The day the shooting started. I said to Richard, “You know, I haven’t heard from that guy, but I gotta tell you what he wants from me. And I gotta tell you there’s no way. He wants my soul.” And I was struggling to explain how this was a question of my integrity. I said, “I have to let him know there’s no deal makeable here. This is not something that’s for sale.”
And Richard Brooks looked me in the eye, and he said, “You know what? Fuck him.” And we started shooting the picture.
I’ve always wondered, Did Richard say something to the studio? Did he say. “You’re forcing me to find another person on such short notice; I can’t do it, and it’s gonna cost me to delay, and it’s gonna cost the studio money”?
I don’t know what he said, or if indeed he said anything. Maybe the guy himself began to say, “Jesus Christ, what am I doing here?”
Whatever happened, all I know for sure is that I never heard from that guy again.
Not long after I finished that movie, I was back in New York, and I got a call from David Susskind, the television producer. He said, “I’ve got a script that’s just the greatest, and I want you to play it.” He sent it to me and it was fabulous, something called
A Man Is Ten Feet Tall
. I loved the title; it really spoke to what the movie was about.
I told David, “I love it. I want to do it.”
He said, “Great, we got a deal.”
We were just about to go into rehearsal, no contracts yet, when I got a call from an
NBC
guy who said, “Could you come in?” So I went in to see him, and again he gave me this form to sign. It was a loyalty oath, and once again it made a point of asking me to disassociate myself from this man I so greatly admired, Paul Robeson.
Well, at this point I couldn’t hold back what was inside. I didn’t permit it to explode, you know? I was much more in control than that, but I couldn’t hide my feelings. I told him that the man he was talking about was a man I respected a great deal, and yes I knew him, and yes I liked him. I liked the fact
that he was a stand-up guy. He was a good person to me, I said, and I could not and would not, under any circumstances, be a party to anything that denigrated him.
To sum it all up I said, “Thank you very much, but no thanks,” and I left.
I called David Susskind, and I told him what the situation was, and he said, “Let me have a go at this.”
I said, “Fine.” But I went on to explain that I simply couldn’t do this. I knew all about the rightwing, leftwing tug-of-war stuff. I was perfectly capable of interpreting it on the basis of how it affected me as a young black man in America. My political awareness had matured by then. Yes, I was definitely, by then, inclined toward the left of center. Yes, there I found more people like Phil Rose and David Susskind, people demonstrating a genuine willingness to receive me as an equal. This was reason enough, I suppose, for the
FBI
to keep an eye on me, given the fear and panic of those terrible cold war days of madness. A time in which a young. African-American male was at odds with his times and in constant search for answers to the core conflicts in his life. Conflicts that had little or nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the cultural forces rooted inside him and the multitude of daily surrenders demanded of him by their social surroundings. Balance is what he was looking for, but he hadn’t yet learned its name. In time he will come to know it as a state of being. It can only be found at a place that is widely believed not to exist. Truth is that there is a place of space that does exist between two opposites everywhere, and somewhere therein dwells a point at which balance can be found.
The people who were kind to me were kind to me, you know? If I had dug into their motives, I might have found that they were politically different from me, or maybe politically in tune with me. Yes, I knew liberals and progressives and Democrats and Republicans and fellow travelers, communists, anarchists, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites; but whatever they were was their choice—and they were free to so choose.
Blacklist or no, I was determined that I was going to be an actor, because I felt a deep connection between myself and the craft. And blacklist or no, I swore I’d find jobs, or I’d work in a little theater, I’d work in off-Broadway theater, I’d work in Harlem, I’d work as a porter or janitor or wherever I could find jobs. To support my family, I would go out and work as a carpenter’s helper if need be, which I did.
I was fine working in the little restaurant and washing my dishes and putting on the barbecue and selling it for eighty cents a meal. I would far rather wash dishes and work over a grill any day than sign a loyalty oath I considered repugnant.
But some weeks later I received a call from David Susskind and he said to me, “I want to go into rehearsal.”
