Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood

Stealing the Show

THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

The George Gund Foundation has endowed this imprint to advance understanding of the history, culture, and current issues of African Americans.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.

Stealing the Show

African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood

Miriam J. Petty

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Petty, Miriam J., author.

    Stealing the show : African American performers and audiences in 1930s Hollywood / Miriam J. Petty.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27975-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-27977-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96414-3 (ebook)

    1. African American motion picture actors and actresses—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century.    2. African Americans in motion pictures.    I. Title.

PN1995.9.N4P45    2016

    791.43’652996073—dc232015032357

Manufactured in the United States of America

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

For Naomi E. Jackson Petty, my Mama, the Queen who loved me so

For Esther Merle Jackson, the Brave Forerunner

For Rudolph P. Byrd, the Rough Diamond Cutter

For Jim Clark, the Angel who said grow, grow

For Clement A. Price, the Great Heart of the Brick City

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Stealing the Show . . . or the Shoat?

1. Hattie McDaniel: Landmark of an Era

2. Bill Robinson and Black Children’s Spectatorship: Every Kid in Colored America Is His Pal

3. Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington: Delilah, Peola, and the Perfect Double Act

4. Lincoln Perry’s Problematic Stardom: Stepin Fetchit Steals the Shoat

Conclusion: Time Now to Stop, Actors

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Greek-revival style columns at Tara, in Gone with the Wind

2. Greek-revival style columns in a concept painting of Twelve Oaks Plantation, in Gone with the Wind

3. Pseudo-monumental structure, Das Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich, circa 1937

4. Pseudo-monumental structure, the Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, circa 1937

5. Loews’s Grand Theatre in Atlanta, adorned with columns for the premiere of Gone with the Wind

6. Hattie McDaniel as Mammy

7. Hattie McDaniel and Olivia de Havilland in the staircase scene

8. Celebrated soprano Marian Anderson performing at the Lincoln Monument, 1939

9. Bill Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple

10. Bill Bojangles Robinson with portable staircase

11. Shirley Temple and Spencer Tracy cuddling

12. Bill Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple share a dance at arm’s length

13. Bill Bojangles Robinson demonstrating his famous backwards-running prowess

14. The Cabin Kids cutting up in Hooray for Love

15. Bill Bojangles Robinson and up-and-coming tap dancer Jeni LeGon in Hooray for Love

16. Bill Bojangles Robinson and stride jazz pianist Fats Waller trade verses

17. Bill Bojangles Robinson in affectionate, teacherly mode with African American children in Stormy Weather

18. Fredi Washington as a tragic light-skinned chorus girl

19. Fredi Washington, her face darkened with pancake makeup for her role as Undine

20. Pancake queen Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), flush with success, in Imitation of Life

21. Peola (Fredi Washington) and her mother Delilah (Louise Beavers) in Imitation of Life

22. Elmer Simms Campbell’s Thelma on the cover of the National Urban League’s Opportunity

23. Nina Mae McKinney on the cover of the NAACP’s The Crisis

24. Fredi Washington on the cover of the National Urban League’s Opportunity

25. Advertisement from the Kansas City Call for screenings of Imitation of Life

26. Advertisement from the Philadelphia Tribune for screenings of Imitation of Life

27. Advertisement for Jarodene Beauty and Bleaching set from the Pittsburgh Courier

28. Advertisement for Elsner’s Pearl Cream skin lightening lotion from the Topeka Plain Dealer

29. Stepin Fetchit in his signature slumping pose

30. Bert Williams’s facially expressive pantomiming

31. Judge Priest (Will Rogers) and Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit) amble off fishing in a scene from Judge Priest

32. Willie Best simulates Stepin Fetchit’s signature pose

33. Stepin Fetchit pretender Nick O Demus Stewart as Lightnin’

34. An animated replica of Stepin Fetchit from Mother Goose Goes Hollywood

35. An animated version of Stepin Fetchit from The Autograph Hound

Acknowledgments

INSTITUTIONAL THANKS

Portions of this book were presented at the Chicago Film Seminar, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies national conference, the Princeton University Society of Fellows’ colloquium series, the Northwestern University Performance Studies Institute, the DuSable Museum of African American History, and the American Studies Association national conference.

