the one who puts down his arms first. He does so when he arrives at the United Nations and reads the following inscription from Isaiah 2:4 on the building: They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:3-4, King James Version). 62 Ralph enacts the ideals of the United Nations in order create peace among the few people left on earth. The image of the black Ralph and white Ben fighting over the white Sarah reflects the difficulty of separating racial and sexual antagonism. The filmmakers envisioned the story as a fairly straightforward civil rights parable. The American Film Institute Catalog describes the producers’ intentions: According to MacDougall, Sol Siegel purchased the rights to the novel in 1956 and decided to marry concerns about racial tensions to those in the novel about survivors in a world nearly destroyed . . .. “Siegel felt strongly, as do many historians, that these two problems are interrelated and that we must solve both in order to solve either.” 63 155 However, the spectacle of Ralph, Ben, and Sarah expressing their desire and antagonism for their fellow survivors, offers a small glimpse of the complicated psychosexual implications of colonial racism that Fanon explores in his treatise. Fanon writes, “If one wants to understand the racial situation psychoanalytically not from a universal viewpoint but as it is experienced by individual consciousness, considerable importance must be given to sexual phenomena.” 64 Though the filmmakers’ remarks indicate they envisioned the film as a universal statement about black-white racial relations, the film’s inability to follow through on either heterosexual romantic coupling makes room for a reading that considers things from the perspective of the black male psyche. Indeed, while the ads I described above insist on reading the film through the lens of heterosexual coupling from the point of view of a desired woman, the film actually builds up to the tortured exchange between Ben and Ralph. As one reviewer pointed out, the film leaves us with the confusing image of Sarah walking down the city streets with Ben and Ralph walking hand in hand with her. What is the film suggesting about future couplings? Ben and Ralph have laid down their arms but it isn’t clear how they will work out the complicated gender, sexual, and racial relations that existed before and after the atomic bomb. 65 Ralph is obsessed with preserving the library and art materials housed in New York cultural institutions but one of the few that we actually see him hang 156 up in his apartment is a painting of a black man shackled to a slave ship. Though his preservation of cultural artifacts initially strikes the audience as deference to white cultural values this moment suggests that Ralph may be cataloging the remnants of the past for information on how to create a different future. The film seems to be saying that an important part of the cultural legacy of the pre- atomic world is a racism that is so enduring and fundamental that it would still be an important factor in a post nuclear world. 66 When Ralph puts down his rifle in front of the UN inscription, he decides to pursue the UN’s goals of peace and security. His movement goes from reminding Sarah about pre-atomic racial antagonism to espousing racial harmony seems abrupt. 67 Ralph’s change of heart comes quickly but mirrors the rhetorical movements of Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon spends the bulk of his book detailing the violent effects of colonialism on the black male psyche but ends the book imagining an exploration of black identity that works beyond the trauma of the past. Fanon seems to be arguing that a nation can’t act as if colonialism never happened but that it can work through the trauma in order to establish new relations between blacks and whites. Ralph makes the same trajectory. The film, however, is never able to fully imagine Ralph outside of his relationship to whites. It begins promisingly by presenting Ralph as the universal man – the lone survivor -- in the beginning of the film but he becomes 157 particular man once Sarah and then Ben come into the picture. He is restored to his position as universal man at the end of the film when he obeys the UN mandate but only in the company of other, white characters. In the beginning, the film seems comfortable presenting the black man as universal man – suitable for repopulating the earth with the white woman -- but by the end, the film is so uneasy with that notion that it has to have him leave with Sarah under the watchful eye of Ben. This appears to be Belafonte’s view of the film. He criticized it for being unable to fully explore romantic and antagonistic relationships between blacks and whites and framed his critique as an indictment of what the film is unable to do relative to television: he described the film as “a preposterously paltering retreat from racial issues that any TV viewer had come to seen as urgent.” 68 He goes on to comment, I guess what happened to me on The World, the Flesh and the Devil was my first real exposure to Hollywood studio chicanery. The original script was written with greater honesty for two white guys, and the metaphor was laborer versus capitalist. But then they said let’s take it to another level, let’s make it racial so it’s a black man versus a white man. 69 Belafonte suggests that the film’s inclusion of a black character prevents it from making any critique of the status quo. It isn’t willing to fully explore a relationship between a black man and white woman or the antagonism between a black man and white man; and its inclusion of a black body distracts it from its original capitalist critique. In his next film, Odds Against Tomorrow, Belafonte 158 and HarBel attempted to more fully explore racial antagonism and class inequality. Odds Against Tomorrow: Problematizing the Black Masculine Ideal According to a 1978 Washington Post Article, Belafonte stormed off the set of The World, The Flesh and the Devil because he objected to MGM’s unwillingness to let HarBel fully explore the relationship between his character and Inger Steven’s. 70 As I mentioned previously, he also objected to the censorship of his romance with Joan Fontaine in Island in the Sun. HarBel produced Odds Against Tomorrow alone in order to “avoid compromises.” 71 Belafonte’s criticism of his previous films’ handling of interracial romantic relationships might lead one to believe that he was invested in representing successful interracial encounters. However, the representation of black/white relations in Odds Against Tomorrow suggests that he was really invested in representations that were more complex, ones that may or may not result in interracial harmony. Odds Against Tomorrow, significantly, doesn’t represent a romantic relationship. Instead, it represents an interracial criminal/business relationship, reluctantly entered into by a black and white man. Odds Against Tomorrow is a film noir that chronicles a bank robbery carried out by three men. Belafonte plays Johnny Ingram, a nightclub singer who is recruited as the third man in a robbery plot. Ed Begley plays David Burke, a former New York City policeman who was imprisoned for taking 159 bribes. He recruits Ingram and a “bigoted Southern tough guy Earl Slater (played by Robert Ryan) to rob a bank with him.” 72 Ingram is a reluctant participant; he is persuaded to go along with the plot when the gangsters he owes money to threaten to hurt his ex-wife and daughter if he doesn’t go in on the plan. The robbers need him because their access to the bank after-hours hinges on Ingram impersonating the black man who delivers coffee to bank employees each night. Though Burke claims he has a foolproof plan for the robbery it goes horribly wrong. The three enter the bank and execute their plan, however, when Burke exits he catches the attention of two policemen who shoot him. Ingram and Slater are unable to get away from the bank because they don’t have keys to the getaway car: the original plan had Ingram holding the keys but at the last minute Slater decides he doesn’t trust a black man with the keys so he tells Burke to hold onto them. Ingram and Slater run away from the bank but are more preoccupied with fighting each other than escaping from the police. They end up at an oil refinery and shoot each other, ignite an oil tank, and die in the fire that ensues. When the police catch up to their charred bodies one policeman asks “Which one is which?” and the other replies “Take your pick.” Belafonte’s Ingram rejects the norms of white heterosexual masculinity. He is a far cry from the many upstanding characters that Poitier played. He is also the antithesis of the family man and capitalist entrepreneur that Belafonte was represented as in the media. He is a nightclub singer, like Belafonte, but his 160 gambling addiction has contributed to the end of his marriage. Ingram’s gambling endangers his wife and child. It prevents him from having enough money to take care of them and it puts them at risk of violence from the gangsters he’s in debt to. His character is also a dandy. When we first see Ingram, he emerges from an expensive sports car and is dressed in a stylish hat, suit, and coat. His stylishness as well as his skin color contrasts with Robert Ryan’s more hardboiled Slater. His dandyism engenders the appreciation of men. On his way to meet Burke for the first time in Burke’s apartment, he rides the apartment elevator with a black elevator attendant. The elevator man looks Ingram over admiringly when he enters the elevator and whistles at him when he exits. Most surprising, however, is that when Ingram goes to the park to meet with the gangster who has given him a loan, one of the gangster’s henchmen flirts with Ingram. In The Celluloid Closet, Vitto Russo includes Odds Against Tomorrow in his list of Hollywood films with gay characters with the following annotation: “Does a homosexual really try to pick up Harry Belafonte in a park?” 73 Indeed a homosexual does try to pick up Belafonte’s character in the park and flirts with him again after he performs in a nightclub. Though Russo’s annotation indicates surprise, Robert Corber points out that gay coded characters frequently appeared in films noirs. In Homosexuality and Cold War America, Corber argues that noir’s preoccupation with masculinity in the Fordist post-war economy often prompted 161 filmmakers to include various masculinities including homosexual masculinity. Corber argues that noir was one of the few genres of the forties and fifties that dared to question the ideals of the American Dream. Specifically, it questioned the late capitalist shift in the economy from one that promoted the myth of “rugged individualism” to an economy that required the individual worker to sublimate his desires for the good of the corporation. The late capitalist ideal man was a company man who made money for his family to live in a middle class house and consume middle class goods. Noir’s usual detective hero, according to Corber, worked for himself and lived alone in a sparse city apartment or room; he was a symbol of a masculine ideal lost in late capitalism. 74 Because the detective’s bachelor status made his heterosexuality suspect, film noirs often included an effeminate or gay coded male character to contrast with the hard boil detective and assure audiences that our hero wasn’t gay. The noir detective’s shabby appearance, sparse accommodations, and slang filled vocabulary contrasted with the gay male character’s stylish dress, lavish apartment, and “uppercrust accent.” 75 Belafonte’s Ingram rejects the fifties’ norms of white heterosexual masculinity. 76 Like the noir detective, he works outside the corporation and lives in the city outside of the family unit. However, unlike the noir detective, he is a stylish consumer. For this reason I will talk about him as a character who is marked as homosexual by the film. Ingram has an ex-wife, Ruth, and child, 162 Annie, whom he visits several times, however, he seems ambivalent about being a husband and father. He clearly loves Ruth and Annie, however he is unwilling to take on the regular job that would enable him to be the husband and father is ex-wife wants. In one scene we see Ingram sleeping on a bed with Annie. His arm is wrapped around her head as if he is protecting her. When Ruth walks in the bedroom, Ingram wakes up, looks lovingly at Ruth, follows her into the living room, and then kisses her. He tells her he loves her but she tells him that his gambling prevents him from being a good husband and father. He becomes angry and tells her that if being a good husband and father requires that he “fit into the white world” then he wants no part of it. 77 Ingram could be viewed as a black stereotype: the lazy coon character of minstrelsy. Alternatively, Ingram, as Belafonte and the film’s screenwriter, Abraham Polonsky, envisioned him, is a black character who “rejects the rules of the system.” 78 Belafonte elaborates, Ingram’s wife is working to accommodate the rules of the system. Ingram rejects the rules of the system, which he felt were sucking us dead. Violate the system. I’m outside the system. We’ve got to hustle the system. If we can’t make America work inside the law, because the laws are stacked against us, we work outside the law and we’ll set up our own moral code as to what we will and will not do. We won’t kill, we won’t sell cocaine, but we will be in the numbers business, we will go bootlegging. The black community completely understood this. 79 The contrast between Ingram and Ruth is illustrated early in the film. He interrupts a PTA meeting at his wife’s home in order to see her and his daughter. Most of the meeting attendees are white, however two black men dressed in 163 conservative suits and his black wife are also in attendance. None are as stylish as Ingram and he seems to look with contempt at their “straight” dress and manners. His interruption of the parental group is a metaphor for his rejection of his paternal role in a domestic life. In his explanation of Ingram, Belafonte emphasizes the economic constraints that Ingram operates under. He argues that Ingram’s problem “wasn’t so much that he was a gambler as that he was trying to break his way out of this economic suffocation that existed.” 80 In other words, Ingram rejects the few legitimate means to making a living allowed for black men in the racially stratified labor market. While this is true, the film suggests that Ingram’s choices are also motivated by desire. He likes to gamble. He likes to wear nice clothes and drive a fancy sports car. He is a consumer, as was required of men and women in the postwar period, however his consumption exceeds the requirements of the domestic sphere. He consumes for pleasure. This places him outside of the norms of heterosexual masculinity. His job as a nightclub singer also places him outside of the norms of heterosexuality. When he performs early in the film, he becomes the object of the male gaze: the same gangster who tries to pick him up in the park ogles him at the club. Ingram’s adversary, Robert Ryan’s Slater, also exhibits qualities that are antithetical to the corporate breadwinner’s role in the economy. He does not work, but lives with his girlfriend Lorry who manages a soda fountain and 164 supports him with the money she earns. His economic dependence on Lorry makes him uncomfortable. He resents it when she asks him to pick up her dry cleaning and baby-sit for their upstairs neighbors. He indicates to her that he feels like a prostitute. In one scene, Earl lies on a bed while Lorry gets ready for a dinner meeting with clients. He starts to tell her about his desire to participate in the robbery and says that it will make him feel like a “real man” again to earn his own money. She tries to reassure him that she’s fine with their relationship by telling him, “You don’t have to be the big man for me. I don’t care about that. There’s only one thing I care about.” Earl replies, “I know but what happens when I get old?” Lorry bristles at his implication that she only cares about having sex with him (whereas I guess we’re supposed to understand that she meant she only cared about being loved?) and we understand that he feels like a sex worker. In an early scene, we learn that some of Earl’s frustration can be traced back to his experience in the army. He seems to crave the intensity of action and feeling he felt as a soldier. After he goes to the dry cleaners, Earl walks into a bar holding Lorry’s cellophane-wrapped dress. He orders a drink and watches as a soldier in uniform entertains two men and one woman by showing off the fighting techniques he’s learned in the Army. Earl looks disgusted that the soldier is utilizing his war training for bar tricks and he and the bartender roll their eyes over what they call the soldier’s “make believe war” maneuvers. 165 When the soldier flips one of his male friends over his soldier, the male friend bumps into Earl causing his drink to spill on Lorry’s dress. Earl angrily wipes the alcohol off the dress and gets more annoyed as he hears the soldier continue to show off in front of the woman. The soldier wraps his arms around the woman’s shoulder daring her to flip him and Earl turns around and gives her instructions on how she can succeed, assuring her “Honey, you can throw that bum. Throw him the other way.” When the soldier angrily approaches him, Earl tells him “That stuff belonged to my war.” In other words, the soldier’s maneuvers meant something in the context of World War II and have no place in bar bets. When the soldier challenges Earl to a fight, Earl responds “Honey, you better go back and play with the girls. Tell them all about Sputnik”; suggesting that the cold war has rendered the soldier impotent. When the soldier encourages Earl to “throw a punch” and tells the bartender that he doesn’t really want to fight but that he “wants to show this old veteran how this thing works” Earl tries to resist and the bartender tires to intercede but the soldier keeps provoking until Earl finally throws a brutal punch that completely knocks the soldier to the floor. The bartender reacts to Earl’s punch by chastising him for being overly aggressive. Earl tells the friends tending to the soldier that he didn’t mean to hurt him and then leaves visibly upset. The soldier clearly rattles Earl’s nerves. Early in the scene, after he bumps into Earl, the soldier’s friend offers to buy Earl a drink but Earl declines 166 saying “I pay for my own drinks.” It probably occurs to Earl, as it occurs to us, that Earl doesn’t actually pay for his own drinks. His girlfriend Lorry does. At one point during the soldier’s “make believe” fight with his friends, the soldier pretends to be a woman who is walking on the street, surprised by the aggression directed at her. In short, Earl and the soldier are both awkwardly dealing with gender roles and relations and it shouldn’t be a surprise that the scene erupts into violence. Earl’s punch to the soldier demonstrates a strength that was useful in the military and probably had a place in the production (hard- labor) oriented economy of the pre-war period. In the post-war period of consumption and culture, however, there is no place for his aggression. Earl resembles the hard-boiled detective of noir: he has skills that place him outside of the postwar economy. Earl immediately hates Ingram, presumably because he’s black. But one can also imagine that he bristles at Ingram’s dandyism. Earl and Ingram are a stark contrast: Earl is stocky, plain and, cold while Ingram is tall, thin, stylish and engaging. Their entrances into the film reflect their differences. We see each walking on a street, entering an apartment building, and riding up in an elevator to meet with Ed Begley’s ex-cop David Burke. During Ingram’s entrance, we see that children are naturally attracted to him and crowd around him and his car on the street. The elevator man is charmed by Ingram’s style and Ingram responds to him in kind. Earl on the other hand, has to grab a young 167 black girl in order to interact with her on his way to the apartment building. He scoops her up and while holding her in his arms he calls her a pickanniny. He also ignores the elevator man’s attempts to talk to him. Earl seems more threatening than Ingram and we immediately like Ingram more than Earl. Earl seems closer to the hard-boiled detective usually idealized by noir, but the movie doesn’t hold his behavior up as admirable. Corber argues that noir has both progressive and conservative elements. He maintains that noir’s representation of men’s struggle with the narrow roles offered to them in the postwar period presented a critique of late-capitalism and that its inclusion of gay characters, in a period in which the MPAA code discouraged it, at least made homosexuality visible. Of course, since the gay characters largely appeared in order to confirm the main detective’s heterosexuality, their presence was also regressive. Noir often romanticized the noir detective’s entrepreneurial brand of masculinity. Though the noir detective didn’t triumph, his attempt to play by his own rules was valued. Thus, while noir problematized the masculine conformity required by postwar capitalism, it offered an earlier form of heterosexual masculinity as the desired alternative. Other masculinities, especially gay masculinity were excluded from this ideal. Corber points out that the ideal masculinity of the past was also marked by particular racial characteristics. African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American men’s participation in earlier forms of capitalism was limited and 168 sometimes prohibited entirely. Most noirs don’t acknowledge the racial particularity of the ideal thus their progressive questioning of masculine ideals is further compromised by racial blindness, not to mention disinterest in and demonization of women who also had trouble adjusting to the gender behavior required by the postwar economy. 81 As I’ve discussed above, Belafonte was interested in the economic aspects of Ingram’s struggle. I believe that the film’s inclusion of a black character could have allowed or even forced it to be more critical of capitalism because it can’t posit early capitalism as more ideal than late capitalism. 82 The film, however, doesn’t offer any viable alternative for Ingram and Earl. They die in the flames of the oil refinery without ever realizing their goals. The policemen’s comments about not being able to tell the difference between the two suggests that the failure lies with the individuals rather than the system: if Ingram and Earl could have overcome their racial hatred and differences perhaps they could have escaped the scene of the crime in the car and lived. Though it appears that Belafonte wanted the film to indict U.S. economic and racial structures, the ending prompts a more conservative reading of the text. William McGivern’s novel Odds Against Tomorrow and the film end quite differently. The film ends with Ingram and Earl leaving the bank and killing each other because they engage in a gunfight in an oil-refinery and blow it up. In the novel, Ingram and Earl leave the bank and hide out on a farm. In 169 fact, the second half of the book chronicles their time after the failed bank robbery. Earl and Ingram bond. They overcome their mutual animosity because Earl somehow gets over his racial hatred of Ingram and Ingram responds to Earl’s change of heart. The filmmakers decided to depart from the book for several reasons. First, the book’s narrative of two fugitives from the law – one black, one white – who overcome their animosity to form a bond sounded too much like the critical and box-office success The Defiant Ones (1958). The Defiant Ones depicts the relationship between a black and white man (played by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis) who escape a chain gang with their legs chained together. Although the white man hates the black man he is forced to work with the black man because they are chained together. In the course of the film they grow to love and respect one another and at the end, even though they have gotten rid of the chain that binds them, they each choose to risk being recaptured by the police in order to save each other and stay together. Robert Wise, the director of Odds Against Tomorrow, described the decision to depart from the novel in a 1995 interview: We were too close on the heels of The Defiant Ones (1958) where the two came together at the end. I didn’t think we could make a film about the same racial problem, and have the same resolution where they get together. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I didn’t like that. It seemed to be too pat somehow. But we could get the same message over by doing the reverse, by having them both get lost in the holocaust at the end there. And by doing that say “hate destroys.” This is what happens when you have this kind of hatred. Nobody wins. 83 170 Wise offers an industrial reason for the changed ending but argues that the film achieves the same message as The Defiant Ones: blacks and whites hating each other will lead to destruction. Belafonte has a different take on the film’s loose adaptation of the book. He agrees that they wanted to differentiate the film from other social problem films about black and white relationships, but he emphasizes how different the film’s Ingram is from the accommodating characters that Poitier played in films like The Defiant Ones. In his description of Ingram’s character quoted previously, he notes “Ingram rejects the rules of the system” while “Ingram’s wife is working to accommodate the rules of the system.” 84 He goes on to say: [Polonsky] wrote him in a way that made him hugely different in how he was talking to the white characters. He walked in and he demanded his equality by just his presence. “What do you want? Run it by me and I’ll think about it. I understand the power of my vote.” No black guy ever talked to white guys that way in films [emphasis original]. 