Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Jack’s connection with the ADL was a natural outgrowth of the new circumstances of his life, of his move from California to New York. About half of Brooklyn’s population was Jewish; among the Dodger faithful, Jews were probably far more ready than any other major group, such as the Irish or
the Italians, to identify with the fight against Jim Crow embodied by Robinson. Both Jack and Rachel found themselves developing personal ties to Jews. “
That may be so,” Rachel would say years later, “but for us friendship was really a personal matter, as it should be. We made friends. For whatever reason, many happened to be Jewish. We didn’t think of them as Jewish, unless we were dealing with a specific organization. They were simply interesting people who wanted to know us, just as we wanted to know them.”
Almost certainly, the Robinsons found Jews far more ready than other whites to accept them socially. In addition to their friendship with the Satlows in Flatbush, they also grew close to Bea and Andre Baruch, a Dodgers broadcaster who also hosted the popular radio show
Lucky Strike Hit Parade.
Later, in Harlem, Jack fell in so easily with Frank Schiffman, the owner of the Apollo Theater, and his son Bobbie, that for some years the Harlem landmark was almost his private uptown office. Almost all of Jack’s lawyers and financial counselors, as well as business partners, would be Jewish. Jack’s friendship with a prosperous employer like Meyer Robinson, the head of Manischewitz Wines and an avid Dodger fan, was vital to him. In Chicago, he visited regularly with Caroline and David Wallerstein, who controlled a group of theaters and had been instrumental in Jack’s 1948 vaudeville tour. Jennie Grossinger gave the Robinsons (and other top athletes) virtual carte blanche at Grossinger’s, her family’s popular resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where over a number of years Jack was a great favorite and Rachel and the children also loved to go to rest, play, eat, and socialize.
Friendship with whites, no matter how easily developed, typically brought with it at least a small degree of tension. The shadow of race and racism, of white guilt and black and white doubt, fell over even the more intimate relationships. As blacks, the Robinsons had more freedom now than ever before, but the knowledge that in many instances the freedom derived mainly from Jack’s celebrity took away some of the pleasure. In restaurants such as Lindy’s in New York, where Jack was treated royally, the question that haunted him was how the same restaurant would treat an ordinary black. “
One way we knew the answer to that,” Rachel said, “was by looking at how I was treated when I was not with Jack—not with Jackie Robinson. Sometimes I was treated well, but very often, until or unless it came out that I was Jackie Robinson’s wife, whites would be as rude to me as they were rude to other blacks. These things upset Jack pretty badly.”
For both Jack and Rachel, as for many black couples, the worst part of Jim Crow was watching it begin to weigh, in one way or another, on their children. In November 1949, when Jackie Junior celebrated his third
birthday at home in St. Albans, the published photograph of his little party, with ice cream and cake, created a stir in some circles; other than young David Campanella, all of the guests were white. One evening, as Rachel was putting him to bed after his bath, Jackie suddenly blurted out: “Mommy,
my hands are still dirty.” Stunned, Rachel quietly explained to him that his hands and her own were the same color, and clean. On another occasion, Jackie embarrassed her in a store by asking loudly, “Mommy, why are you lighter than I am?” One day, as she watched in horror, she saw youthful racism in action on her own lawn, where a “jungle gym,” set up by Jack, had become a magnet for local kids. As Rachel watched, a little white girl who had been playing amicably with Jackie suddenly became cold to him when two white boys showed up. “Look,” Rachel thought, “
there’s discrimination being practiced in our own yard!” When Jackie, in tears, came running to her, she was careful. “
Why
isn’t she playing nicely with you now?” she asked. “Because I’m
different
from her,” Jackie sobbed.
With integration, many blacks had both greater freedom and further reason for self-doubt; but Jack Robinson was not one of these. In 1954, a troubled black boy named Jimmie living in a Fort Wayne, Indiana, orphanage, shocked one of his mentors, a white man, by declaring: “
I wish I was white.” The man, who did not know Robinson personally, nevertheless asked him to help set the boy straight. In a letter that reached the newspapers, Robinson told Jimmie that while his desire to be white was “understandable for a boy your age,” Jack himself did not share it; “I am so proud to be Negro that I feel really good.” Jack’s sense of the meaning of his black skin derived mainly from his faith in God, not from admiration for the African past; whatever God does is right, although we may not know God’s plan. “I am proud because God put us here on earth,” he told Jimmie, “and gave us a color that is distinctive, and then put problems before us to see what would happen.” Blacks, despite these problems, had achieved much. “Because of some handicaps we are better off,” Jack argued; Jimmie must “look in the mirror at yourself and be proud of what God gave you. I, too, have felt the pains that you must feel, but I have never been ashamed of what God has given me.”
