Sweet Thunder Read online

  The communiqués had reached the highest levels of the White House. The U.S. military, worried about resentment in the ranks because of discriminatory practices against Negroes, needed to show a unified front in battling the Nazis. Two big sensations in Negro America—Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson—suddenly found themselves in the Army.

  It was World War II that marked the first time military dress was lent the sheen of celebrity. From Broadway to Hollywood, men and women from the entertainment ranks would be featured in newsreels and on magazine covers wearing their military attire. Life and Photoplay magazines were particularly adept at placing uniformed stars on their covers and throughout their pages. Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable looked as genuine in uniform on a military base as they had on celluloid.

  Nothing created more of a high-wire act for American officialdom, however, than the combination of blacks and war. It was a segregated country, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson remained opposed to integration of the armed forces. But Washington officials were aware of the sporadic outbursts of Negro activism around the country in recent years, protesting the failure of antilynching and antidiscrimination legislation. Some notable figures from the black community—Paul Robeson, W. E. B. DuBois—had uttered rather romantic sentiments about the Communist Party, a circumstance that made Washington twitchy, the more so after the blood began to spill upon the sand following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  Might blacks sour on patriotism? Might America be unable to showcase a unified front across racial lines? Labor leader John L. Lewis, in a nationwide radio address delivered before the attack on Pearl Harbor, minced no words about what he saw as the state of war and jobs and equal rights. “Labor in America wants no war nor any part of war. Labor in America wants the right to work and live—not the privilege of dying by gunshot or poison gas to sustain the mental errors of current statesmen.”

  Could a populace—black men and women—be gathered up and set down on military bases and all the while be expected to heed the same imprisoning rules that applied in outside society?

  There were no Negro Hollywood stars for the War Department to woo. No figure from the Negro community in Tinseltown whose weekly movements were followed and marveled at by the larger public, giving them the aura of celebrity and creating a public relations boon.

  Having no one from Hollywood to turn to, the War Department reached into the Negro world of sports. And that meant Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson.

  Robinson was clearly rising in boxing circles, and quite rapidly. In 1941, in an Associated Press sports editors’ poll ranking athletes, Robinson received 29 points to Joe Louis’s 14. That positioned Robinson in sixth place to Louis’s tenth. Frank Sinkwich, the University of Georgia’s galloping halfback, was named the nation’s number-one male athlete that year; Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams was right behind Sinkwich. (Before he had officially entered the military, Robinson participated in a celebrity boxing event at Camp Upton, on Long Island, with the main draw being an exhibition bout between Joe Louis and his sparring mate George Nicholson. It was a mixture of boxing and entertainment watched by a crowd of seven thousand, and both Sugar Ray Robinson and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson were there and whispered about.)

  On the streets of Harlem, Sugar Ray Robinson was beginning to carry a special cachet. The reporters had begun referring to him as “the Harlem Dandy.” Whereas Joe Louis struck many as severe, Robinson was as light and chipper as a dancer. In addition, Robinson lived in Harlem; Louis was a visitor to that cultural stomping ground, waltzing about after his big bouts and on social occasions. The height of Joe’s power had been in the mid-and late thirties.

  “If you’d see both of them on the street,” recalls the influential congressman Charlie Rangel, who was raised in Harlem and would see Louis and Robinson side by side and gawk at them as a kid, “you’d want to run over to Sugar Ray. If both of them were walking into a bar, you’d get a wave from Joe. But Sugar Ray would stop and be rapping. Joe was very self-conscious. If there was an opposite of that, it was Sugar Ray.”

  But poll standings aside, Sugar Ray wasn’t about to overtake Joe Louis’s popularity in the early months of wartime as the government waged a battle for the hearts and minds of black folk. Joe was legend; Joe was lore; Joe was going to have a poem (“Joe Louis Named the War”) written about him and the war.

  Joe Louis had given black America an emancipation right into the sports world when he became heavyweight champion in June 1937 by knocking out Jim Braddock at Comiskey Park in Chicago.