85 For Belafonte, Ingram is the unusual black character who refuses to accommodate white characters. Ingram rejects white middle class notions of success and the notion that black people should ask for equality. As he repeatedly did, Belafonte contrasts Ingram with Poitier’s roles. Belafonte was hardly the only black artist who objected to Poitier’s film roles. James Baldwin leveled his own critique of Sidney Poitier’s films. Though Baldwin admits that The Defiant Ones was well intentioned, he criticizes it for perpetuating the notion that black men are eager to integrate into 171 the U.S. because they want to be liked by white men. Baldwin argues that the film’s insistence on the march toward friendship of the two protagonists covers over the film’s inability to deal with the “terror” that white people feel of black people and the “rage” that black people feel toward white people. According to Baldwin, at all points the film works to reassure white audiences that black people want to be accepted into intimate white company whereas, to Baldwin’s mind, black people aren’t so much interested in becoming friends with white people as they are eager to have them out of their way. 86 In spite of the film’s reluctance to deal with racial antagonism, especially black anger, Baldwin believes Poitier’s performance conveys some of the truth of black people’s experience and feelings. He writes, “His [Poitier’s] performance, which lends the film its only distinction, also, paradoxically smashes it to pieces.” 87 Though white audiences may read the film as a reassuring allegory of integration, black audiences, Baldwin contends, read it differently: It is this which black audiences resented about The Defiant Ones: that Sidney Poitier was in company far beneath him, and that the unmistakable truth of his performance was being placed at the mercy of a lie. Liberal white audiences applauded when Sidney, at the end of the film, jumped off the train in order not to abandon his white buddy. The Harlem audience was outraged, and yelled, Get back on the train, you fool! And yet, even at that, recognized, in Sidney’s face, at the very end, as he sings ‘Sewing Machine,’ something noble, true and terrible, something out of which we come: I have heard exasperated black voices mutter, more than once, Lord, have mercy on these children, have mercy --! They just don’t Know. 88 172 Baldwin and the black Harlem audience see the black strength and even rage that the film works overtime to conceal. Belafonte wanted that black rage to be at the surface of Odds Against Tomorrow. The book’s Ingram is more accommodating than Belafonte’s film version. The book’s Earl repeatedly calls Ingram “Sambo”, even when he is reaching out to Ingram; but Ingram is still willing to form a friendship with Earl. Like the black/white buddies of The Defiant Ones, Ingram and Earl form a bond on the run. Also like The Defiant Ones, a white woman comes between each pair of black/white buddies: she tries to persuade the white guy to abandon the black guy with the probable outcome that the black guy will be caught. In the novel Odds Against Tomorrow, Earl’s girlfriend joins them on the run and persuades Earl to abandon Ingram which will lead to Ingram’s capture by the police. Earl has second thoughts and goes back to get Ingram. His decision ironically leads to both their deaths: the police see Earl as he returns and follow him to Ingram. Arthur Knight suggests that Belafonte’s portrayal of an angry Ingram is also a direct response to the more passive character he played in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, the character who engages in a battle with the white guy but is the first to lay down arms. 89 The figure of the film’s Ingram brandishing his gun until the bitter end is a stark contrast with The World, the Flesh and the 173 Devil’s Ralph Burton laying down his gun and imploring his rival Ben to do the same. Belafonte describes Polonsky’s Ingram as follows: Abe [Polonsky] wanted to create a character which would be significantly different from the way black men had been portrayed, but not to take it to the extreme where you so defiled the black character that he lost his humanity, texture, or believability. We did not want to be predictable. Abe took on the task of creating a black man’s relationship to the world that had never been seen before. The basis for equality in the relationship is seen in how he talked to white people. He had to have a certain confident ability in who he was and where he was and what he was doing, even if he has flaws. He moved with a certain kind of strength and a certain kind of ease through life, and made decisions about what to do with an independence that black characters in film had never expressed before. 90 His confident Ingram contrasts with the more ambivalent Ralph Burton, who I’ve argued exhibited the black male identity crisis described by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. 91 Belafonte’s description of Ingram is convincing; the ending of the film doesn’t completely nullify his strength. His image of Ingram’s relationship to the white characters in the film mirrors his own powerful position in the production of the film. His HarBel production company produced the film jointly with United Artists. Belafonte secured the rights to the film and was savvy enough to employ the radical black writer John O’Killens to act as a front for the blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky, who didn’t receive official credit for the film until 1996. Though the film can’t quite imagine an alternative economic system for Ingram and Earl, its critique of the politics of capitalism is 174 reinforced by HarBel’s employment of a writer who was excluded from the Hollywood system because of his involvement in socialist politics. Conclusion In a 1961 interview with The Washington Post, a reporter asked Belafonte to explain, “why is he such a success on television, and with his one- man shows, but not in movies.” Belafonte answered: I’ve talked that over many times with Sidney Poitier, who is one of my closest friends,” Belafonte said. “Prior to Sidney coming out in ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ I had the feeling the image of Belafonte was one people didn’t want to see in terms of a heavy drama. My last two pictures – ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ and ‘The World, the Flesh and the Devil’ – were not successful. But when Sidney starred in the film version of a hit Broadway play with the Broadway cast and it turned out to be a box office zero, I felt a little personal relief. I saw a larger picture of the problem. I think with the intensity of the civil rights movement, the intensity with which colonized countries are overthrowing colonialism, the intensity with which people of South America and Africa are charging forward in terms of independence, and the fact that these things are before the attention of the public 24 hours a day, the American nation has been jarred into a reality that things are radically changing around the world. I think that when people pay $1.50 to go to the movies they want to be relieved. They don’t want to be confronted with the same problems they are forced to face in everyday life. 92 Belafonte emphasizes the political changes in the diaspora and argues that it is such a strong presence in the world of U.S. audiences that it interferes with their pleasure. Each of the film’s I have examined mobilize the public’s awareness and anxiety about black/white relations in the U.S. and the diaspora. 175 The mainstream film industry was interested in Belafonte because of his music success and Belafonte was able to utilize his marketability to expand upon his star text and create an image of black male masculinity that contrasted with the mainstream in its specific expression of black life. Belafonte wasn’t able to find a consistent place in the film industry to express his aesthetic. He had much more success in the television industry of the ‘50s and ‘60s. In the next chapter I will examine the rich body of productions Belafonte created for television. 176 Chapter Two Endnotes 1 Not a totally random collection of pictures: Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Elvis Presley were all under contract to RCA records in the period. 2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Belafonte’s Balancing Act. Singer and Activist Harry Belafonte,” The New Yorker, August 26, 1996, 132. 3 James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Darkside (New York: Routledge), 2. 4 Ibid. 5 Gates, 132. 6 Dorothy Gilliam, “For the Calypso Crusader, Just Entertaining Has Never Been Enough: Harry Belafonte, The Calypso Crusade,” The Washington Post (1974-Current file). November 20, 1978, http://proquest.umi.com/(accessed September 7, 2007). 7 The decision required the big four and little three studios to divest themselves of their movie theaters. They held onto distribution and studio filmmaking but faced with competition from television and other forms of leisure pursuit (like amusement parks, travel, and shopping) in the 1950s, they began to turn to independent producers to make movies – to help them finance the production of motion pictures – that the studios distributed. 8 Tino Balio, Hollywood in the Age of Television (Cambridge, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 10. 9 Balio, 11. 10 Balio, 10. 11 “Hollywood’s Summer Films Tackle Some Sweaty Topics with Varying Success,” Hollywood Reporter, June 22, 1957. Margaret Herrick Research Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 177 12 Margaret Herrick Research Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “American Budget.” Special Collections, William Gordon Collection, Folder 149, Island in the Sun. Belafonte was paid $150,000 for five weeks of work while James Mason received $125,000 for a minimum of nine weeks of work and Joan Fontaine and Dorothy Dandridge were each paid $75000 for twelve weeks of work. 13 Jack Hamilton, “The Storm Over Belafonte,” Look June 25, 1957, 139. 14 See Hamilton and Lisa McGill, Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation. (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 15 See Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003); and Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.) 16 “Sun Goes Down in West (Memphis), Traditional Haven of Banned Pix, Variety, August 12, 1957; “Dixie Segregationist Attack ‘Island in the Sun’, April 4, 1957; “Memphis Bans ‘Sun’ As ‘Too Frank a Pic’ on ‘Miscegenation’, Variety, July 8, 1957; “’Sun’ Boycott Try Fizzles in Mpls.”, Variety, June 14, 1957; Herrick. And "Defenders Chief Seeks Ban on 'Island In Sun'." The Washington Post and Times Herald (1954- 1959), April 4, 1957, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed September 7, 2007). 17 Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 203-217. 18 Anthony P. Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean: Challenges of an Asymmetrical Relationship (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 15. 19 Maingot 25. Maingot goes on to explain that Roosevelt’s decision to not occupy the Caribbean was driven by the U.S. racial situation. He quotes a Roosevelt letter to Cordell Hull, his secretary of state: ‘If we can get our naval bases’, he wrote to his Secretary of State, ‘why, for example, should we buy with them two million headaches, consisting of that number of human beings 178 who would be a drag on this country and who would stir up questions of racial stocks by virtue of their new status as American citizens?’ Maingot, 52. 20 See Frank Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism(Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 89-152. 21 U.S. relations with other nations have always been shaped by our domestic attitudes toward race. Maingot describes a letter Roosevelt wrote to his secretary of state Hull that stated that he was uninterested in occupying Caribbean territory because he didn’t want to include more Black bodies in the U.S. nation. 22 Alec Waugh, Island in the Sun: a Story of the 1950’s set in the West Indies (New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy), 142. 23 Klein 9. 24 “Daryl Zanuck ‘Controversy is Box Office,” International Film Annual, ed. Campbell Dixon (London: John Calder, 1957), 80. 25 Margaret Herrick Research Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Letter from Truman K. Gibson, Jr. to Colonel Frank McCarthy of 20 th Century Fox Film Corporation. Island in the Sun Production file. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 “’Sun’ A ‘Terrible Pic’ Says Belafonte, Even Tho ‘I Get to Sock James Mason,’” Variety, 8 July 1957, Herrick. 29 Because the musical introduction to the Island occurs during the opening credits, before we’re introduced to the characters or narrative, the first introduction seems to be offered by Belafonte, rather than the character he plays David Boyeur, however, one could also say that David Boyeur introduces us to the Island musically. This conflation between Belafonte and Boyeur is especially true in the musical sequences of the film. 30 See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. (London: Verso, 1983), 97-110. 179 31 Lisa McGill, Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation, (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 67. 32 Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University, 2004.) 33 Fischer, 12. 34 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 392 and Fischer, 12. 35 Fischer, 12. 36 Fischer, 37. 37 Belafonte was hurt, but not surprised, when 20 th Century-Fox, producers of the picture, requested him not to refer to Joan Fontaine in any public statements he made about the film – however discreet these statements might be. “Here I am one of the stars of the picture,” he says, “trying to do a little publicity job the way all stars are expected to do. And they tell me to keep quiet.” “Belafonte’s Lips Sealed!” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 June 1957, 1+ and Jack Hamilton, “The Storm Over Belafonte,” Look June 25, 1957, 139. 38 Michelle Stephens, 228. 39 “’Sun’ A ‘Terrible Pic’ Says Belafonte, Even Tho ‘I Get to Sock James Mason,’” Variety, 8 July 1957, Herrick. 40 “A Word or Two From Mr. Belafonte . . . ,” New York Post, sec. 1957 July 10. In Schomburg Center Clipping File, 1925-1974. New York: New York Public Library, 1985. 41 “Organization man Named Belafonte,” Emily Coleman New York Times (1857-Current File); Dec 13, 1959 Proquest Historical Newspapers (1851- 2003) SM 35. 42 Murray Schumach, “Hollywood Patterns,” New York Times (1857-current file) 26 Jul 1959, Proquest Historical Newspapers (1851-2003) X5. 180 43 Jesse Zunser, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Cue 25 April 1959. Schomburg Center Clipping File, 1925-1974. New York: New York Public Library, 1985. 44 Ibid. 45 For better or worse, HarBel was seen as a company that promoted interracial stories. Interracial conflict and desire was at the center of most of the films it planned on doing and Belafonte was quoted as saying that he felt his stardom gave him a platform on which to explore interracial subjects. At least one black columnist found fault with those aims: Lillian Fisher complained about the dearth of black actors in HarBel’s films. See Schomburg Clipping File, “Belafonte,” “Hollywood Scratchpad” Lillian Fischer. 46 Irene Thirer.,“Movie Spotlight: Belafonte Hails Poitier’s Success,” Schomburg Clipping File. 47 Richard Harrington, “In Black & white,” The Washington Post (1974-Current File); 17 June 1984, Proquest Historical Newspapers (1987-1990). Carmen Jones was successful. About Odds Against Tomorrow Belafonte said: “After we did that movie, if finally dawned on me that we would never really get over trying to hammer away at Hollywood as an independent institution, because it was really linked to so much that was just America and that if one were to effectively change the American overview, the American attitudes, it would have to be something that would impact on American institutions.” “And that was the civil rights movement,” he says. “So I went with Martin King, put all my efforts into changing the American character. I didn’t peak again until the end of the ‘60s because we were now pursuing this other objective. And it did work. Then came the black exploitation period, the black films, black newspeople, sports were opening up. Blacks will go to white pictures, very few whites will go to black pictures.” 48 Dorothy Masters. “Capitol Movie is Provocative.” No source. Margaret Herrick Research Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil Production File. 49 Fanon’s book came out in French in 1952 but wasn’t translated into English until 1962, three years after the film came out. Nevertheless, while the filmmakers may not have been directly influenced by the book, the film’s use of a black protagonist who thinks he’s alone and then must deal with the company 181 of whites, recalls Fanon’s analysis of how blacks’ self images are shaped by their encounter with whites. 50 Fanon, 10. 51 Ibid., 193. 52 Sarah too is a victim of dominant ideology. Faced with the prospect of being the lone woman in the deserted city she voices her regret that she’ll never get married. Sarah and the filmmakers are too scared to imagine new relations between the sexes. 53 To be sure, the film doesn’t overtly encourage this reading. Ads for the film played up the romantic triangle. “What would YOU do if YOU were this girl, alone with two men? Who wins when these two stalk each other through empty streets, over roof-tops with rifles in hand and lust in their hearts?” Curiously, contrary to usual film theory, the ads put the audience in the position of the woman. Is the film appealing to female movie goers or does it ask men to imagine being these women? Another full page ad reads, “Which one gets the last girl on earth?” after the first “one” there is a picture of Belafonte’s face and after the second there is picture of Ferer’s face. Underneath the sentence is a picture of Inger Stevens showing ¾ of her figure against a tiny image of the NYC skyline. This triangle and the novelty of seeing NYC completely emptied of people (the filmmakers filmed in the middle of the night) were the two main selling points of the film. Ads from Schomburg Center for Black Research. 54 Bosley Crowthers, “Raisins in the Pies: On Looking for the Particularly Tasty Things in Films,” New York Times (1857-Current File) 24 May 1959 ((accessed 8 March 2008). See also American Film Institute Catalog, “ The World, the Flesh, and the Devil”, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?: “Reviews generally admired the quality of the production, but criticized the ending and the handling of the racial conflicts. The LAMirror-News wrote that the film "soon bogs down in a standardized Hollywood plot of racial issues and the old triangle." Time complained that "the grand drama of humanity's survival collapses into an irrelevant wrangle about racial discrimination that has no...real significance. SatRev wondered, concerning the ending, Are we to assume that some sort of polygamous arrangement has been worked out, or will the three henceforth lead entirely sexless lives, thus dooming both white and colored races to extinction? No answer being given, we must assume that the color question was injected into the story more as a gimmick than out of any real seriousness." 182 55 Richard Harrington, “In Black & white,” The Washington Post (1974-Current File); 17 June 1984(accessed March 9, 2008). 56 Gael Greene, “Belafonte: The Doors Slammed Shut,” New York Post, 12 October 1958, Schomburg Clipping File. 57 In that review she wrote: He is showing Europe on his present tour, just as William Warfield [another black singer] is, that at least artists in the U.S. can come to prominence and be popular regardless of race or color.” See New York Post, 6 September 1958, Schomburg Clipping File. 58 Ibid. 59 United Nations Web Site at: http://www.un.org/aboutun/basicfacts/unorg.htm. 60 Advertisement for “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil”, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 61 Ibid. 62 Swords into plowshares is also name of sculpture presented to UN by Soviet Union in 1959. 63 “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” American Film Institute Catalog http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl? 64 Fanon, 160. 65 See “Sr Goes to the Movies: All This and Heaven, Too,” Saturday Review 2 May 1959. 66 The movie presents an odd image of a post atomic future in which only people are evacuated: buildings, roads, and radio equipment survive. So, why not racism? 67 The ease with which Belafonte’s Ralph becomes the representative of U.N. values covers over the ambivalent black Americans had with the United Nations. Several scholars have documented black Americans’ criticism of the UN. During the original formation of the UN, third world activists complained that it was disingenuous to claim that the world would be represented in the United Nations. By according membership to nation states, they argued, the people of 183 Africa and Asia were not sufficiently represented in the international body, since the colonial powers determined who went to the UN on their behalf. These activists argued for representation based on race and ethnicity. At the same time, W.E.B. Duobis and the NAACP appealed to the UN. 68 Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford, 1993), 262. 69 Schultheiss, 236. 70 Dorothy Gilliam, “For the Calypso Crusader, Just Entertaining has Never Been Enough,” The Washington Post (1974-Current File), 20 November 1978, Proquest Historical Newspapers. 71 Ibid. 72 “Odds Against Tomorrow,” American Film Institute Catalog, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl? 73 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 255. 74 It’s important to note that noir idealized an earlier form of capitalism rather than alternative economic systems like socialism. Many noir screenwriters and directors were former members of the Popular Front who were interested in labor issues. Their questioning of late capitalism argued that male workers were dehumanized by the requirements of the Fordist economy but their critique stopped short of arguing for dismantling the entire capitalist system. 75 According to Corber: “As Richard Dyer has shown, however, in identifying the set of elements that distinguishes film noir form other classical Hollywood cinema, film scholars have tended to overlook the unusual presence of characters who are explicitly marked as gay. Film noir developed a distinctive iconography for representing gay male characters that drew on the traditional signifiers of male homosexuality in classical Hollywood cinema (uppercrust accent, effeminate mannerisms, impeccable taste, and son on.) . . . by contrast the hard-boiled hero frequently appears disheveled and unshaven and is identified with coarse surroundings (shabby, unkempt offices and rooming houses.) Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity(Durham: Duke University, 1997), 9-10. 184 76 John Schultheiss argues that Ingram is the first African American noir character in film but that there were several black noir literary characters including, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son and several Chester Himes characters. See Abraham Polonsky, Odds Against Tomorrow: The Critical Edition, Edited with Annotations and Critical Commentary by John Schultheiss(Northridge, CA: Center for Telecommunication Studies California State University, 1999), 225. 77 Interestingly, Arnold Shaw characterizes Belafonte’s relationship with his first wife, Marguerite in similar terms: She was an upper middle class teacher who wanted Belafonte to get a nine to five job while he was a bohemian dedicated to making it in the entertainment filed on his own terms. See Arnold Shaw, Belafonte: An Unauthorized Biography(Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1960), 54. 78 Schultheiss, 251. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Lorry, Earl’s girlfriend, is a working class woman who works in the service industry, who is required to dress sexily for her dinner meeting with a potential male client. The film, however, doesn’t encourage us to worry over her. While she is dressing for dinner, it is Earl that the film focuses on: we see how her work doesn’t leave her time to pay attention to how tortured Earl is over the desire to perform the bank heist. 82 While the book does suggest that black and whites and live in brotherhood and depends on an accommodating black man who doesn’t mind being called “Sambo” it does suggest that their bond between white guy and black guy is made possible through a shared class identity: In the course of the book it becomes clear that Earl’s racism is a result of his shame over being poor and seeing black men as reminders of his own shameful class position. 83 Schultheiss, 157. 84 Ibid., 251. 85 Ibid., 252. 185 86 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: an Essay(New York: Dial Press, 1976), 64. 87 Ibid., 64. 88 Ibid., 65. 89 Arthur Knight, “1959: Movies and the Racial Divide,” American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 234. 90 Schultheiss, 250-251. 91 The ending of the film, wherein the Earl and Ingram blow each other up and two white policeman come across their bodies and remark that they can’t tell the difference between the two may or may not dilute the effect of seeing a different kind of black character. It depends on how much stock one puts in endings. 92 Joe Hyams "Belafonte Intends to Play It By His Own Instincts Alone." The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973), July 23, 1961, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed May 17, 2008). 186 Chapter Three – Oh Let Me Fly: Belafonte and ‘50s and ‘60s Variety Television This chapter will consider Belafonte’s television work in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that television was the medium in which Belafonte was most able to realize his aesthetic and political project. Belafonte was successful on television. He made over fifty appearances on network television in the ‘50s and ‘60s. His production company, HarBel, produced several of those appearances. He won an Emmy for his variety special Tonight With Belafonte (1959), and his shows garnered good ratings. Why was television available to Belafonte? This chapter begins with a history of the representation of blackness on TV and examines how the three networks championed the presentation of blacks on television in their effort to position themselves as representatives of the nation’s ideals of equality and inclusion. I go on to discuss how variety television, the genre Belafonte participated in most, exemplified network policies and then I discuss specific programs Belafonte appeared in and/or produced. Belafonte not only performed on television, but he spoke out about the medium. He was especially critical of the medium’s representation of blackness and spoke and wrote about in the mainstream press. In effect, he used the popular press to practice a kind of media education for the public. Steve Classen has argued, “TV is ‘something people do’ – a complicated set of social 187 practices, both forming and formed through various modes of state and social regulation.” 