Chapter Twenty-One #2
Hattie McDaniel retrieved a letter from a rolltop desk and slipped a business card into Mazelle’s hand.
DARK DREAM PICTURES, it read. MASON JACKSON—PRESIDENT.
“I heard just yesterday from an old friend in Chicago who said he’s making race pictures now, and he has a script he wrote for me about a schoolteacher who gets in all kinds of funny jams. I’m so tied up with contracts, these scripts always pass me by, much as I wish I could.
My agent won’t show me scripts if they’re not from a studio.
But, girl, I think you’d be perfect for it!
You’re young, but I don’t know any actresses with a name who can deliver the comedy like he wants to.
” She lowered her voice as if her friend might overhear her across the miles.
“Especially who’d be willing to work for what he can pay. ”
Mazelle had felt her feet lifting from the floor as she looked at the business card, but the buoyant feeling vanished when she heard Mother’s voice in her head. “Will I make at least five dollars a day?” Mazelle heard herself blurt out.
Hattie McDaniel raised her eyebrows at her boldness.
“To be the star? Sure, you might get a hundred dollars for the whole picture.” It sounded like a small fortune now, but Mazelle had been making twice that per week working for Mr. Lorenzo.
“But, child, nobody does race pictures for the money. None of them have much money to speak of—not even Oscar Micheaux. I hear he won’t spend more now than he did when he first started before you were born.
But you can be the star, not just a face in the background. ”
“If you get paid,” Otis muttered. “Miss Hattie, can I tell her?”
Miss Hattie turned to look at him with a swatting motion. “Child, hush. I never should have told you anyhow.”
“Come on, Miss Hattie—let her dream about what she can do.”
“I’m gonna go check on my chicken,” Miss Hattie said, making her way toward the kitchen. Her house’s layout was eerily similar to Mazelle’s, the kitchen at the far rear of the house. “And I’ll bring you some sweet tea, Mazelle. Nobody knows how to brew tea in L.A.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Otis whispered to Mazelle, “She’s making four hundred and fifty dollars a week on Gone with the Wind.”
A week! Mazelle gaped. Mazelle didn’t know Negro actors were ever paid that much.
“Close your mouth back up, or she’ll know I told you.”
Mazelle would enjoy many dinner parties with Hattie McDaniel in the years to come—several at her Jefferson Park house, and later at her more lavish Sugar Hill home that she would be forced to go to court to defend her right to occupy—but that first frank conversation was the most memorable because Mazelle didn’t know she would ever see her again, so she asked every question she could think of.
Her parents had insisted that she finish her high school education—but Miss Hattie felt like her first true teacher.
The only teacher she’d ever needed. Mazelle almost forgot to eat while she savored Miss Hattie’s advice.
Although her dining room and every table setting were well appointed and stylish, the house around Mazelle vanished as Miss Hattie spoke to her as if she were in the spotlight on a stage.
“I spent years writing letters to get my papa his war benefits,” Miss Hattie said.
“He fought for the Union in the Civil War, you know. Year after year, they said no because he was born a slave, so he didn’t have no birth certificate.
See how it’s rigged against us? Hollywood too.
Hollywood is hard for anybody, but it’s ten times worse for Negroes.
So when I see stories in the press asking, ‘Why does Hattie McDaniel want to play maids?’ or ‘How come Hattie McDaniel is playing Mammy?’ I get real hot until I remind myself they don’t know how far I’ve come.
They don’t know how many times I heard ‘No’ and kept on singing and acting to keep from cleaning bathrooms. And they sure don’t know how much I wish I didn’t have to play a maid…
But if I stopped making pictures, I might have to go back to being a maid.
When you’ve missed some meals, you know more hungry days might be waiting just around the corner. ”
Mazelle nodded. She knew too well. As educated as Mother was, the only steady work she’d found in Los Angeles so far was cooking. She was planning fancier parties now and supervised other cooks, but she was still working for a white family.
Miss Hattie went on: “Miss Butterfly, she’s been on Broadway and whatnot, and I’ve told her she needs to pick her battles.
You may be ready to quit over this or that—but don’t be surprised if your phone stops ringing.
White folks never did like an ‘uppity’ Negro, which to them is any Negro that stands up for themselves.
And you’re skinny as a pin and cute as you can be, so I’m just gonna tell you straight: These studios will say you should gain weight.
Big as I am, those producers wish I was bigger.