  Braddock, a Depression-era hero—the Cinderella Man—had overcome poverty to stage a ring comeback in the early 1930s; his defeat of champion Max Baer on June 13, 1935, was considered a seismic upset. The victory set up his bout with Louis. Louis was a native of rural Alabama, and on the day of the Braddock match, some of his relatives living in the Bukalew Mountains near Lafayette, Alabama, got themselves into town so they could press ears to the radio. Louis had trained in near-isolation in Wisconsin for the Braddock title match. There was so very much at stake, and there were also worries from many quarters about the measure of Louis’s gifts: He had been knocked out in June 1936 by the German Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. As that bout deepened, and Schmeling—who looked on his way to defeat—began staging something of a comeback, whites, soaked with emotion now, began to root for the German, a noise that caused those in Louis’s corner to wonder about national loyalty. (An ocean away, Adolf Hitler, chancellor of the Third Reich, was goose-stepping his Nazi armies around Europe, killing and plotting war.) It was in the eighth round of that 1937 Chicago bout when, with the world listening, Louis’s fierce right caught Braddock. “I laid it solid,” Louis would recall, “with all my body, on the right side of his face, and his face split open. He fell in a face-down dive.” Louis had become the first black champion since Jack Johnson. Johnson was so mercurial, there were even those in the Louis camp who considered the retired champ unpredictable and belligerent. Johnson was still displaying a lavish appetite for white women, agitating many blacks as he complained that black women had taken advantage of his financial largesse. Joe Louis left no doubt about his cultural pride. Upon his victory over Braddock there were celebrations in mud-strewn Negro hamlets, in gin joints, in houses of ill repute in Detroit, in dressing rooms of Negro League ballplayers barnstorming through the South, in hair salons, on rooftops where garden parties were held in Harlem, beneath the hanging lights of the fine homes that Negroes had purchased in the Georgetown section of the nation’s capital. Joe had made sure that—as William Nunn, the sports editor of The Pittsburgh Courier put it—“all the fondest dreams of the 12,000,000 racial brethren of the new champion have come true. He has been a credit to them and now he rides the ‘Glory Road.’ He has taken them up with him. He is theirs.” The aura of Joe Louis spread like honey. A Harlem columnist felt obliged to remind his readers: “For the benefit of some Harlem lovelies, Joe Louis is due in Harlem next week.”

  When Louis felled Schmeling in June 1938 in their ballyhooed rematch—against the smoke of war in Europe and the attendant rise of Naziism—he had produced the final line needed in a narrative arc that could be felt from Sugar Ray’s Harlem to the offices of the War Department: The nation needed to be unified on the home front.

  In 1942 Louis’s musings about patriotism had an undeniable psychological weight for the American Negro. The military printed up Army posters showing Louis in uniform—helmet, khakis, canteen on belt loop, his face grim and a bayonet in hands—with some words he had uttered at a rally enlarged beneath the photo: “We’re going to do our part … and we’ll win because we’re on God’s side.” Suddenly, he was the Negro basso profundo that sounded through the political worries of the nation. Sugar Ray Robinson—inducted into the Army in February 1943, thirteen months after Louis—was the keening alto sax in the corner. He looked strikingly handsome in his pressed Ike jacket, his creased slacks, and his corporal’s stripes. (Official military rec
ords would list him as Corp. Walker Smith, his birth name.)

  It would, however, be the last time that Robinson would seem to shrink in the presence and aura of a fellow prizefighter. He had yet to gain his first belt title; his welterweight size made him look thin as a fashion model. Even though he had had some tough battles in the ring already, he still retained a boyish look. But he was certainly positioning himself as the one figure—with his athletic prowess and rhythmic style—who was ready to burst right through the curtains of racial witchery that both Jack Johnson and Joe Louis had had to part.

  It seemed that entertainers and movie stars were everywhere in the military seasons of 1943 and 1944. If they were not in uniform, they were performing on military bases. Actresses such as Hedy Lamarr, Bette Davis, Gene Tierney, and Carole Lombard were involved in the effort, their beauty and verve helping to sell war bonds and bring smiles to the troops. Jimmy Stewart—who had been a huge hit in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939—joined up and became a bomber pilot. The matinee idol Tyrone Power would end up in the South Pacific. Fellow actor Ronald Reagan reported to Fort March in San Francisco. (Hollywood hummed into action with its patriotic-themed films. This Is the Army starred Kate Smith, Irving Berlin, and, among others, Lt. Ronald Reagan and Sgt. Joe Louis. The film was full of skits and songs; Joe’s role was a speech-making cameo. He appeared in a swaying all-black musical number, in which some lovely black dancers cavort about, pointing out the cut of military uniforms and crooning—about the uniforms specifically—“That’s What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear.” The film was directed by Michael Curtiz.)