1 My discussion of black representation and Belafonte on television will demonstrate how media representation is something people do: rather than a set of static stereotypes, it is formed through the social practices of producers, performers, and institutions. Consequently, this chapter will consist of textual analyses of Belafonte’s performances as well as an analysis of television’s industrial practices as reported through the mainstream media. I use Belafonte to explore larger questions: What were the possibilities for the representation of race and politics in television of the ‘50s and ‘60s? And how was it possible for individuals to combine their politics with access to mainstream institutions? These were questions of importance to black entertainers at the time and performers of all races today. Belafonte is a productive figure for looking at the representation of race on television because he was a performer, producer, and critic of television. He performed for others, made decisions about program content, interacted with television executives, and articulated his own viewing sensibilities. His editorials and interviews both give a sense of his production ideas and index a black interpretive community. When Belafonte began working in television in the mid 1950s, he was hopeful about television’s potential to depict the complexity of black life not represented in film. At the end of the ‘60s, he was 188 less hopeful. His work in this period reflects each aspect of the doing of television that this chapter is concerned with. Though I argue that television was more open to Belafonte’s creative project than film or music I will also examine how it worked with the other mediums he participated in -- to bolster his film and music career, both commercially and aesthetically. His television appearances promoted his film and music but also worked in combination with those media to articulate more complex meanings than he could achieve any single medium. Blacks and Television: Blacks on Television Black performers have always been an integral part of television. Donald Bogle’s Primetime Blues chronicles the history of black representation on television. He describes the first experimental transmission of television conducted by NBC in 1939: it was a variety program starring the black singer and actress Ethel Waters. Hazel Scott hosted another early variety program, The Hazel Scott Show, in 1950. Like Belafonte, Scott was a politically outspoken, West-Indian lefty. She was the second wife of the politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and lost her show after being listed in the blacklist publication Red Channels. Belafonte appeared in an early variety program called the Sugar Hill Times. The short-lived program, named after the upper middle class African American Harlem Renaissance neighborhood, exclusively featured black musicians, singers, comics and dancers as guests including, Willie Brant, 189 Timmie Rogers, The Jubileers, Don Redman and His Orchestra and Belafonte. Thus, African American performers were present from television’s early inception. Belafonte was one of many black performers who appeared regularly on prime time television in the ‘50s and ’60s. Because many historical treatments of blacks on television focus on weekly drama and comedy series, it appears as if black people didn’t appear on television with much frequency in the 1950s. Television books also tend to focus on the history of stereotypes, so it seems as if African Americans only appeared as the minstrel characters of shows like Amos ‘n Andy and Beulah. When one looks at the many variety programs on network television in this period, however, it becomes clear that black people were actually quite visible on fifties television and often in ways that expressed the diversity of black life and culture. Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole, and Ethel Waters were just some of the black performers who regularly appeared on television in this period. Herman Gray contends that the networks were only interested in particular kinds of black people that reaffirmed white hegemony -- the stereotypical representations of the early ‘50s Beulah and Amos ‘n Andy and the later ‘50s and ‘60s representations of “polished” performers like Nat King Cole. 2 While Gray may be correct that the networks were interested in representations of black people that didn’t question white middle class values or power, I 190 believe that Belafonte and other black performers were often able to exceed the intentions of the network programmers. Television images of Black people singing and dancing did play into minstrel stereotypes, yet the presence of black bodies in variety apparently did upset some white viewers: Leontyne Price, Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte’s appearances on television all inspired angry letters. 3 The presence of blackness clearly represented a threat to some of the white viewing public. Black audiences also saw the visibility of black performers as an index of black power. Civil Rights groups routinely demanded that the networks include more black performers and the memoirs of intellectuals and artists who grew up in the period often include anecdotes that relate memories of calling family members to let them know a black entertainer would be on television and gathering around a television set with friends and families. 4 At the very least, the presence of blacks on television allowed black viewers a chance to develop a black interpretive community through praise and protest. Drama was and continues to be considered as the highest mark of television quality, thus social progress on television was and has continued to be measured by how diverse network dramas are. When we look closely at black variety performances, however, we see black performers expressing a range of black aesthetics and politics that was not visible elsewhere. 191 In addition, I will argue that Belafonte was able to critique the very terms in which he was included. While the networks saw black performers as emblems of their commitment to national ideals of racial equality and inclusion, Belafonte’s performances often foregrounded the racism and racial discrimination practiced by the nation. Television Audiences in Black and White Television is a terrain that allows different races (as well as classes, genders, and sexualities) to mediate identity and politics. The apparatus explicitly hailed white middle class viewers, as evidenced by the address of television commercials, however, protests against the networks, and ads for television programming in black newspapers indicate that black people were also avid television viewers. Television is a powerful realm of popular culture in the way the Stuart Hall and Robin Kelly have defined it. Hall argues that there is no such thing as a pure popular or folk culture untouched by mass culture nor a mass culture that hasn’t been influenced by or even that has co-opted popular/folk culture. Instead, he proposes a definition of popular and mass culture, which acknowledges the dialectical, rather than binary, relationship between the two. Further, Hall believes that when talking about popular or mass culture one can’t just talk about the cultural experiences of one class. What is important to Hall are relations: the relation among working class, dominant class and middle class; 192 and the relations between popular and mass culture. In fact, rather than assigning culture to particular classes, Hall believes that culture comes from the struggle between domination and subordination: “ . . . what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture.” 5 Because the end result of this antagonism is constantly shifting, what is important about the antagonism is the process of contestation. John Beverley has critiqued this dialectical notion of popular culture because he feels that it ultimately presents the act of consumption as an act of politics. 6 Robin D.G. Kelly’s “Notes on Deconstructing the Folk” offers us a way to think about a dialectical relationship between popular and mass culture that doesn’t relegate the subaltern or subordinated class to consumer passivity. Like Hall, Kelley argues that there is no authentically pure folk culture. 7 He similarly sees mass culture as bricolage and acknowledges that different audiences can find popular meanings in dominant culture. While Kelley acknowledges that audiences do find subaltern meanings in mass media, they also do, perhaps unconsciously, identify and find enjoyment in hegemonic meanings and he believes that many critics are too celebratory by calling any meaning made by audience members as resistant. If a person makes meaning that affirms hegemony then it’s not resistant. He believes that cultural studies scholars make a mistake when they view the relations of popular culture through 193 the lens of audiences versus producers; it is more fruitful, he argues, “to focus on race, gender, and class hierarchies within popular culture rather than the audience versus producer dichotomy.” 8 For Kelley, then the dialectics between popular and mass culture are only meaningful in as much as they specifically interrogate race, class, gender, (and I would add sexuality.) I will discuss how Belafonte’s television performances allowed for the enjoyment of hegemonic and subaltern meanings. In theory, the television apparatus facilitated equal access to the viewing if not production of television. Black audiences could have the same view as white audiences because they didn’t have to deal with the formal and informal segregation of public venues like theaters, cinema houses, and concert auditoriums. The presence of black performers on television allowed black viewers to establish a visible black interpretive community. Whether they were protesting Amos ‘n’ Andy or demanding more representation of black performers, black audiences asserted their power as viewers. Television as a home theater also gave freedom to white audiences. They were able to enjoy black representations in the privacy of their own homes. There were surely white viewers who would think twice before going out to a venue to hear Nat King Cole or Harry Belafonte, for fear they would mix with black people and, possibly worse, liberal whites, but who felt perfectly happy to enjoy them in the privacy of their home. 194 Civil Rights and Television The frequent appearances of Belafonte and other black performers on fifties and sixties television makes sense if we believe, and I do, Sasha Torres’ argument that television has long been interested in a liberal representation of blackness and civil rights. Torres argues that television’s representations of blackness did not exclusively draw upon the tradition of minstrelsy that other critics have traced, but that television created “new tropes of blackness.” 9 She writes, To complicate the now-dominant historical understandings that TV borrowed its tropes of blackness from a variety of representational sites all more or less indebted to the traditions of minstrelsy, I will argue that the period roughly from 1955 to 1965 was a crucial moment in the establishment of extremely durable ideological, rhetorical, and institutional procedures for the depiction of African American persons and politics on television, and that these procedures had less to do with black social subservience than with an emergent black political agency. For, as I have argued in my introduction, American television has – and always has had –a liberal tradition of African American representations . . . 10 Torres doesn’t deny that television has perpetuated racist stereotypes – the appearance and popularity of ‘50s shows like Amos ‘N Andy and Beulah attest to the persistence of stereotypical images. Nor does she ignore how television served the conservative interests of segregationists. Indeed Torres, like Steve Classen, notes how white southerners tried to block the appearances of black talent and were largely responsible for the failure of shows starring black talent. 11 However, she argues that television always had an investment in the 195 presence of black people, and that presence opened up a space for understanding race, blackness, the relationship between black people and white people, and the effects of racism, whether or not that space was eventually contained by the conservative results of television’s bottom line. 12 Torres argues that television news and the Civil Rights movement had mutual interests in the period between 1955 and 1965. Television news was willing to risk the disapproval of white southerners because it needed to demonstrate that it could transmit topics of vital national interest in ways that print and film media could not. The movement, in turn, needed to engender national empathy, which it gained through the melodramatic visibility that television news provided. Torres shows how the current rhetoric that television news must be “fair and balanced” did not apply to network television coverage of the Civil Rights movement. Network coverage was spun to show images of southern racists in violation of the national ideals of democracy and an African American citizenry insisting upon their rights under the constitution. Television became a vehicle through which the national was represented: the liberal promise of inclusion in the nation-state was contrasted with the decidedly undemocratic actions of segregationists who used an assertion for states’ rights against federal intervention to justify racial exclusion through violence. In other words, the news presented images of the Civil Rights movement through a 196 narrative of regional southern racists versus Northerners (journalists representing the network news) who represented U.S. national ideals. Variety Television Torres focuses on news programming of the fifties and sixties to support her argument, but entertainment programming of the period, especially variety programming, also expressed television’s “liberal” and national inclinations. In her examination of Leontyne Price’s television appearances on NBC in the ‘50s, Dianne Brooks references NBC’s integration policy. She writes, By 1955, the year of the Tosca broadcast [which Price starred in] NBC had already been actively practicing a policy it called “integration without identification.” NBC’s public relations director, Sidney Eiges, explained that “people who work for us whether in office work or on programs as entertainers are all employed on the basis of ability without regard to race or color.” 13 NBC was not the only network that consistently presented black talent. CBS and ABC also did, 14 however I will focus on NBC because it articulated its policy publicly many times and Belafonte appeared on the network. NBC’s policy wasn’t always satisfactory to black or white viewers. Some white viewers felt NBC featured too many black performers and many black viewers felt they didn’t feature enough. Brooks relates how Price’s Tosca performance provoked letters from angry viewers who didn’t want to see black faces on their screen. She also quotes a New York Amsterdam News column by Alvin “Chick” Webb who complained to NBC that it didn’t feature as many 197 black performers as the CBS network. 15 A New York Times article reports on a stockholders meeting where black attendees protested the lack of diversity on NBC: Barney Young, who owns one share of stock and represents Negro radio and television performers, intimated that the National Broadcasting Company, R.C.A.’s wholly owned subsidiary was by-passing Negro talent. He asked whether several parent company directors up for re-election at the meeting approved or disapproved of the lack of colored performers on N.B.C. radio and television. 16 And Brooks describes a written exchange between a viewer, “John Randolph who expressed his regret over his participation in a ‘blackout,” whereby audiences turned off their television sets protesting against NBC’s lack of inclusion of black performers.” 17 NBC responded to black viewer complaints in a consistent manner. At the stockholders meeting Robert Sarnoff answered Mr. Young with a listing of NBC’s accomplishments: Mr. Young was answered by Robert Sarnoff, president of the National Broadcasting Company and son of the R.C.A. chairman Mr. Sarnoff pointed out that Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, and other Negro performers had appeared on N.B.C. television from time to time. The network considered talent, he said, on the basis of quality rather than on the basis of race, creed or color. 18 And NBC PR executive, Sidney Eiges, responded to John Randolph’s letter with these words: We think NBC’s record of the use of persons on the basis on their abilities without regard to race, creed, or color in an outstanding one. . . . It is perhaps best exemplified by the recent appearance 198 of Leontyne Price during the NBC Opera Theatre performance of “Tosca” on January 23. NBC has a policy of integration without identification under which the number of Negroes appearing on our program and joining our work force is constantly increasing. 19 Sarnoff and Eiges’ statements demonstrate how the values of integration were consistently linked with quality and how variety television programming was used to demonstrate their commitment to both. I am interested in how black performers like Belafonte used the opening created by NBC’s policy to produce programming that sometimes went beyond the intentions of their liberal benefactors. NBC’s interest in black performers fit with its history of championing “controversial” or “sensitive” topics. William Boddy explains that network executives persuaded the FCC and audiences that it was important for networks to have control over programming because they, unlike sponsors and local affiliates, were committed to presenting content that was challenging, and thus, commercially risky. They framed their desire for economic control over programming in “public-interest terms.” 20 It was not lost on southern affiliates and viewers that the network often posited urban, specifically New York, entertainment as in the national interest as opposed to the programming provided by southern affiliates or Hollywood studios. It presented the transmission of New York Opera, New York dance, and New York Theater as public service broadcasts. 199 Though Network executives certainly overstated their commitment to public service, it is true that sponsors did often bow to outside pressures. Because early television shows were mostly single sponsored shows, the sponsor company felt it was directly represented by the ideological content of the shows it sponsored. Companies like U.S. Steel, for example, avoided shows that were deemed “controversial,” especially material that would inspire political boycotts. Boddy writes, Most significant and sustained was the systematic political censorship and blacklisting of television personnel objectionable to the organized, anticommunist Right. Inspired by earlier congressional investigations in Hollywood and the increasingly anti-communist mood of the country, political blacklisting in television began in earnest in 1950, with the publication by a small right-wing organization of Red Channels: The Report on the Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The targets of the report were not only Communist party members in the broadcast industry, but also what Red Channels called the “dupes” and “innocents” among the “so-called ‘intellectual classes.” The report singled out several network-produced dramatic anthologies and explained: “Dramatic programs are occasionally used for Communist propaganda purposes . . . Several commercially sponsored dramatic series are used as sounding boards, particularly with reference to current issues on which the party is critically interested: ‘academic freedom,’ ‘civil rights,’ ‘peace,’ the ‘H-bomb,’ etc. These and other subjects perfectly legitimate in themselves, are cleverly exploited in dramatic treatments which point up current Communist goals.” 21 As I noted above, Hazel Scott’s variety show was a victim of Red Channels. Networks, then, positioned themselves as above sponsor pressures – as able to bring programming in the public interest. And they often posited the inclusion 200 of black performers as in the national interest; as part of a national commitment to diversity and inclusivity. Networks articulated their public/national interest programming as quality programming. As the networks began fighting against Hollywood producers who were, contrary to popular myth, interested in television as a vehicle for films, they began to link quality with liveness. They declared that only the networks were interested in “live” rather than the filmed programming that Hollywood produced, and, that after all, liveness was the key to the “magic of television.” 22 Television critics supported the networks by championing “live television” as the mark of quality television because, they argued, it best exploited the medium’s potential and difference from film. Jack Gould wrote columns that asserted that liveness embodied television’s highest technological and aesthetic achievement and that live television, rather than filmed television, was able to excite viewers with its “humanness,” its ability to connect a viewer immediately and intimately to another person in geographically distant but occupying the same time. 23 Boddy locates the critical appeal of live TV to “the metaphysics of presence” and the intimacy of production and reception. This interest in liveness resulted in the privileging of hour-long live dramas and television spectaculars. Few black performers appeared in the live dramas but many black performers were featured in the live variety spectaculars. 201 Many viewers complained that the networks favored the sensibilities of New York critics and audiences and, southern viewers in particular, objected to the networks inclusion of black performers. Pat Weaver countered that for NBC “entertainment was used to get the people to watch the realism and to get caught by it, but the end would be that we would inform them, enrich them, to liberate them from tribal primitive belief patterns.” 24 In other words, he argued that NBC’s programming educated southern/regional people about the national ideals of integration and inclusion. When networks began buying content from independent producers rather than producing their own content (thus eliminating one of their previous arguments for network control over programming) they argued that they could protect producers form the interference of sponsors who were only interested in the commercial not the artistic or social. 25 This was the context which allowed Belafonte to be a frequent performer and producer in television. Race, and specifically blackness, rather than being a mark of inferiority, became a mark of quality in the context of live variety television and, more rarely, in television drama. 26 Networks positioned themselves as the ones who could tackle controversial issues like “civil rights” and race in ways that advertisers were afraid of and they argued for themselves as the vehicle for bringing viewers into contact with humans they might not interact with. In other 202 words, they could bring white middle class audiences into contact with the black people they didn’t (and possibly didn’t want to) encounter in real life. The mere presence of blacks on television, of course, did not mean that the networks had a commitment to giving power to blacks, nor did it mean that they were particularly interested in the depth and breadth of black life. The visibility of blacks could – and can – co-exist with and even support conservative interests. The networks presented themselves as high-minded civic leaders, however, the presence of blacks on variety television was also another example of the way in which blacks and other performers of color carry the “burden of liveness.” 27 As Jose Munoz writes, The “burden of liveness” affords the minoritarian subject an extremely circumscribed temporality. To be only in “the live” means that one is denied history and futurity. If the minoritarian subject can only exist in the moment, she or he does not have the privilege or pleasure of being a historical subject. If that subject needs to focus solely on the present, it can never afford the luxury of thinking about the future. 28 Networks’ willingness to include black bodies spoke as much, or even more, to their desire to provide access to exotic figures than its desire for real social change. The minority subject’s presence in the moments only affirmed the dominant culture’s control over history and the future. It’s significant that in all of is defense of its integration policy, NBC could only point to the number of blacks who appeared on variety programming – it couldn’t point to the other 203 “quality” programming, nor more importantly could it point to any writers, producers or network executives. Clearly the networks used variety programming to express a symbolic if not actual commitment to civil rights. I will demonstrate, however, how Belafonte and other performers used their access to variety television to exceed network intentions. Belafonte used his presence in live television to present the complexity of race and nation: to reveal the political and economic inequality experienced by black Americans by showcasing the art and music produced by and expressing that experience. Belafonte and Fifties Television In the beginning of his career, Belafonte expressed high hopes for television. In a 1956 editorial in the New York Herald Tribune TV and Radio Magazine, Belafonte articulated his hopes for television in language that echoed NBC’s stated colorblind policy. He even hailed NBC’s broadcast of Leontyne’s Price’s Tosca as a symbol of television’s liberal possibilities. He wrote, Where are the big name Negro stars as video regulars? Will they always be relegated to occasional guest appearances and secondary roles? I sincerely believe that the networks are color blind. They are not interested in a man’s pigmentation, but in his skill as an actor, a dancer, a singer or whatever craft he can perform well for the millions of television viewers. I can cite many cases where a sincere attempt has been made to make the Negro an important and useful part of the still very young viewing medium. Just last season Leontyne Price played the role 204 of “Tosca” on the NBC opera series, a notable achievement for a member of the Negro race. 29 . . . an industry as vast and powerful as television needs the Negro and the Negro needs it. It’s sort of an artistic collaboration. The creative Negro artist has a rightful place in television, no one can deny that. The TV cameras are not bigoted, the home screens show up a Negro as clearly and graphically as any other individual. Television with its broad scope, its constant need for newness and originality wants the Negro performers and Negro craftsmen. I know that the networks know this and are working toward the end when there won’t be any need for discussion of the subject. A mass medium such as video cannot stop south of the Mason- Dixon line and hastily change its color lines. The sooner some of the narrow minded find this out the better it will be for all concerned. 