He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants,
and marched me on my tippytoes toward the door. He was seething. “You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you can handle,” he barked. And just as he threw me out, he ended with, “Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.”
I have to tell you that his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree back in my childhood. His assessment was like a death sentence for my soul. I had never mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he
didn’t
know, what was it about me that implied to this stranger that dishwashing would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?
Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it, or life was going to be mighty grim. There’s something inside me—pride, ego, sense of self—that hates to fail at anything. I could never accept such a verdict of failure before I’d even begun my life! So I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening meal-breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed, near the entrance to the kitchen, reading newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor, as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant and he helped me learn to read.
My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, mind you. Not that I had ever given acting a thought before reading that ad. I simply needed to prove to that man at the American
Negro Theatre that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes.
And it worked. The second time around they let me in. But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to fill the new acting class. But soon after that first hurdle went down, another went up: because of my lack of education and experience, after a couple of months I was flunking out. And once again I felt that vulnerability, as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lost my chance at the theater, where would I be? One more black kid who could barely read washing dishes on the island of Manhattan. So I worked out a deal. I became their janitor, and they let me continue to study.
Things began to improve, and maybe even
I
began to improve—as an actor, that is. But when it was time to cast the first big production, in walked this new guy, another kid from the Caribbean with whom the director had worked before. After all my studies, busting my ass trying to learn to act (not to mention busting my ass sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace), she was going to cast
him
in the lead. Well, I had to admit he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a nice voice. He could even sing a little.
I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me the understudy, but little did I know. On the night of the first major run-through, the one night a significant casting director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid they’d cast for the lead—a kid named Harry Belafonte—couldn’t
make it. I had to go on for him, and son of a gun, the casting director liked what I did and called me.
“I’m preparing a version of
Lysistrata
for Broadway. Would you be available?”
Are you kidding?
Next thing I knew I was staring out into a sea of white faces from a Broadway stage, scared shitless as I fumbled for my lines as Polydorus.
The word
bad
cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was BAD. The stage fright had me so tightly in its grip that I was giving the wrong cues and jumbling the lines, and within a few moments the audience was rolling in the aisles.
The moment the curtain came down it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.
The critics trashed the show. I mean, they
hated
it. But they liked me. I was so god-awful they thought I was good. They said they admired my “fresh, comedic gift.”
If you saw this scenario in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? I saw it in real life, and I certainly didn’t. In my world, effort and reward were expected to settle into a natural balance. By any reasonable measure, I knew that I’d fallen short that evening. That was
my
critical assessment. That assessment, taken at its worth, created a big fat contradiction inside me. Maybe I just wasn’t up to this acting thing.
Maybe the man at the little theater in Harlem was right. Maybe I
should
“go out and get a job I could handle.”
I couldn’t shake the sense that failure was lurking somewhere in the wings, waiting to pick my bones if my doubts should become reality. Still, in the face of all that, I had to stay in charge of my life no matter how it all played out. Regardless of whatever (or whoever) else might have been looking out for me, I needed to know, first and foremost, that
I
was looking out for
myself
. Even when the dread of being shot down by failure twisted my insides into knots.
Did I misjudge this new culture? Should all the glitter that now seemed only inches beyond my reach have been taken with a grain of salt? Maybe natural balances weren’t that easily found amid so much concrete and steel. Amid so many machines pushing automobiles, lifting elevators, pulling trains. Or maybe, at the very bottom, I wasn’t yet ready to accept that environment compromises values far more than values do their number on environment.
The play ran only four days. But to my surprise, my “triumph” in
Lysistrata
led immediately to another acting job as an understudy in a road show of
Anna Lucasta
, a job that lasted intermittently for several weeks. Then, after a long, lean, and frustrating period, during which off-Broadway roles happened by just often enough to keep my meager skills alive, I found out quite by accident that 20th Century-Fox was casting for a movie called
No Way Out
, the film that would be the first that Reggie and Evelyn Poitier would ever see.
My fingers touched the glitter with that first movie, and it was a mighty reach, I tell you. I knew full well how far I had come from those days in Nassau when I dreamed of being a “cowboy” in Hollywood.
While I was completing that Fox picture in L.A., the film’s director, Joseph Mankiewicz, told me that when I got back to New York I should look up a producer named Zoltan Korda. I did, entering his office just as he was walking out. “No time to talk,” he said. “Can you come to London?”
Next thing I knew I was on the Pan Am
Clipper
in a first-class compartment heading east across the Atlantic, bound for London and eventually South Africa, to play the part of the young priest in
Cry, the Beloved Country
.
It was heady stuff, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that, not only was I one lucky youngster, but something more had to be at play here. I had grown up in a culture where unseen forces lurked just out of view, where people looked to “the mysteries” to explain both good fortune and bad. As I tried to absorb the changes in my new life, I butted up against the knowledge that this many accidents and lucky breaks just didn’t happen in the movie business, or anywhere else. They didn’t even happen in the movies themselves! I knew that things could be taken away just as easily as they now seemed to come. I rested uneasily on those black-and-white and scary uncertainties.
