Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (34 page)

And Hollywood's terms rose steeply with sound. The studios began producing a flurry of “talkies” targeting black audiences, often singing-and-dancing “short subjects” designed to precede the major attraction. The studios sought out “fresh” black faces they could claim as their own discoveries—preferably stage-trained actors, because it was thought that “types” recruited from the street or the lot “cannot remember the lines and are subject to mike-fright,” according to one skeptical fan-magazine article on the new “ebony heroes,” penned by a self-described white “daughter of Dixie.”

The West Coast Lafayette Players were well positioned to satisfy this sudden craving. Yet Hollywood relegated many of even the most schooled black thespians to “Negro dialect” humor, or background singing in nightclub scenes. The Christie Film Company offered Preer and Thompson a thousand dollars a week for a series of shorts based on the Old South stories of Octavus Roy Cohen, a story writer for the
Saturday Evening Post, Collier's,
and other magazines. Lafayette Players like Laura Bowman and Sidney Kirkpatrick also found steady employment in studio music departments, singing in Bebe Daniels and
Amos 'n' Andy
vehicles.

Although Cohen's Negroes were meant to be sympathetic, they were invariably uncouth and prone to dumb comedy. And the skin of the first lady of race cinema had to be “darkened beyond the duskiness of her natural make-up” for the series, according to a 1929 article in
Motion Picture Classic.
(“When she spoke off-stage, her voice was as cultured as Jeanne Eagles's and bore none of the dialect she had affected before the microphone,” reported the magazine.) The Christie comedies, according to Preer's daughter, Sister Francesca Thompson, “might be considered throw-backs to the minstrel style or the ‘coon shows' of the nineteenth century.”

Indeed, Preer “broke her contract” with Christie after only three such pictures, according to Thompson, “refusing to continue to wear blackface makeup, or to speak in the fractured English required.” Over time Preer
would play other small parts at nearly every major studio. The lucrative Hollywood moonlighting permitted the actress to continue onstage at the Lincoln Theatre on Central Avenue, performing everything from Shakespeare to Gilbert and Sullivan.

One thing was certain: Evelyn Preer had starred in her last Oscar Micheaux picture. She had been Micheaux's favorite leading lady, his greatest star, his only guaranteed box-office draw. And, as it turned out, she was irreplaceable.

 

Micheaux's growing conflict with his brother Swan was his third problem, and just as irreparable.

Like his brother, Swan Micheaux had a taste for fame. His earliest press notices, written when he first joined the Chicago office, portrayed Swan not as a junior officer, but as a take-charge business executive who was destined to play a key creative role in the company. Swan supplied a publicity photo of himself to newspapers and posed for advertisements for Carter's Little Liver Pills. He dabbled in real estate. He gave only occasional interviews, but he was as garrulous and glib as his brother, and the press found him quotable. “The [race-picture] game is too fast for slow thinkers,” he told one reporter. “There must be quick action regardless of cost, all hours working hours, every day a working day.”

When Micheaux brought Swan to New York in 1926, he was hoping to rein in the crooked salesmen and booking foul-ups. It is hard to know how many of these persistent problems could be fairly blamed on Swan, or whether Micheaux was growing paranoid and looking for a scapegoat. But Micheaux thought Swan was incompetent or dishonest or both, whereas Swan thought he was underpaid and deserved greater opportunity.

The tension between the brothers was aggravated after Micheaux's marriage to Alice B. Russell. The new couple took bigger living quarters on Morningside Avenue and Mrs. Micheaux joined the business, now headquartered in the modern Harlem Center building at 135th and Seventh Avenue. Swiftly, she became the conduit of all important financial (and, soon enough, creative) decisions. Furious, Swan stormed out of the office in the winter of 1926–1927, temporarily accepting a post as manager of the New York branch of the Agfa Raw Film Company.