30 Belafonte aligns himself with the networks and against the regional interests of southern affiliates. He makes an argument for quality being enhanced by the presence of the Negro in language that is quite similar to Pat Weaver, Jack Gould, and other network executives and critics. His editorial reads as both an earnest meditation on television’s potential and a skillful positioning of himself on the side of and in the language of the networks. It is the network who represents the “Negro” and is posited as in opposition to those who are “south of the Mason-Dixon line.” Like the networks and television critics then he makes a case for the national liberal idea as embodied by the urban north which he sees as battling the regional, segregationist values of the rural south. He also makes specific reference to video (rather than film) and the quality “dramatic shows, [and] fine musical programs.” 31 His highest ideal is 205 color blind casting – Leontyne Price as Tosca and Sidney Poitier in A Man is Ten Feet Tall (a role, he tells us, which wasn’t specifically written for an African American.) Belafonte’s praise of both performances is odd in light of his own work: A Man is Ten Feet Tall is memorable for its avoidance of the racial and class issues which would surely come up in the interracial friendship of the ‘50s it focuses on. 32 Later in this chapter, I will discuss how Belafonte changed his views on television in the late ‘60s, but in the ‘50s he had a lot of hope. Of course even this editorial has traces of critique: he repeatedly asserts that he has faith in the networks but, as he lists all the reasons that television shouldn’t hesitate to invite black artists of all kinds, he acknowledges that television only seems comfortable with their irregular presence. The Bell Telephone Hour The Bell Telephone Hour was a variety music program that embodied many of the ideals NBC and Belafonte championed. The Bell Telephone Hour was a quality television program that expressed NBC’s desire to bring culture to the masses. It originated on radio in 1940 and debuted on television in 1959. Belafonte appeared on the first episode and several later episodes. It brought together a mix of high and middlebrow, classical and popular, and black and white. Like the Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show (two shows Belafonte appeared on), The Bell Telephone Hour featured performers from a 206 range of genres (music, dance, Broadway and Theater) and, like those shows, black artists appeared with some frequency. Unlike many variety programs, it only featured musical and dance performers – no jugglers or stand-up comics. Also, it was a “quality” music show: classical music, jazz, Broadway show tunes and gospel were represented; Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll were not. Spirituals, gospel, and folk music were also represented. A typical episode included four segments of performances by musicians, singer, actors, and dancers. Ginger Rogers, Johnny Cash, Andre Previn, Renata Tebaldi, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Lena Horne, Leontyne Price, and Harry Belafonte were some of performers who appeared. The show was broadcast semi-regularly from 1959 to 1968, the period of time the Civil Rights Movement became part of mainstream consciousness. Equality and integration were modeled by the show’s inclusion of black and white artists. Integration was imagined in black and white terms, however there were episodes in which other races and ethnicities were represented (which I will discuss later.) Jack Gould’s New York Times review of the premiere episode noted the program’s “impeccable taste” which he contrasted with the time slot’s usual offerings: “The evening’s attractions included a delightful charming little romp that brought together Maurice Evans and the Baird marionettes; Renata Tebaldi, the New York City Ballet and Harry Belafonte. For these joys a Western and a mystery were pre-empted. There’s hope for TV yet.” 33 The show featured live 207 performances from 1959 to 1965 but changed format in 1966 and began broadcasting hour long filmed documentaries of artists. Duke Ellington and Leontyne Price were two black artists that performed on the live version of the show and later received the in-depth documentary treatment. The show took black artists seriously. Black guests represented a range of black artistic production, including gospel, folk, jazz, and classical music. The show also took black art seriously. In the show’s 1967 documentary profile of Duke Ellington, for example, the program framed Ellington’s career in terms of Dubois’s notion of double consciousness: on the one hand, the narrator of the Ellington segment tells us, he maintained his mainstream popularity by performing his jazz greatest hits (like Sophisticated Lady), for white audiences; on the other, he shared his more personal love of sacred music with black church congregations. It also documented his preoccupation with performance over composition: a value that is more in accord with African than Western musical traditions. Black singers like Leontyne Price and Diahann Carroll performed pieces that were not racially marked in the stereotypical norms of film and television dramas and comedies. The show also accommodated black political artists of the left like Belafonte and Lena Horne. As I’ve discussed above, Leontyne Price was an important figure on television of the period. Dianne Brooks views her as a televisual symbol of integration and I take a closer look at her appearances on the Bell Telephone 208 Hour in order to offer a figure to which Belafonte’s use of the show can be compared. Price appeared on The Bell Telephone Hour four times from 1963 to 1967. In each broadcast, she performed pieces from the operas that made her famous, ranging form the black protagonists of Porgy and Bess, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Aida and her “colorblind” roles in Tosca and Don Giovanni. Price was neither the mammy nor the jezebel stereotypes. Brooks argues that “the Black female operatic persona, constructed via television, opened an alternative space for black women. In this space, black women were allowed to be something other than poor, pathological members of the underclass, even allowed to represent people who were not necessarily black.” 34 In a Bell Telephone Hour episode broadcast in January 1967, entitled, “First Ladies of the Opera,” Price appeared alongside opera divas Birgit Nelson, Joan Sutherland, and Renata Tebaldi. Each diva is interviewed and then performs. Price is treated as an “equal”: she discusses her training and approach to her roles just as the other divas do. Her race is not commented upon. She seems to embody NBC’s colorblind policy. Her performance of an aria from Aida, however, marks her as different, and specifically black. Not only is Aida black, but also Price performs in a gown and headdress that look vaguely “Egyptian” in front of fake Egyptian-like columns. In 1967 this segment could fulfill a network interest in presenting the exotic to a domestic audience and it 209 could also be read by black viewers as a nod to the Egyptian inspired Black Power movement. 35 Like the Civil Rights news programming that Sasha Torres discusses, The Bell Telephone Hour showcased the network’s role in bringing the national values of integration to local affiliates: black and white artists appeared on the broadcast, though rarely together, and one can imagine that black and white people watched them at home. As in the past, the values of inclusion and integration are linked with New York. A Bell Telephone Hour episode, called “The New Met: Countdown to Curtain” chronicled the preparations for a production of Cleopatra staged in the then newly built facilities, contains a moment where the star, Leontyne Price expresses thanks that the people she grew up with could see her New York life. She proclaims, “I am grateful to God. I’m excited completely out of my skin. I’m also excited too because my home town Laurel Mississippi is now connected with our broadcast and this makes me so proud of them I can’t possibly tell you.” The Bell Telephone Hour had only one sponsor: AT&T. There were usually three commercial breaks in the show which I would classify into three categories. The first I will call “Long Distance Service in Late Capitalism.” These commercials typically featured parents and/or grandparents who were separated from children/grandchildren living in other parts of the country. Given that the families seemed to want to talk to each other, one can only imagine they 210 were separated because of their jobs – their distance a result of the changing labor economy. The children, not able to be present for birthdays, births etc. would call their parents on the phone: the global corporation was part of the solution not the problem – “long distance, the next best thing to being there.” The second type of commercial advertised phone extensions for every room of the suburban home. This commercial typically featured a white housewife who decided she needed a phone in the kitchen, the bedroom, etc. Her request was fulfilled by the friendly looking white “telephone man” who came to her house to install them. Third, were the commercials that might appease the liberal viewer who was upset over the global reach of the “natural monopoly,” as AT&T often called itself. These commercials emphasized the “diversity” of the company by showing viewers the workers of Western Electric, the Bell Laboratories, the Baby Bells, the female operators connecting calls and the telephone man who would make a visit to you home to provide services. These commercials made the case that the “natural” monopoly encouraged innovation, ensured service to all areas, and kept service costs down. In the fifties and sixties, AT&T was one of the largest global corporations. It was satirized, criticized, and the subject of numerous anti-trust suits. In addition to providing phone service to most of the nation, AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories serviced the National Defense industries and, of course, 211 built and operated the system that made network television transmission possible. A 1964 New York Times article declared that, The system is extraordinarily sensitive about its public image and has spent millions on public relations and publicity to promote such ideas s ‘the voice with the smile’ and the best possible service at the lowest possible cost’ . . . the watchword throughout is quiet dignity and conservatism. . . . It tends toward the friendly-folksy all-is-well, bless-our-nativeland theme. 36 Since The Bell Telephone Hour was a part of their PR arsenal it appears that their notion of dignity and conservatism, like Pat Weaver, Jack Gould and Harry Belafonte’s notion of quality and taste, included and perhaps was even enhanced by racial inclusion as evidenced by the program’s inclusion of the “best” musicians, singers and dancers, white or black. Though AT & T was interested in presenting black musicians and singers, the commercials aired during the broadcasts hailed a white viewer. The families featured in the commercials were all white and the kinds of suburban households depicted in the commercial referenced the kinds of home white middle class families were moving to in their exodus from urban areas in the period. Of course black viewers watched the show and saw these commercials. The moment when Leontyne Price acknowledges her hometown viewers on the “New Met: Countdown to Curtain” episode which I discussed above, was one of the few times the show directly acknowledged its black viewers. Other evidence of black viewers of AT&T commercials came in the form of critique. A 1968 New York Times article began with the headline “Negroes in Alabama 212 Town Upset Because They Can’t Get Phones.” 37 Charles Pettis, a businessman in Bogue Chitto, Alabama, a small rural town, was quoted voicing the following accusation: “The TV comes on and talks about getting different phones in each room, different colors and all that. We can’t even get one in our community.” 38 Thus, while The Telephone Hour, allowed viewers to imagine a space in which blacks and whites were treated (and presented) equally, the reality of those viewers’ lives were less than equal – and the company that promised that the technological advances of corporate capitalism made integration possible discriminated when it came to deciding who got access to that technology. Given the disparity between the wealth and status of the black performers on The Bell Telephone Hour and the black rural residents referenced in the New York Times article, one might concluded that the sponsor and network championship of integration was a public relations move rather than a strong commitment to civil rights. If so, were the black performers on the program just public relations shills? I would argue that some artists did manage to at least subtly critique the corporate propaganda. Black audiences especially may have read performances by blues and gospel artists as critique against the liberal fantasy of safe and happy integration into corporate capitalism. Mahalia Jackson performed three times on the program. She primarily sang the gospel songs and spirituals that made her an international star. Jackson was a well-known civil rights activists. She frequently performed in support of 213 Martin Luther King Jr., from the Montgomery Bus Strike in 1955 to the March of Washington in 1963. The show may have used her to promote an imagined equality as already achieved or on the way thanks to the benevolence of NBC and AT&T but her presence on the October 28, 1960 episode entitled “One Nation Indivisible” would probably have been viewed by black audiences with some irony – knowing that the nation was in fact quite divided and Mahalia Jackson was part of the battle being waged on the streets. 39 Harry Belafonte appeared on the first Bell Telephone Hour broadcast in January 1959 and went on to appear in four more telecasts. The premiere episode was divided into four segments. In segment one, the British actor Maurice Evans recited an Ogden Nash poem while marionette puppets performed. In segment two, the Italian soprano, Renata Tebaldi performed three solos from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. In segment three, the duo Gold and Fizdale played piano while members of The New York City Ballet danced. Harry Belafonte closed the show with segment four. As I noted above, Jack Gould dubbed this first episode “a varied delight offered with impeccable taste.” 40 Gould praised almost every aspect of the program: from the fact that its four part structure gave a satisfying amount of time to each performer down to the fact that each segment was connected by a tasteful fadeout and an unobtrusive narrator. He wrote the following about Belafonte’s segment: Mr. Belafonte was superb. His contributions included a sizzling torch number done to a magnificent trumpet accompaniment; the 214 deeply moving “Take My Mother Home” and other folk songs and spirituals. The use of spotlights for purposes of both décor and dramatic mood also were unusually effective in Mr. Belafonte’s sequence. 41 Belafonte’s appearances were unique because they were all produced and directed by his own production company, HarBel, and so stood apart from the other segments of the show. Belafonte insisted on producing his own segments. In a 1959 interview with Belafonte, Nat Hentoff reported, “He will not appear on television unless he has complete control of his part of a program.” 42 This was very unusual for a black person, or any, artist in this time period. He probably learned from bad experiences of being at the mercy of other producers. On a November 16, 1951 appearance on the Jackie Gleason show Cavalcade of Stars, for example, Belafonte walks out singing the first few lines of “Hold ‘em Joe” leading a donkey. He is dressed in a straw hat and an exaggerated version of his nightclub outfit: a button down shirt with blousy sleeves. As he walks out, the white female June Taylor dancers, wearing skirts and short blouses that cover their bellies but leave their waits bare, walk behind him, holding jugs on their heads. As Belafonte sits down to complete the song, we see the male June Taylor dancers wearing outfits similar to Belafonte’s but with what seem to be curtain tassels hanging off their shirts. The dancers mug for the camera. Their outfits and mugging and Belafonte’s straw hat and donkey tending turn the performance into a kitsch approximation of the work that Belafonte sings about. 215 His appearances on The Bell Telephone Hour stood out from the performances by many of the other black performers because they featured traditional black music (chain gang songs, spirituals etc.), rather than the Broadway show tunes sung by Diahann Carroll or the Italian arias sang by Leontyne Price. Like Mahalia Jackson, he sang the same songs he sang when he performed on behalf of the Southern Christian Leadership Council and other Civil Rights groups. Unlike the tropical setting of his Cavalcade of Stars performance, the costume and décor Belafonte used in the premiere episode of the Bell Telephone Hour was very plain. The sets were stark and the lighting was sparse. He wore his trademark performance outfit, the dark slacks and light v-neck dress shirt, and his back-up singers, “the Harry Belafonte singers,” wore suits and ties. Belafonte sang five songs: “Turnaround,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” “Jump Down Spin Around”, “Take My Mother Home” and “In That Great Getting’ Up Mornin’.” “Turn Around,” is a pop song written by Belafonte, Malvina Reynolds and Alan Greene “Hallelujah I Love her so” is a rhythm and blues love song written by Ray Charles. “Jump Down, Spin Around” is a work song that repeats the following lines over and over: Gotta jump down, spin around and pick a bale of cotton Gotta jump down, spin around and pick a bale a day Gotta jump down, spin around and pick a bale of cotton Gotta jump down, spin around and pick a bale a day “Take my Mother home” and “In That Great Getting’ Up Mornin’” are spirituals. 216 The difference between his early performance on Cavalcade of Stars and his later performance on The Bell Telephone Hour is instructive in how Belafonte constructed his televisual image of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The Cavalcade of Stars performance invites the construction of a kitsch narrative: an Island Man happily sings as he works, or takes a break from his work, with his donkey. The June Taylor dancers are the focus and Harry Belafonte is introduced as a supporting player: We present the June Taylor dances but this time they are aided and abetted by the wonderful stories of Harry Belafonte. And he’s assisted by his guitarist and accompanist Craig Work and by the way they’re both appearing now at the village vanguard in New York. So here they are the June Taylor dancers with Harry Belafonte. The announcer emphasizes Belafonte’s storytelling and the June Taylor dancers represent the notion of dress up, or play, so the song seems less like an expression of black life than a whimsical play-acting or story telling. The participation of the dancers may have invited audiences to read the performance as a travelogue or an advertisement for the delights available in the Caribbean for white travelers, and indeed, the Caribbean was a popular tourist destination for white middle class North Americans in the period. Belafonte is then presented as an exotic in his natural habitat and the white June Taylor dancers are the white audience’s proxy – they have the pleasure of playacting in the scenario. In contrast, on The Bell Telephone Hour, Belafonte wears his traditional nightclub outfit. Though his white v-neck outfit invites the audience 217 to gaze at his chest, the gaze is at one who is a sexually attractive New York/urban nightclub entertainer rather than the innocent, island exotic. The stark set design, without the donkey prop, also reinforces the sense that we are watching a sophisticated performer rather than the natural exploits of an island dweller. Belafonte’s repertoire is noteworthy for the musical styles it puts in relation to one another: he chooses a pop song he wrote, an R&B song, a work song, and two spirituals, thus reflecting a range of black music and artistic work. I have looked at these songs in chapter one (the music chapter), however here I am interested in the repertoire taken altogether. Why didn’t he sing songs all of a kind? Why include a work song? As I have argued in the rest of this dissertation, I believe that Belafonte was invested in showing the relationship among different historical moments of black life – thus he links the black pop star that he is with the R&B musician, the church member and the cotton picker. Belafonte embodies all. He doesn’t invoke them through costume or narrative scenario as he was asked to do on The Cavalcade of Stars, but through the order of the songs. Belafonte’s Bell Telephone Hour performance creates a different relationship between the performer and the audience than the Cavalcade of Stars performance. The tone is one of seriousness rather than kitsch: the stark lighting and sets don’t reproduce a travelogue instead they present the performer as a 218 serious artist, equal in stature with classical pianists and ballet dancers. The viewer, then, is in the position to appreciate the art – thanks to the privileged view offered by the network spectacular. The show designates black art (rhythm and blues, spirituals, and work songs) as tasteful. One might argue, then, that while the songs may have their origins in the working life of blacks, the tasteful lighting and costuming erases the grain of the labor at the core of the songs. This may have been true. The only sweat we see is that of the singer. The camera cuts between medium shots which include Belafonte and some of the back up singers and close ups of Belafonte’s face which shows emotion. Sometimes Belafonte’s eyes are closed; sometimes he looks straight at the audience. In one of the medium shots, Belafonte lifts his arms up and we see the perspiration that soaks his underarms – the grain of the labor of his tasteful performances. While white critics lauded the tastefulness of his performances, some Black audiences felt he reminded them too much of the slave past. In the Nat Hentoff interview, Belafonte remarks, “To some of them,” Belafonte says sadly, “the supreme goal has come to mean not just equality with whites but total acceptance of white culture. Their own past is no good. They don’t like my singing “Cotton Fields,” for example. They want to forget all the pain of that life, but they don’t see the history that’s there. The cotton empire was built on the sweat, blood, and annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Negroes.” 43 219 So, while white audiences, TV critics, and network executives may have seen Belafonte’s repertoire as proof of new liberal relations among blacks and whites, black audiences may have read it as a reminder of past inequality and insistence on that history’s relevance to the “new Negro,” even an upper middle class Negro pop singer. This insistence on the connection between the exploitation of black labor and new subjectivities of blackness is evident in all of the work Belafonte did in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The broadcast constructs race – blackness and whiteness – in complicated ways. Blackness is exhibited through the arts. The presentation gives us an image of sophisticated blackness on par with classical music and dance. The content of the songs constructs blackness as something else: passionate, working class etc. The broadcast connects whiteness with appreciation of the arts and acceptance of integration is on par with appreciation of classical music and dance. The network acts as the medium that connects blacks and whites together: it offers ideal whiteness and blackness a chance to mix. As I discussed above, the program showcases integration in terms of black and white, however the program also represented other racial and ethnic identities. The segment with Renata Tebaldi introduces a representation of East Asian culture that is troubling. The white Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi performs an Aria from the opera Madame Butterfly, in full costume and make- 220 up that verges on yellow-face. The announcer introduces the segment as “The Adventure of East meets West.” And describes the opera as follows: Puccini’s beloved opera is based on the sad story of Choc Ho San, the Japanese Girl who married an American Naval officer. All too soon, after the wedding day, he sailed away from his bride and now three years later she stands looking out to sea still certain that her husband will come back her and her child one fine day, she sings, we’ll see his ship on the horizon. He will return, I know it. We then see Tebaldi in a set designed to look like a Japanese room with screens and pillows. Tebaldi is dressed in a kimono. She sings “Un bel dì” and as she sings she makes some vague gestures related to Japanese dance. After she finishes the song the camera cuts to a vase of blossoms and we hear the announcer say: And one day he did come back but he was accompanied by a woman he married under the laws of his own country. And now poor butterfly must die by her own hand according to the ancient traditions of honor. But first she must bid a sad farewell to her child. The camera then cuts back to Tebaldi who sings “Con onor muore” while holding a knife. When she finishes, Tebaldi pulls a screen around herself and then falls over after she presumably stabs herself. The program, then presents Asian culture in the stereotypical manner chronicled by Edward Said and other theorists. Butterfly is the archetypal sacrificial Asian woman who embodies the values of submissiveness and melancholy long attributed to Asian characters. She recognizes the legitimacy of the western marriage and the natural display of western hegemony when “East meets West.” This segment only amplifies the 221 content of Belafonte’s segment: it demonstrates that liberal politics can coexist with and even support racist ideas. More Bell Telephone appearances Belafonte appeared on the Telephone Hour three more times: in September 1961, April 1963, May 1964, and April 1965. The September 1961 and April 1965 appearances were reruns of his 1959 performance. The April 1963 performance featured Belafonte performing another mix of folk songs, but the May 1964 performance is noteworthy because of the way it uses him as a emblem of the nation, much as the State Department did in his appearance at the World’s Fair and European, African, and Latin American tours. In his May 1964 appearance on the Bell Telephone Hour, Belafonte is presented as a mature artist. The show is structured as a retrospective of work by four great male artists. Each artist is presented as at the peak of his career and an esteemed representative of his art. The announcer introduces the show: Tonight the Bell Telephone Hour brings you great moments in the careers of a brilliant quartet of musical artists. . . . There are moments in the professional life of musical artists that mark a new height in his career, a starting point to greater success. They are milestones and great moments to be remembered. Tonight the Bell Telephone Hour recreates for you some these unforgettable moments. He introduces the four artists: “The wonderful wizard of jazz Woody Herman and his band; World famous bass baritone George London; celebrated concert audience Grant Johannesen; and the incomparable Harry Belafonte.” 