After returning from London I at last went back to the Bahamas and came very much back down to earth. I saw my mother and my father for the first time in eight years. I had gone
away a troubled boy of fifteen, and here I was, a man of twenty-three whom they could hardly recognize. It was a powerful moment when I returned to our little house in Nassau and saw them sitting together, alone, on a Saturday night. It was a moment of miraculous joy, but also a time of wrenching guilt for me, because during those eight years I had remained entirely silent.
It’s an unwritten law in the Bahamas that when people who go to America to live write home, they put a little something in the envelope. I had been unable to contribute to my family for so long that the habit of silence had simply overtaken me. Or at least that’s how I had justified it to myself. I had to wait until I was in good shape, I had told myself. Still, I knew that
Reggie
was more of a man than to let eight years pass without a word.
I made amends, but my guilt wasn’t canceled. My parents forgave me—they would have forgiven me anything—and I left with them almost all of the three thousand dollars I had made in my nascent career in the movies. But I knew that, forced to take my measure at that moment, even they would have found me wanting.
So going back to New York was a valuable exercise in humility. After that initial burst of success—a couple of films and a couple of major theatrical productions—I was back in Harlem washing dishes. Perhaps I had a gift from Cat Island buried deep within me, because despite the setback, I still had faith in myself and faith in the future—enough of each to marry a beautiful young girl named Juanita and try to get on with my life. Then a buddy of mine had the bright idea of opening a rib place. We scraped together the money and opened a
little joint, Ribs in the Ruff (at 127th Street and 7th Avenue), with seating for all of thirteen people.
My wife was trying her hand at modeling, though that led by way of necessity to a job as a seamstress at a clothing factory. This life was tough, but we were up for it. Having lived with my mother and my father, having watched how they dealt with other people and with each other, I felt prepared for pretty much anything.
Soon our first child was born, little Beverly, and then another was on her way, and I didn’t have any money. Our little barbecue place was a hole in the wall. Eighty cents for a meal, including side dishes. My partner and I did everything. We cooked the ribs, we made the potato salad, we made the coleslaw, we scrubbed out the place when we closed in the morning. Times were so tough that I used to take milk from the restaurant home for my kid.
One day when my wife was pregnant with Pam, I was working in the rib joint. I was tapped out and feeling worried. That day, with nothing encouraging in sight, out of the blue a big agent named Marty Baum called me and said, “Would you come down? I have something I want to talk to you about.”
He wasn’t
my
agent, of course. He was just helping out on a casting assignment. His office was on 5th Avenue, between 58th and 57th Streets.
He said, “Go over to the Savoy Plaza Hotel, suite such and such. There’s a gentleman who wants to see you about a part.”
I went over. Two guys were there, the producer and the director. We had a very brief talk, they looked me over a bit, and one of them said, “We’d like you to read for us.”
I said, “Certainly.”
They gave me a script, asked me to turn to a particular page, and gave me a few moments to look over the scene. When I thought I was ready, I said, “Okay.” They had me read the scene with the producer while the director watched.
I felt good about the reading, though they didn’t say much about it. They asked me things about my life and what I had done in the business, and I told them. They gave me a script to take with me and said they would talk to Marty Baum. They thanked me for coming as I left.
I went back and said to Marty Baum, “They gave me a script.” He said, “Well, read it. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll work out something.”
I went straight home—127th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue—and I read the script. I didn’t like it. The part they wanted me for was a man who was a janitor for a gambling casino in Phenix City, Alabama. He was a very nice man, but there had been some kind of murder at the casino, and it was thought that this janitor might have some information that could incriminate whoever was responsible. He received threats and warnings to keep his mouth shut, so he didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything. Then, to augment the threat, the bad guys killed his young daughter, throwing her body on his lawn. He was enraged. He was tormented. Still, he remained passive. He didn’t do shit. He left it to other people to fight his battles.
So the next day I went back to Marty Baum’s office.
“What do you think of the script?” he asked.
“Well, I have to tell you, I’m not going to play it,” I said.
Disbelief etched his face. “You’re not gonna play it?”
“No,” I said. “I
can’t
play it.”
“What do you mean you can’t play it?” he asked, irritated.
“I cannot play it,” I repeated.
“It’s not a derogatory part,” he pointed out.
“No, it’s not.”
“What happens to this guy isn’t a racial thing,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” I agreed. “It could happen to any guy in that particular set of circumstances.”
“So what is it?” he said. “I mean, is it…?” He paused, apparently trying to make sense of my response. “They don’t call you names, they don’t—” He went on to say they’re not doing this to you, they’re not doing that to you.
I said, “Yeah, that’s all true.”
“Then what
is
it?” he urged.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, “but there’s something about it. I just don’t want to go into it.”
So he said to me, “Well, listen, that’s the way it goes. But I still don’t understand.”
I thanked him and left. Then I went over to 57th Street and Broadway, one flight up, to a place called Household Finance Company, and I borrowed seventy-five dollars on the furniture in our apartment, because I needed the money. The birth of our second daughter was fairly near, and I knew that Beth Israel Hospital was going to cost me seventy-five bucks, so I had to line up the money.