Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (49 page)

One performer who got under Micheaux's skin was Yvonne Machen, whose temperament mirrored the character she was playing. Machen was a spitfire, always challenging Micheaux, wanting to try scenes
her
way. He'd shout at Machen worse than he shouted at the men, and she'd shout back.

Another actor who got on his nerves was Harris Gaines, who was playing Doctor Lee, the McCracken-devil incarnate. Gaines had grandiose show business aspirations, and in his death scene Micheaux thought he was dragging things out, hamming it up. The angry director kept yelling at him, “C'mon, you black Barrymore, die!”

Such tense moments were sometimes broken up by Micheaux's chauffeur, Obie, who was always hanging about. Although he didn't have any official status on the production, Obie wasn't shy about offering his own opinions, at times even disagreeing audibly with his boss. “Obie, you don't know what you're talking about!” they heard Micheaux snap back, to their amusement. “Aw, shut up, Obie!”

As she always had, Alice B. Russell did her share, watching over the script during scenes, taking her husband aside for whispered words, making suggestions and solving small problems. Micheaux pieced off the tricky emotional scenes to his wife, for extra rehearsal. One of them was a big moment between Collins and Myra Stanton, when the two are drawn closer and closer—while reciting the Lord's Prayer—until their characters finally kiss. Flustered, Stanton kept forgetting the words to the prayer, screwing up the take. “Damn it, Deborah!” Micheaux swore, calling her by her character's name.

The young leads weren't sure how real the kiss should be. Mrs. Micheaux took additional time with them, showing them how screen actors “phony-kiss” with their lips to the side, so that the camera angle makes it look real. “She was quite dynamic” and helpful, Jesse Johnson recalled, from watching the rehearsals.

The worst sin for any Micheaux actor was to deviate from the dialogue in the master script. Micheaux wanted each and every word he had written clearly enunciated, and if the words weren't registered he'd call for retakes.

Again, the sole exception was Collins. Though dramatically untrained, Collins felt “pretty much natural in the part.” Still, at times he would say to himself, “I can't talk that way. It's not me.” And then he would improvise a few words, change the dialogue a little, trying for a more organic quality. He was the one actor Micheaux never interrupted or chastised. Collins could tinker, “but he didn't let the others improvise” any lines.

“The dialogue just didn't come natural to a lot of the characters,” Collins mused. “It was like someone saying, ‘Here is my philosophy, here is how I feel, and I'm going to say it all through this character, all at once, right now.' I had taken speech classes, and I had some success at speechmaking, and even I knew that the dialogue could be improved.”

The cast and crew gathered every night after filming to watch the previous day's rushes. Micheaux had to be satisfied before they could move on. “If he saw something there he didn't care for, we'd reshoot it,” said Collins. “It could be reshot the next day, while the costumes and actors were still there.”

 

A seventy-page “dialogue sheet” of Micheaux's script for
The Betrayal
survives in the New York state archives. Scene by scene, it was the old familiar story he'd already told in several books and films—ending, as in
The Wind from Nowhere,
with the homesteader, the mixed-race Scottish girl, and Martin Eden's rescued baby all returning to the Rosebud just in time to save their land. (For movie purposes, this involved a frantic train ride, a speeding car trip, and a perilous trip across a cloudburst-swollen river on horseback.) They arrive to discover that mineral riches have been found on their claim, guaranteeing a future of wealth and happiness—the fairy-tale ending Micheaux had sought all his life.

Of course Micheaux wasn't going to do any filming in Hollywood; that was merely hooey for the press. Nor was there enough budget for any trip to South Dakota. Micheaux used farms in southern Wisconsin and fields in Michigan to simulate the Rosebud, with Leroy Collins plowing like a madman, or riding a horse in full cowboy regalia.

They'd be driving along a country road, a convoy of open-topped cars with Micheaux and the cameraman in the lead, looking for a farmhouse for an establishing shot. Suddenly Micheaux would order Obie to pull
over, gesturing at a picturesque house over on a slight rise. All the other cars would swing over to the side of the road, while Micheaux hopped out, telling the cameraman where to set up. The curious residents of the farm would trickle onto the porch, or peer through their windows at the strange sight of the cars, the camera, and the tall, husky, white-haired black man standing in front of their home and stabbing his finger in their direction. Without so much as a hello, Micheaux would wave angrily and shout: “Get out of the way of the shot!”

And then the farm folk'd skedaddle. “He could put the scare into people,” Collins recalled.

The more freewheeling scenes were out of doors. If the actresses and romantic touches were more Alice B. Russell's bailiwick, Micheaux handled the manlier scenes himself. One time, Jesse Johnson was playing a scene where he plunges into a fistfight with another white homesteader who makes prejudicial comments about Martin Eden. Johnson was supposed to slug the other actor hard enough to knock him to the ground. The two amateur actors tried faking it one way, then another and another. “We faked it and faked it and faked it,” Johnson recalled.

