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Documentary celebrates amazing life of first black actress to win an Academy Award

Sunday, August 05, 2001

By Monica L. Haynes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

She was a minister's daughter, a veteran of the vaudeville stage and a film actress. She was never anybody's mammy. But it was the role of the capable, head-scarf-wearing servant in "Gone With the Wind" that brought Hattie McDaniel notoriety and the distinction of being the first black performer to win an Academy Award.

The role of Mammy was the pinnacle of McDaniel's career, but there was more to her life than that famous character. She was married four times, wanted children desperately but never had any, and became a civil-rights activist in the 1940s.

Giving McDaniel her due as an actress and as a human being was the impetus for American Movie Classics' documen-tary "Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel," which will air at 10 p.m. Tuesday. Whoopi Goldberg, only the second black actress to win an Oscar, narrates the one-hour film.

Jessica Falcon, executive producer of documentary programming for AMC, said McDaniel fits perfectly into the kind of documentaries the cable network wants to do.

	TV PREVIEW "Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel" When: 10 p.m. Tuesday on AMC. Narrator: Whoopi Goldberg.

"I think very few people know about the life of the actress who played that ['Gone With the Wind'] role, who's essentially become an icon," Falcon said. "There's a lot of stuff about Hollywood all over the dial, and what we're trying to do is give a deeper experience."

Emmy-winning documentarian Madison D. Lacy had the task of bringing together the dimensions of McDaniel's life.

"The first thing I realized was that there was a lot more to this story than was in the popular ether," Lacy said. "Hattie was intelligent, a perfect lady. She knew who she was as a character."

McDaniel's career began on the vaudeville stage. The youngest child of an ex-slave turned Baptist minister, she traveled and performed with her siblings. When vaudeville died, the McDaniel family moved to Hollywood. McDaniel was determined to break into the movies, but Hollywood had little use for African-American actresses whether they were movie-star slim or rotund like her.

For a while -- and somewhat ironically -- the stage veteran actually worked as a maid to make ends meet.

Eventually she got a break and landed a role in the 1932 film "Hypnotized." From then on, McDaniel appeared in a succession of films in which her character was listed as "maid" in the credits. Sometimes those characters had first names such as Hannah, Hilda, Ambrosia, Beulah, Jenny, Rosetta or Ella. But they were still maids.

In "Beyond Tara," Lacy strings together snippets of McDaniel's roles from 40 films to show how she built her career. "She'd have a walk-on and walk-off part, then she had lines. As the lines built, she had a character," Lacy said.

While the NAACP chided black actors and actresses for portraying maids, butlers and buffoons, McDaniel didn't feel her roles were demeaning to black people. In fact, she turned down roles she felt were stereotypical.

"They knew and understood what the social situation was of their time," Lacy said about the black actors of that period. "They knew improvement and progress was incremental, and they felt they were part of that process."

McDaniel tried to imbue her characters with dignity and the kind of common sense the heroes or heroines seemed to lack.

In no film was that more evident than "Gone With the Wind," in which Mammy was a major character.

McDaniel had done 30 or so films before landing the role that made her a star and an integral part of a cinematic classic. She'd already worked with Clark Gable in the 1937 film "Saratoga" and had played a mammy-like character, Queenie, in the 1936 version of "Show Boat." Singer Bing Crosby saw her in the latter and recommended her to producer David O. Selznick for his Civil War epic, as did Gable.

"I wanted to turn this stock role into a living, breathing character," McDaniel said of her role in "Gone With the Wind." The actress refused to use the word "nigger" in the film; it was written out of the script.

She did not see Mammy as the usual comic relief but as a complex, dramatic character.

Black leaders and organizations such as the NAACP viewed the role not as an acting triumph but as one more stereotypical character in a film that was filled with negative portrayals of black people. The NAACP organized protests of the film. McDaniel was caught in the crossfire, feeling at times that she was being attacked personally.

In response to the NAACP's criticism, McDaniel replied, "I'd rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be one for $7."

Adding more insult was the fact none of the movie's black actors were invited to the premiere in a then-segregated Atlanta. Trying to make things easier for the studio, McDaniel informed Selznick she would not be available for any of the premiere festivities.

McDaniel was the first black person ever nominated for an Oscar. When she attended the ceremony in 1940 and won the statue, she accomplished two more firsts. Even as she accepted the award and gave a speech written by the studio, there were demonstrators outside. The fact McDaniel was one of the few black actors to get steady work and decent pay did not assuage them.

McDaniel had found a niche playing domestics. Her long-term contract and the times did not allow her to play anything else. MGM producers even told her not to lose weight or she could lose her contract.

Despite the obvious frustration, McDaniel carved out a life for herself. In 1942, she purchased a 15-room mansion in an area of Los Angeles called "Sugar Top," named for the upper-middle-class area of Harlem. There, her neighbors included other black entertainers such as Louise Beavers and Ethel Waters.

In 1945, as parts began to dry up, McDaniel was thrust back into the spotlight when a group of white property owners tried to remove her and other black residents from their homes based on restrictive covenants. These agreements prohibited homeowners in certain neighborhoods from selling their homes to black people. McDaniel battled all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down the covenants, putting an end to legal housing discrimination in Los Angeles.

The times also were changing in the film industry. After World War II, there was even more pressure on studios to open up the roles available to black actors and actresses. MGM signed the breathtaking Lena Horne, who became the first black actress to be promoted as a beautiful, glamorous star. Horne's contract even stipulated that she not play any maid roles.

But McDaniel was not bitter about the difference in how she and Horne were treated. The two were friends, Lacy said. When Horne could not get a hotel room in L.A., she stayed with McDaniel.

As her movie career waned, McDaniel turned to radio, landing the title role in "The Beulah Show." It was a hit, earning McDaniel $2,000 a week. The show aired on radio from 1947 to 1950, when it made the transition to television. But after filming only one episode, McDaniel learned she had breast cancer. By the spring of 1952, she was too ill to work and was replaced.

She died in October of that year. In death, McDaniel also made history: She was the first black person interred at Rosedale Cemetery after having been denied burial at her first choice, Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But in 1999, McDaniel was honored with a monument in the same cemetery that had rejected her 47 years before.

"She ended her life doing what she wanted to do," Falcon said. "She found a way to have a lot of dignity playing these roles as maids."