In late 1927 the acrimony between the brothers accelerated and broke out into the public forum. Micheaux had just returned from another extended stay in Chicago, where he had finished editing
The Millionaire
and then quickly shot another film,
Thirty Years Later.
That October, eager to get
The Millionaire
approved by the New York State censors, Micheaux consented to numerous cuts in every reel of the nine-reeler, except for reels 7 and 8—mainly offensive intertitles, or scenes of drinking, gambling, violence, or sexy dancing. In early December, however, inspectors got a tip to visit the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, where
The Millionaire
was being shown—in a mint print, without any of the censors' deletions.

Curiously, the theater manager, Peter Eckert, worked for Micheaux on the side; his name even appears on the documents submitting
The Millionaire
for censorship review. When the print was seized, Eckert was fined; he responded by suing Micheaux, claiming that he'd been duped into showing an uncensored print.

In a fury, Micheaux fired off a letter to the censors. Insisting that his company had been made “the victim of an organized effort to get possession of and to exploit our films”—not just
The Millionaire,
but “at least one print of all the pictures we make”—Micheaux fingered the man he maintained was the real culprit. “This plot was engineered and has been directed by the former General Manager of the concern, whose name you may observe at the bottom of this page”—Micheaux could not bring himself to identify his own brother, still conspicuous on the letterhead. Swan had been aided by “the trickery of his associates,” Eckert and others among them. Having secured “temporary possession” of the original print of
The Millionaire,
they were circulating it to New York theaters without the stipulated cuts, or Micheaux's approval.

At the moment, his younger brother was hiding out somewhere in New York. “Although I have a summons out and papers to haul him into Court,” Micheaux added bitterly, “we cannot lay hands on him.”

The only legal papers that survive this imbroglio indicate that Micheaux lost the Eckert case, with the court levying damages of $331.66 against him. Eckert then
bought
the print of
The Millionaire
at public auction for two hundred dollars.

If Swan was indeed hiding out in Harlem, he didn't stay concealed for very long. Within three months he had organized his own Dunbar Film Corporation, opening offices on Lenox Avenue not far from those of his more famous brother. Swan “is not connected with his brother Oscar
Micheaux,” the press accounts stated plainly, “any more.” By the end of April, Swan had actually produced his first race picture,
The Midnight Ace;
its actors—A. B. DeComathiere, William Edmondson, and “discovery” Mable Kelly (Miss Lincoln of the Howard–Lincoln 1927 football rivalry)—were recruited directly from the cast of
Thirty Years Later.

Besides stealing his brother's actors, Swan successfully rallied Micheaux's remaining staff against him. By then, Micheaux's employees had lost all hope of obtaining the back wages their boss owed them. Peter Eckert was the president of the Dunbar Film Corporation; as the secretary and treasurer Swan secured Bertha Elwald, formerly Micheaux's secretary. And John Wade, Micheaux's onetime Man Friday on the road, was director of the new company's first film.

 

The coming of sound, the desertion of Evelyn Preer and other Lafayette Players, and the nasty bust-up with his brother—all of this combined to overwhelm Micheaux. No wonder, on February 8, 1928, the race-picture pioneer filed for bankruptcy, a voluntary maneuver intended to protect his meager assets while staving off collapse.

The filing in New York's Seventh District Court demonstrated just how undercapitalized Micheaux's corporation was, after a decade of scrimping and scraping. The bankruptcy papers listed the acknowledged assets of the corporation at $1,400, with liabilities at $7,837. The worst liabilities, according to published records, were “to cover securities to creditors,” $2,930; “to unsecured credit given,” $1,600; “to wages,” $1,125.

The news flashed across the nation in headlines in black newspapers. “Despite the filing of bankruptcy proceedings,” reported Baltimore's
Afro-American,
“Mr. Micheaux is busy seeking bookings for films at present, and it is felt by those who are acquainted with the workings of the defunct corporation that the promoter has been able to retain his hold on many of the numerous productions set on celluloid.” The newspaper announced that Alice B. Russell had been appointed the new general manager of the corporation, and “now controls many of the reels” of past and forthcoming Micheaux pictures.

The “one-man corporation” was now a thing of the past, along with brotherly love and silent pictures. Now the Micheaux Film Company was a one-man, one-woman corporation, a husband and wife enterprise.