“Aw, it looks phony!” Micheaux shouted at the young actor. “Go on, hit him, Johnson!”

“I can't, Mr. Micheaux,” Johnson apologized.

“Well, you're not faking it too well,” Micheaux complained, not unkindly. “At least fake it better!”

So the director himself stepped in and showed Johnson how to punch and feint more credibly. “We finally did it to his liking,” Johnson recalled. “We did it a half dozen times, trying it until he liked it.”

The scene where the preacher's daughter Linda (Verlie Cowan) stumbles out into traffic and is run down by an automobile was a rare stunt job for Obie, Micheaux's chauffeur. With the cast and crew lined up to watch from the sidelines, Micheaux took his time setting up the important shot, advising his chauffeur where to aim and angle the car—Micheaux's own black limousine—for the maximum visual effect. Obie got behind the wheel, Micheaux called action, and the car shot forward like a missile, so fast that everyone had to leap out of the way.

“The car missed her, but it was very close,” Myra Stanton remembered, laughing. “Mr. Micheaux had a fit. ‘You almost hit Linda! We almost had a fatal accident with that gal!' He was so angry with Obie.”

Micheaux splurged for wind machines for the signature sequence in
the film, where Martin Eden, living forlornly on his homestead, is suddenly attacked by “the wind from nowhere.” Huge fans were set up to blow great gusts of air against Collins, pushing him back, impeding his progress—just as nature and society had always tried to keep Micheaux from achieving his life's goals. To Collins it seemed an extremely realistic and effective scene, with the tornadolike wind whirling him about and slamming him repeatedly to the ground.

Most of the photography was done in the month of September, inside of three weeks. Micheaux left Chicago soon thereafter, taking the footage with him. Most of the crew and cast never laid eyes on him again.

Even so, there was a footnote: Despite all the read-throughs, the rehearsals, dailies, and retakes, this was Micheaux's last chance to tell his life story, and he was determined to get it right. Late in the fall he sent orders from his New Jersey editing room: The race-picture pioneer wasn't satisfied with the coverage. He needed more retakes. He sent pages of instructions to his assistant director, who took the cameraman and some of the actors out and supervised a little reshooting.

Back east by November 1947, Micheaux launched into postproduction. He would take as much care with the editing and polishing in Fort Lee as he had with the preproduction in Chicago. After three months of cutting and splicing, Micheaux had
The Betrayal
down to twenty-four reels, or just over three and a half hours. Declaring a temporary halt, he called in some favors and loans before continuing. After “days of virtual amputation,” in his words, he had a release version ready—at three hours and fifteen minutes.

He still had to raise five hundred dollars to “start matching the negative so he can get a print for screening” to stimulate booking contracts, according to his wife, Alice B. Russell. In the meantime, he mocked up “some of his advertising matter,” in the words of Mrs. Micheaux, who sent the “Program” to a sister-in-law in Great Bend, Kansas. “So you can see, dear,” her accompanying letter said, “he is doing a big job and he is doing it alone. Isn't that wonderful?”

But finances weren't the only reason that the postproduction bogged down. Micheaux himself was physically spent.

“Dad has arthritis all over his body,” Mrs. Micheaux wrote to her sister-in-law. “I have to help him put on his clothes and take them off. And I have to help him take a bath. His hands are slightly swollen, and he can't grip or hold anything tightly, but as I said, he keeps on working. It is better for him to keep busy as long as he can, because he is so restless he couldn't stand not being able to go where he wanted to go.”

“Dad's books are still selling,” her letter closed, “but nothing like in the past.”

 

Astor Pictures, a distribution company on West Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, had been in existence since the mid-1920s; by the late 1940s the firm had twenty-six offices in key cities around the country. Astor's main business was circulating reissues of A pictures relinquished by major Hollywood studios; most of its business came from RKO. But after World War II, the Southern-born head of Astor, R. M. Savini, announced a plan to produce “dignified, entertaining Negro pictures” for the now estimated 678 American theaters said to welcome a mixed or substantial black clientele. Yet the first film it produced—
Beware,
starring the boogie and blues bandleader Louis Jordan—wasn't especially profitable, and Astor's first fully financed “Negro picture” was also its last.

Still, Astor agreed to distribute Micheaux's comeback, starting with a June 24, 1948, premiere at the Mansfield Theatre on Forty-seventh Street, at last fulfilling the race-picture pioneer's lifelong dream of opening one of his films on Broadway. Ticket prices for the three hour and fifteen minute version of the film sold from ninety cents to $1.80. “The Greatest Negro Photoplay of All Times,” raved the advertisements, and the “Longest Picture Since
Gone With the Wind.
” Micheaux placed ads beyond Harlem, even in New York's white newspapers.

Micheaux was rolling the dice with this final variation on his life story. But starting with its blunt retitling—the evocative
The Wind from Nowhere
became the bitter-sounding
The Betrayal
—he gambled badly. The reviews, which called
The Betrayal
obvious and tired and old-fashioned, might as well have been aimed at the man himself.

The white New York newspapers, which had long ignored Micheaux but now profited from his advertisements, published devastating notices. “It is not a professional production,” said the New York
Daily News.
“It is even difficult to class as amateur. The characters religiously interpret Oscar Micheaux's poor script with the stilted movements and hesitations associated with grade school plays. Flimsy and without purpose, the plot offers neither argument nor substantial material for discussion of any kind.”

“A preposterous, tasteless bore,” echoed the
New York Herald Tribune.

The
New York Times,
which had never reviewed a single one of
Micheaux's more than forty previous pictures, dismissed
The Betrayal
as “confusing,” “gauche,” poorly photographed and “consistently amateurish.” Even the show-business bible
Variety,
which had neglected Micheaux's productions for thirty years, critiqued the race-picture pioneer's final testament, calling it “overlong,” “dull,” and “stilted and artificial.”

Though most simply overlooked
The Betrayal,
the black press was hardly kinder. The
Chicago Defender
—which had boosted him in the past—reprinted the New York barbs; then staff writer Al Monroe, who knew Micheaux's history full well (he'd been writing for Chicago's black press since the 1920s), piled on, lambasting the “poor” continuity, the “ill-timed and tasteless” dialogue, and the directing, “faulty to say the least.”

Leading man Leroy Collins watched the movie with his fraternity brothers in a packed audience at the Chicago premiere. As the film dragged on, he slunk down in his seat, seeing his worst fears come to life on the screen: the wooden acting, the long-winded speeches, the interminable convolutions, all leading to the revelation of the Scottish girl's “one drop of Negro blood,” an outdated climax that hardly carried the same impact for young, post–World War II audiences.

“It was
long,
” Collins reflected ruefully.

Astor might have handled the distribution, but Micheaux was as ever the chief hawker of his own wares. Ignoring the reviews, he tweaked his sales pitch: a year later he was trumpeting
The Betrayal
as the “Greatest Picture of Its Kind Since
Imitation of Life
and
Lost Boundaries
[a 1949 Hollywood film about the perils of ‘passing'].” He tried mounting a pseudo-“road show” to enhance bookings, adding short subjects and special showtimes while charging higher prices. Though his various afflictions now restricted him to Harlem, he sat at his desk, sending out circulars and ads exhorting others to share his enthusiasm.

“We colored people, 15,000,000 of us, don't like to be monkeyfied,” he told theater managers in his circulars. “Nor do we like attempts to flatter us by making us, on the screen, what we are not in everyday life. And we don't like being pushed off the screen altogether as the major producers seem to be doing, to appease the South. We want to see our lives dramatized on the screen as we are living it, the same as other peoples, the world over.

“That, my dear exhibitor,” his statement continued, “explains why I am returning to the production of motion pictures after an absence of seven years, during which time I wrote and published four novels.”

From Harlem, he would use mail, telegram, and telephone to make one last stand against censorship.
The Betrayal
might have been an overly familiar story to many, but the white censorship board of Pennsylvania still found it an exceptionally violent drama about a black man who appeared (throughout most of the story) to be romancing a white woman. Times might be changing in postwar America, but not that fast, at least not in Pennsylvania. No doubt Micheaux gave a snort of familiar indignation when
The Betrayal
was “condemned in toto” there; he may also have felt perversely vindicated by the censors' dismissal, which confirmed that miscegenation was still a hot-button issue. Then, reaching into a bag of tricks as old as his first silent film, he rounded up prominent local black citizens to appear before the board and successfully demand that the ruling be overturned.

Yet the censors weren't Micheaux's only problem. More than anything, it was the
Gone With the Wind
-like length of
The Betrayal
that put off theater managers, forcing Micheaux to recut the picture. He tried a compromise, offering to divide the film into “three installments.” “Like a serial, you'll say,” Micheaux explained in one circular. “Please do not confuse this as any serial. It was not conceived as a serial and will not be exhibited as such. It is simply a super-feature, too long to be shown in all theatres, as is, at one time, so we're offering to let you run it in three installments…

“Incidentally, the installment prints run 3 hours and 24 minutes, 9 minutes longer than the road show prints.

“Before arguing that no picture has ever been shown this way,” Micheaux continued oddly, “recall that no country had ever employed the Atom-bomb until we dropped two on Japan—and ended a destructive and costly war right quick.”

The circular ended with this salutation, “Kindly get in touch with us—and let's make some money—yeah man!”

Some black theaters in eastern cities agreed to book the picture for one- or two-day stints. Most took a pass.
The Betrayal
found more receptive venues in the South and West, where “Direct from Broadway!” became part of the sell. “When they showed it throughout the South, the theaters were packed,” Collins insisted. “I saw pictures of the theaters
with lines going down for blocks. It was accepted by the black audience. They wanted to see it.”

Whether or not
The Betrayal
truly broke “attendance records” at spots like the El Rey Theatre in Oakland, where it played for two weeks in August 1949, or whether this was boastful publicity—no one can say.

Whether
The Betrayal
was abysmal, as the critics claimed, or whether the packed audiences in the South and Oakland suggest that the old master was still in touch with a segment of his audience—no one can say. It's unlikely that more than two or three prints of Micheaux's last picture were ever struck, and like two-thirds of the movies he wrote, directed, and produced, his last film is “lost” today. Astor, which had gone into the “Negro picture” business with such fanfare, got out of it quietly but speedily and altogether.
*

 

The failure of
The Betrayal
crushed Micheaux financially. It was no secret in Harlem that the race-picture pioneer was broke. But he also disappeared from the streets. The failure had finally ruined his health.

Actor Lorenzo Tucker still visited occasionally, and “around 1949 or so” he stopped by to see the man who had launched him into motion pictures, who had mentored him, whom he thought of as a second father.

The tough body that had tamed the Rosebud was gone with the wind. Tucker found the once-strapping Czar Oscar shrunken, folded into a wheelchair. The vigor was gone, but more surprising, so was the zeal to reclimb the mountain. Micheaux knew that he had reached the bottom, not Booker T. Washington's bottom rung—always a good place to start—but the deep bottom of ending, and never-ending.

Yet Micheaux was religious at his core, and he believed in the inevitable bottom. He had always been an idealist on behalf of his race, but a realist when it came to his own fortunes. He sold illusions to inspire others, while living a hard-luck life of heartbreak and disappointment himself.

“I don't go out now,” Michaux told Tucker matter-of-factly, his once-fiery eyes now stoical. “He rolled his chair from his desk to his dining room,” Tucker recalled, “and I had something to eat with him, and that was the last time I saw him.”

There was still business to attend to: Even from his wheelchair, Micheaux arranged bookings here and there for his most durable old films, and filled the small number of mail-order requests for his books. Ironically, his reputation as a novelist was on the rise in Harlem, even as he was being written off as a race-picture artist. In 1948, Hugh M. Gloster's
Negro Voices in American Fiction
rated Micheaux alongside the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Gloster devoted four pages to Micheaux's pre-filmmaking novels, finding them “unimpressive in technique,” but graced with characters, settings, and situations “far removed from the well-trod paths of American Negro fiction.”

For its fortieth anniversary edition, the
New York Amsterdam News
featured a roundup of significant black writers of the twentieth century, and whether book editor Constance Curtis had changed her mind about Micheaux, or felt compassion for his sorry circumstances, she ran his photograph at the top of the page, where it shared space with the portraits of such eminences as W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and the NAACP leader Walter White. True, Micheaux had not won “critics' acclaim” with his books, but they appealed “to the public,” she wrote. And he was “still writing books,” reported the
Amsterdam News.

This belated recognition might have given him solace, but it's unlikely that Micheaux really was still writing books, or much else. A shadow spread over him in his twilight years, as his arthritis, hypertension, and arteriosclerosis advanced. His feeble health is one reason to question the widespread belief, based on a brief clipping in the
Charlotte Observer,
that in the winter of 1951 the filmmaker became ill “while here selling books and making a tour of the South.” Yet it is a fact that around that time Micheaux ended up in Good Samaritan Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Some rumors suggest that Micheaux may have ended up at the Good Samaritan after a car accident. Whatever the case, Micheaux was hospitalized there for six weeks, before passing away on Easter, March 25, 1951. He was sixty-seven years old.

Neither advertisements placed in the
Charlotte Post,
the city's black newspaper; nor repeated requests for information posted in the
Charlotte Observer,
the largest city daily; nor a search of medical and police records by local officials, has been able to establish the true circumstances of Micheaux's death. Not a single person could be located who claimed to have met Micheaux, or who knew what he was doing in Charlotte on that final trip.

One likely scenario is that the race-picture pioneer journeyed with his wife to North Carolina, where she had relatives, to find refuge at Good Samaritan (today part of Carolinas Medical Center), an historic black hospital said to be the first in the United States operated exclusively for African-Americans. Mrs. Micheaux, with whom he had just celebrated twenty-five years of marriage, was at his bedside when he died. Dr. Allen Atkins Wyche, a black physician who was a pioneer in the treatment of heart disease, signed the death certificate.