222 Of course, one wants to ask why Woody Herman is the representative of jazz. Duke Ellington appeared on the program in 1959, 1965, and 1967 and had been performing since the 1920s, longer than Woody Herman, so perhaps he was considered. Black political avant-garde artists like Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman never appeared on the show. One surmises that Herman was an artist who would have been most familiar to the middle class viewers of The Telephone Hour. The introductions for London and Johannasen emphasize that they are Americans who demonstrated their musical expertise in international settings. George London performs a portion of his cold war triumph: he sings a few of the numbers he sang in a 1960 performance at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow where the audience gave him a standing ovation. The announcer tells us that he was “the first non-Russian to perform the title role in Russia’s best loved national opera, Boris Gudunov.” Grant Johannesen’s performance is described this way: “In 1949 at an international contest in Belgium, a young American pianist competing against 57 pianists from 32 countries won first prize. It was the start of an illustrious concert career in which he’s appeared with all the important symphony orchestras of this country as well as those of Europe and South America.“ Thus Belafonte performs in a context where men are shown to represent the U.S. nation well. 223 Belafonte’s segment also emphasizes his role as an American interpreter of international culture. The announcer tells us that he will be recreating the triumph of his number one Calypso album. . . . in the triumphant years since that moment, Mr. Belafonte has devoted himself to [shot of the other albums] exploring the folk music of many other countries and cultures. But tonight he returns to the great moment that started it all. Harry Belafonte and the folk music of the West Indies. Belafonte sings Island in the Sun, the hit single from the 1959 film he starred in; “Mama Look a Boo-Boo (Shut Your Mouth Go Away),” from Belafonte at Carnegie Hall (1959); “Jamaica Farewell” “Goin’ Down Jordan” from Jump Up Calypso (1961); My Lord What a Mornin’ from My Lord What a Mornin’ (1959); and Jump Up Calypso from Calypso (1955). Only Jamaica Farewell is from the Calypso album. The costumes and décor are as understated as his premiere performance. Belafonte’s performance is the last performance of the show. It’s noteworthy that all the performers were male: though the Bell Telephone Hour featured women on other episodes, this episode presents the accomplishment of artists through the language of the nation and men are naturalized as the representatives of the nation. Belafonte’s presence suggests a liberal inclusion of black men in the nation. Like his state department tours, Belafonte’s presence was evidence of the progress that black people could or had made. Before the announcer signs off, he continues the program’s global 224 themes by asking the audience if they are planning to come to that year’s world’s fair in New York City. The Bell Telephone Company offers their assistance in continuing to bring the audience into contact with the world in via New York City, just as their program has done. Belafonte and TV In a 1957 interview in the New York Daily News, Belafonte spoke about his frustration with the fact that black performers were mainly guests rather than hosts on weekly series. While promoting his August 6, 1957 appearance on the Nat King Cole Show, Belafonte referenced Cole’s battles with advertisers: We’re trying to prove to some of the ‘unconvinced’ along Madison Ave. that the show is still the thing – not the color of the performer’s skin. It’s about time someone set out to disprove the myth that the Southern market can make or break a TV show because the star is a Negro. 44 Again, Belafonte blames advertisers rather than the networks for the failure to present black artists. Belafonte, the article tells us, could command up to $45,000 per guest appearance but was working for $500, scale, to appear on Cole’s show. He explained why, 225 “If it weren’t for performers like Cole,” Belafonte pointed out, “many Negroes of true ability might never get a chance to become TV regulars. Therefore, it’s up to the artists who’ve already become established to help keep TV’s door open to Negro performers.” 45 And, Getting back to the Cole show, Belafonte sums up: “Nat’s show may be for TV what Jackie Robinson’s career with the Dodgers was to baseball – a real opportunity to all those qualified.” 46 As in the editorial he wrote which I discussed above, Belafonte still uses the language of colorblindness to advocate for the inclusion of blacks on television. He was frustrated with the irregular use of Negro talent and announced his plans to produce his own shows. Tonight With Belafonte Belafonte’s Emmy Award winning special, Tonight With Belafonte was a spectacular that gave Belafonte a chance to produce a whole hour of entertainment. It was broadcast on Thursday December 10, 1959 on CBS at 8:30 p.m. It was produced by Phil Stein and directed by Norman Jewison, who went on to direct many theatrical films. The content and style were an extension of Belafonte’s fifteen-minute segment on The Bell Telephone Hour. As he explained in a 1957 interview: I would like to do three or four special shows a year,” he says, “in which I could select the form and content of presentation. I’m not primarily interested in just coming on and singing a few songs. The very nature of my programming demands that we 226 have the proper settings for our songs, which are taken from the ethnic sources of all nations. 47 He performed an extended set of his trademark repertoire against austere sets and lighting and he had one featured guest, the then relatively unknown singer Odetta. Joining Belafonte and Odetta were a “26 voice chorus [The Belafonte Singers], 12 dancers, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, harmonica and guitar instrumentalists.” 48 The program’s songs were announced in what appears to be a press release printed in the New York Amsterdam News. The set list read as follows: Under the heading of “chain gang songs,” Belafonte, and chorus will sing “Sylvie.” Odetta will sing “Water Boy.” In the “work song” sequence, Belafonte will be heard in “John Henry.” Children’s game songs will include “Coffee Grows” and “Jump Down Spin Around,” with Belafonte, the chorus and dancers. Spirituals will include “My Lord what a Mornin’”, with Belafonte and the chorus, and “Joshua Fit do[sic] Battle ob[sic] Jericho,” with Belafonte, the chorus, and dancers. Other songs will include “Suzanne” (Belafonte) and “Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’” (Belafonte and company.) 49 The press release suggests that all the songs performed represented some aspect of Black music. Though they aren’t classified as such on the press release, “Great Getting’ Up Mornin’” was also a spiritual and “Suzanne” was a song written by Belafonte but sung in the style of a work song. In contrast to his Bell Telephone Hour appearance, he didn’t sing any pop songs. Belafonte conceived of the show as a special project infused with his black aesthetic and politics. TV Guide, quoting Belafonte, wrote, “The theme? ‘This is going to be a portrait of 227 Negro life in America told in song,’ according to its star. ‘There is going to be a great deal of sub-meaning in this thing.’” 50 Thus, Belafonte announced in the popular press that it was more than a pleasant variety hour. Unlike his performance for The Bell Telephone Hour, Belafonte created narratives for the songs. They are arranged in four sequences: the chain gang songs, work songs, children’s songs, and spirituals are all performed in settings that evoke their contexts. Belafonte represents “negro life” through spirituals, blues and folk music that evoke the political and economic realities of black life: he presents them as the songs of imprisoned black men and poor rural couples. There are no commercial interruptions during the program, but there are short breaks between the musical numbers. The breaks feature paintings of Black men, women and children rendered in a style that approximates the social realism of WPA murals. There is minimal commentary by Belafonte: just a few brief introductions and a thank you message at the end. Belafonte actually begins the special with “Bald Headed Woman” (another chain-gang song not listed on the press release.) We hear the opening strains of the song before we see Belafonte: the camera frame shows a mural, done in the WPA style, of black men working on what appears to be a street. The next shot shows a stage of seven male dancers miming the gestures of hammering to the beat of a steel instrument. Belafonte stands at the front of the stage, singing, while dancers wearing shackles move behind him. During the 228 song, the camera moves between medium shots that take in Belafonte and the dancers and close ups which show the emotion on Belafonte’s face as he sings lines that convey the desires of a man working on a chain gang. He sings “I don’t want no bald headed woman, She too mean, Lordy, Lordy well she too mean;” “I don’t want no cold iron shackles,’Round my legs, Lord, Lordy well round my legs,” and “If you see my long haired woman, Better bow your head, Lord, Lordy well bow your head.” Belafonte ends the song by singing, “Hold that Line”: after he finishes the song the camera moves in on a close-up of Belafonte’s foot standing on top of a chain. The stage goes black and the next shot shows the same seven dancers sitting on scaffolding in the back of the stage. There is a screen directly in front of the dancers in a set design that evokes a prison yard. Belafonte enters the frame from the left side and stands for a few seconds at an angle so the camera takes in his figure in relation to the figures standing behind him. Belafonte then sits down and sings “Sylvie.” This time the Belafonte Singers back him up. With “Sylvie,” Belafonte takes on the persona of a prisoner singing about his girlfriend. At one point he complains, “She brought me a little coffee, She brought me a little tea, She brought me nearly ev’ry damn thing, But she didn’t bring me the jailhouse key. A little drink of water won’t satisfy me.” Belafonte sings the last verse of the song while holding onto a piece of barbed wire. 229 There is applause from the audience as the stage goes black, then Odetta comes to the stage alone with a guitar. It is dark save for a single spotlight on her. She sings the spiritual “Water Boy” and accompanies herself on guitar. When she finishes the stage goes black, we hear applause, and then the camera cuts to another WPA style mural which depicts three black children playing while children’s voices sing “Little bird, little bird, fly through my window.” The mural signals the next sequence of songs: the children’s songs. In the next cut the camera faces the stage as five children (two black girls, one black boy, one white girl, and one white boy) run in and out of the frame. Belafonte smiles at them from the back of the stage and then introduces the sequence with the following speech: In the expression of any people, children always play an important part. When you think of children you think of music. And oddly enough, many of the songs which our children sing, at least many I’m familiar with, were written by a man who spent his life on the chain gang. His name was Huddy Ledbetter, commonly known among those who loved him and cared for him as Leadbelly. And he was most famous for his nonsense songs. The introduction points to the many layered meanings of the seemingly simple children songs that make up the sequence. The songs can be read as expressions of black and white children, a constituent that was frequently invoked in the fight for U.S. civil rights, and they also serve as the artistic expressions of an adult black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner working on a chain gang. The introduction is also striking because it offers a different image of 230 Leadbelly than the one promoted by Alan Lomax. As Hazel Carby has noted, the folklorist Lomax played up Leadbelly’s violent past, while Belafonte, on the other hand, emphasizes the man beyond the stereotype, one who was “loved” and “cared” for and wrote songs. The children’s song sequence includes Odetta and the children singing “Three Pigs,” Belafonte and the children singing a verse of “Coffee Grows,” and Belafonte, the children and the Belafonte singers singing the work song “Jump Down Spin Around.” “Jump Down Spin Around” is an extensive number that includes a dance sequence that features six dancers of various races (Black, white, and Asian American) dancing as couples as if on a farm. In the midst of the dance sequence, Belafonte goes over to the duo that has been playing guitar and harmonica for the song, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. They get an extended instrumental solo. When the music ends, the stage goes black and we see a mural that focuses on the face of a black man, eyes closed, in some state of reverie. This mural signals a shift of mood to the seriousness of work. The next shot is of Belafonte singing “John Henry” on a dark stage with a single spotlight on him. When he finishes, the stage goes black and we see another detail of a mural, this time a black man with his hands on his chin. The camera slowly zooms in on the mural detail while we hear the Belafonte singers sing the opening strains of “My Lord What a Mornin’.” The camera then alternates between medium shots of the dancers and Belafonte and close-ups of 231 Belafonte’s face and hands: all close their eyes or look down, away from the camera, lost in the reverie of the spiritual. Belafonte and the singers stand on various sides of scaffolding that are constructed to look like a church steeple. When the song is over the camera dissolves into the set up for the next performance: Odetta singing the spiritual “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” with vocal backing by the Belafonte singers and Belafonte himself. They are in the steeple setting of the last song. When the number ends the stage goes black and then the lights go back on showing Belafonte sitting with his back up against a railing. He introduces the next song with the following: You know not all folk songs came out of the churches and out of the mines and out of the steel mills and out of the chain gangs and prisons. A lot of them were written by some great novelists. Like for instance the song we’re about to do was written by one of America’s foremost poets, a man by the name of Langston Hughes. And when we first put music to this bit of poetry we had not anticipated the task we set for ourselves [hear laughter from the background – from Belafonte and perhaps some of the performers.] Consequently during rehearsals many of the singers had to take off because of chronic laryngitis. It’s a very strenuous piece, however, be that as it may Mr. Hughes called this “A Little Lyric of Great Importance.” Belafonte smiles and then sings with the Belafonte singers, who are off camera. . . I wish [Belafonte closes his eyes] I wish [Belafonte puts his hand on his head] I wish the rent I wish the rent Was heaven sent [And the stage goes black.] 232 His elaborate set-up then is both a joke and not a joke. The song is hardly strenuous, it is only six lines, however, as Langston Hughes indicated, it does express, though humorously, the marginal existence of some black people. The audience bursts into laughter, the lights darken and then come up to show Belafonte and Odetta sitting together on the stage. They have a humorous exchange about the problems of putting precocious children to bed and she sings “Why ‘n’ Why” a song that chronicles the incessant questions of a child trying to postpone his or her bedtime. When she finishes, Belafonte tells Odetta “that was a goody goody goody [song]” and then they adopt the personas of a husband and wife to sing “Hole in the Bucket.” “Hole in the Bucket” is a folk song whose lyrics convey the conversation between a wife who wants her husband to do work, and a husband who will do anything to delay doing the work. The song finishes, there is applause, the lights go dark and in the next shot we see a mural that has a black man and black woman in profile standing next to each other. While the exchange between Odetta and Belafonte is humorous, the extended presentation of a black man and black woman playing a loving, though annoyed couple – and the presentation of the extremely close and talented friends Belafonte and Odetta -- was a striking visual presence on a television screen that showed few black couples. The shot of the mural dissolves into a shot of Belafonte sitting on a stool in the foreground of the stage and a guitar player sitting on the stool to the left of 233 him. Belafonte sings “Suzanne.” When he finishes, the stage goes dark and in the next shot the camera pans across a mural that depicts black men and women with instruments and in the next shot we see all the singers, dancers, and Odetta who go on to sing the spiritual “Glory Glory.” As they sing they all walk slowly down scaffolding, as if leaving a ship. When Odetta finishes singing, the camera moves up to reveal Belafonte standing on scaffolding above Odetta and the singers, as if he were a preacher in the pulpit, and he leads them in the finale, the spiritual “Great Getting’ Up Mornin’.” As my description indicates, the show does create some narrative: less than the Cavalcade of Stars performance but more than The Bell Telephone Hour. As I described above, barbed wire and shackles evoke the slave context of the songs “Bald Headed Woman” and “Sylvie.” And when he and Odetta sing “A Hole in the Bucket” they act like the married couple the song evokes and sing on a set that looks like a shack the rural couple might live in. Similarly, the sequences where Belafonte and Odetta sing with the children, illustrate the playfulness of the lyrics. Throughout the show, scaffolding is loosely constructed to evoke the settings of a prison yard, a ship yard or dock, and a church. All illustrate the context of the songs but minimally without any of the overblown kitsch of The Cavalcade of Stars performance. In a New York Daily News story Belafonte described his narrative intentions, We’re going to use a chorus of thirty voices and sixteen dancers, not merely because ‘you’ve got to have dancing,’ but because 234 they will be necessary in telling the musical stories that will be unveiled on the program. The songs that Belafonte sings, and the ones he and Odetta will perform together on “Tonight With Belafonte,” are small playlets in themselves, and a chorus of voices . . . Some of the songs have never been performed on television before. “All the music is special. The choreography is fresh and it has a special folk quality,” said Belafonte. “In other words, from Odetta to our chorus, to our dancers, and including the very production values of the show, we are utilizing a special approach. After all, if you don’t do something creatively ‘special’ for a ‘special’ what’s so special about it?” 51 As in his editorial, Belafonte uses the discourse of quality or special programming to promote what is unique about his program: the inclusion of black folk songs and spirituals which evoke the particular diversity of black life. Reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, emphasized the quality of the program. John P. Shanley of The New York Times, singled out Belafonte’s “impressive” singing, the imaginative execution of the numbers, and the “striking settings.” 52 Cecil Smith’s Los Angeles Times review described the show as “beautifully conceived and executed, a delight to see and hear.” Each noted the range of moods invoked in the program. Smith wrote, “Furthermore, it was such a happy show, one that bounced and floated, a gazelle of a show. Belafonte, who can tear the heart with a tragic spiritual, can also tickle the funny bone with one of Leadbelly’s nonsense songs. And Odetta of that incredible voice can blend blues and merriment without a pause.” 53 Each reviewer understood the diversity of each segment while perhaps missing the 235 layers of meaning constellated by the songs that both evoke the history of U.S. slavery and the bleak economic conditions of contemporary blacks. Both reviewers praised the sponsor of the program, Revlon, for presenting it whole, with no commercial interruptions. We hear applause between many of the songs, but we never see a studio audience. There is no stand in for the audience at home and one might be free to imagine people of all races watching the show. However, while there were no commercial interruptions in the middle of the program, the sponsor, Revlon, put a commercial for their products at the beginning and end of the hour-long show. And those commercials did represent the audience, and that audience was white. The first commercial occurs after the opening credits. There is a shot of a closed theater door on which is written “REVLON, New York, Paris, London.” The camera goes through the door and we see a young white woman, standing in a lobby, or powder room, dressed in a white evening gown who welcomes us to the program: Good evening and welcome to one of the most exciting television evenings of the year. ‘Tonight With Belafonte’, brought to you by Revlon. I’m Barbara Britton.” Britton was an actress who was a Revlon spokesperson. After she greets us, Britton sweeps her arms to call attention to all the Revlon gifts in the lobby, which she tells us is called “The Revlon Room.” As she shows us the lipstick cases, jewelry, and compacts that men can buy for the “women in their lives” two heterosexual white couples dressed in formal wear (a tux for him and 236 gown for her) walk through the room. As she finishes showing us the goods she introduces us to the main show: Now, we know how eagerly you must be looking forward to this evening’s program. And we here at Revlon feel the same way. We too are anxious to see what the exciting Belafonte has in store for us. So here’s a Christmas gift that Revlon has for you. No commercials. Not even a tiny little one until the program is over. Ladies and Gentlemen, Tonight With Belafonte. The show created an aura of theater by having Britton present the Revlon gifts in what looked like a lobby, or sitting area in a theater. Britton and her Revlon gifts returned onscreen after Belafonte and company finished “Great Getting’ Up Mornin’.” Before we see her, the camera shows three white couples coming out of a theater. Britton greets us with “Have you ever heard anything like it before?” Her statement could be read as high praise for Belafonte’s exceptional showmanship and/or as indication that we’ve just witnessed something strange and exotic. She then shows us an array of Revlon Gifts for women (milk bath, fragrances) and men (manicure sets, cologne). She segues from the gifts to Belafonte with the following: So you see this year Revlon a fabulous collection of fabulous gifts and every single one is so right you will have nothing but delightful decisions in store. We hope you’ll enjoy shopping for them at your Revlon counter as we hope you’ve enjoyed Tonight with Belafonte. So, in spite of how Belafonte’s songs can be read as a critique of the economic inequalities produced by capitalism, Revlon presents the show as an object on par with Revlon products. The viewing of the program is put on the same level 237 as shopping – it reinforces the white heterosexual family unit and doesn’t challenge it nor the economic and political structures which support it. Belafonte then returns to thank CBS and Revlon but his gratefulness did not last long. Belafonte’s Tonight With Belafonte was supposed to be the first in what was a five episode series of specials he had contracted to do with Revlon for CBS. Belafonte did a second Revlon sponsored show, called “Belafonte: NY:19” which was broadcast on CBS on November 20, 1960. 