This book could not have been completed without the support I received as a postdoctoral fellow with the Princeton Society of Fellows, in residence with Princeton’s Department of English and Center for African American Studies.

This book was also completed with the support of Kerry Ann Rocquemore and the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity’s faculty bootcamp program.

I wish to thank the Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., the publisher of the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for the use of the image of Nina Mae McKinney first published in the March 1930 issue of The Crisis.

I wish to thank the Defender, for the use of the image of Bill Bojangles Robinson first published in the October 15, 1927 issue of the Chicago Defender.

Thanks are due to the Northwestern University Research Grants Committee for their generous grant providing subvention funds for this book.

Many librarians, collectors and archivists helped to make this book possible. I wish to extend my thanks to:

Barbara Hall, at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Camille Billops and James Hatch, at the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York City

Julie Graham and Lauren Buisson, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Arts Special Collections

Mark Quigley, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Archive Research and Study Center

Ned Comstock, at the University of Southern California, Cinema Special Collections

Sandra Lee, at the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California,

Renea Henry, at the Amistad Collection

The Connecticut Historical Society

Karen Nangle and Anne Marie Menta, at Yale University’s Beinecke Library

Steve Wilson and Albert Palacios, at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center’s (the David O. Selznick Collection)

The Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma

The Eastman House in Rochester, New York

SPECIAL THANKS

I used to wonder why book acknowledgment pages were so long; now I know better. The village that builds a scholar from scratch, creates context and history, and actively offers love, encouragement, tough talk, more love, reading, writing on site-ing, friendship, consumption of strong drink, intellectual honesty, and hope in the long road to build a book is indispensible; their essentiality to this project cannot be underestimated. I am certain that I’ve lost some names along the way here, and for any glaring omissions, I do sincerely beg pardon.

I am a proud product of the Chicago public school system; my mother, Naomi E. Jackson Petty, was a public school teacher for over thirty years herself. So I would be less than honorable if I did not thank and acknowledge my teachers at Beulah Shoesmith Grammar School, especially Ms. Dolores Snyder, Ms. Joanna (Papageorgiou) Lalos, Ms. Hunter, Ms. Mican, and Ms. Haynes; my teachers at Louis Wirth Experimental Middle School, especially Mr. Freeman Willis, Ms. Selby, Ms. Webster, Mr. James Mooney, and Mr. James Johnson; and my teachers at Kenwood Academy High School, especially Ms. Bonnie Tarta.

As an undergraduate at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, I was taught by a faculty of dedicated and generous teachers, whose model I still hold up before myself in the classroom. My thanks go out to Harry M. Williams, Diethelm Prowe, Mary Moore Easter, Jewelnel Davis, Cherif Keita, Kofi Owusu, John Ramsay, and Richard Crouter. And I am also thankful to my Carleton friends, who formed my first intentional intellectual circles, in the Gold Room, in Sayles-Hill, on the Bald Spot, in We Speak, at the Rueb, in Faribault, and wherever else we gathered to argue, agree, protest, pray, teach, cry, learn, laugh, and take care of each other: Maurice Lee, Audra Watson, Julia Baker, Chris Navia, Demetrius Bagley, Darwin Conner, Karen Thompson, Stephen Taylor, Stace Burnside, Lisa Bass, Cyrus Farmer, Truscee Dorham, Anjula Prasad, Ben Gill, Dara Moskowitz, Pam Rahmings, Lucy Vilankulu, Johanna Hinman, Margaret Henry, Angelina Carrillo, Alex Bannerman, Michael Bazzett, Read Winkelman, Paul Gore, Eliot Wajskol, Pat Carriere, Nate Turner, John Podezwa, David A. Johnson, Lance McCready, Beverly Boxhill, Cheryl Johnson, and Kristene Maxie.