J
ACK BELIEVED IN CHARITY
, but he also wanted to capitalize on his fame; thus he jumped quickly at a number of commercial endorsements. In one issue of
Ebony
magazine, three advertisements featured him. One endorsed the Jackie Robinson Official Baseball Game (“
Pitches Curves! Fast or Slow Balls! Hit Home Runs Just as Jackie Does with the Dodgers!”). Another endorsed Chesterfield cigarettes (although Jack still hated smoking). A third
hawked a line of Jackie Robinson shorts, sportshirts, and T-shirts (“Boys and Girls … I am proud to have you wear them”). In Manhattan, Macy’s department store offered a line of Jackie Robinson jackets and caps; elsewhere Jack endorsed a line of men’s slacks. Thus he was perhaps not altogether shocked in July when a Chicago man, Stanley Kuttner, sued him for $100,000 for allegedly violating an agreement about the use of Robinson’s name to sell clothing. In
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Ebony
, and on subway billboards, Jack endorsed Wheaties, the breakfast cereal.
Searching for a financial advisor, Jack at last found one he liked in Martin Stone, a graduate of Columbia University and the Yale School of Law, and a pioneer of sorts in television. Tall, handsome, and urbane, Stone had helped to develop a number of popular television programs, notably the children’s classic
The Howdy Doody Show.
One day in 1949, at the urging of a friend, he had gone out to St. Albans to visit the Robinsons about a specific legal matter. “
Jack was mentioned to me,” according to Stone, “by an agent who told me Jackie Robinson was so naive he would sign anything. After I met him, I agreed; I couldn’t believe that the man could be so naive! He trusted everybody. In those days, he really had little idea what he was getting into half the time, or the kind of people he was dealing with; some of them were real crooks. My job, once we decided to work together, was to look closely at every deal when it came in, and then advise Jack how to proceed—to accept, to reject, to modify, and so on. I liked him from the start, and I think he and Rachel liked me. After all, we were still working together and good friends practically up to the end.”
Stone’s first challenge was extremely important; a financial windfall from Hollywood was at stake for the Robinsons. Stone had to get Jack out of his contract with the small New York publisher, Greenberg, that had brought out
Jackie Robinson: My Own Story
(written by Wendell Smith) in 1948. At issue now were the movie rights, because a motion picture of Jack’s life was being planned in Hollywood. “It was a terrible deal,” Stone recalled of the Greenberg contract, “just unfortunate from Jack’s point of view. He had signed away everything for just about nothing.” Stone settled the matter to Jack’s advantage, and the new movie deal went forward.
The Hollywood story was complicated. Two years earlier, Lawrence Taylor, a screenwriter and baseball fan captivated by Jack’s rookie exploits, had written a movie script about his life. Taylor quickly discovered that not one studio would agree to make a picture with a black leading man. “
Two of the big studios were interested,” Taylor said, “if the story could be changed to show a white man teaching Robinson to be a great ball player. Of course, that was out of the question.” Then, as a result of Jack’s HUAC appearance and his 1949 MVP season, and with Hollywood taking a decidedly liberal
turn following films like
Gentleman’s Agreement
(about anti-Semitism) and
Home of the Brave
(about blacks), Taylor at last had an interested producer. After several urgent telephone calls to investors, William J. Heineman of the Eagle-Lion studio found money for the project. Unfortunately, he found only $300,000, which would make
The Jackie Robinson Story
a low-budget movie. It also had to be a quickie, shot in about a month, to be ready to open early in the baseball season.
