Hattie McDaniel

American Arcade postcard. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.

 

American actress, singer-songwriter, and comedian Hattie McDaniel (1893-1952) won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as "Mammy” in Gone with the Wind (1939). She was the first African American to win an Oscar. She appeared in over 300 films, although she received screen credits for only 83. Encountering racism and racial segregation throughout her career, McDaniel was unable to attend the premiere of Gone with the Wind in Atlanta because it was held at a whites-only theatre. When she died in 1952, her final wish - to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery - was denied because the graveyard was restricted to whites only.

 

Hattie McDaniel was born in Denver in 1893 to formerly-enslaved parents in Wichita, Kansas. She was the youngest of 13 children. Her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of gospel music, and her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War with the 122nd United States Colored Troops. In 1900, the family moved to Colorado, living first in Fort Collins and then in Denver, where Hattie attended Denver East High School and in 1908 entered a contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, reciting 'Convict Joe'. McDaniel was a songwriter as well as a performer. She honed her songwriting skills while working with her brother Otis McDaniel's carnival company, a minstrel show. McDaniel and her sister Etta Goff launched an all-female minstrel show in 1914 called the McDaniel Sisters Company. After the death of her brother Otis in 1916, the troupe began to lose money, and Hattie did not get her next big break until 1920. From 1920 to 1925, she appeared with Professor George Morrison's Melody Hounds, a black touring ensemble. In the mid-1920s, she embarked on a radio career, singing with the Melody Hounds on station KOA in Denver. From 1926 to 1929, she recorded many of her songs for Okeh Records and Paramount Records in Chicago. After the stock market crashed in 1929, McDaniel could only find work as a washroom attendant at Sam Pick's Club Madrid near Milwaukee. Despite the owner's reluctance to let her perform, she was eventually allowed to take the stage and soon became a regular performer.

 

In 1931, Hattie McDaniel moved to Los Angeles to join her brother Sam, and sisters Etta and Orlena. When she could not get film work, she took jobs as a maid or cook. Sam was working on a KNX radio program, 'The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour', and was able to get his sister a spot. She performed on radio as "Hi-Hat Hattie", a bossy maid who often "forgets her place". Her show became popular, but her salary was so low that she had to keep working as a maid. She made her first film appearance in The Golden West (1932), in which she played a maid. Her second appearance came in the highly successful Mae West film I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933), in which she played one of the black maids with whom West camped it up backstage. She received several other uncredited film roles in the early 1930s, often singing in choruses. In 1934, McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild. She began to attract attention and landed larger film roles, which began to win her screen credits. Fox put her under contract to appear in The Little Colonel (David Butler, 1935), with Shirley Temple, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Lionel Barrymore. Judge Priest (John Ford, 1934), starring Will Rogers, was the first film in which she played a major role. She had a leading part in the film and demonstrated her singing talent, including a duet with Rogers. McDaniel and Rogers became friends during filming. In 1935, McDaniel had prominent roles, as a slovenly maid in Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935); a comic part as Jean Harlow's maid and traveling companion in China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935), McDaniels's first film with Clark Gable; and as the maid Isabella in Murder by Television (Clifford Sanforth, 1935), with Béla Lugosi. She appeared in the romantic comedy Vivacious Lady (George Stevens, 1938), starring James Stewart and Ginger Rogers. McDaniel had a featured role as Queenie in the musical Show Boat (James Whale, 1936), starring Allan Jones and Irene Dunne, in which she sang a verse of 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man' with Dunne, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, and a black chorus. She and Robeson sang 'I Still Suits Me', written for the film by Kern and Hammerstein. After Show Boat, she had major roles in the romantic comedy Saratoga (Jack Conway, 1937), starring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable; The Shopworn Angel (H. C. Potter, 1938), with Margaret Sullavan; and the screwball comedy-mystery film The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. She had a minor role in the Carole Lombard–Frederic March film Nothing Sacred (William A. Wellman, 1937), in which she played the wife of a shoeshine man (Troy Brown) masquerading as a sultan. She was criticized by members of the black community for the roles she accepted and for pursuing roles aggressively rather than rocking the Hollywood boat. For example, in The Little Colonel (David Butler, 1935), she played one of the black servants longing to return to the Old South, but her portrayal of Malena in Alice Adams angered white Southern audiences because she stole several scenes from the film's white star, Katharine Hepburn. McDaniel ultimately became best known for playing a sassy, opinionated maid.