Stealing the Show began as a dissertation written during my graduate school years at Emory University’s interdisciplinary Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. I am fully indebted to the late Rudolph P. Byrd, whose mentorship, friendship, and love changed my path in life indelibly. My warmest and most especial thanks are due to the living members of my doctoral committee, Matthew Bernstein, Mark A. Sanders, and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, for the many hours of help and encouragement that they gave me during my years at Emory. I also had a particularly amazing set of colleagues and friends at Emory, who were crucial to my intellectual growth, and to the maintenance of my sanity: Calinda N. Lee, Mimi Kirk, Michael Antonucci, Trystan Cotton, Rhea Combs, Kimberly Springer, Frances Wood, Lynell Thomas, Marsha Ford, Tony the ladies’ man de Velasco, Donna Troka, Eddie Gamarra, Lina Buffington, John Willis, Yanique Hume, Aldo Valmon-Clark, Stuart Patterson, and Petrina Dacres. At Emory I was also fortunate enough to have a number of professors and administrators who supported and mentored me from outside my committee and my department, and who deserve my gratitude: Randall Burkett, Leroy Davis, Leslie Harris, Nathan McCall, Paula Gomes, Charlie Shepherdson, Chris Levenduski, Robert Paul, Dana White, Karen Fulton, and Virginia Shadron.

In my years in New Jersey, as a postdoc at Princeton University, and as a postdoc and later a member of the faculty of Rutgers University-Newark, I had the benefit of extensive support from a vibrant community of colleagues. First and foremost among them is the late Clement A. Price, whose scholarship, activism, kindness, and humanity were an incredible model for me as a newly minted PhD. In New Jersey, I was also lucky enough to meet and be befriended by the brilliant and audacious Noliwe Rooks and Bill Gaskins, eternal and loving friends whose support, generosity, and joyful fellowship has never wavered. Heartfelt thanks are also due to my colleagues at Rutgers-Newark, especially Sherri-Ann Butterfield, Ian Watson, Aimee Meredith Cox, Nick Kline, Tim Raphael, Ruth Feldstein, and Frances Bartkowski.

My time as a postdoc in the dynamic community of the Princeton Society of Fellows was especially fruitful for my work on Stealing the Show. From that time I owe a real debt to the Society of Fellows’ brilliant, patient, and clear-sighted executive director, Mary Harper, as well as to my colleagues Mendi Obadike, Gayle Salamon, Margot Canaday, Amin Ghaziani, Eduardo Canedo, Graham Jones, Ricardo Montez, Andrew Quintman, Jennifer Rubenstein, and Sarah Ross. Major thanks are due to my Princeton colleague and fellow 1930s film scholar Judith Weisenfeld, for her camaraderie and support, and to the phenomenal Valerie Smith, for her consistent encouragement, mentorship, and enthusiasm. It was also nothing short of a blessing to meet the late Jim Clark at Princeton; his joy, shining good spirit, and generosity lifted me, as they did so many others.

At Princeton, I worked up significant portions of this book with the wonderful Black women’s writing group Fire and Wine; besides Noliwe Rooks and Mendi Obadike, this group’s members Amada Sandoval and MR Daniel were some of my best and most honest critics, with whom I shared laughter and tears.

My many visits to California for the use of archives included kind hosting, especially by my San Pedro cousins, John and Marjar Childs, and their beautiful daughter, Ava. I owe them many times over for their hospitality and good humor. And I thank my extended Adams/Orton/Childs family-in-love for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and even for just remembering to ask Is it done yet? Thank you Karen Adams, Gayle McKeown, Tracie McKeown, Kim Abercrombia, Brandon Daniel, John Childs, Michael Childs, and Brian Childs.