In 1928, two Micheauxes would vie for theaters, audiences, and the accolades of the press.

Despite his bankruptcy, older brother Oscar managed to finish two pictures in the wake of the break-up with his brother. Both were silent:
Thirty Years Later,
shot in Chicago in late 1927, and
The Broken Violin,
produced early in 1928 amid the court filings. The first was adapted from the stage, while the latter was another Micheaux original.

The source for
Thirty Years Later
was Henry Francis Downing's play
The Racial Tangle,
which had been presented in Chicago in 1920 by a touring company of the Lafayette Players. Micheaux couldn't help but admire the redoubtable life of Downing, a black American whose career included diplomatic service as well as the authorship of poetry, fiction, and plays—much of it preoccupied, like Micheaux's work, with the topic of “passing.”

Downing's cousin had served as president of Liberia, and after the Civil War, Downing himself lived in the African republic for several years. After a posting as U. S. consul to St. Paul de Loanda in Portuguese West Africa, Downing had moved to London; he lived there for two decades, married to a prominent white Englishwoman. While in London, Downing also had written, besides his plays and poetry, a novel called
The American Cavalryman,
set in Liberia. In the mid-1920s, Downing moved back to the States, and lived in Harlem, near Micheaux.

Micheaux was friendly with the octogenarian, who remained an out
spoken advocate of American support for Liberia.
*
Micheaux had family ties and political sympathies with the African nation, and after he was done with his adaptation of Downing's play he thought he might film the author's Liberian novel.

The “passing” in
Thirty Years Later
was done by a man: a rich white man (William Edmondson) posing as a man of color in order to woo a beautiful “race girl” (Ardelle Dabney), only to discover that he is actually the son of his Negro housekeeper, whom he had previously scorned. Advertising a story as “patterned after Alice Rhinelander's famous case” had worked magic once before, and Micheaux tried it again to boost ticket sales. (Though it was more of a stretch for
Thirty Years Later,
“the Rhinelander case” was practically a byword in the black press, which referenced the 1924 story with each new headline scandal involving mixed-race romance.)

The Broken Violin
was more intriguing, a melodrama about a gifted young violinist, the daughter of a washerwoman and an abusive, alcoholic father. For this film Micheaux carried over some of the cast members from
Thirty Years Later,
including Ardelle Dabney, who had been associated with W. E. B. DuBois's Krigwa Little Theatre movement. The other cast members included the brothers Salem Tutt Whitney and J. Homer Tutt, and Alice B. Russell herself, making her first known appearance in one of her husband's films.
**

Neither of Micheaux's 1928 pictures circulated widely, and both are “lost” today. At the time, columnist Obie McCollum of the
Afro-American
found
Thirty Years Later
“the best [film] put out by the pioneer” yet, in spite of its catchpenny limitations (“Why does the heroine not ‘sport' a few more changes of clothing as almost any New York stenographer in real life would?” McCollum complained).

For every booster like McCollum, though, there was a more dubious critic. And the skeptics had an opportunity to compare the brothers Micheaux in October 1928, when the maiden Dunbar Film Corporation production,
The Midnight Ace,
held its New York premiere. The story as well as the casting bore Oscar's influence, though Swan Micheaux neither wrote nor directed. Some sources indicate the director was indeed John
Wade; others propose A. B. DeComathiere, who also starred as the “Midnight Ace,” a clever race detective who solves a series of robberies hatched by a criminal mastermind.

Though
The Midnight Ace
supplied only “fair” entertainment, as one of the Micheaux skeptics, Sylvester Russell, wrote in the
Chicago Defender,
“it is a slight improvement on his brother, Oscar.” It's impossible today to second-guess such judgments, since
The Midnight Ace
is another “lost” Micheaux film, albeit one of Swan's. But Swan's publicity was every bit as grandiose as Oscar's. Declaring his new company to be fully capitalized, he announced plans to follow up with an ambitious series of motion pictures at a record pace. “Film Corporation To Make Picture Every Six Weeks!” vowed the publicity.

