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BLACK ARTS WEST
Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles
By DANIEL WIDENER Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4679-1
Chapter One
HOLLYWOOD SCUFFLE The Second World War, Los Angeles, and the Politics of Wartime Representation
I would rather handle everything that the Germans, Italians, and Japanese can throw at me than to face the trouble I see in the Negro Question. -GENERAL GEORGE C. MARSHALL, 1943
The musical began on a Thursday. A hot Thursday. With the temperature in the high eighties and humidity to match, a capacity crowd that wrapped around the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Hill Street sweltered in weather more common to Manhattan than Los Angeles. Decked to the nines, the racially mixed crowd stood waiting in line for a performance whose blend of sarcasm and swing also would have been more familiar to the connoisseurs of the cosmopolitan East than the ambivalent urbanites of prewar Los Angeles. But show up they did. Los Angeles was changing, and even with the outbreak of war five months away, the material and social transformation of Southern California had already begun affecting the cultural contours of local life.
Such were conditions for the opening, on 10 July 1941, of Edward Kennedy Ellington's new musical Jump for Joy. Featuring a star-studded, all-black cast, compositions designed to evoke the breadth of African American aural history, and satirical lyrics meant "to take Uncle Tom out of the theater," the musical signaled the realization of a longstanding ambition on the composer's part. An expansive production that included more than a dozen writers and the stage, costume, and lighting expertise of an elite cadre of Hollywood technical personnel, Ellington's showcase of the "sun-tanned tenth of the nation" served as his initial foray into socially themed work. Indeed, as a number of biographers note, Jump for Joy provided the opportunity for Ellington to combine interests in creative control, racial pride, and entry into the fold of American mass entertainment.
Offering a simultaneous critique of Hollywood and Broadway, Jump for Joy combined aesthetic and political ideas. Ellington's score blended social realism and satire, as in the number "I've Got a Passport from Georgia (and I'm Going to the U.S.A.)," while the overall sensibility of the production, described by the composer as "highly intellectual, but entertaining," sought to convey an insistence on dignity that black audiences and artists had sought for decades. Audiences were treated to an unusually serious portrayal of black romance between the co-stars Dorothy Dandridge and Herb Jevries, while in the musical's penultimate number, "Made to Order," the veteran vaudevillians Pot, Pan, and Skillet celebrated and signified on both zoot culture and African American religiosity. Blending the height of urban style with the traditional time of year during which African Americans linked conspicuous consumption and Christian faith, the sketch featured "Mr. Luscious Beebe's" negotiations with "Fly & Dicty, Lapellists and Drapists" over the terms of his Easter suit. As the rhythm section punctuated with drum rolls and cymbal crashes, the tailors agreed to produce a "zoot suit with a reet pleat and a stuff cuff and a drape shape, shoulders extended, eighteen as intended; padding-Gibraltar, shiny as a halter; streamlined alignment; pipeline the pocket; drape it, drop it, sock it and lock it-fifty-three at the knee and seven at the cuff." The tailors then asked, "What color cloth do you want to cover your hide," to which Potts replied, "Daddy, let the rainbow be your guide!" The latter comment set up the concluding number: an Easter parade that featured pastel costumes by the Academy Award-winning costume designer René Hubert, as well as "blinding" zoot suits on Pot, Pan, and Skillet that led to uproarious applause.
The show's musical selections reflected an expansive vision of African American musical culture. The singer Herb Jevries infused his ballads with gospel inflections, while Ellington summoned the bluesman Joe Turner from Chicago to add further musical depth. Upon his arrival, Turner moved into Central Avenue's legendary Dunbar Hotel. Having commandeered an entire floor for himself and his sidemen, Ellington dictated compositions to Billy Strayhorn from inside the bath while Ben Webster, Sonny Greer, and Ray Nance played alongside from inside their rooms. Ellington's compositions ran the gamut from swing numbers and waltzes to proto-Middle Eastern/Latin jazz fusions written by the trombonist Juan Tizol, while vocals included the soon-to-become-standards "Brown-Skin Gal (in the Calico Gown)" and "I've Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)."
