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PART TWO // (PART ONE))
In November of 1947, Oscar-winning actor Hattie McDaniel (Mammy in Gone With The Wind) stepped into the maid's uniform for Beulah, a fifteen-minute daily show on the CBS radio network airing weeknights at 7:00.
A refreshing and progressive entertainer, Hattie refused to play Beulah with the hyper-exaggerated dialect typified by Marlin Hurt and Bob Corley. McDaniel fought and won a provision in her contract that included script approval to ensure her role would not be an insulting one.
On the new show, it's Beulah's family, her house, her world - even if she is the employee.
Hattie McDaniel was already one Hollywood's most accomplished film actors. Forced to play a succession of supplicant, larger-than-life servants in films like The Little Colonel with Shirley Temple and The Shining Hour with Joan Crawford, Hattie alone was allowed to occasionally portray characters who spoke back to whites. This was unheard of in the 1930s, a first measured step toward social progress that can not be overlooked historically.
The Mammy role was so pervasive (and sincerely beloved) that Hattie found herself permanently typecast as the jolly gal in a pressed uniform. It's clear that during this period and beyond, the Hollywood establishment was eager to perpetuate the myth of the maternal Negro domestic - overweight, cheerful, safe and eager to please.
Because of this long-standing practice, Hattie had been on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism from the NAACP and other race organizations for years. They urged her specifically, and other African-American actors in general, to avoid playing these types of demeaning roles.
But Hattie and the others knew that if they didn't play subservient maids and pop-eyed ninnies, indeed if no black actor ever took these roles again, they would likely be played by whites in blackface (or blackvoice).
That was already a time honored tradition in Hollywood; howls of protest rang out when Hollywood started casting Blacks in Negro roles in the first place; they were taking jobs that could be filled by good white folks! After all, the guys who played the most popular and famous black entertainers of the era (Amos 'n' Andy) were both white, as were other 'Negro' stars like Watermelon and Cantaloupe, Molasses 'n' January and others.
"What do you want me to do," Hattie questioned one civil rights crusader. "Play a glamour girl and sit on Clark Gable's knee? When you ask me not to play the parts, what have you got to offer in return?"
She put it more plainly in another interview, "Why should I complain about making seven hundred dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making seven dollars a week actually being one."
Hattie did what she could. She had insisted the word 'nigger' not appear in Gone With the Wind a decade earlier, and she financially supported up and coming actors in the community.
There could be some argument over whether motion picture studios and broadcasters in 1950 had a responsibility to portray African-Americans in a positive light given past transgressions. Producers didn't think audiences would except Blacks in anything other than the lightest of entertainment - their place was singing, dancing and mauling the English language for the enjoyment of all.
When protestations of this practice started erupting in the forties, the movie studios reacted by greatly reducing the number of African-American faces in their productions. Suddenly Hattie McDaniel and other Black actors were operating in a shrinking marketplace. As film roles dried up, Hattie toured the country in a one-woman show called 'Mammy Meditations.'
In one way, Hattie's real life might serve as an example of the household workers she too-often played, women who's good humor on the job masked the reality of their lives at home. Despondent over the criticism leveled at her by black leaders and her inability to get good roles, Hattie attempted suicide.
The suicide attempt didn't make the press, but Hattie was quoted as saying, "Hell can't be anything worse than what I've been living through right now." A lifelong Baptist, she began to drink and smoke pot, throwing legendarily lavish parties for her fellow Black actors.
Hattie was back on top after taking over the role of Beulah on November 24, 1947, earning a cool thousand a week for the first season. Within a year she had doubled the ratings of the original series.
The NAACP was pleased that - finally - a black woman was the star of a network radio program, the first instance since Aunt Jemima fifteen years earlier, and that was a white woman in blackvoice.
That's not to say the show didn't contain insulting characterizations; as Hattie herself argued, that's the nature of every sitcom.
For instance, Ruby Dandridge (mother of Dorothy Dandridge) was heard as Oriole, Beulah's best buddy who worked as the maid next door. Oriole was impossibly shrill, grossly inept and hopelessly ignorant - you would have sworn you were listening to Butterfly McQueen doing Prissy from Gone With The Wind. Ernie (Bubbles) Whitman as Beulah's boyfriend Bill was lazy, dumb and unwilling to commit.
Also in the cast, Hugh Studebaker and Mary Jane Croft (The Lucy Show) as Harry and Alice Henderson, the shallow, upwardly-mobile suburban family Beulah worked for. The Beulah writers were to become influential in the development of many classic TV shows - Sherwood Schwartz (Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch), Sol Saks (Bewitched), Hal Kanter (Julia), Howard Leeds and others.
Just as Hattie's star was rising on radio, her personal life was falling apart. She eloped with her fourth husband in 1949, a bisexual interior decorator. Four months and tens of thousands of dollars later the marriage was over. (Rumor had it that Hattie was bisexual as well, actress Tallulah Bankhead was reputed to be one of her lovers.)
The audience was still gung-ho on Beulah, however, with ABC announcing plans for a television production to debut in the fall of 1950. It was assumed that Hattie would get the role, but she passed on the role due to her already hectic schedule.