I said, “David, what do you mean? I told you I can’t sign that thing.”
He said, “Listen, I think these guys are nuts. Let’s just go into rehearsal and see.”
So we started in and we did that play, and it was a bombshell. The story was about this guy working on the docks, the only black guy in the gang. And a white kid drifts on, a kid from the South, and he gets hired and put in the same gang that I’m in,
and he turns out to be a wonderful kid with a remarkably philosophical outlook on life. He and I become very close friends, to the chagrin of the bad guys. It was like a morality play. It was a wonderful presentation on television, and later we did it as a film. It was called
Edge of the City
on the big screen.
For the television show, which aired October 21, 1955, on
NBC
, the part of my wife was played by a young actress named Hilda Simms. She was a very fair-complected African-American woman who had become a star on Broadway playing Anna Lucasta. Her complexion was so fair that on the black-and-white television screens of the day she looked white.
Well, when we went on the air that evening, the switchboard at
NBC
lit up; it was jammed, you hear me when I tell you? I mean
jammed
. Jammed from the first scene throughout the whole teleplay, which ran for an hour, live television, a Philco Playhouse presentation. The Philco people were deluged with letters as well, people writing about this being such a scandal. Such an issue.
The critics thought the piece was excellent, but the country just wasn’t used to it.
The wonderful irony, of course, is that Hilda Simms
was
black—just not black enough to suit the country’s perception at that moment.
The curious thing about being an outsider is that you never know where your guardian angels are lurking. Had that studio guy called back, I would have said, “Hey, I can’t oblige you. What you want me to do is sign away my loyalty. You’re fuck
ing with my dignity.” Had he called back and I’d said that to him, I wouldn’t have gotten work at
MGM
, you follow? And the guy at
NBC
. When I said, “No, I’m outta here” and left, did that guy say to David, “Look, I talked to the kid, and he didn’t give much, but listen, what are we doing here? Why don’t you go ahead and make your movie.” Again, I don’t know what happened. All I know for sure is that whatever list I was on that prompted these encounters with studio and network attorneys didn’t in the end have any discernible effect on my career.
By the same token, these were the days of the big studio contracts. In
Blackboard Jungle
, the kid who played the bad guy, Vic Morrow, was offered a contract at
MGM
. All the other guys were talking about who else was being considered for a contract. But it never entered my mind that there was a chance of that for me. The great good fortune in that situation is that I never
was
considered, because had I been considered, the temptation would have been to accept. That’s guaranteed salary, you know? I probably would have wound up on suspension more often than not, because I probably wouldn’t have done the stuff they offered me. But by remaining an outsider on the free market, I was able to pick and choose my projects, which led to work I can still stand behind, work informed by my life experience, work aligned with my values.
In 1955 I was sent to Atlanta to do publicity for
Blackboard Jungle
. I went down primarily to do black newspapers and black radio. When I was done, I was at the airport, ready to leave, but I was hungry and decided to have a bite. So I went to a very nice restaurant, where all the waiters were black; the
maître d’ himself, dressed in a tuxedo, was black. He recognized me, I suppose, from some movie.
I appeared at the entrance to this restaurant, and he said, “May I help you?”
I said, “Yes, I’d like a table.”
I saw his eyes widen a bit. “Are you alone?” he asked.
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Mr. Poitier, I’m sorry. I could give you a table, but we’re going to have to put a screen around you.”
And I said to him, I said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s the practice here; it’s the law.”
I looked into his eyes, and I could see that he was pained by having to do this. I could tell it; I could smell it. For him, another black man, to be saying, “We do have this table, but we’ll have to put a screen around you”—it must have hurt.
So I said, “Well, no thank you,” and I walked away feeling for the man. Not feeling for myself, because I was getting out of there. But I was also somewhat impervious, because that wasn’t me. The me they saw and wanted to put a screen around didn’t exist to me.
But did I feel some outrage? Of course. Did I feel angry? Yes, but I took it in stride—because this moment of absurdity was, in fact, so totally unremarkable. To African-Americans in 1955 this kind of insult was old hat. So I digested it, and I went on with my life to fight other battles, as I had to. But I never accommodated it.