54 19 referred to the postal zone of midtown Manhattan and the show featured several guests including Gloria Lynne, John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Contemporary String Quartet, Arthur Mitchell, and May Hinkson. A 1961 New York Times article reported that Belafonte and Revlon severed ties after “Belafonte: NY: 19” because Belafonte objected to the number of commercials Revlon put in the second show. In a 1996 Henry Louis Gates interview, Belafonte offered a different explanation for the aborted contract. The show featured “ black and white luminaries from jazz, folk, and pop” 55 but after it was broadcast Belafonte was told by Charlie Revson that Revlon had gotten feedback that audiences preferred him with all black artists, like in his first special, rather than a mix of black and white. Ironically, while television and the U.S. government had seized on Belafonte’s image in order to promote integration, Revlon rejected him because they felt he went too far. This is an irony that all black musicians who toured the world on behalf of the State 238 Department’s Cold War projects encountered: it was important for the world to believe that the U.S. promoted racial tolerance but it was equally important for the U.S. to conceal their international propaganda from citizens, especially in the South, who objected to the use of tax payer money in the promotion of integration. 56 Once again Belafonte’s encounters with corporate television revealed the limits of the liberal conception of equality. Belafonte wouldn’t do an all black show; he objected to being “resegregated.” Revlon paid him but let him out of his contract. This too shows the contradictory meanings Belafonte’s work could inspire : while black audiences may have read Belafonte’s programs as visualization of the problems in black life (economic inequality, imprisonment, coerced labor) and an expression of the art produced under these circumstances, the program may have reinforced the idea that the segregation of blacks was natural and aesthetically pleasing. When his second show offered an image of integrated musical groups, it made the sponsor and audiences uncomfortable. Tonight with Belafonte constellates several contradictory yet compatible meanings. It is presented as a product, as appealing as the Christmas gifts Revlon sold. 57 In as much as audiences read the show as Belafonte intended -- through the introductions of black culture and history -- they may have understood those problems to be safely contained in the past. I believe that Belafonte wanted the audience to connect the two meanings together: the 239 baubles made by corporations like Revlon were inextricably tied to the economic inequality and exploitation expressed by the songs. In other words, the ideal viewer would have seen how the content of the show was in dialectical opposition to the frame. Belafonte’s songs expose the coerced labor and inequality at the root of the values of the marketplace celebrated by Revlon. Political Variety While Belafonte trusted that the “submeanings” would be accessible without explicit narrative in Tonight with Belafonte, two later variety programs eschew subtlety for more explicit commentary. This section examines two variety television collaborations between Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte: The Strollin’ ‘20s (1966) and A Time for Laughter (1967). I argue that the two stars were able to use television to depict the particularity of black history and culture that they were unable to represent in film. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Donald Bogle argues that Hollywood film has replicated stereotypes of black people established in 19th Century popular culture. He contends that Poitier’s ‘50s and ‘60s roles were updated Toms and that Hollywood was interested in Belafonte as a buck. James Snead adds another layer to Bogle’s argument. In White Screen/Black Images he maintains that because black film characters often represent longstanding stereotypes, they appear to be unanchored in particular historical periods or spaces. 58 Many of Poitier and Belafonte’s ‘50s and ‘60s film roles suffer from Hollywood cinema’s tendency 240 to depict blacks as outside of history. Surprisingly, television gave them the opportunity to present the particularity of black history and culture. The Strollin’ ‘20s represented black life in 1920s Harlem and A Time for Laughter offered a history of black comedy beyond the one dimensional minstrelsy on exhibit in mainstream film (and TV sitcoms.) Poitier and Belafonte were often the lone black characters in the films in which they appeared. I will examine the two television shows that allowed them to collaborate with a diverse group of black artists (including Moms Mabley, Joe Williams, and Richard Pryor) to depict the complexity of black life in particular historical moments. TV had changed in this period. It was the late 60s. In a New York Times Interview in promotion of The Strollin’ ‘20s Belafonte was quoted: Until recently the resistance [to using Negro performers in television] has been great . . . But in a five-year period a lot has happened to reshape thinking in broadcasting. Look at the use of Negroes in ads, as actors and in the new consideration given to the use of Negro performers. The total climate has changed and I’m just lucky enough to be here when this kind of history is unfolding. 59 By the time Poitier and Belafonte collaborated on these specials, Cicely Tyson had been featured on the short-lived drama series East Side, West Side (1963- 64), Bill Cosby had starred in I Spy (1965-68), and Greg Morris had costarred in Mission Impossible (1966-73). 241 Sidney Poitier Belafonte produced both programs but Sidney Poitier is front and center as the host of both. Poitier had won the Best Actor Oscar in 1963 for Lilies in the Field and was a popular and familiar face to mainstream television audiences. Poitier’s persona in most of the films he starred in was well represented in Lilies of the Field. In that film he played a handyman, Homer Smith who helps a group of nuns, who are East German refugees, build a church on the Arizona land they’ve resettled on. Homer is an ex-GI who not only helps them build their church but also introduces them to American culture. Like Belafonte was often called upon to do, Smith is a representative of U.S. nation. He teaches them American customs and he also teaches them the English language. In one sequence he uses the gospel song “Amen” to teach them how to speak. In Homer’s hand, then, the gospel song is not used in protest, as civil rights workers used them, but on behalf of the nation. Homer is the ambassador of the ideals of democracy as embodied by the U.S. and reaches out to those fleeing communism. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Belafonte critiqued the film’s presentation of Homer as emblematic of U.S. hospitality is disingenuous because it covers over the way in which blacks and their culture are unvalued by the nation.. 60 Most of Poitier’s ‘50s and ‘60s film roles prevented him form representing the particular history and culture of blacks. In 242 television, however, he played host for two programs that presented the art of black Americans in particular historical moments. The Strollin’ ‘20s The Strollin’ ‘20s was broadcast on Monday February 26, 1966. Belafonte produced the program and appears at the beginning to introduce it, but he doesn’t appear in the rest of the program. The script was written by Langston Hughes. It consists of variety performances of song, dance, and comedy. Unlike Belafonte’s previous variety programs, each segment is held together by extensive narration spoken by Poitier. The show contains the musical and comedic numbers that are a staple of variety television but these are connected by a script which purports to reveal the Harlem aesthetic of the 1920s to mainstream audiences of the 1960s. It showcases a range of black artists including, Duke Ellington, Diahann Carroll, Nipsey Russell, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joe Williams. The artists represent black entertainment in a range of settings: nightclubs, the Chitlin’ Circuit, Theater, Television, and film. Belafonte described the show as follows: It’s a simple glimpse of Negro life in Harlem of the 1920s,” Belafonte explains simply as he relaxes in a living-room club chair, cigaret[sic] in hand. “It was a very prolific period, a time of large migration into Harlem, the emergence of writers like Dunbar and Hughes. It was also the time of Garvey’s back-to- Africa movement, and rent parties. The program looks into this period with consideration given to today’s temperament and circumstances. 243 Negro communities all over the U.S., like Watts, are on the path of head-on collision with the white world. Yet within the same ghetto, there is humor, love and personality of the Negro that remains unseen. This program shows another dimension of that ghetto, a new perspective. Thus, Belafonte wanted the program to be read in dialogue with the news of violence, poverty and racial antagonism coming out of black ghettos. While reviews of the show criticized the lack of sociological realism of the show – John S. Wilson’s New York Times review described the show as “a candy colored Chamber of Commerce Valentine that might have been designed by Busby Berkeley for a movie of the nineteen-thirties”—what is striking about the show is how it avoids the era’s emphasis on black and white relations by instead focusing on the relationships among blacks. The program opens with Belafonte, dressed in a tuxedo, describing what the 1920s meant for the “General [i.e. white] population”: The 1920s was an interesting time for the World. In Geneva the United Nations struggled with World Affairs. Benito Mussolini Marched on Rome, And In Germany Adolph Hitler wrote Mien Camp. In America 1920s was a colorful period. Woodrow Wilson was president when women got the right to vote. Prohibition went into effect. And Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. Rudolph Valentino was mesmerizing all the women And Gilda Gray was making the nation shimmy crazy. And in New York City everything was happening. Jimmy Walker made a colorful mayor And everyone who could afford it had a wireless set. A local boy made good and gave the world its first talking motion picture 244 And in Harlem, a tiny community in the middle of Manhattan, Marcus Garvey raised money for the purpose of taking Negroes back to Africa Duke Ellington was writing a new page in American musical history. Tonight Miss Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis, Jr., Duke Ellington, Sidney Poitier, George Kirby, Miss Gloria Lynn, Brownie McGhee, and Joe Williams recreated some of the highlights of that era, which for most of America was called the Rolling Twenties but in Harlem it was called the Strollin’ ‘20s. Belafonte sets up an opposition between the 1920s as experienced by whites and the 1920s experienced by blacks. As Belafonte speaks, we see photographs of the people and events he references. The show breaks for a Listerine commercial and then returns. We hear singers singing “The Strollin’ ‘20s” theme song and see black women and men, dressed as dandies and flappers, walking down the street. It’s a variety show rendition of Harlem street life where boys fighting is carefully choreographed and looks like a dance. The camera tracks across the stage and we catch glimpses of all the principal cast members (Diahann Carroll et. al.) The camera then tracks back across the stage and the Harlem residents have changed: we see the more unsavory members of the community, including, prostitutes, and pimps (though, since this is a network variety musical, they look rather harmless.) The camera tracks back again and shows more of the more wholesome members of the community and then the song comes to an end and the camera finally stops on Sidney Poitier who is dressed in a 1920s style suit and leaning against a stage window. He launches into the lyrical, Langston Hughes penned, narration: 245 That’s what we call it. Strollin’. Folks all dressed up and walking up and down. 7 th Avenue, Lenox Avenue, 135 th Street. Meeting friends to joke and laugh, to eye the girls and get the latest news by word of mouth. Find out who’s going with who, who got married last week, who died, who lost their job? Will Marcus Garvey get across the Atlantic before Lindberg? Will the mob be able to move Dutch Schultz out of the Numbers racket? Will Herbert Hoover make a good president? And all this taking place right here. In the little village of Harlem. The camera then cuts to a black woman on the stage asking a policeman, “Could you tell me where the Harlem YWCA is?” He tells her, “Just stroll up here two blocks and turn left sweet thing. As the policeman eyes her, the camera shows Poitier, with his back to the camera, looking on at the exchange, he then turns around and launches into a poem about Harlem: Harlem is a song with a minor refrain. Harlem is a dream folks keep dreaming again and again. Harlem is a tear held back until it turns into a smile. Harlem is a sunrise you know has got to come after awhile. Harlem is the kid you hope will grow up nice. Harlem is the shoes you have half soled twice. It’s many hands working hard all day long. It’s the prayer you pray to that keeps you going along. That’s Harlem and I like it. The fact is, I love it. Ever since I came up from down under and threw one foot over the Mason Dixon line and stepped into Harlem, that dusky sash across the middle of Manhattan, and somebody handed me a house rent party card. The introduction to the program is over and the variety performances begin. 246 The introduction paints Harlem as a community of families and couples: it briefly makes references to illegal activity (prostitution and gambling) but it emphasizes the neighborhood activities of more wholesome denizens. Belafonte’s introduction reframes the ‘20s for the audience, who is assumed to be the members of the white middle class who think of the ’20s as the “Roaring ‘20s.” Belafonte describes the ‘20s as the assumed audience views it, through the mainstream headlines, and contrasts it with the ‘20s from the perspective of those from Harlem for whom Duke Ellington and Marcus Garvey were as, or perhaps more, important than Wilson, Hitler, and Mussolini. Poitier’s introduction elaborates on the perspective of Harlem residents. In the rent party sequence, which follows the introduction, Gloria Lynn performs the Bessie Smith blues song, “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon,” Nipsey Russell rhymes, and Brownie McGhee plays the guitar. The next sequence features Diahann Carroll singing the Louis Jordan song “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” There is a commercial for Pell Mell cigarettes and then the program comes back with Sammy Davis, Jr. doing the song and dance number, “Doin’ the New Low-Down” made famous by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. The next scene is a comedy routine performed by Nipsey Russell and George Kirby. [I suspect this is a recreation of a routine by Bert Williams and George Walker – but I need to research.] Carroll and Davis sing and dance to “Ain’t Misbehaven” along with fourteen chorus dancers. After 247 commercials for Norelco Rotary Blades and Pepto-Bismol, Joe Williams sings “Nobody Knows the Way I feel this Morning” and he, Gloria Lynn and three children perform “Very Well, Very Well.” [?I can’t find a record of this song.] In the next scene Duke Ellington performs and then Kirby, Carroll, Russell, Williams and Lynn sing “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If that Ain’t Got That Swing.)” After a Roi-Tan cigar commercial, we return to Poitier who recites some more lyrical lines about Harlem: The Lenox Avenue Subway, Harlem’s tunnel to the rest of the world. That’s the way most of us came From an old place down home to this new place called Harlem. This dusky sash across the middle of Manhattan. And I like it Fact is I love it. We then hear the Strollin’ ‘20s theme and each of the principal performers hold up their credit. The program features more elaborate set decoration than the Belafonte television productions I’ve discussed previously. Each performance takes place in a setting from the Harlem of the 1920s: brownstone apartments, nightclubs, and the city streets. There is also more narrative introduction than in Belafonte’s previous variety outings. Each narration explicitly announces the social and economic context of the upcoming number. The opening number, set at a rent party, is introduced by Poitier, strollin’ into the apartment as a woman at the door asks him for 25 cents. He tells the audience, “25 cents. That’s if you’re 248 lucky and got it, else you don’t get in. It’s rent time and the man is crowding close so you charge 25 cents at the door and you call everybody and everything to help it get out.” He walks in and the camera moves in for a close-up as he finishes his introduction: “Even a tinkering treble, rolling bass, high noon teeth and a midnight face. Great long fingers on great big hands. Screaming Pedals with his 12 show lands. It seems his eyes are teasing pain. A few minutes late for the freedom train.” The rent party, then, is a response to the dire economic circumstances many men, women, and children faced in 1920s Harlem. Though Gloria Lynn, Nipsey Russell, and Brownie McGhee’s performances are enjoyable they are mixed with the pain of being under economic pressures. The Joe Williams performance of “Nobody Knows the Way I feel this Morning” is introduced by Poitier with questions that conjure the plight of unemployed black men: What does a man do when he aches in the morning and aches at night? What does he do when even in his dreams he aches. And when he faces the cold light of day and remembers the job he never could get, never could have. And can’t have now. Sometimes he just sits here in the middle of Harlem and looks out on the world and hates to remember that he don’t know what he’s going to do. During Poitier’s introduction, Williams and three dancers come to the stage dressed in work clothes; they walk slowly looking despondent. As Williams sings he closes his eyes and looks pained. The melancholy song, written by 249 Dinah Washington, could be an expression of many troubles including heartache, but unemployment is the reason given for this expression of the blues. The Duke Ellington sequence is set in the Savoy Ballroom and begins with Poitier telling us that black people couldn’t get into the Harlem located Cotton Club so they established their own space where black people could be admitted: The Savoy, Harlem’s citadel of happy sounds The jazz center of the world Every village has its meeting place and the Savoy happens to be ours. Not that there aren’t other places for people to meet in like The Cotton Club for instance. But The Cotton Club ain’t for black folks. True, they don’t have signs up telling you this, but, well, we just can’t get in. But in our own place, the Savoy, we dress up and pay tribute to the black musical giants of the day. Poitier even introduces Sammy Davis, Jr.’s seemingly light performance of “Doing the New Low-Down” with the following words: “You know, there are 168 hours in a week and around here most of that time is spent in a struggle for survival. And sometimes when that is too much we turn to our poets, our artists, our players.” Thus, while the number seems to be divorced from the economic and political struggles of Harlem residents, its lightness is a response that reflects a desire to escape economic limitations. That the ‘20s is represented as a time of poverty and unemployment for some creates a different image of the time which, as Poitier and Belafonte point out in the show’s introduction, was often imagined as a more prosperous time 250 that contrasted with the economic depression of the 1930s. All in all, this is a picture of a community that is separate from the white community. The people of Harlem suffer different problems than the white community (discrimination and widespread unemployment) yet, contrary to the rhetoric of the ‘50s and ‘60s civil rights movement, they weren’t necessarily interested in integration. In fact, they longingly invoke the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey several times in the program. In his introduction to the show, Belafonte lists Marcus Garvey as the first personality on the minds of blacks (but not whites) in the ‘20s: “Marcus Garvey raised money for the purpose of taking Negroes back to Africa.” The rhyme Nipsey Russell makes while gambling with friends at the rent party includes “Abraham Lincoln set us free, but I want to go home across the sea, Tell Marcus Garvey to hold that ship. Here’s a fool going to pay for the trip”; and, “And if I should catch me a forty-nine, I’ll help Marcus Garvey with that Black Star Line.” Poitier’s narrator also mentions Garvey. In the introduction he asks, “Will Marcus Garvey get across the Atlantic before Lindbergh?” The program illustrates Stuart Hall’s contention that “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.” 61 Though Belafonte and Poitier may have been positioned by mainstream culture as emblems of the hope and promise of black integration into mainstream culture, they suggest that they are also positioned in a history of black nationalism that is uninterested, or, at the very least, 251 suspicious of integration. Poitier begins and ends the program by asserting his love of Harlem, the location where blacks have been segregated in New York City. “That’s Harlem. And I like it. The fact is that I love it.” Though Poitier emigrated to the U.S. from The Bahamas, his narrator made the migration to Harlem from the south. He tell us about his arrival in Harlem twice. In the beginning he tells us, “Ever since I came up from down under and threw one foot over the Mason-Dixon line and stepped into Harlem, that dusky sash across the middle of Manhattan . . .” and at the end, “Harlem’s tunnel to the rest of the world. That’s the way most of us came. From an old place down home to this new place called Harlem, this dusky sash across the middle of Manhattan.” In his final moments on stage, Poitier goes over to a player piano and reads a sign above that says “dispossessed.” This is another marker of economic suffering. Presumably the piano and other possessions have been left out on the sidewalk. Perhaps the rent party at the beginning of the show didn’t raise enough money. Dispossessed, indicates not only has the property been taken over, but that it was taken over unjustly and unlawfully. The show, like Belafonte’s previous television spectaculars, hails a white audience. Though Belafonte clearly intended the show to be a unique offering of black life, one could argue that the show features the same old singing and dancing of black people that is only lifted by a middle-brow veneer of cultural education. Poitier’s narration assumes the audience is uninformed about black 252 history and the black vernacular and the show promises a close-up view of black life in the period. During the Rent Party sequence, for example, the camera is positioned in the midst of the black couples who are listening, singing, and dancing. It is as if the viewer in the middle of the crowd – with the black couples dancing up in the viewer’s faces. It is curious that the commercials, all hailing middle class white viewer’s needs, featured ads for Listerine and Pepto Bismol. The show makes unconscious connections between contact with Negroes and disease and germs. Reviewers judged the show by its authenticity. They complained that there was none of grittiness of the real Harlem and that Ellington did not in fact play with his band on the telecast. Perhaps they picked up on how the commercials unconsciously played into a repulsion toward blackness and a need for cleanliness. It is a variety show, however – I’m not sure there is a realist aesthetic for variety programming. The reviewers seemed to miss the authenticity that is there: the songs represent blues numbers and dances performer by actual performers of the twenties. Though, that said, I’m not interested in making a case for authenticity. Black shows shouldn’t have to carry that burden. What is striking about the show is the way in which the particular artistry of blacks in the 20 th century is showcased. A range of black performers performs the songs and dances of the ‘20s. The critics also seem to have no understanding of the double role that black music has always played in black 253 life. Black spirituals often functioned as a cover for subversive communication among slaves and served as emblems of protests during the Civil Rights Movement. In addition, joyful singing and dancing, as Saidiya Hartman has written, represented an expression of freedom and control over the body in times when blacks had no official control over their living situations or their bodies. 62 Dubois used sorrow songs in his writings about black American politics for this reason. Clearly some viewers didn’t understand the complexity of the variety show but I would argue that those black and white viewers already familiar with the breadth and depth of black history and culture would have seen layers in the show. A Time for Laughter The Belafonte produced A Time for Laughter aired on April 6, 1967. It was hosted by Sidney Poitier and starred a range of black comedians and performers including Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Pigmeat Markham, Richard Pryor, George Kirby, Diahann Carroll, Godfrey Cambridge, Diana Sands and Belafonte. According to a New York Times article about the show, Belafonte chose to make a comedy, instead of a musical variety show, because of the criticisms that The Strollin’ ‘20s was too tame. 63 Also, according to the article, Belafonte wanted to call the show “100 Years of Negro Laughter,” but network executives thought the title would turn people off. In a New York 254 Times interview written to promote A Time for Laughter, Belafonte explained his production philosophy: “The American white,” says Belafonte, “can only become acquainted with the American Negro through his art.” I hear words like ‘socially retarded’ and ‘culturally deprived’ and economically depressed.’ Already I’m given the onus of some kind of misfit. ‘Culturally deprived!’ Hell! What does that mean? Isn’t this the same community that produced Langston Hughes, Jimmy Baldwin, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington? Ruby Dee? . . . If we’re ‘culturally deprived’ because we don’t have ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ and ‘Hello Dolly,’ then we’re very rich. You’re the ones who are perpetrating mediocrity. As a producer, my plans are vast. I want to unfold the realities of Negro life. We’ve all got to get committed, because if America can’t make it, what society can? Belafonte, then, sees the special as in dialogue with the sociological rhetoric used to analyze the “problems” with black America. Poitier sets the tone for the special: There are few things that express the mood of the Negro better than his humor. Unlike his music jazz which has been able to break out and move freely through most of the societies of the world Negro humor has stayed home. And through generations of fermentation it has become a heady wine rarely tasted by the outside world. For the most part America has only seen a caricature of our humor and it all started in the 1800s when an unsuspecting stable hand by the name of Jim crow was the victim of what appeared to be an innocent request from a song and dance man known as Daddy Rice. Thus, according to Poitier, white audiences up to now have only seen a watered down (or whitened up) version of black humor. This is an argument Mel 255 Watkins makes in his 1994 book On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying – the Underground Tradition of African-American humor that Transformed American culture from Slavery to Richard Pryor. He writes, The distinctive character of authentic African-American humor – sometimes ironic, evasive, and oblique, sometimes playful and purely entertaining, and sometimes aggressively militant – was well established by the early nineteenth century. Although this humor was most often conspicuously quiescent, confined to isolated black gatherings and concealed by an outer face of passivity and compliance, occasionally it erupted in pointed satire, directing barbs at the pretentiousness of whites or other blacks, or at the injustices and dehumanization of bondage. But even as this private humor developed among blacks, mainstream America was about to introduce a form of entertainment that would codify the public images of blacks as the prototypical Fool or Sambo. 64 Watkins argues that black comedy manifests the “twoness” of black life that W.E.B. Dubois documented in The Souls of Black Folks. In other words, black people have had to show one accommodating comedic face to white viewers and saved one for other blacks. The Sambo or Coon familiar from minstrel shows is the one shown to whites while black viewers reserve a more diverse and complex array of comedic postures for their own audiences. According to Watkins, it’s the accommodating black humor that was appropriated by white minstrel performers. 65 Poitier similarly suggests that whites have only seen a limited view of black humor because of white minstrelsy’s appropriation of black popular culture in the 1800s. 256 Though the main content of the show will be comedy sketches, the show begins with a song and dance number that represents an exchange between Jim Crow and King Daddy Rice. The segment is startling: it conveys through song and dance the complexities of minstrelsy. Minstrelsy is based on an “authentic” black art form: the song and dance performed by black slaves. But, in the course of its appropriation by white performers, any traces of the particular circumstances that gave form to the art were erased. The musical number opens with the white Daddy Rice standing under a livery sign, spying on the black Jim Crow who is doing a private dance in the stables. When Jim Crow notices Daddy Rice, he begins to explain to him what he’s doing. He explains that he will get extra money from his “master” and “mistress” for performing the dance. Thus, the dance is not a reflection of his foolishness, but an indication of his economic savvy. When Daddy Rice tries to imitate Jim and he ends up doing only a broad approximation of the dance and falling on his butt, it also becomes clear that the dance takes some skill. Jim Crow laughs at Daddy Rice’s lack of skill when Rice offers to pay Crow for some dance tips, Crow accepts: Daddy Rice: Hey boy you laughing at Daddy Rice? Here’s a dollar for your trouble. Tell me what I did wrong. Jim Crow: Step to the left. Step to the right. Do you Spring like a Crow in Flight. Now, when you wheel about and you do your spin you need a little rag blowing in the wind. 257 Jim Crow performs the dance as he narrates the steps to Daddy Rice. Once Jim Crow has taught him his dance steps and told him to dress in rags, there is a cut to Daddy Rice performing his steps with a white dance group assembled behind him. Daddy Rice sings “I got the tatters and the rags and a dance that’s funny. That ought to be worth some folding money.” The Chorus of Whites responds: “We see what you mean. We do just so and gotta end up with a minstrel show.” Jim Crow sees their performance and attire and is immediately upset. He sings, “Minstrel show? Now I seen what you done wrong. You done wheel about and stole my song.” He’s shocked and outraged that his dance is being turned into a minstrel show. Jim Crow soon has his own chorus of black dancers behind him and the number turns into a contest between the white and black dancers. Each group performs the same dance steps and sings the same lines. The black dancers finally seem to trump the white dancers when they chant, “You may look like a crow but you can’t take flight. Your spirit’s willing but . . . your color ain’t right.” In other words, the white dancers are missing the essential ingredient: race. But, then the white dancers surprise the black dancers by donning black face and kinky wigs: “A little dab here. A little dab there. To make the folks laugh, some kinky hair.” At this point, the contest is over. Jim Crow’s voice changes: it becomes deeper and we realize the high pitched voice he’s spoken in up until now has been a put on: a happy spin on an anguishing transition. He says simply, “Now that ain’t fair.” And the black dancers vanish 258 from the stage. The white minstrels take over and the black dancers are erased from the scene. Next come shots of famous performers in blackface including, Al Jolson and Amos ‘N’ Andy. Then the camera goes back to the white minstrel performers on stage who sing “And that’s how darkies was born.” Then back to our host Sidney Poitier who says “That’s how Darkies are born.” He goes on to say, The outcome of Jim Crow’s compliance with Daddy Rice’s request had an impact that was to plague us, the Negro, for generations. But there was one good thing that came out of it. Being forced to live isolated we developed our own comics. And our own song and dance men. Our own vaudeville. Poitier, thus, sets up what is to be understood as black popular culture proper: it is not minstrelsy. It is the black performance that hasn’t been seen. This frames what follows as the “real” negro humor: the particular black humor that has not been seen in the mainstream. This is possibly problematic, since it suggests that the black performers in the show will perform “authentic” Negro humor; once again, black people must perform authenticity. But, it also relieves the black performers from some of the burden of representation. They are not required to be the ultra upstanding blacks – the supernegroes -- that Poitier was burdened with playing. In the comedy sketches to follow, there is hardly an ideal or uplifting Negro to be found. Poitier, the narrator, frequently teases the audience with his inside knowledge, instead of making them comfortable; Belafonte plays a shiftless cad in one comedy scene; and, the rest of the cast 259 consisted of many black performers who were unable (or unwilling) to wear the ideal roles required of motion picture actors, especially, Moms Mabley (who was making her first network television appearance) and Redd Foxx, whose “blue” comedy prevented him from gaining mainstream exposure until the black television renaissance of the 1970s gave him Sanford and Son. 66 Altogether the performers represent the diversity of black humor: Pigmeat Markham shows us the vaudeville routines of the Chitlin’ Circuit; Redd Foxx represents signifying; Richard Pryor embodies the family like comedy of a Bill Cosby (this was in the period before Pryor started basing his comedy in the neighborhood characters of his childhood); Moms Mabley and Godfrey Cambridge satirize; and Dick Gregory performs his political humor. Mel Watkins chronicles different moments and locations in the history of black comedy from slavery to the present in his book. Belafonte’s special similarly features comedians from different periods in various venues. Watkins argues that black humor can only be understood when viewed within its “social setting.” 67 Similarly, the special shows black comedy in set designs that recreate black social settings. Redd Foxx signifies in a pool hall; George Kirby performs the parts of seven men bantering at a barbershop; Richard Pryor performs a family oriented comedy routine as an undertaker trying to fill in for a preacher in a funeral parlor service; Godfrey Cambridge, Diana Sands, and Moms Mabley satirize black upper middle class life in a suburban living room; and, Dick 260 Gregory demonstrates how comedy coexists with the politics of the Civil Rights Movement in a comedy sketch set in a jail cell full of protesters. The bulk of the program features comedy by black people only. The opening and closing, which I will discuss at the conclusion of this section, are the only moments that contain interracial groups. Like The Strollin’ ‘20s, the show aims to introduce white audiences to black humor and a few new (to them) black comics. Sidney Poitier acts as the anthropological guide to authentic Negro people but he shifts in and out of identifying with the culture on display. In his opening monologue, he refers to “the Negro” and “his music,” but, as the show proceeds he uses “us, the Negro” and slips into and out the black vernacular. The opening comedy segment features Pigmeat Markham, a comedian who was a successful vaudeville performer. He was best known to black and white audiences for his “Here Comes De Judge” routine and his segment in this show is a version of that routine. This comedy sequence offers an abrupt shift from the pointed historical and political instruction contained in the opening. It features Pigmeat Markham playing the comically partial judge, and Harry Belafonte and Diahann Carroll as a foolish couple who ask him to intervene in their marital problems. Markham’s judge was a staple of his vaudeville repertoire, however, Belafonte and Carroll play black stereotypes that run counter to the “positive” images they usually projected. Belafonte’s husband is a trifling, mother-in-law hating fool and 261 Carroll’s wife is a vamp who appeals to the judge by playing up her sexuality. The jokes in the sequence are standard issue vaudeville and the segment would almost not be worth commenting on except for the way it interweaves stock vaudeville jokes with topical references to the Civil Rights struggle. For example, in this exchange between Belafonte and Markham, the mother-in-law joke gets a new twist: Belafonte: Well Your Honor, my mother-in-law . . . Markham: Mother-in-law? Mother-in-law? Why that’s an outlaw. That becomes in law through man’s law after that there’s no law [other] than her law which is worse than the law in Arkansas. And later, this exchange between Markham and Diahann Carroll contains another reference to Jim Crow law: Markham: Where you from? Carroll: Well Your Honor, I ain’t no city girl. I don’t care who knows it. I’m proud of my home. I’m dead out of Mississippi. Markham: Child, you were lucky to get out dead. After a Pepto Bismol Commercial (again, black shows might induce stomach pains), Sidney Poitier returns to take us to “the streets of Negro humor.” He introduces the audience to the term “signifying” but teases us by refusing to tell what it means directly. He says, Negro humor is always making its comment on life. We call it signifying. Now, if you want to know what that is you gots to find yourself a signifier in our part of town. They can be found most anywhere. 262 Poitier softly chuckles over the notion of his white audience wandering into the ghetto to look for a signifying black man. Redd Foxx demonstrates the signifying one might find at the local pool hall. On the surface, his character is a stereotype. He hustles players, superstitiously carries around a rabbit’s foot, and references voodoo. But, like Pigmeat Markham’s judge, Foxx’s hustler sprinkles his humor with references to southern civil unrest. It’s another acknowledgement of the race and politics that underpins even the most irreverent routines. Here are a few samples: Now you take those marches. You’ve seen those marches. [Foxx imitates by marching in place.] Why man, I wouldn’t march from here to some money. Now I’ll catch a cab but I ain’t marching nowhere. You’ve got to be a fool to get out there and march. And let somebody hit you upside your head with an axe handle and all you’re supposed to do is lay there and hum we shall overcome? I don’t like music that well. You know, a guy came by my house in Los Angeles. He said “Man, why don’t you go down to Alabama and see what you can do.” I said, “Man, I the smog lifts I can see from here what I’d do in Alabama. I told him “I wouldn’t fly over Alabama with Lindbergh. Be my luck for the plane to crash and I’d be the only survivor and have to lay there an wait for the negro ambulance.” My great-Grandfather was one of the first politicians in Alabama. I’m not kidding you. He ran from the border and made it. Foxx’s character is a working class guy. He is a pool hustler who singles out a middle class white guy to hustle and he expresses the complaints and desires of working class black folks. He does not represent the middle class ideal of uplift (the kind of ideal Poitier and Belafonte often represented); he represents people who express their rage in rioting rather than protest: 263 You know, I was in Watts when the riots started. You remember that riot? I was standing in front of jewelry store when a brick went through the window. [camera closes in on a diamond pinky ring.] It was just laying there; wasn’t no finger in it. The next sketch features Godfrey Cambridge playing seven different people bantering in a Barbershop – another important setting in black male urban life. Though Cambridge is featured in a traditional black setting, he achieved mainstream success in the sixties by performing comedy that was more influenced by radio and television performers like “Jack Benny, Fred Allen and Jack Carter” than by the black comedians who played traditional black venues. 68 In the course of this sketch, Cambridge makes fun of a Black Muslim who comes into the shop: Hello Augustus X– or is this XX this week? West Indian Augustus don’t you know it’s better to remain silent and be thought ignorant than to think and prove it. But he supports the slogan, “Black is Beautiful” in almost the next breath, criticizing a man who is straightening out the kinks in his hair: Now there sits the shame of the race a man denying the negritude frying up his head don’t have any brains now as it is – man takes off dryer head – and has brains a la Frankenstein. A sketch with Richard Pryor follows. He plays an undertaker who clumsily fills in for a preacher who fails to show up for funeral service in Pryor’s funeral parlor. The show was produced in the period in which he was imitating Bill Cosby’s family oriented humor. Then there is a sketch featuring Godfrey 264 Cambridge, Diana Sands, and Moms Mabley which skewers the middle class ideals of integration. Poitier introduces the sketch with the following irony: The price of integration has frightened an awful lot of people. Even some of us. But not for the same reasons. It has been said, “What does it matter if a man gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hmmm. As seen by the Negro humorist, integration does have its hang-ups. Godfrey Cambridge and Diana Sands play an upper middle class black couple who appear to live the white middle class ideal suburban life. The sketch begins with Cambridge arriving home in Westchester from his New York City job and confiding to his wife (Sands) the racial anxieties that have manifested themselves in his train ride home: I’m so glad I don’t have to drive thru Harlem yes dear they are a problem. And then . . .I sat down next to this distinguished lady she said hmm niggers and I said where? where? Were there any on the train? Of course not. You know these days you just never can tell what with all those demonstrations and riot I mean such goings on they are only hurting their cause. After all it’s not our problem. He and his wife then adjust the prominent picture of the conservative politician Barry Goldwater they have hanging on their living room wall. As the sketch continues, Cambridge tells his wife that he feels that some of the “negro” traits he has repressed are beginning to return. Cambridge: Oh mumsy I must see an analyst I have peculiar longings. Sands: For what darling? Cambridge: Yesterday for some strange reason I couldn’t resist the urge to buy a watermelon Sands: A what? 265 Cambridge: I mean me. A watermelon I was so ashamed I told the clerk to wrap it up put handles on it. Sands: Where is it? Cambridge: The closet. Sands: You just eat it here in the privacy of our own little home seeds rind and all. Cambridge: Can I mumsy? . . . You don’t think I’m reverting to type? Cambridge and Sands perform the ideal white middle class life by hiring a black maid Peola, played by Moms Mabley. The satire is directed at the middle class black couple who so aspire to colorblind integration that they fight their racial heritage; so much so that they are afraid of watermelons. The sketch also pokes fun of the suburban white middle class lifestyle that was at the center of popular television shows of the time. While Cambridge had lots of mainstream television exposure in the 1960s, Moms Mabley was virtually ignored by television. 69 She was known for the social satire she performed on the black vaudeville circuit in the thirties and forties. 70 This was her first network television appearance and she would have been a striking figure for white audiences. Mabley’s Peola laughs at her bosses’ neuroses and complains about their patronizing treatment of her. Her presence as a gravely voiced African American woman who rejects the integrationist ideals of the ideal heterosexual couple, opens up space to think about alternatives to the male integrationist philosophy deemed acceptable to mainstream audiences. The last sketch features Dick Gregory’s standup and a musical number by Belafonte. Poitier introduces the sketch with the following: 266 There is no single area in the life of the negro today that so profoundly expresses his spirit as the way he has observed the incredible acts of bestiality that have been heaped upon him during the civil rights revolution. This is hardly a setting in which the victims could be expected to retaliate with humor but the movement is in fact quite heavily endowed. The camera shows a prison cell, filled with mostly black men but a few white men as well. A white man says, “Man I’ll sure by glad when we get out of here” and Gregory responds: Get out of here? Man I’m so glad we got arrested I don’t know what to do. I’ve been marching that picket line for two days and my feets killing me man. Oh they sure put a lot of us in jail this morning . .looks like wall to wall us. Never will forget the first time I got arrested. Remember the great march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama? I was standing in that line man getting ready to make this march and a cop walked up to me and said “where you going boy?” “I’m fixing to make this march from Selma to Montgomery to Alabama. He said you’ll make this march over my dead body. I said baby that wouldn’t be a bad route. Gregory’s standup focuses on language – he does a riff on who gets to use the word “nigger” that is a precursor to Chris Rock’s more recent routine on the topic. He tells a story about going to see the film Nothing But a Man and the reaction a white man has to hearing a black man in the movie call another black man “nigger”: hey let me ask you any of you ever see that movie called nothing but a man hey remember that one scene where that colored cat slipped up behind that one colored cat and called him a nigger. Did that surprise you. It was a white cat sitting next to me he like to went crazy. He nudged me and said why I didn’t know you all used the word nigger. I said shut up nigger and watch the movie. Oh that upset him 267 Why if I called you nigger you ‘d be hurt. I said if you called me a nigger you’d be hurt. He said I thought your were supposed to be non violent. I said I am but its regional. [a few white people] and after the movie my wife and I walked out into the lobby. You know who was standing there/ the same white cat. Oh yeah he walked up to me and says excuse me buddy may I speak to you for a minute? and I said yeah boy what do you want. He says why I just don’t understand how you colored folks can use the word nigger and if we white folks say nigger you get mad. I said oh man we don’t get mad cause you white folks say nigger. Do you realize that colored folks use the word nigger more in one day than all the white folks on the face of the earth could use in a lifetime? He said well why do you get mad? I said we get mad cause you haven’t learned to say it as pretty as we do. Yeah my wife wake me up every morning she just nudge me and say he old pretty nigger. The show ends with Belafonte singing “The Dog Song” – from his Belafonte on Campus Album. Jack Gould, the New York Times television critic, felt the show focused too much on race. In his review of the show he wrote, The American Broadcasting Company’s “Stage 67” devoted an hour last night to depict the humor of the Negro people, but for the most part the program violated the obvious truism that good entertainment neither knows nor pays attention to a color line. The bright spots were few and far between because the program, entitled “A Time for Laughter,” relied far too much on the novel fact that it was an all-Negro network presentation and not enough on the essentials of bright material and inspired performing. 71 Gould, who found Belafonte’s Bell Telephone Hour appearance so tasteful, found A Time for Laughter to be in poor taste. He enjoyed Belafonte’s performance of “The Dog Song,” but felt that the rest of the performers “were 268 saddled with largely dismal sketches that were not up to the usual standards of their appearance in shows where the composition of the cast is completely unimportant.” 72 Gould’s review conflates quality with the colorblindness just as the critics, networks, and even Belafonte did in the mid ‘50s. Watkins writes that the themes explored on [the black vaudeville] stage had nothing to do with non-black, mainstream existence – either imitation of it or reaction to it. Black comedians, like blues artists, primarily focused on the immediate problems of their own day-to-day existence – friendships, finances, marital and sexual relationships, the pleasures of eating and drinking. In a rigidly segregated society, whites were largely extraneous to their existence and, consequently, were absent from their humor. 73 Belafonte’s variety program similarly shows white audiences the humor that developed in segregated black communities. With the exception of the opening and closing sketches, each sketch contains black people performing with other black people; revealing the comedy that comes out of the everyday life and preoccupations of working class and middle class black people. Like The Strollin’ ‘20s, the show depicts black people who are skeptical of and critical about the benefits of integration. While Poitier’s most well known and acclaimed film work required that he play the upstanding figure who both desires and is desired by whites, the black people on display in the special challenge the notion of seamless and happy integration. 269 Gould’s review reflects every artist’s inability to control how a text is read. Gould sees Negro entertainers as eternally cheerful. He compares the show unfavorably with the Belafonte’s previous television performances. He writes, It would appear that the television audience may be ahead of the Negro theatrical community. The knack of the Negro community to parody itself and find laughter among all its troubles is both enjoyed and recognized without a special showcase calling attention to the fact. 74 I read A Time for Laughter as a more explicit critique, but one that is consistent with Belafonte’s previous television work. But Gould sees a difference. Perhaps this is why Belafonte made more explicit commentary in his later shows – so their rejection of the status quo of racial relations couldn’t be ignored. By the end of the ‘60s Belafonte was frustrated with television and his lack of control over its meanings. Belafonte turns off television Belafonte used television to communicate the complexity of black politics and aesthetics, however his optimism of the mid ‘50s was soon replaced with weariness. Shortly after his much publicized battle with sponsors and NBC executives on the set of Petula Clark’s spectacular he wrote an article for the New York Times in which he criticized television for distorting the lives of black people. He noted the lack of roles for blacks on television: What then can we show on commercial television? Our great singers and dancers and musicians? We’ve done that and done that and done that. But there seems to be no escape. The TV world goes on telling me, “Look, don’t rock the boat. Go out and 270 sing and dance and look sexy. You’ll get marvelous ratings, the world will love you, and in fact don’t you serve your cause better if you just play the nice guy? Right, play nice guy, play dead or maybe play a Supernegro who beats up Communists, who does not probe black-white relations, and maybe you will have a chance on television. 75 He expresses a frustration with being relegated to variety television and indicates that television used black performers as other mediums did: to represent the ideal middle class black citizen who is a credit to democracy and doesn’t threaten the fantasy liberal inclusiveness. For a moment, however, Belafonte was able to make the most of his position – to do political variety that challenged the Supernegro stereotypes. 271 Chapter Three Endnotes 1 Classen, Steve, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Durham: Duke University Press), 6. 2 See Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 75-77. 3 See Dianne Brooks, “’They Dig Her Message’: Opera, Television, and the Black Diva,” in Eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, Jane Shattuc, Hop On Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 300-314; Donald Bogle, Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television (New York Farrar Straus Giroux, 2001); and “Vandals Short Out Alabama TV Station Carrying Belafonte.” New York Times November 10, 1958. Belafonte’s performance on the Steve Allen Show “shorted out” the a local Alabama station. 