Brother Oscar, who'd spent much of 1928 in the dumps, followed Swan's notices in the press, seething with anger and resentment. “I came on with Micheaux after Swan had left,” remembered actor Lorenzo Tucker, “so I don't really know what went on between them. But there was bad blood, you could tell.”

No doubt Micheaux was already planning his characteristic revenge—in the form of a new quasi-autobiographical film.

 

Tall, handsome Lorenzo Tucker would become Micheaux's newest on-screen surrogate. Born in Philadelphia, educated at Temple, Tucker had danced in Atlantic City and stinted as a straight man in vaudeville before landing parts with a Lafayette Players touring company. Tucker was at the Dunbar Theatre in Philadelphia in the spring of 1927, trying out for the chorus of
Rang Tang,
when Micheaux arrived to see Evelyn Preer.

Tucker, who had never heard of Oscar Micheaux, paid little attention to the big, well-dressed stranger heading toward the back rows where Tucker was seated. “If you passed him [Micheaux] on the street,” Tucker recalled, “you'd say, ‘Look at that big lug!' He had a very pleasant face and lumbered along because he was a huge man, about 6'3" tall and well over two hundred pounds. He wore a black homburg hat and his overcoat was dragging the ground. Nothing was right. He walked like he had two left feet.”

Glancing at Tucker as he passed by, the big pleasant-faced man
slipped into a seat behind the young actor and tapped him on the shoulder, proffering a business card. “I make movies,” said Micheaux, baring his winning smile. “If you ever want to act in movies, look me up.”

Tucker wasn't particularly interested in movies. Vaudeville and road shows paid better, he reckoned. But he didn't make it into the chorus of
Rang Tang,
and Micheaux already knew that when they bumped into each other on the street in Harlem, weeks later. Micheaux invited Tucker up to his office, offering him a part in his next film, “The Fool's Errand,” one of those “ghost films” no one is quite certain ever came to life.

According to early news items, Micheaux had begun filming “
A
Fool's Errand” back in 1923. But the director may have shelved that project: Tucker was certain that “
The
Fool's Errand” was restarted, and perhaps even completed, in late 1927 or early 1928, though he couldn't recall much about the script or circumstances of production. Interviewed for Richard Grupenhoff's biography,
The Black Valentino: The Stage and Screen Career of Lorenzo Tucker,
Tucker remembered that Micheaux “had enough capital to finish shooting the film, but his funds ran out while the film was in the middle of postproduction, and he didn't have enough money to pay the processing lab for its work.” Time passed, and the lab took possession of the print. More time passed, and the lab “decided to edit the film, shoot the title cards, and distribute the completed product themselves…”

“The Stern Labs called me up,” Tucker continued, “and offered to pay me to come down and write the titles, since I knew what the script was about. So I went to Micheaux to get his permission.”

Micheaux glared at him. “Hell,” the race-picture pioneer said finally, “I don't care what they do with it.”

“Then you don't mind me doing the titles?” Tucker said.

“Are they paying you?” asked the ever-practical Micheaux.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Micheaux. “Get as much as you can from them.”

As far as is known, the lab sent the finished reels to South American theaters.

Be that as it may, Tucker was emceeing a cabaret in Saratoga Springs in the spring of 1928 when a telegram arrived from Micheaux. “The telegram said something like: ‘Role for you in film. Start next week. Get your suit out of hock,'” the actor told his biographer. “See, those were the days before we had actors' unions, and we had to provide our own
costumes for many of the roles we were cast in. And often between shows we had to hock our suits to get money to live on until our next show.”

This time, Tucker was going to play a race-picture producer named Winston Le Jaune—Micheaux by another name—in the most brazen installment yet in the director's ongoing life-on-film.

The Wages of Sin
would open with Le Jaune in mourning at his mother's gravesite in a small prairie town, vowing to take care of his ne'er-do-well younger brother Jefferson Lee. Le Jaune employs J. Lee and brings him to teeming Chicago, where his brother embezzles company funds and squanders money on alcohol, gambling, and loose women. Though forced to fire his brother—and then to work overtime to resuscitate his business—Winston remembers his pledge to his deceased mother and decides to reconcile with his brother. But even after Winston rehires him, J. Lee nurses a grudge, and schemes to betray and destroy Le Jaune.