At Northwestern University, I have benefited from the gracious support of the School of Communication, my home department of Radio/Television/Film, and the program in Screen Cultures. I have also been befriended by a group of scholars and colleagues whose feedback, criticisms, and encouragement were vital to the completion of Stealing the Show. I owe great thanks to mentors and friends Hamid Naficy, Mimi White, Jacob Smith, Susie Phillips, E. Patrick Johnson, Thomas Bradshaw, Jasmine Cobb, and C. Riley Snorton. Found friend Nick Davis’s wise counsel and innately gentle and incisive readings of nearly the entire manuscript has been invaluable; his contribution to this book cannot be overstated. (Mary J. Blige would be proud.) Long-lost brother, road dog and fellow coffeehouse rat Joshua Chambers-Letson’s generous sharing of his sharp mind, infectious wit, and truth-telling made the days spent working through Stealing the Show far more joyous and profound.

Thanks are also due to Northwestern Screen Cultures alumnae Jocelyn Szepaniac-Gillece, who was my wonderful RA through much of the completion of this manuscript, and Maureen Ryan who did such careful and methodical work on the photographic permissions for Stealing the Show.

There are also the friends and colleagues who helped make Stealing the Show possible, even as they defy straightforward categorization and location. I thank Jacqueline Stewart for being a model scholar, and a friend and true ally no matter where she is; her well-grounded suggestions and criticisms are always incredibly prescient and timely. I thank Paula Massood for her amazing, eleventh-hour coaching as this manuscript took what was to be its final shape(s). My profound thanks also go to such dear and cherished friends as Jamie Rosman, Daniel O. Black, Karen Bowdre, Terri Francis, Marcia Sinclair, Angela Jackson, Bambi Haggins, Sabrina Miller, Theri Pickens, Beretta Smith-Shomade, Carina Ray, Camille Billops, James Hatch, Raena Osizwe Harwell, Christine Acham, Anna Everett, Racquel Gates, and Kristen Warner. And thanks of every kind go to Mary Francis, my patient, able, and steadfast editor at the University of California Press, not to mention the Press staff who put all of this book’s disparate pieces together: the kind and patient Kate Hoff man and Zuha Khan, and freelance copyeditor Caroline Knapp.

Finally, my gratitude is most unbounded for my family: thank you to my late mother, Naomi Elizabeth Jackson Petty, for a lifetime of music and worrying, for your bottomless love of teaching, for your love and pride in your children.

Thank you to my father, Joe Louis Petty, for coming to my talks, for answering my questions about going to the movies as a child, and for being a steady, kind, and openhearted presence in my life, all my life.

Thank you to my beautiful and brilliant big sisters, Jill and Audrey Petty, for being unparalleled friends, models, therapists, editors, and life coaches. Thanks too, to my sweet brothers-in-love, Evan Lyan and Maurice Rabb, for their support of my support system. To my niece, Ella Esther, and my nephew, Malcolm Rowland: I love you both, and no, this book is not going to make us rich.

And thanks, thanks, thanks to my husband, Steven Michael Azikiwe Adams: with your graceful, gracious, contemplative, and patient self, your humor and your wisdom, you have kept me going all this time. Thank you for knowing when a play ain’t being played right.

For my beautiful, joyful, wonderful son, Saul Wole Petty Adams—we prayed for you and you came home to us. This is for you, with love.

Introduction

Stealing the Show . . . or the Shoat?

