“I’d rather play a maid than be one.”
Man, no research for this column has made me quite so angry as reading how Hattie McDaniel was treated. In life as well as in death; she wanted to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery (now Hollywood Forever Cemetery), but owner Jules Roth insisted on segregating the dead and wouldn’t allow it. So she’s in what is now the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, LA’s first integrated cemetery. It took until 1999 for Hollywood Forever’s new owner, Tyler Cassidy, to offer to let her in.
Hattie was the child of freed slaves; her father fought in the Civil War. She was a singer and songwriter. She was successful on the radio, possibly the first black person to sing on the radio, though even while on a successful program, her salary was so low that she took work as a maid to get by. Wikipedia says she appeared in over three hundred films; IMDb credits her in 87—more than a few uncredited. And, yes, she played an awful lot of maids.
But let’s be real, here. Even today, what roles are there for a plus-size black woman? At least she got to play maids. She was large, and she was dark-skinned, and she had a forceful speaking voice. So, yeah, she’s telling Scarlett what to do a lot. What would she be doing today? The NAACP apparently wanted her to take more Lena Horne roles, but who was offering them to her? Don’t get me wrong; I love Lena Horne. But she was more than twenty years younger, considerably thinner, considerably lighter-skinned. And more conventionally white features, meaning she was considered more beautiful. Hattie McDaniel wasn’t going to get those roles, and she was clear—she said she’d rather play a maid for $700 a week than be one for $7 a week.
I admire her a lot. She and other residents of the Sugar Hill neighbourhood of Los Angeles sued to keep their homes when their area was declared “restricted.” She may have deliberately stayed out of politics, though I suspect her refusal to distribute Richard Nixon placards as requested to by Hedda Hopper may not have been just about not wanting to be political! She worked within the segregated system during World War II to provide entertainment to black troops. She raised funds for the Red Cross. She was known for loaning money to essentially anyone who asked, and she opened her home to struggling black performers coming to Hollywood. And all this within a system that didn’t always credit her for her work, didn’t pay her as well as her costars, barely allowed her to attend the Academy Awards.
No, really—she was at a segregated table for two against a wall, alone with her escort and her agent. (Who was white, another complicated issue.) The ceremony that year was at the Cocoanut Grove restaurant at Hollywood’s Ambassador Hotel (the hotel where Robert Kennedy was killed, yes). Which, you guessed it, was segregated. She was allowed in as a special favour to the Academy. When she won, she was not only the first black person to win an Oscar, she beat her own white costar—and anyone who’s done the research can tell you that the usual answer when there are multiple nominations in a category from a single film is that none will win. And she was the first black person to attend the ceremony as a guest, not a servant.
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