Brokered by Martin Stone, the deal called for Heineman to pay Jack $50,000 in two installments, from which Jack agreed to give Taylor and a collaborator, Louis Pollock, a total of $20,000. Also, Jack would receive fifteen percent of the net profits, out of which he would give the writers one-third. In addition, Jack would portray himself. Gary Cooper had been the doomed Lou Gehrig, and William Bendix had played Babe Ruth, but in this rare movie about an athlete still in his prime, Jack would play himself. At this point, Rickey stepped in—and almost killed the project. Reading the script, he became so enraged by its distortions that he flung it across the room. Recognizing the potential importance of the movie to his own reputation, Rickey assigned his assistant Arthur Mann to watch over it. Mann, aware of Jack’s book with Greenberg, then decided to write his own biography of Robinson. Although “
this might sound like ‘muscling in,’ ” he wrote Rickey in November 1949, the draft of Mann’s book would be the legal basis for fighting any claims by Greenberg or anyone else about infringement of copyright.
Once the deal was set, Rickey sent his private plane to bring Clay Hopper, Clyde Sukeforth, and Burt Shotton to Brooklyn to help with the script. In January, just before the start of shooting, Mann reached Hollywood with Rickey’s final orders about the movie. Its basic structure was set. It would follow Jack’s life chronologically, more or less, but would have its grand climax in his appearance before HUAC in Washington. Baseball would be integral to the story, and Robinson at its center, but ultimately it would be about the triumph of democracy and of Americans of goodwill, including both Robinson and Rickey.
On February 3, Jack flew to Los Angeles to begin shooting. Reporting to the set, he met the director, Alfred Green, whose work included the highly successful movie
The Jolson Story;
the producer, Mort Briskin; the dialogue director, Ross Hunter, with whom Jack would work closely; and his fellow actors, including the beautiful and talented Ruby Dee, who would play Rachel. On every side, Jack heard the same advice: as an actor, be yourself. But the tight schedule made for a harried atmosphere on the set. “
It took all of one day just to get him to relax,” Hunter recalled. After talking on the telephone to Rachel in New York three times one day, Jack made a
decision—she had to join him, to see him through this unusual challenge. Soon she was on a plane to Los Angeles.
Once Rachel was at Jack’s side, everything went far more easily for him. “
Jackie made a tremendous impression on everyone,” according to Mann. Being a movie star did not make him temperamental; his sole demand had nothing to do with his own part. “
He was a loyal guy,” the producer Mort Briskin recalled. “He insisted, demanded” that some of his Pasadena and UCLA friends, including Kenny Washington, be written into the script. “Making the picture meant more to him the opening of doors, rather than the money.” He kept his composure even when Al Green put the company on a day-and-night shooting schedule; Jack also put up calmly with the seemingly endless repetition required by the moviemakers. “
The way they had me running bases, stealing second, running from first to third over and over again,” he told a reporter, “I never had any spring training in which I worked any harder.” But once over his nervousness, he showed a certain ease as an actor. “
I simply explained what we wanted,” Green recalled, “and he did it with all the feeling we asked.” John Barrymore Jr., visiting the set, laughed at a suggestion that he give Robinson acting tips. “
Are you kidding?” he asked. “He could teach me!”
Ruby Dee, playing Rachel, found Jack friendly but tense; most likely, he was flustered by their physical closeness as actors, and had no professional and little personal experience with other women to fall back on. “
In one scene, I was to massage his back,” she said. “So I put my hands on him and he jerked his head back over his shoulder and glared at me, and I realized my hands were so cold!” A magazine writer noticed Jack’s clear embarrassment one day when, during “
a mildly romantic scene” with Dee, Rachel strolled onto the set. Dee had an easier time with Rachel. Married to Ossie Davis, and even then pregnant with her own daughter, Dee was thrilled to be allowed to hold the infant Sharon. But she had one lasting regret: she had made Rachel too passive on the screen. “
The moment I talked with her,” Dee said, “I had the feeling I wasn’t doing her justice. She was a much more outgoing person than I was portraying. She was twinkly-eyed, and I remember feeling, Gee, I wish I had known her before I took this part. She was a stronger woman than I portrayed. I had listened to too many directors about not undercutting the star. I hadn’t imagined Rachel as she really was.”
On the last day, Jack made it a point to thank in person everyone on the set. Workers inured to the vanity of stars were astonished to see him climb a catwalk to shake hands with an assistant electrician. Then, late for training camp, he hurried to catch a flight to Florida.