Indeed, nothing more effectively burlesqued the entire notion of ownership in human beings than the incessantly told story of the slave who was caught killing and eating one of his master’s pigs, and who mockingly rationalized his act by arguing that since both the animal and the slave were the master’s possessions nothing was lost: Yes, suh, Massah, you got less pig now but you sho’ got more nigger.¹

—Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom

In the second of his autobiographical slave narratives, My Bondage and My Freedom, American statesman Frederick Douglass describes his various white owners and handlers, over the twenty years of his life in which he was enslaved. In Thomas Auld, a ship’s captain who owned Douglass for nearly a decade, the stinginess that the man evinced with respect to keeping his slaves fed was only one aspect of his cruelty. Desperate to keep himself nourished, Douglass and the three other slaves owned by Auld were compelled either to beg, or to steal, and we did both. He recalls:

I frankly confess, that while I hated everything like stealing, as such, I nevertheless did not hesitate to take food, when I was hungry, wherever I could find it . . . . this practice . . . was, in my case, the result of a clear apprehension of the claims of morality . . . . Considering that my labor and person were the property of Master Thomas, and that I was by him deprived of the necessaries of life—necessaries obtained by my own labor—it was easy to deduce the right to supply myself with what was my own . . . . In the case of my master, it was only a question of removal—the taking of his meat out of one tub, and putting it into another; the ownership of the meat was not affected by the transaction. At first, he owned it in the tub, and last, he owned it in me.²

Douglass’s description mirrors the burlesque joke of the epigraph above. And his three autobiographies, like so many other narratives and firsthand accounts of slavery from the point of view of African Americans, support the point that historian Lawrence Levine makes about slave humor, that in effect it stripped the actors bare revealing the ludicrousness of the white man’s puffery and the black man’s situation. It was on this plane of absurdity that much of Afro-American humor took place.³ The thefts that Levine and Douglass describe in these passages are, on one level, committed in secret as a matter of survival against the hardships of slavery. Yet they are also enacted as protest that nearly invites detection, to be registered and acknowledged by its target, the slaveholder who enforces and benefits from the slave system, while keeping his or her slaves in a state of poverty and want. Levine’s reference to the actors in this scenario is fortuitous for my purposes; all the better to bridge these instances of literal theft with a collection of dramatic and cinematic analogues that are the preoccupation of Stealing the Show.

The seemingly offhand phrase stealing the show is often used to describe and praise acts of performance that steal our attention, managing to detract from the ostensible center of attention of a film, scene, or sequence. Through these acts, skilled performers pull a viewer’s eye and interest away, sometimes even into the margins. The phrase may be used in a distinctly American spirit of celebrating the underdog, the scrappy second-string player who works harder for recognition than anyone guaranteed the spotlight. But considering stealing the show in terms of its historical utility and implications for African American performers in the context of early Hollywood also provides an opportunity to reconsider specific Black histories and experiences. Of course the central notion of theft is overdetermined in relationship to Black bodies in the United States, and to those same bodies on cinema screens in particular, in images dating back to some of the earliest representations of Blacks in motion pictures.⁴ The longstanding stereotypical assumption of Black illicitness complicates the meaning of stealing the show in this way. But the phrase—as informed by Douglass, Levine, and others, to indicate theft as an act of survival and protest—also invokes the skewed power relations between African American performers and Hollywood’s essentially white major studios during the 1930s. The thirties were an era of normative Jim Crow segregation throughout America, a decade that was only beginning to see any dwindling in the number of routine lynchings, rapes, and other forms of racist terrorism against African Americans that became prevalent and even routine after the end of the Civil War. What is more, the thirties also found America less than a century removed from the end of formal and legal slavery, and somewhat enamored of an idealized slave-owning past as manifest in the popularity of the plantation setting in period films like Dixiana (RKO, 1930), Carolina (Fox Film Corporation, 1934), The Littlest Rebel (Twentieth Century Fox, 1935), The Gorgeous Hussy (MGM, 1936), Jezebel (Warner Bros, 1938), and Gone with the Wind (Selznick International/ MGM, 1939). Perhaps the staging and restaging of America’s antebellum tableaux in such media texts best confirms just how relevant the charged context of slavery is for an analysis of the personae of the era’s Black film performers. The past, after all, is prologue.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved provides an eloquently customized version of the tale of slaves stealing food from their masters. Morrison’s interpretation highlights the theft’s significance both as a means of survival and as a critical commentary upon the inhuman practice of buying, selling, and owning other human beings. She imagines a standoff between African American slave Sixo and his white master, Schoolteacher, who has discovered Sixo in the slave quarters in possession of a cooked and partially eaten young suckling pig, or a shoat. Schoolteacher immediately presses Sixo for an explanation, demanding,

Did you steal that shoat? . . . . Schoolteacher was quiet but firm . . . . You stole that shoat, didn’t you?