Best I figure, they don’t want you to think you’re in competition with those white starlets.
A big Negro woman won’t intimidate them the same way.
“I know it’s not a pretty story. But I fight any way I can.
Why did I want the part of Mammy so much I read that book three times?
Because Mammy runs that place. She tells Scarlett all about herself.
She’s not afraid of nobody. The NAACP and these seditty reporters don’t know how mad the Southern markets get when I mouth off and show I’ve got a brain in my head.
You should’ve heard the fuss after The Mad Miss Manton, when I threw that pitcher of water in Henry Fonda’s face. ”
Otis chuckled, remembering that scene, and his laugh broke the melancholy that had settled over Mazelle.
Miss Hattie’s recipe for success had a bitter taste.
She was sure Mother would say she should call Dark Dream Pictures and try out for that teacher role.
Even if it didn’t pay as much, having a choice comedy role like that might help her get better-paying work.
But to get better work, would she have to play a maid too?
Was she the right “type” to play a maid?
Even in the race pictures she’d seen like Micheaux’s Birthright last year, leading woman Ethel Moses, dubbed “the Black Jean Harlow,” had much lighter skin than hers—the opposite of what the studios wanted.
Miss Hattie recognized the sad questions in Mazelle’s eyes and offered her another scoop of macaroni and cheese as consolation.
Miss Hattie gave Mazelle a motherly smile. “If I do a good enough job as Mammy and show them I’m as good at dramatic acting as any of the rest of them? God willing, maybe one day none of us will ever have to play a maid again.”
Mazelle’s hands trembled slightly as she held a thin sheaf of pink script pages.
It felt so strange to have such a valuable script in her hands, covered in scribbles and marks, while she stood encased within the giant soundstage.
Beyond the partitions, a racket of industry was just out of sight: men calling to each other urgently, pounding hammers, whirring machinery.
Mazelle was hidden, but around the corner she’d glimpsed the opulent set: the gigantic portrait of actress Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in a bright blue dress, the thick curtains in rich red fabric draping an imaginary windowpane.
Color was a spectacle in Gone with the Wind.
The bright colors on the set had surprised Mazelle, since the sets of Li’l Gumshoes had been so bland because Mr. Lorenzo never shot in color.
The set was a bright, immaculate island ringed by shadows. And she, of course, was in the shadows.
But she was here with Miss Hattie, who was nervous and fretting about her lines after more last-minute script changes, so she had invited Mazelle to meet her on the set early to run lines with her.
Miss Hattie already had been fitted in her full costume for the day’s shoot—a black dress with an awkwardly wide white skirt apron, and her white head wrap.
For today’s scene, she was wearing a red skirt beneath the visible one, a gift from Rhett Butler she was hiding from him.
The costume was heavy, so a sheen of sweat glimmered across her face.
Miss Hattie fanned herself with a folded California Eagle.
“You control yourself, Mr. Rhett, you’ll be seeing it for a long time…
” Miss Hattie said, rehearsing her dialogue for her upcoming scene with Clark Gable, celebrating the birth of Rhett’s baby.
Then Miss Hattie paused, frustrated. She had forgotten the next line, and Miss Hattie hated forgetting.
Mazelle had never known such a perfectionist, except Mother—and the producer, Mr. Selznick, from the stories everyone told.
“I’d like to apologize…” Mazelle prompted.
“I’d like to apologize, Mr. Rhett, about it’s not being a boy.”
Mazelle read the next lines, marked Rhett: “Oh, hush your mouth, Mammy. Who wants a boy? Boys aren’t any use to anybody. Don’t you think I’m proof of that? Have a drink of sherry, Mammy. Mammy, she is beautiful, isn’t she?”
“She sure is,” Miss Hattie said with a wide, happy grin. But she wasn’t satisfied with that reading, so she shed her grin and repeated the dialogue with sober earnestness instead: “She sure is.” Mazelle studied Miss Hattie’s every facial expression, marveling at her craft.
An authoritative man’s voice rang from the soundstage beyond the thin plywood partition. “Where’d Mammy run off to?” It sounded like Victor Fleming, the director. Mazelle cringed, realizing that Miss Hattie’s director called her by her character’s name, not her real name.
“I just wish they didn’t change these pages every time I sneeze,” Miss Hattie whispered. “I’ve never seen a picture shooting before the script’s done. They just won’t let it alone.”