Musical breadth and innovative staging aside, countering common images of African Americans remained the primary aim of the production. Although Ellington described Jump for Joy within a longstanding African American tradition of dissimilation, claiming that the work "was well done because we included everything we wanted to say without saying it," the musical was unusual precisely as a result of its outspoken nature. One scene featured "Uncle Tom" on his deathbed, wasting away despite repeated adrenaline injections from film and theater executives desperate to prolong his life. Another skit featured an African "king" and "queen" dressed in western finery. Informed by a courier that an expedition from America had arrived in search of the origins of jazz, the king laments to his wife, "We shall have to get out our leopard skins again." The final number of the first act, entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin Is a Drive-In Now," suggested the demographic, economic, and cultural shifts taking place on the eve of the war. In lyrics that connected black migration and mobility with Southern California's emerging car culture and perhaps the most famous intersection in moviemaking, the song proclaimed:
It used to be a chicken shack in Caroline But since they moved it up to Hollywood and Vine, They paid off the mortgage with barbecued chow 'Cause Uncle Tom's Cabin is a drive-in now.
Another skit featured the dancer Paul White followed across the stage by a white ghost that he frightened to death by turning around to shout, "Boo!" White had long danced as the "black" shadow of the white bandleader Ted Lewis, and his skit offered the veteran dancer an opportunity to demolish a humiliating previous role. As White's number ended, Ellington addressed the crowd. The composer's words spoke explicitly to the challenge that black artists and activists would face in confronting Hollywood during the coming war:
Now, every Broadway colored show, According to tradition, Must be a carbon copy Of the previous edition, With the truth discreetly muted, And the accent on the brasses. The punch that should be present In a colored show, alas, is Disinfected with magnolia And dripping with molasses. In other words, We're shown to you Through Stephen Foster's glasses.
Although Ellington had been discussing plans for a socially themed work with Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, among others, since at least 1936, the specific impetus for Jump for Joy came as a result of more or less spontaneous discussions that took place amid after-hours jam sessions held in Culver City at the home of the progressive screenwriter Sid Kuller. Kuller's house parties attracted a like-minded cohort of affluent actors and writers, and the host wasted little time in raising funds from a group that included Lana Turner, Harpo and Groucho Marx, John Garfield, Paul Webster, Bonita Granville, and Tony Martin. Liberal members of the "Hollywood colony" contributed $20,000 for the production, providing nearly half of its initial budget, and the cast of peripheral players associated with the project included the Popular Front icons Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Mickey Rooney.
Beyond their financial contributions, progressive Hollywood personnel participated in an unusually collective creative process. While Ellington composed nearly all the music, the production involved a floating group of more than a dozen writers, leading Herb Jeffries to complain that the show had "too many chefs." The ultimate result was more like a semi-improvised jazz performance than a standard musical. As Ellington noted, the show "was never the same, because every night after the final curtain we had a meeting. ... All fifteen writers would be present whenever possible, and we would discuss, debate and make decisions as to what should come out of the show the next night."
What ultimately emerged offered "a new mood in the theater." This new mood targeted multiple audiences, including black Angelenos, Hollywood progressives and their employers, and the theatergoing public at large. The political core of the project, however, remained African American, with the white writer Sid Kuller describing the overall point of view as "black people looking at whites." Something of the sensibility, as well as the import, of Ellington's musical is captured by reviews published in the local black press. In a joint review of competing "Negro" theatrical productions playing in Los Angeles during the summer of 1941, Almena Davis compared Jump for Joy to the work of Frederick Douglass and linked Cabin in the Sky with the political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. Moreover, in addition to establishing a rare link between Hollywood and Central Avenue, Jump for Joy marked a public extension of an emerging vocabulary of urban cool unfamiliar to most whites in Los Angeles. In a move that recalled Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary (1936) and anticipated Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (1944), attendees received a glossary of terms intended to help them make sense of the hipster argot used in the musical. This allowed the uninitiated to follow performers who bragged about "snapping their caps" while draped in "vines" and "ice." Although Ellington viewed his principal task as demonstrating that dignity and entertainment were not mutually exclusive, his inclusion of a jive dictionary constituted a key rhetorical strategy aimed at broadening the appeal of a working-class black vernacular among consumers of mass culture. This process of translation-explicitly interracial and cross-class-reflected the exigencies of cultural politics in Los Angeles on the eve of the Second World War. At the very least, a glossary was a necessary addition to a musical program that attracted "the most celebrated Hollywoodians, middleclass ofays, the sweet-and-low, scuffling-type Negroes, and dicty Negroes as well."