No. Sir, said Sixo, but he had the decency to keep his eyes on the meat.

You telling me you didn’t steal it, and I’m looking right at you?

No, sir. I didn’t steal it.

Schoolteacher smiled. Did you kill it?

Yes, sir. I killed it.

Did you butcher it?

Yes, sir.

Did you cook it?

Yes, sir.

Well, then. Did you eat it?

Yes, sir. I sure did.

And you telling me that’s not stealing?

No, sir. It ain’t.

What is it then?

Improving your property, sir.⁵

Following this exchange, Morrison notes, clever, but Schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.⁶ This bleak postscript disrupts the tale’s humor, and displaces the triumphal slave hero/trickster of the African American folkloric cosmology, revealing his vulnerability to the harsh realities of slavery itself. Morrison’s historically accurate use of the archaic term shoat in her retelling of the fable is serendipitous, as its convenient sonic proximity to the word show allows for a productive wordplay. The historical and cultural implications of stealing the shoat, introduced here, significantly illuminate this text’s approach to African American film performers and their attempts at stealing the show in 1930s Hollywood. The comparison to slavery is meaningful, given the predominance of the slave and servant roles allotted to Black actors and actresses, as well as their repetitive, menial, marginal, and essential presences in Hollywood films.

Abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, begins the chapter detailing Privations of the Slaves with a section simply entitled Food. Weld explains that we begin with the food of the slaves, because if they are ill treated in this respect . . . they will be ill treated in other respects, and generally in a greater degree.⁷ One particularly damning allegation that Weld makes is that "the slaves are allowed, in general, no meat . . . [and even] in the [two] slave states which regulate the slaves’ rations by law . . . the legal ration contains no meat. Like other critics of slavery, Weld connects the scanty food provisions allowed to slaves to any acts of theft that they commit against their masters, especially considering the demanding nature of their labor. Metaphorically speaking, one might rightfully allege that in the 1930s African American performers were only infrequently allowed any meat in terms of their appearances in Hollywood films. A speaking role with any significant screen time, or a character who could boast any depth or dimensionality, was an exceptional, phenomenal occurrence, one that happened just frequently enough to stoke the hopes of the very ambitious. Far more routine were the roles which required performers to follow some version of what Langston Hughes called the standard form of direction for Negro actors, which ran as follows: Upon opening the car door for one’s white employer in any film, the director would command: ‘Jump to ground . . . Remove cap . . . Open car door . . . Step back and bow . . . Come up smiling . . . Now bow again . . . Now straighten up and grin.’⁸ As a decade often dominated by cinematic representations of Blacks as menial and domestic workers, the 1930s nevertheless provided more opportunities for Black actors and actresses to be cast in distinct, visible roles than ever before.⁹ But given the nature of these roles, Black performers’ opportunities to steal anything more substantial were risky and few and far between. More to the point, individual attention grabbing performances in this context were ultimately constrained by the larger racialized structure of the American film industry itself. However successful such performances may have been in increasing a single actor’s visibility, or in engaging Black audiences in celebration or critique, they ultimately served primarily to improve the property" of the Hollywood studios for which these performers worked.