In the summer of 1928, even as Swan was planning the premiere of
The Midnight Ace,
Micheaux was busy filming this scenario attacking his brother. There was no ambiguity about Micheaux's casting: William A. Clayton Jr., whose glowering face and piercing eyes had typed him as a villain ever since his noteworthy debut in the race picture
A Prince of His Race,
would portray J. Lee, the Swan Micheaux figure. The employee torn between two brothers would be played by Baltimore actress Katherine Noisette, who had captivated Chicago when touring with a Lafayette Players troupe. Also in the cast were Ardelle Dabney and Alice B. Russell.

On the set, Micheaux radiated an intense focus. He “reminded me of a symphony orchestra leader,” Tucker recollected. “He could get down behind the camera, or on the side, and it was like the director with his baton. Every moment of the action [he'd follow] with his body; he would wring and twist, and naturally when there was sound he couldn't talk, make [a] sound; he would just be ready to burst. He would just…Ooo…he'd look at you; if it was anger [he wanted], like my god, [you'd think] I'd better give this guy a [good] job!”

The Wages of Sin
was rushed into theaters in February 1929, just in time to take the edge off Swan's plaudits. And Oscar's version of the split with his brother made for a fascinating, passionate film that drew reviews as glowing as any he had earned since
The House Behind the Cedars.
“One of the best to be shown here in a long time,” said the
Pittsburgh Courier,
“well worth seeing.” “An interesting and dramatic story,” echoed the
New
York Amsterdam News,
“one of the finest pieces of work ever produced by the colored motion picture makers.”

One can only guess at how truthful
The Wages of Sin
was in its blanket condemnation of Swan. Autobiography, for Micheaux, had become an increasingly crafty, nearly indivisible blend of fact, fiction, and public relations.

Micheaux's brother did not respond in kind. In fact, Swan Micheaux never produced another picture after
The Midnight Ace.
All the publicity for Swan's Dunbar Film Corporation had been so much grandstanding. The “Picture Every Six Weeks” never happened. As Micheaux well knew, producing a race picture was a snap compared to booking one into theaters, circulating several prints around the nation, sidestepping censors and critics, and crossing one's fingers for profits.

“Any time any other company would start up—like the Goldbergs, which was a white company—he would laugh,” remembered Tucker.

“He'd say, ‘Well, they're spending too much money.' He knew to the penny how much to spend on a production, because he knew what he could get back.”

The bad blood between brothers was permanent. Micheaux never again mentioned Swan by name. He dedicated later novels to his wife, his mother-in-law, his sisters, practically every family member except Swan, who disappeared as a character in his stories and films. With
The Wages of Sin,
Swan Micheaux was erased from his older brother's life.

In like fashion, Swan erased himself from the race-picture field soon thereafter, returning home to Great Bend, Kansas. His wife left Swan after their daughter came of legal age, and he briefly returned to Harlem in the early 1940s, earning a living as a carpenter and odd jobs man. Some unconfirmed reports suggest that a house fire may have ravaged him financially. He ended up back in Kansas, doing house and lawn work. He drank to excess. Declared mentally incompetent, Micheaux's younger brother was in and out of state institutions before his death in 1975.

 

Swan Micheaux was a quitter. Not his brother Oscar.

Censors dogged his heels. Films were abandoned in labs and theaters. Checks bounced.

Got to keep going!

In at least one city, Baltimore, Micheaux's check-kiting caught up with him; Micheaux was served with papers, his print of
Thirty Years Later
confiscated by authorities until the penalties were paid.

Despite his constant problems, Micheaux fed sunbeams to the press. When Chappy Gardner of the
Pittsburgh Courier
found him at his favorite Harlem eatery, Tabb's, after the New Year, “the pioneer of Negro films” insisted that “in every city where they are shown crowded houses greet” his films. Micheaux was busy directing his latest project, featuring “the best actors and some of the prettiest and brainiest of our feminine kind,” wrote Gardner.