In 1955, if the nation had cared to take an honest look, it would have seen the approaching civil rights storm kicking up
dust on the horizon, coming, perhaps, to seek out the young, quiet preacher of the gospel, destined to lead the way across the difficult and painful years ahead. In fact, before 1955 had passed into history, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, appearance on the national scene seemed to have no end in sight.
BRENT STAPLES DID a piece in the
New York Times
not long ago saying that when white kids run amok, it’s time for soul-searching in America, time to figure out our ills. But the problems of black kids always remain “other” and somehow apart.
When we did
Blackboard Jungle
there were forces in the country, Clare Booth Luce among them, that described the film as un-American. They thought it was a misrepresentation of American high school education. Well, it certainly wasn’t the kind of school that Ms. Luce’s kids would have attended. There were a couple of Hispanic kids, some black kids, and
all
the kids were lower-income. It was a vocational school in New
York City, a school for the incorrigibles and the kids who weren’t doing too well. The message coming loud and clear from these critics of our film was, “This isn’t ‘us.’” But Richard Brooks, the film’s director, had a different message: “Yes it is. This is ‘us’ too.”
The film’s theme had to do with courage and belonging. Those issues were presented within the context of how an ethnically and racially mixed class of hard-knocks kids moved and changed over time. The individuals in that classroom came to certain realizations having to do with self-perception, courage, and the abuse of power. All of these elements were very creatively orchestrated.
Further animating this already lively mix, the producer added rock and roll to the soundtrack! Let me tell you, in the mid-fifties, with my character’s alienated and uncooperative presence in that classroom challenging the authority of the teacher (but winding up an ally of his on some level), and with Bill Haley and the Comets singing “Rock Around the Clock”—well, the result was an electric jolt.
Blackboard Jungle
was made in 1954, the year of
Brown
v.
Board of Education
, but that court decision notwithstanding, black schools at that time were invisible to white America. This was the era of the Andrews Sisters and Perry Como in terms of popular entertainment.
Your Hit Parade
was the big show on television, and the big cultural barometer. The sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t begin for quite a few years. In 1954 the issue of race was still damn near unchanged from when I got off the boat in Florida in 1943. Back then I couldn’t go into cer
tain stores and try on a pair of shoes. If I wanted something from a restaurant outside the community in which I was confined, I had to go to a back door. If I rode the bus, I was in the back of the bus. If I wanted to take a train, I was in the Jim Crow car. Thurgood Marshall was running around the country bringing suits at various places, but America wasn’t ready for change yet. Most folks didn’t want to hear the news.
I made 750 dollars a week for
Blackboard Jungle
, and I was overjoyed. That was a monumental amount for me, but still I knew it wasn’t going to change my life. I went back to New York, back to Riverside Drive at 147th Street, back to my restaurant empire, which had grown to three establishments, only one of which was profitable. We were on a slide, and before long the whole thing fell apart. When my partner and I dissolved our relationship, he took the one decent location, and I was left with the other two—which also left me at my wits’ end. Here I was, a well-known face in the movies, with my only form of consistent income a business that wasn’t working, with three children to support and no money.
My father-in-law was a master bricklayer. After a bit of soul-searching I went to him and asked if he could teach me how to lay bricks. My brother-in-law was designated as the teacher. He took me up to 126th Street, to a two-family house with a backyard owned by a friend of his, and he set me up with a stack of bricks and some cement. It was a tight space, actually, and they got me going with the plumb line and the white string to keep the rows straight. I tried and tried, but I evidently didn’t have the knack.
When I got home I told my wife, “Don’t worry. I’ll get a job.” And I meant it. I’d been a carpenter’s helper once before. I’d even once had a job stacking barrels of nails. I’d spent a whole day going around to the entrance of the building to get the barrels, then dragging those babies around back to a crawl space under the floor and stacking them in. That was a backbreaker.