THE TV SHOW
Beulah (1950-53)
Beulahbecame the first ever network television series to star an African American and the first and last TV program to star an African-American woman until Julia in 1968.
Beulah was a pleasing sitcom with familiar storylines that mimicked the successful radio format, albeit with an entirely new cast.
Starring as Beulah was Ethel Waters, described by some as the first Black Superstar, the first Black (or more accurately, Biracial) woman to star in a Broadway drama and the first Black woman to star in a network musical-comedy program back in 1933.
A true Diva since the 1920s, Waters was one of the most influential singers of all time, some credit her as being the very first Jazz vocalist. Her hit songs included Summertime, Stormy Weather, His Eye Is on the Sparrow and so many others.
She starred in several Broadway hits including Cabin in the Sky and Member of the Wedding and was seen in the motion picture versions of these plays as well.
Her career was at a high point in 1950, she'd been an Oscar nominee (for Pinky) a year earlier, but had little money and believed that this network sitcom would make her a major star like Milton Berle or Jack Benny.
Not a naturally plump woman at the time, (she was once known as 'Sweet Mama Stringbean'), Waters had to force feed herself to get her weight up for the role. Within a few years she hit 375 pounds and would be plagued by weight problems for the rest of her life.
Rounding out the cast were Percy (Bud) Harris as Bill Jackson with Butterfly McQueen (that's right, Prissy from Gone With The Wind) cast as Beulah's daffy friend Oriole.
The NAACP may have praised the radio format, but they were not at all happy with the TV version of Beulah. They accused both Amos 'n' Andy (which came along in 1951) and Beulah of leading to a "conclusion among uninformed or prejudiced peoples that Negroes and other minorities are inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest."
Stars like Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson (The Jack Benny Program) disagreed, "The Negro characters being presented are not labeling the Negro race any more than Luigi (Life With Luigi) is labeling the Italian people as a whole. Beulah is not playing the part of thousands of Negroes, but only the part of one person, Beulah."
Distribution over the struggling ABC network was spotty, and the more contentious Waters was not accepted into the role. Unhappy in the role of a maid once again, Waters became a tyrant on the set, she and longtime acquaintance Butterfly McQueen openly feuded.
After the first season, Percy Harris left the role of Bill, unhappy in a part he saw as something akin to "Uncle Tom." Dooley Wilson (Sam in Casablanca) took over as Beulah's boyfriend for year two - but he quit in disgust as well at season's end.
Waters announced that she too would leave the production after the second season because of 'pressing commitments' but more likely because of the mounting criticism of the series. "I'm not concerned with civil rights, " she confided to a reporter. "I'm only concerned with God-given rights and they are available to everyone!"
Noting the mail from viewers and healthy radio ratings, ABC decided that Hattie McDaniel was the only logical choice to play Beulah on television.
Despite her reluctance, Hattie began filming the third season of Beulah in the summer of 1951, while her radio show was on hiatus.
The entire cast was overhauled. Ruby Dandridge assumed the role of Oriole from Butterfly McQueen, robbing the public of a chance to see McDaniel and McQueen working together for the first time since Gone With The Wind in 1939. Truth was, they didn't like each other, so either McQueen walked or Hattie had her fired, depending on which story you want to believe.
Dandridge's Oriole was a completely vapid caricature that played more insulting on television, if that's possible. "I keep tellin' people you ain't as simple as you act," Beulah would exclaim to Oriole. Invariably she was.
The role of Bill Jackson was more understated as played by Hattie's radio cohort and friend Ernest Whitman, the interaction between the two actors was a joy to watch.
In the TV version, Hattie McDaniel played Beulah like Oprah Winfrey's character in The Color Purple AFTER the shock treatments. There's a pleasing one-dimensional calmness to her portrayal; the cheer was evident in Beulah's smile, it was in her cheeks, but it was scarcely in her eyes.
Hattie was smiling through some serious pain.
NEXT - PART THREE:
Hattie McDaniel's sudden death -
Louise Beavers, Butterfly McQueen,
Lillian and Amanda Randolph and more!
Mrs. Henderson:"Well, women prefer men with polished manners, don't they Beulah?"
Beulah:"You just give me the man, I'll do my own polishin'." Ernest Whitman died in 1954, Louise Beavers died October 26, 1962, Ruby Dandridge passed in 1987. Ethel Waterspassed away in 1977 after years of touring with evangelist Billy Graham.
Her last major TV appearance was on a special in 1971 with Pearl Bailey and the Sid and Marty Krofft, puppets called Something Special.
Waters was ill most of the last twenty years of her life and destitute. She lived in the home of a Christian couple at the end of her life with little public contact other than the television. On the sixth episode she filmed, Hattie McDaniel opened with a typical Beulah-ism: "Don't let nobody tell you that I'm in the market for a husband. 'Course, I would be, but they don't sell husbands in a market."
Butterfly McQueen was famously quoted as saying, "As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion." In 1946, Hattie McDaniel was seen in the role of Aunt Tempey in Song of the South, a Disney film that seemed to look longingly back at the 'happy days' of slavery.
As of 2003, Song of the South has never been released on DVD or video in the United States but can be found easily in European shops.
Ruby Dandridge
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