African American actors were continually confronted with the question of whether these acts of stealing the shoat could be significant to anyone beyond the indirectly enriched master and the temporarily sated slave. Their individual, limited access within Hollywood’s economy of power and resources created an emphasis upon the difference between artistry and survival, revealing it to be a narrow and uneasy divide. Their performances were generally confined to this liminal space, and exceeding it too far in either direction generally meant the end of a career. Thus, stealing the shoat acts as a kind of shadow figuration for stealing the show—it is always there, undermining the phrase’s celebratory connotations and reminding one of the specific social, political, cultural, and historical terms of Black cinematic performance. Even when African American players received mainstream kudos as picture stealers, such acclaim carried with it the implicit understanding that most possibilities in the cinema arts were wholly closed to them.

PICTURE STEALERS IN DEMAND

Show Stealing, Stardom, and Cinematic Performance

In the spring of 1935, the Los Angeles Times carried a puff piece about Hollywood casting practices entitled ‘Picture Stealers’ More in Demand Than Costly Stars. Times reporter John Scott detailed an extensive group of actors who appear in support of the stars and, through the excellence of their ‘type’ portrayals, often save pictures and frequently steal them.¹⁰ Scott profiled popular character actors like Berton Churchill and Una Merkel, explaining that in their portrayals of banker types, dignified tipplers, homewrecking females, et cetera, they could command good salaries, may only work a week on a picture, but are considered indispensable by casting directors.¹¹

The article closed with a short paragraph quoting Columbia casting director William Pearlberg, who identified African American comedian Lincoln Stepin Fetchit Perry as the Negro most in demand, adding that Pearlberg feared that at least three ebony-faced gentlemen will yell their heads off [in protest of Fetchit]. They are Slickem [Clarence Brown], Oscar Smith, and Henry Martin, the boot-black-actors at M-G-M, Paramount, and Columbia Studios, respectively.¹² Though Scott incorporates a section about frequently cast comedians and comediennes in the article, Fetchit’s nearly postscripted inclusion identifies him only as an in-demand Negro, which Scott clearly thought of as an equally uncomplicated type as a dignified tippler or homewrecking female. In terms of race, the hierarchy of stars versus scene stealers is all but meaningless given that the Negro most in demand is effectively one of the only Negroes in demand, as star or anything else. It is rendered even less significant when one considers that Fetchit’s biggest acting competition in his category, according to the reporter, are simply the Negroes closest to hand, a trio of shoeshine men who work the studio lots.

Still, though the article touts picture stealers as everyday paragons in terms of their relative merit as measured against costly stars, the writer implicitly reinforces the understanding that stars exist at the top of the Hollywood food chain. Stealing the Show complicates this schematic for African Americans in particular, arguing for the cultural significance of performers who would likely be considered character actors at most, and scene stealers at best. In the 1930s, a decade in which stardom was such a potent cultural and industrial force, many African American viewers took their stars as they found them, even when they were contained and marginalized in Hollywood offerings. Cotemporary Black critics like the NAACP’s Loren Miller railed against the African American press for pumping some Negro bit actor up to the dimensions of a star, decrying the practice as the abjectness of a beggar fawning over a penny tossed him by his lord.¹³ Yet as present-day scholar Arthur Knight asserts in his critical essay Star Dances, the counterargument, then as now, is that these bit actors are (or may become) stars in a different, Black universe.¹⁴ Stealing the Show’s subjects are largely performers who inhabit what Knight labels a problematic stardom: regularly cast and highly visible despite their usual narrative marginalization, significantly well known for a limited and stereotyped set of performances. Yet these performers were put to a surprisingly wide variety of ideological uses by Black moviegoers. Stealing the Show explores the ways in which 1930s Black performers and African American audiences expressed agency and negotiated ideas about their lives and identities through acts of performance and discourse that incorporated and exceeded the cinematic frame.