Of all my father’s teachings, the most enduring was the one about the true measure of a man. That true measure was how well he provided for his children, and it stuck with me as if it were etched in my brain. I didn’t know where I was going next, but I knew that failure wasn’t an option.
The restaurant was once and for all finito. I went next door to the little newsstand and tobacco shop. I gave the owner all the food that was left over and whatever fixtures he could use, and I closed the doors. I owed back rent, so I had to leave the rest of the equipment. And then I just walked away.
That’s when I got the call from Richard Brooks to make
Something of Value
in Kenya. And from there my career really took off.
This was still 1950s America, however, an America in which a career like this had never even been dreamed of for an outsider of color; it had never happened before in the history of the movie business—a black leading man. I was in the midst of a revolutionary process with this institution I was so at odds with. But my eye was still on “the nature of things,” not the career. I was only doing what seemed natural to me, but I knew in the larger scheme of things that it was far from “natural,” and that it didn’t obviate
what was going on in everyday America. There was still gross unfairness in jobs all around me, in living space, in the manner in which black Americans were received.
I saw the truth clear as could be. The explanation for my career was that I was instrumental for those few filmmakers who had a social conscience. Men like Darryl Zanuck, Joe Mankiewicz, Stanley Kramer, the Mirisch brothers, Ralph Nelson, Mike Frankowitch, David Susskind—men who, in their careers, felt called to address some of the issues of their day.
With my earnings from
Something of Value
I was able to buy a two-family house in Mt. Vernon, New York, for twenty-seven thousand dollars. We lived in the ground-floor apartment with three kids (and a fourth on the way) in what was a mixed, but mostly black, community. Among our neighbors—an extraordinary bunch—were Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. It was a middle-class neighborhood made up of people with either solid professions or secure jobs. Ossie, Ruby, and I knew we represented a slight departure from the norm. Black actors earning as much as a middle-class living amounted to less than one percent of all black actors in the profession. The handful of those lucky enough to have employment had to be constantly mindful of the uncertainties attendant to such fragile statistics and keep an eye out in case the winds of fortune should shift unnoticed and blow them back beyond the poverty line. Through training passed down from all the earlier generations who had to be careful where they walked on the sidewalk, we had the radar to pick up vibrations—good and bad—moving in our direction. Especially when threaten
ing situations arose, all judgment calls required clearance by intuition as a court of last resort. Only then would a course of action be determined.
In 1958 I did another picture.
The Defiant Ones
, that took some heat. Here a good portion of the controversy came from my friends in the black community. It was a Stanley Kramer film written by some very intense and committed progressives, based on their own convictions about race in America. The story was about two fugitives from a chain gang, one white and one black, literally bound together—at least at the beginning—who could never maneuver their way safely through the system. Each misunderstood the other, but they also misunderstood their own individual limitations; so they scapegoated each other.
They weren’t able to clearly define what class was, what race was. They experienced poverty, but they couldn’t objectively characterize it over and above the fact that they didn’t have any money in their pockets. They were simply poor, and that pissed them off, and each used the other to justify his anger—until each discovered that the real difficulty was within himself.
Stanley Kramer’s message in the film was that all people are fundamentally the same. Our differences are, for the most part, cosmetic. The character played by Tony Curtis demonstrated that the society we’d constructed wasn’t too kind to a goodly number of people who weren’t black, who weren’t Hispanic, who weren’t Asian, who weren’t Native American. Some of the people being given a tough time were Irish, and some were
Italians, and some were French, and some were Spanish, and some were eastern European. Modern society wasn’t too terrific to many of them—at times, to
most
of them.
Greed and cruelty are pretty widely distributed throughout humanity, as are their victims. You can have oppression of one sort or another all across the board culturally speaking, and all across the board racially speaking, and all across the board religiously speaking. The down-and-out characters played by Tony Curtis and me in
The Defiant Ones
weren’t willing to give any credence to this commonality until their experience thrust it right up in their faces and they could no longer ignore it. That’s why, at the end, they wound up on that railroad trestle, one guy holding the other guy, struggling to survive, hanging on, but singing a song, a song of hope.
They’re interchangeable, these two guys. The slight difference—
very
slight difference—of one being white and one being black obscures all the other issues about the nature of society. To lay all of society’s ills on racial differences is simplistic.
Nonetheless, there was criticism of
The Defiant Ones
. A small but highly vocal subset of viewers loved the film but took exception to the ending. They were saying, essentially, “We aren’t ready for oneness.” Only
this
time the sentiment was from the black perspective.
Certain of my friends in the Hollywood community wanted more of a sense of satisfaction from the ending—a payback satisfaction, you follow? The moment that sets up the final scene is when Tony Curtis was unable to run as fast as I had to catch
the moving freight train that had become our last chance for escape. He had tried with all his might to reach my outstretched hand and hold on. At one point, in fact, our hands almost clasped—another inch was all he needed—but then his fingers began to slip away from mine. It was at that moment that I tumbled off the train too, following after him. So what my friends were questioning was whether I should have stayed on the train and said, “Screw that guy.” I explained that the scene in question had been clearly designed by the writers and the director to demonstrate that something had happened in the arc of both characters, something powerful enough that my character felt compelled to make that sacrifice, for a
friend
. My adjustment as an actor for playing the scene as written was the thought that maybe we’ll get to the bottom of the hill and be able to take off, or the posse might assume we’re still on the train. Nevertheless, from the point of view of those friends my character’s tumbling off the train added an unsatisfactory note to the tag of the film. People who saw it that way would have let Tony Curtis go to suffer his fate, whatever that was, and they would have stayed on the train. Now, if I’d been in my character’s shoes, in real life, what would I have done? Truth is I’m not altogether sure where I would have come down. But as a professional actor my job was to create the character with the sensibility to conduct himself in the way he behaved at the end, and that’s exactly how I played him. The movie’s point of view was Stanley Kramer’s. And I’m very happy to say, now, in retrospect, that it was a good choice on his part, and on the writer’s part. And indeed on my part for playing the character as it was
written. It was a message of tolerance that has stood up pretty well, given that the picture was made over forty years ago.
By the end of the movie the two characters had each made peace with that part of the self that they’d come to terms with in the other. Tony’s character was lying there in my arms in bad shape, but making jokes about our situation, and he pulled the whole thing together by saying, in effect, “There’s much about you that is me, and there’s much about me that is you, and I’m comfortable with that.” The movie ended before viewers could question how long this comfort would last or where it would lead or how profound it was. But it seems to me that the kind of realization Tony’s character came to doesn’t fade. You may ignore it—you may find that it becomes advantageous politically or socially to ignore it later in life—but you can’t erase it, because it’s an experience that takes root down at the deepest level of commonality—down where all of us were molded out of the same clay.
For myself, I rarely have the desire to stick it to people. It’s enough for me to know that I’ve held myself in good standing with
me
, you see. It’s enough for me to be able to look at the film and say. “That represents me well. That’s how I would like people to see me. I would like them to see me as a person who has some value unto himself, and there it is.”
But when I’m done wrong by someone, I’m not above putting that person on the rack in my mind, you know? I rage against the misdeed by devising all kinds of responses and reactions that would dissipate my anger, but it’s all in imaginary form. Then I become sorry for the thoughts and contemplate forgiveness.
In this life of mine I can’t recall any situation in which forgiveness hasn’t ultimately been the settlement. However,
getting
to forgiveness hasn’t necessarily been a rapid transition. Still, I level out with most such relationships at least cleansed of the rancor, if not intact. And I live better with the situation even if a relationship is altered irreparably in some ways.
Governor Wallace, before his death, said he was sorry for what he had done, and he spoke of the harm and the pain his views and actions had caused. Jesse Jackson went to see him, and I think a form of absolution took place. When you genuinely and sincerely apologize for harm and pain, it’s a sign that your life has taken you to another place from where you were when you caused the harm and pain and had no apologies to make. But the process is never simple, and words can never undo lives destroyed.