As Ellington's own description suggests, Jump for Joy sought a wide audience for its ambitious creative agenda. Throughout the course of his career, the regal race man described the production as his primary "political" work, once famously telling a group of black students accusing him of quiescence in the face of growing civil-rights activity that he had "made his statement" midway through 1941. As a militant, interracial, collective project connecting racial justice, black pride, and, however tangentially, the political left, Jump for Joy seems a signature example of the progressive inroads of the Popular Front period. As Michael Denning describes, Ellington spent portions of the summer and fall of 1941 lending his talents to a variety of causes, appearing at a fundraiser for American veterans of the Spanish Civil War, allowing his name to appear on statements issued by the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and performing selections from the musical on an NBC radio "Salute to Labor" broadcast. These forays attracted government notice, as well. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informers reported that Ellington's name had appeared among the sponsors of a benefit dinner held under the auspices of the American Committee to Save Refugees, the Exiled Writers' Committee, and the United American-Spanish Aid Committee.
Such connections notwithstanding, Jump for Joy fits only so well into the typologies of the Popular Front, and a related, though distinct, framing may more accurately capture the meaning the musical held within the cultural politics of wartime Los Angeles. Premised on full creative control over the image and sound of black life, culture, and history, Jump for Joy offered less a celebration of the "laboring of American culture" than a cross-class, though popularly rooted, analysis of the ambiguous place of African Americans within an unstable American polity and against an openly dismissive culture industry. The idea that the musical fit within a political conversation more or less internal to African Americans was noted by journalists at the time, for the composer himself said as much. In remarks before an audience at a local Methodist church, Ellington gave his own views regarding the intersection of black culture, black particularity, and American life and history. Ellington balanced his support for Langston Hughes's call for a "democratic recognition of the Negro on the basis of the Negro's contribution" with his own observation that black America constituted something distinct that, while integral, existed apart. Terming this condition "dissonance as a way of life," he cast black Americans as simultaneously central to and indissolubly distinct from the mainstream of American life.
While Ellington had been asked to take as his subject Langston Hughes's poem "I, Too, Sing America," the composer's commentary took gentle issue with what he saw as the limitations of discussions that linked the struggle for racial justice to the recognition of African American contributions to the United States. "In the poem," Ellington remarked, "Mr. Hughes argues the case for democratic recognition of the Negro on the basis of the Negro's contribution to America.... One hears that argument repeated frequently in the Race press, from the pulpit and rostrum." Citing a litany of commonly cited heroes, valiant military participation, and ceaseless loyalty, Ellington added that, while "this is all well and good ... I believe it to be only half the story. We are more than a few isolated instances of courage, valor and achievement." Ellington's comments amounted to more than an effort to place African Americans at the center of American life and culture. They suggested a shift away from a politics of both uplift and persuasion, opening a path toward a framework that might simultaneously capture pride in black particularity and demand inclusion in American liberal democracy.
The dialectical vision of black life and culture as an autonomous set of practices in, but not of, the broader United States is a recurring theme of the present volume. Between 1941 and 1945, it led to a push for equal access on the representational terrain of the cultural field. Demonstrating what Harold Cruse would subsequently term "cultural democracy," this practice linked the contest over the image of African Americans with a struggle over the terms of employment within a culture industry that formed a key segment of America's domestic and export economy. In a manner distinct, though not wholly divorced, from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, Cruse predicated his prioritization of struggle within the superstructure on the recognition that the politics of culture reflected a strategic necessity in the context of bourgeois democracy and, most important, corresponded to the concerns, views, and demands of the masses of black people. As a practice that sought to transcend the political binaries of accommodation and protest, cultural democracy suggested a vision of pluralism that allowed creative and social autonomy as well as political and economic federation with the dominant society. The framework of cultural democracy incorporated a variety of strategies, concerns, and forces, including "race" activists of varied persuasions, liberals, the radical left, and even segments of the American state. It thus had the character of a "popular front," but one that transcended the concerns of the interracial prewar left and the boundaries of postwar liberalism.
During the Second World War, Los Angeles became a key site for the articulation of a new African American cultural politics as activists and artists sought to use the unsettled landscape of life during wartime as a means for wringing rhetorical and material concessions from American society. This struggle over representation and access constituted, in essence, one inaugural element of a burgeoning struggle for self-determination that went well beyond the simple framework of "civil rights." At the center of self-determination lay self-definition, and cultural activists devoted significant attention to critiquing how African Americans appeared on stage and screen, as well as to seeking broader entry into all facets of motion-picture production. Achieving the desegregation of the culture industry-a task still incomplete at war's end-demanded new associations of artists, activists, and entertainers who recognized the strategic importance of culture as an autonomous realm of political activity. At the same time, challenging Hollywood created rifts among black entertainers, pitting those with longstanding relationships inside the motion-picture industry against those actors and activists on the outside. The cultural front thus generated both unity and struggle as it developed.
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