The Times’ reporter is correct insofar as Lincoln Perry, in the guise of his cinematic persona Stepin Fetchit, was a near-virtuoso scene stealer with an idiosyncratic presence and performance style that made it difficult to look at anyone else in the frame. Perry’s stylized performance of Stepin Fetchit was initially so mesmerizing as to provoke Fox Studios to put him under contract twice between 1929 and 1937. His slurred drawl, slumped posture, alternately open and collapsing facial expressions, clean-shaven head, and unsustainably lazy spirit, made him the apotheosis of the 1930s chief African American racial stereotype—as well as a blatant parody thereof, for those able and willing to see his performance as such.

In one of Perry’s earliest movie appearances, in the 1929 Fox Movie-tone film Salute, his performance as Stepin Fetchit is arresting enough that he even distracts the white actors with whom he shares his scenes. Directed by John Ford (who would work with Stepin Fetchit throughout the 1930s in popular Will Rogers movies), Salute is a softhearted story about sibling rivalry between two brothers, one enrolled as an army cadet at West Point, the other as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. As Stepin Fetchit, Perry is cast as Smoke Screen, the erstwhile valet of the younger, Navy-bound brother, Paul (William Janney). Family rivalry provides the device for the film’s attention to the Army-Navy football game, in which the brothers compete against one another.

Salute has a thin, slow plot, which gives Perry significant latitude to indulge himself as a performer. The role is one of the most blatant examples of his deployment of the lazy, incoherent Stepin Fetchit persona as a way to draw out his screen time. During the film’s fateful Army-Navy game, Smoke Screen is on the sidelines, languorously hurling an extemporized hex at the Army team, while the Navy coach (David Butler) and his assistants look on. He drawls: "Navy goat, the way you smell . . . beat that Army mule I know darn well. Oh hoo-doooo the Army! Hoodooo them all! Win this game for Massa Paul. (sings) Naaaaa—vy goat . . . an’ awayyyy we go . . . He also performs a sleepy, ersatz set of hoo-doo" gestures (e.g., picking up soil from the ground and listlessly flinging it at the football field as he shambles offscreen). Here as elsewhere, Perry’s performance is in direct tonal contrast with the straitlaced manner of most of the film’s white performers. He clearly unsettles many of them in a way that only creates more time, space, and attention for Stepin Fetchit. The men on the sidelines patiently gawk, unsure of when he will finish his obviously unscripted and equally unclear speech.

Even in a context where abject, stereotyped African American performance was the rule, Perry was exceptional. His over-the-top performance style is a testimony to the bizarre lengths to which a Black performer might expect to go in order to attract a white audience’s attention in the context of the 1930s. After flawlessly embodying the dominant stereotype of Blackness as lazy and idiotic, Perry added odd details (like the strange doggerel of his speech) that made his performance fully baroque. As he concludes his monologue in Salute, he leaves a somewhat stunned silence in his wake, as the white male actors who have been watching him attentively, chuckle, mystified. Being the center of such dubious attention was the paradoxical hallmark of African American cinematic performance in the classical Hollywood era.

Stealing the Show examines the impact of cinematic performance, extra-cinematic dynamics, and performer-audience discourse upon African American presences in Hollywood film. I also consider the decade of the 1930s itself, an era in which marginalized, problematic stars transformed Black audiences’ expectations of Hollywood films, acting as lightning rods for praise, critique, blame, identification, and interrogation. The 1930s saw these and other Black film performers cast for the first time in distinct, recognizable roles with screen credit. Black film performers’ newfound visibility allowed them to negotiate an unprecedented set of questions around the impact and significance of their own racialized performances. Bounded on one end by the coming of sound technology to the cinema, on the other by Hattie McDaniel’s 1940 Oscar win for her performance in Gone with the Wind (GWTW), and between those markers, characterized by a highly visible, well consolidated Hollywood star system that largely ignored Black performers and audiences altogether, the 1930s witnessed a subtle yet profound cultural shift in the relationships among African American performers, audiences, and Hollywood.

The images of Blacks in 1930s film were controlled and influenced by industrial factors, including the experiment with Black-cast sound films at the start of the sound era, the well-worn myth of the Southern box office among major studios, and the dominance