4 See Bogle, Brooks, and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Belafonte's Balancing Act. Singer and Activist Harry Belafonte," New Yorker v72, n25 (26 August 1996): 132. 5 Hall, Stuart. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'," People's History and Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227-40. 6 Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation : Arguments in Cultural Theory. Contemporary Interventions, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.) 7 Kelley, Robin D. G. "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Folk'." American Historical Review 97.5 (1992): 1402-3. 8 Ibid., 1405. 9 Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13. 10 Torres, 13. 11 Torres, 2. 12 Torres, 33-34. 272 13 Dianne Brooks, “’They Dig Her Message’: Opera, Television, and the Black Diva,” in Eds. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 301. 14 See Bogle, 9-91. 15 Brooks 307, 308. 16 R.C.A. Sales, Net Set Records; Stockholders Vote Option Plan. New York Times ((1851-2003), May 8, 1957, 68 (accessed December 16, 2006). 17 Brooks, 309. 18 R.C.A. Sales, Net Set Records; Stockholders Vote Option Plan. New York Times ((1851-2003), May 8, 1957, 68 (accessed December 16, 2006). 19 Brooks, 309. 20 Boddy, 96. 21 Ibid., 99. 22 Ibid., 126. 23 See Boddy 81, Jack Gould "'Live' TV Vs. 'Canned' :A critic casts a vote for live TV and its 'first night' quality. Live TV Vs. 'Canned' ." New York Times (1857-Current File), February 5, 1956, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed May 18, 2008); and Jack Gould "A Plea for Live Video :Switch to Film for TV Was a Major Mistake ." New York Times (1857-Current File), December 7, 1952, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed May 18, 2008). In the latter article, Gould complained that film offered inferior visual and sound quality to live video. He concretely states that the film offers fuzzy images and muddled sound but concludes with the more ineffable statement that “In short, both the visual and aural aspects of films lack that intangible sense of depth and trueness which the wizardry of science did impart to ‘live’ TV.” He countered arguments that filmed programs offered more perfect versions of performances – with mistakes edited out – by stating that viewers are more interested in the “excitement” of watching a performance in the moment. “Take away the 273 actuality of television and there is lost the heart of TV.” And ends with “ . . bring television back alive.” 24 Boddy, 105. 25 Boddy, 105. 26 Though no weekly series featured black performers, black appeared infrequently on live television dramas. See Donald Bogle’s Primetime 59-91. 27 Jose Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 187-189. 28 Munoz 189. 29 “The Negro Star in Television. Harry Belafonte. TV Radio and Magazine. New York Herald Tribune. Week of June 24-30. Year? Probably 1956. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 See Bogle 62-67 for an extensive synopsis and analysis of the drama. 33 Jack Gould , “Television: A Bell Ringer: ‘Telephone Hour’ Proves Tasteful Delight in First of Monthly Series on Channel 4,” New York Times Jan 13, 1959. 34 Brooks, 301. 35 For more on Black American invocation of Egyptian myth and imagery see Melani McAlister, “The Middle East in African American Cultural Politics, 1955-1972” in Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 84- 124. 36 Hayes B. Jacob, “Bell Grows Two Billion Dollars Bigger: Everyone Depends on It, Everyone Must Do Business with It, Everyone is Affected by It: That's A.T.&T. and Its Affiliates, for Which the Only Word is Colossal. Bell Grows Bigger,” New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y. March 1, 1964” (accessed February 28, 2007). 274 37 Negroes in Alabama Town Upset Because They Can't Get Phones New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y.: Jan 5, 1968. 38 Ibid. 39 "Mahalia Jackson," Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971- 1975. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/HistRC/ (accessed February 28, 2007.) 40 Jack Gould, “Television: A Bell Ringer: 'Telephone Hour' Proves Tasteful Delight in First of Monthly Series on Channel 4,” New York Times, January 13, 1959, in Schomburg Center Clipping File, 1925-1974. New York: New York Public Library, 1985. 41 Ibid. 42 Nat Hentoff, “The Faces of Harry Belafonte, ” The Reporter, July 1959 , in Schomburg Center Clipping File, 1925-1974. New York: New York Public Library, 1985. 43 Ibid. 44 Sid Shalit, “Singer Works for $500 After Turning Down 45Gs” New York Daily News 8/6/57 Schomburg Clipping file. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Sid Shallit, “Singer Works for $500 After Turning Down 45Gs,” New York Daily News, August 6, 1957. Schomburg Center Clipping File. 48 New York Amsterdam News 12/5/59 “Belafonte on Whole Hour in TV Special.” Schomburg Center Clipping File. 49 Ibid. 50 “’An Evening with Harry Belafonte’,” TV Guide Dec. 5 – 11, 1959, Schomburg Cener Clipping File. 275 51 Kay Gardella, “Specs Aren’t Special Says Star Belafonte,” New York Daily News, December 6, 1959, Schomburg Center Clipping File. 52 John P. Shanley, "' Tonight With Belafonte' Offered :Folk Song Program Over Channel 2." New York Times (1857-Current file), December 11, 1959, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed May 18, 2008). 53 Smith, Cecil, “The TV Scene: Belafonte Show Fine Xmas Gift,” The Los Angeles Times, Dec 14, 1959. 54 I have not yet found this in any television archive. 55 Gates, 140. 56 See Penny Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 57 Cecil Smith wrote, “It was a glittering bauble to hang on any electronic Christmas tree.” 58 James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Darkside (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3. 59 “Harry Belafonte: Sentimental Journey,” New York Times, February 20 1966 in Schomburg Center Clipping File. 60 Gates, 139. 61 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Jonathan Rutherford, Identity, Community, Cultural Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 225. 62 See Saidya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 63 Paul Gardner, “Dark Laughter in Snow White Land,”, New York Times (1857-Current file), Apr 2, 1967, 117 (accessed March 8, 2008). 64 Mel Watkins, On the Real Side : a History of African American Comedy (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, 81. 276 65 Watkins 36. 66 See Christine Acham’s Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 67 Watkins, 41. 68 Ibid., 509. 69 Ibid., 225. 70 Ibid., 390. 71 Jack Gould, “TV: 'Time for Laughter',” New York Times (1857-Current File), April 7, 1967, http://www.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (accessed March 8, 2008). 72 Ibid. 73 Watkins 368. 74 Jack Gould. “TV: ‘Time for Laughter.’, 74. 75 Belafonte, Harry, “Belafonte: Look, They Tell Me Don’t Rock the Boat,” New York Times, April 19, 1968, 95:1. 277 Conclusion Belafonte’s aesthetic and political work have resonances in the contemporary mediascape. Paul Gilroy describes how hip hop is shares the characteristics of black music since slavery: it partakes of the syncretism of Africa, Latin American, Asian and European cultures and it is produced out of the stories and industrial material of the working class. Hip Hop artists as diverse as D J Spooky, Mos Def, Kanye West, have used their hip hop musical careers as a base for making visual media that articulates subaltern viewpoints. D J Spooky’s remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation utilizes the language of cinema and the repetition and breaks of hip hop music to create a multimedia project that critiques the history of stereotypical images of black Americans and pays homage to the intellections and artists of many mediums (dance, music, and film) who have critiqued and offered alternatives to the status-quo. Mos Def has turned his success as political rapper into a mainstream movie career, while continuing to bring attention to political issues, including calling attention to the living conditions of poor black and whites in the gulf after Katrina and the racial disparity in the Justice systems as manifested the sentencing of the Jenna Six. Kanye West made the most of television’s liveness, by going off script during the nationally televised telethon, “A Concert for Hurricane Relief,” and stunning his onscreen partner (Mike Myers) and the viewing audience by calmly stating “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” His “disruption” was a 278 response to the mainstream media coverage that acknowledged the racial demographics of New Orleans but who framed black residents as passive recipients of charity rather than angry citizens, demanding nothing less than their due. “They portray us in the media, they see a black family and says they are looting, to the white family it says they are looking for food, . . . a lot of the people who could help are at war . . . .“ Kanye West disrupted network television, however, most people probably saw his telethon performance on YouTube, a space that Will I Am made the most of by circulating his campaign video for Barack Obama, which features a multiracial collection of television, film, and music celebrities reciting Obama’s “Yes We Can”, New Hampshire concession speech. All of the above mentioned artists have utilized the dispersed media of today to make political interventions. Belafonte was a star in the Broadcast era of television, and, unlike many of today’s music and film artists music artists, he reached a cross section of U.S. audiences: White, Black, Latino, Asian- American, and Native American, young and old. Will Smith is probably the black star who most approximates Belafonte’s crossover star status today. He began his career as, “The Fresh Prince” singing family friendly songs like “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” His album, He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, [was] one of the first hip-hop LPs to achieve double-platinum status. 1 His music success led to his phenomenally popular television show, which in turn led to his 279 motion picture career. Interestingly, Smith’s first critically acclaimed role came in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), in which he plays a character who pretends to be Sidney Poitier’s son. Smith’s most recent film, I am Legend (2007), is reminiscent of Belafonte’s The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1959). Both films chronicle the exploits of the last man on earth. Unlike Belafonte’s film, however, Will Smith’s film was phenomenally popular at the box office in the U.S. and around the world. Village Roadshow/Warner Bros' I Am Legend opened $77.4 million -- almost double the studio's hoped-for $50 million -- after making a whopping $30.2 million Friday and $29 million Saturday (-4%) in 3,606 theaters for first place. This more than demonstrates that Will Smith is now the biggest U.S. box office stud bar none and breaks his previous opening record (I Robot's $62 mil in summer). 2 The same question Richard Dyer asked of Paul Robeson, and this project has asked of Harry Belafonte, could be asked of Will Smith. To paraphrase Dyer, “How did the period from 1990 to 2008 (and beyond) permit crossover black stardom of this magnitude?” 3 The question regarding black stardom is different in this moment, because as I’ve indicated above, there are many more black actors and actresses who are able to sustain mainstream acting careers. In addition, there are also Latino and Asian actors who regularly have starring roles motion pictures. There are also many black and Latino performers, like Jennifer Lopez, who are successful in more than one medium. Will Smith, however, is arguably the most 280 successful. Directors credit him with the ability to get “difficult” films like Ali green lit. And, like Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, his film characters often require him to act as a representative of the U.S. Nation. In Independence Day (1996), he plays an Air Force pilot, entrusted with the safety of the U.S. president and nation under threat of nuclear attack. In Men In Black films (1997 and 2002), he’s a U.S. government agent who, along with Tommy Lee Jones, must protect the U.S. and all of Earth from alien attack. In I Am Legend he is a U.S. Navy Scientist who is responsible for creating a deadly virus that he ultimately must protect people from. Many have suggested that Smith’s rise as the major black AND American movie star has come at a time when the U.S. is having to reimagine its status as a global nation. The 1950s was a moment in which the U.S. had to grapple with itself as a global power in the age of decolonization. In this moment, the U.S. has to grapple with its declining economic and political status. Though it is still a major cultural force and it continues to flex its military muscles in the international sphere, it is facing critique and competition from all parts of the globe. Smith has many of the crossover qualities that made Belafonte so successful. He is perceived as a family man, whose marriage and family with the actress Jada Pinkett is well publicized. He even regularly brings his kids to work, going so far as to put them in his films. Though he began as a comedic actor on television, he has extended his range to “serious” films. His politics are 281 vague, however he has repeatedly expressed an interest in running for public office some day. He is different from Belafonte in one fundamental way: it’s almost impossible to characterize his media output as critique. His hip hop music stood out as celebrations of middle class black life, while most of his contemporaries were creating music that articulated the problems in urban cities. Rappers like Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, and Public Enemy are artists not journalists, but their music functions as social protest against the economic and political conditions of urban African Americans. Though these rappers have had phenomenally successful music careers, and sold albums to a cross section of youth, including suburban white teenagers, they have not have the crossover success that Will Smith has had. In interviews, Harry Belafonte has repeatedly bemoaned the lack of activism of some of the most successful black media stars, including athletes and music and film stars. And while he doesn’t name names, it’s safe to assume that he would put Will Smith in this category. Smith’s has not taken any high- profile political stands and, with the exception of Ali, has not appeared in films and television shows that question the U.S.’s commitment to racial and economic justice. In short, while he exhibits Belafonte’s 1950s’ ability to attract diverse audiences he hasn’t used his platform to do political work. Whether 282 Will Smith should use his mainstream success to do political work is a question I can’t really answer. The record breaking success of I Am Legend, occurred during the burgeoning presidential prospects of Barack Obama, and it was hard not to think of Smith and Obama as two manifestations of U.S. audiences’ interest and pleasure in African American male figures. When Obama won the Iowa Caucuses, he became an even more interesting figure. As I am completing this phase of my project, Obama is the likely Democratic Nominee and seems to have a credible chance at becoming the next President of the United States. Obama’s multicultural biography has been a problem and a benefit to him. His Black father was from Kenya and his white mother was from Kansas. He is an “African American” whose African ancestry gives him access to a history that is free from the legacy of U.S. slavery. At first, this was seen as his positive appeal to U.S. Whites, who, it was assumed, could embrace an African American without have to deal with the tragedy of U.S. slavery. It was seen as a negative to Black Americans. There were countless debate about whether Obama was black enough; so many, that the satirical talk show host Stephen Colbert brilliantly suggested that Obama just run as a white guy. Of course that would be impossible; not only because Obama has repeatedly identified himself as black but also because his skin color would make it almost impossible for him to be seen as white given the way race is recognized in the U.S. imaginary. 283 Since Obama has won many more caucuses and primaries and exit polls have documented that he is doing well among African Americans, (and White males, and youth of all races) his blackness is no longer questioned. With the emergence of the Reverend Wright tapes, many are suggesting that Obama is now too black. In response to the endless loop of Wright’s most incendiary speeches on cable news outlets, Obama gave a speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” in Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008. One of the most repeated lines from Wright’s comments was “God Bless America? No, God Damn America” and Obama’s association with Wright caused many to question Obama’s commitment to the nation. Obama took the podium, standing in front of two large American flags, and addressed the comments by giving a history of relations among blacks and whites, which was startling for its acknowledgement of antagonism and black anger. He begins with a discussion of slavery, risky territory for a figure who wants to been seen as being able to represent white people. He describes the production of the constitution as tainted by the reality of slavery: The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a 284 Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. 4 His description of the constitution recalls Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington Speech. King begins his “I have a Dream” speech with describing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution as “promissory notes”: This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." 5 Obama suggests that Reverend Wright is from a generation of black activists and intellectuals who did the work of demanding that the U.S. make good on that promissory note. He also argues that Wright was damaged in the fight: he suffers from the antagonistic thinking required for this fight and he presents himself as a figure that, having been born after the work of the Civil Rights movement, has the ability to move beyond the anger. 285 All of these maneuvers are to be expected: it would be impossible for him to fully embrace Wright’s words without completely damaging his chances for election. What was remarkable about his speech, however, is that he didn’t completely throw him or his grievances under the bus. He presents himself as a man who is free from the “anger” and “bitterness” of African Americans from Wright’s generation, but he doesn’t discount their experiences of the “humiliation” of segregation and racial discrimination in jobs and housing. Though he insists on “the progress” that has occurred in U.S. racial justice, he acknowledges that not everyone has experienced the benefits of progress but also points out how the history of slavery and Jim Crow have material effects on the present: We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. 6 Though he places Wright in the context of the black community and the black church, and himself identifies as black American, he reminds his audience that he can and must represent multicultural America against economic and military threats and that he is uniquely qualified to do so: I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've 286 gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one. 7 In a curious throwback to early racial theories, he argues that he is genetically multicultural. Obama’s parents aren’t alive, but photographs of them are often prominently featured in articles about him and he’s made appearances with his half-sister. He and his strategists are savvy wielders of multimedia; it’s a safe bet that more people have seen his speech on YouTube than watched it broadcast on the cable news networks. He presents part of his ability to be a bridge figure for blacks and whites as a result of his experience listening like an audience member to the anger of both blacks and whites. Joining Trinity Church meant sitting in the audience to hear Wright, other pastors, and presumably parishioners, speak about racial injustice in ways they didn’t in front of other whites; and to listen to the anger and fear of his white grandmother “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. 287 Obama’s message of bringing races together without forgetting the past racial history is reminiscent of Belafonte’s political project. His discourse on slavery and economic injustice recall Belafonte’s music, television, and film work. On a January 22, 2006 episode of Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Obama to denounce Harry Belafonte’s recent statements on the Bush Whitehouse’s foreign and domestic policy. Below is an excerpt from a transcript from the interview 8 : MR. RUSSERT: I want to talk a little bit about the language people are using in the politics now of 2006, and I refer you to some comments that Harry Belafonte made yesterday. He said that Homeland Security had become the new Gestapo. What do you think of that? SEN. OBAMA: You know, I never use Nazi analogies, because I think that those were unique, and I think, you know, we have to be careful in using historical analogies like this. I think people are rightly concerned that we strike the right balance between our concerns for civil liberties and the uniform concern that all of us have about protecting ourselves from terrorism. MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Belafonte went to Venezuela, as you well know, some time ago and met with the Hugo Chavez, leader of that country, and said some things that obviously were noted in this country and around the world. Let’s listen, and come back and talk about it. (Videotape, January 8, 2006) Mr. HARRY BELAFONTE: And no matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush, says, we’re here to tell you not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people, millions, support your revolution, support your ideas, and we are expressing our solidarity with you. 288 (End videotape) MR. RUSSERT: Is it appropriate to call the President of the United States "the greatest terrorist in the world"? SEN. OBAMA: I don’t think it’s appropriate. That’s not language that I would use. But keep in mind that, you know, one of the great things about the United States is all of our citizens have the right to, you know, speak our mind about what’s going on politically. What I do think we have to focus on is-in the context of the Middle East and Iraq, Iran-is the fact that we are at a very delicate time right now, which requires not just military might, but also diplomacy. And there’ve been times where we have not used all the tools in our tool kit. There’s been a tendency on this part of this administration to talk tough, to act first and plan later. And coming back from Iraq what was clear to me is is that we have a six- to nine-month window in Iraq in which things can either turn out much better or turn out much worse, depending on how effectively we apply pressure to the Shia-dominated government to make sure that they’re bringing everybody into the fold. Belafonte’s comments in Venezuela about George Bush were lampooned by many including John Stewart on The Daily Show. Belafonte is no longer a bridge figure; he is a figure that is seen as a crazy radical who is on the fringes. Though Obama was asked to denounce Belafonte’s words because Belafonte is reportedly a good friend of Obama. Belafonte has the luxury of others taking on the mantle of ideal black AND American multimedia star. People are suspicious of Obama because he is telegenic: a great speaker who is attractive in a geeky way. 289 It remains to be seen if the American electorate can see Obama as a multiracial representative of the nation, but we are witnessing an interesting conversation that Harry Belafonte can no longer publicly participate in. 290 Conclusion 1 “Will Smith,” AllMusicGuide, http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:gbfpxquhld0e, Accessed April 6, 2008. 2 Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily “Will Smith Can Now Say 'I Am Legend': $77M For Best December Debut Ever! 'Chipmunks' Open To Cheeky $44M Wkd” http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/will-smith-can-now-say- i-am-legend-30m-friday-debut-70m-weekend/ 3 Dyer, 64. 4 “Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race,” New York Times, March 18, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Barack Obama, interviewed by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, MSNBC, January 22, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10909406/ (accessed April 6, 2008). 291 Bibliography Acham, Christine. Revolution Televised : Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. “Ads for The World, the Flesh, and The Devil.” In The World, the Flesh, and the Devil file in the Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture.” “American Budget.” Margaret Herrick Research Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, William Gordon Collection, Folder 149. Anderson, Tim J. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Beavers, Karen (author)

Core Title Lead man holler: Harry Belafonte and the culture industry

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/01/2008

Defense Date 05/13/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American studies,black diaspora,cinema studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,Popular music,race and media,television studies

Language English

Advisor Polan, Dana (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Marez, Curtis (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email kbeavers@usc.edu,soyfed@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1462

Unique identifier UC1125282

Identifier etd-Beavers-20080801 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-103666 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1462 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Beavers-20080801.pdf

Dmrecord 103666

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Beavers, Karen

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu