E-Mail This Article to a Friend Black lots of Hollywood Donald Bogle’s Bright Boulevards; John Stahl’s Imitation of Life BY GERALD PEARY

Woe to African-American actors in the halcyon era of Hollywood. Except for the very rare all-black musical, screen roles were demeaning, subsidiary ones: domestics, servants, conductors, shoeshine boys, "colored" folks bowing, scratching, shuffling, grinning, on high alert to the whims of the Caucasian leads. In the 1930s and 1940s, a few black performers stepped away, refusing to participate in such egregious stereotyping. Many others went along with the Devil’s pact, since salaries for studio films were decadently high, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you portrayed an embarrassing Tom or Mammy.

Were opportunities better off camera in racist America? "I’d rather play a maid than be one," is a famous quote from Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, for her loyal house slave in Gone with the Wind. But what did Hollywood’s black performers do after hours, after they’d shed their maid aprons and starched servant uniforms? Did they worry into the night about bartering their souls to white Hollywood? Or did they bury the indignities of their day jobs? That’s the key concern of African-American film historian Donald Bogle in his important new book, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood (Ballantine Books, $26.95). Bogle has set himself the daunting task of determining the off-screen life in Los Angeles of black performers from the silent era into the 1950s, concentrating on the years 1930–1950, Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age. What he discovered is that there was a vibrant, supportive community of well-known African-American actors who resided in the same downtown-LA neighborhoods, who socialized together, and who for the most part led complacent bourgeois lives far removed from those of the servile characters they embodied on screen.

And happily removed from their white employers. There were out-of-work meetings with liberal actors (Gene Kelly) or adventurous ones (Rita Hayworth), but mostly it was a black thing. When they went out, it was along LA’s Central Avenue to fancy "Negro" hotels and nightclubs. They knew about maids and servants up close because they had them in their homes. Hattie McDaniel was typical: she gave lavish, formal parties at her beautiful estate. A voracious reader, she collected books about black history.

Some others leading the good and decent life: Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, the Nicholas Brothers, Louise Beavers, Lena Horne, Clarence Muse. Upstanding citizens. They were annoyed at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson for taking his "Uncle Tomism" beyond his movies, telling the press, "I like white people to like me," and speaking worshipfully of Shirley Temple, with whom he tap-danced in neutered old-plantation roles. (Later, black actors would be equally perturbed by Sammy Davis’s coonish crawling about with Frank Sinatra and the Brat Pack.) And then there was Stepin Fetchit, who shuffled like nobody’s business in countless movies but between takes was a royal pain to everyone on the set and off-hours owned 12 cars including a pink Rolls Royce. He went whoring openly, even with white women. One night, he tooled down to Central Avenue with Mae West in his automobile. Bogle tells us that "no one in Black Hollywood wanted to exhibit the gaudy ostentatiousness of Stepin Fetchit."

Bright Boulevards is upbeat and friendly to just about all black performers, whatever clownish roles they took on in movies, even those with messy private lives. Stepin Fetchit is the exception; he’s ridiculed for his delusional egotism, his womanizing, his trash-mentality overspending, and because "he ultimately represented the African-American . . . as . . . a lazy, inarticulate, shuffling, whimpering, simpleton." Can a somewhat revisionist case be made that this black actor turned many of his Tom roles into comic triumphs, stealing scenes right and left from the frozen, stodgy white actors with his pretzel-twisted body moves and range of vocal expressions?

And what of the black actors who said no to Tom casting? Bogle’s hero is Fredi Washington, whose insistence on her black dignity mirrored the character she played in John Stahl’s Imitation of Life (1934): an angry young woman who runs away to find her identity, rejecting her obsequious mammy (Louise Beavers), who’s happy to be a white woman’s cook. Imitation of Life plays this Friday, February 28, at the Harvard Film Archive in an extraordinary vintage 35mm print. Do as I did for Black History month: read Bogle’s book, then rush out to see this marvelous, complex movie.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@geraldpeary.com