 

The competition to win the part of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) was almost as fierce as that for Scarlett O'Hara. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to film producer David O. Selznick to ask that her own maid, Elizabeth McDuffie, be given the part. McDaniel did not think she would be chosen because she had earned her reputation as a comic actress. One source claimed that Clark Gable recommended that the role be given to McDaniel; in any case, she went to her audition dressed in an authentic maid's uniform and won the part. Upon hearing of the planned film adaptation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought hard to require the film's producer and director to delete racial epithets from the movie (in particular the offensive slur "nigger") and to alter scenes that might be incendiary and that, in their view, were historically inaccurate. Of particular concern was a scene from the novel in which black men attack Scarlett O'Hara, after which the Ku Klux Klan, with its long history of provoking terror on black communities, is presented as a savior. Throughout the South, black men were being lynched based upon false allegations they had harmed white women. That attack scene was altered, and some offensive language was modified, but another epithet, "darkie", remained in the film, and the film's message with respect to slavery remained essentially the same. Consistent with the book, the film's screenplay also referred to poor whites as "white trash", and it ascribed these words equally to characters black and white. Loew's Grand Theater on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia was selected by the studio as the site for the 15 December 1939 premiere of Gone with the Wind. Studio head David O. Selznick asked that McDaniel be permitted to attend, but MGM advised him not to, because of Georgia's segregation laws. Clark Gable threatened to boycott the Atlanta premiere unless McDaniel was allowed to attend, but McDaniel convinced him to attend anyway. While Jim Crow laws kept McDaniel from the Atlanta premiere, she did attend the film's Hollywood debut on 28 December 1939. Upon Selznick's insistence, her picture was also featured prominently in the program. For her performance as the house slave who repeatedly scolds her owner's daughter, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), and scoffs at Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), McDaniel won the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first black actor to have been nominated and win an Oscar. Gone with the Wind won eight Academy Awards.

 

Hattie McDaniel once again played a domestic in In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942), starring Bette Davis, but one who confronts racial issues when her son, a law student, is wrongly accused of manslaughter. McDaniel was also in Thank Your Lucky Stars (David Butler, 1943), with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis. McDaniel continued to play maids during the war years in The Male Animal (Elliott Nugent, 1942) and Since You Went Away (John Cromwell, 1944), but her feistiness was toned down to reflect the era's somber news. She also played the maid in the live-action/animated drama Song of the South (Harve Foster, Wilfred Jackson, 1946) for Disney. She made her last film appearances in the coming-of-age film Mickey (Ralph Murphy, 1948) and the domestic comedy Family Honeymoon (Claude Binyon, 1949), where that same year, she appeared on the live CBS television program The Ed Wynn Show. She remained active on radio and television in her final years, becoming the first black actor to star in her own radio show with the comedy series 'Beulah'. She also starred in the television version of the show, replacing Ethel Waters after the first season. Waters had apparently expressed concerns over stereotypes in the role. Beulah was a hit, however, and earned McDaniel $2,000 per week; however, the show was controversial. In 1951, the United States Army ceased broadcasting Beulah in Asia because troops complained that the show perpetuated negative stereotypes of black men as shiftless and lazy and interfered with the ability of black troops to perform their mission. After filming a handful of episodes, however, McDaniel learned she had breast cancer. By the spring of 1952, she was too ill to work and was replaced by Louise Beavers.

 

Hattie MacDaniel did not join the Negro Actors Guild of America until 1947, late in her career. McDaniel married Howard Hickman in 1911, in Denver, Colorado. He died in 1915. Her second husband, George Langford, died of a gunshot wound in 1925, soon after she married him and while her career was on the rise. In 1941, she married James Lloyd Crawford, a real estate salesman, and in 1945 she was pregnant. McDaniel began buying baby clothes and set up a nursery in her house. Her plans were shattered when she suffered a false pregnancy and fell into a depression. She never had any children. She divorced Crawford in 1945, after four and a half years of marriage. She married Larry Williams, an interior decorator, in 1949, but divorced him in 1950 after testifying that their five months together had been marred by "arguing and fussing." In 1952, McDaniel died of breast cancer at age 59 in the hospital on the grounds of the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills, California. She was survived by her brother Sam McDaniel. In her will, McDaniel wrote that she wished to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery, the resting place of film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Its owner, Jules Roth, refused to allow her to be buried there because the cemetery practiced racial segregation. Her second choice was Rosedale Cemetery (now Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery), where she lies today. McDaniel has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Hollywood: one at 6933 Hollywood Boulevard for her contributions to radio and one at 1719 Vine Street for motion pictures. In 1975, she was inducted posthumously into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. In 2002, McDaniel's legacy was celebrated in Beyond Tara, The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel (Madison D. Lacy, 2001), hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. This one-hour special depicted McDaniel's struggles and triumphs in the presence of rampant racism and brutal adversity. The film won the 2001–2002 Daytime Emmy Award.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

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