  Not long after, Carole Lombard’s plane, a TWA DC-3, went down in the Nevada mountains, killing her and the crew—she had been out selling war bonds, blowing kisses—her husband, a heartsick Clark Gable, joined the military. Gable and Lombard had nicknames for each other: Ma and Pa.

  “Why Ma?” Gable asked, over and over, until it began to sound like an echo.

  The American GIs needed laughter, so the comics packed their bags too. Jack Benny cracked wise, though he thought it smart to leave his black sidekick, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, behind, given the racial setup of military life. The champion of the comics, however, was a jovial-looking jokester who had been born in England but raised in Cleveland. Bob Hope—who had boxed as a teenager before abruptly leaving that sport behind—took to war shows like a starlet to Sunset Boulevard. Hope had made a name for himself in vaudeville. Then came Broadway and comedy shorts. Hollywood summoned him and he garnered attention in The Cat and the Canary in 1939. But his early “road” pictures with crooner Bing Crosby—Road to Singapore in 1940 and Road to Morocco in 1942—set new standards for that kind of hilarity. The war shows seemed to have been dreamed up for a man such as Hope: Some days he did four performances, yuk-yuking it with the troops, tossing out silly lines about his cowardice, about his Hollywood friends. At a performance in Tunisia, a wiseacre in uniform popped off at Hope.

  “Draft dodger! Why aren’t you in uniform,” came the voice, stunning Hope.

  “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Hope answered, his vaudeville timing smooth as ever. “A guy could get hurt!”

  Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis—paired up in the military—were not on the road to Morocco. They were, however, soon on the road to Alabama.

  A Brooklyn-born singer and aspiring chanteuse took her dreams to Los Angeles in 1941. She was looking for beauty—the kind shared by others—and grace and acceptance. Lena Horne settled into a Hollywood apartment, in a neighborhood where Negroes were not welcome; neighbors apparently believed she was “Latin;” no one bothered her. Duke Ellington and others had convinced her to go West; there was talk from an acquaintance of a new nightclub opening. Then came the haunting news of war—and the nightclub dream faded. “Everything’s over,” Horne imagined upon hearing news of Pearl Harbor humming over the radio. Only it wasn’t, of course. She soon befriended others who believed in beauty and grace, among them Billy Strayhorn, a composer and arranger who worked closely with Ellington; and Katherine Dunham, an iconoclastic Negro dancer—she had done doctoral work in anthropology at the University of Chicago—who had formed a dance company, the Dunham Dancers, and who now had engagements in Los Angeles with her troupe. Ellington was already on the ground in Los Angeles. He was in town with a show called Jump for Joy. (Among its cast was Dorothy Dandridge, another ethereal young beauty, this one from Cleveland, Ohio. Dand ridge had made her screen debut—a tiny part—in A Day at the Races, a 1937 Marx Brothers film.) It was at a Jump for Joy performance that Horne met the gifted Strayhorn. Horne had a manner of quickly delighting those she met. There was laughter, the sharing of home-cooked food and good wine, gossip, the jangled wartime nerves, which they all defeated with their bonhomie and togetherness and the music spilling out of the record player. Together with the willowy Dunham Dancers, Horne opened in a nightclub act at the Little Troc, a new club on Sunset Strip. Strayhorn, who was as fixated with Horne—in a platonic way; he was gay—as she was with him, did a version of “Honeysuckle Rose,” among other songs, for the young singer. It was wartime; she sang at the nightclub as if there might be no tomorrow. It was beautiful and sweet and suggestive, and word spread. On Sunset Boulevard, when it came to new and sensational acts, word traveled like blown dandelions. Movie stars—those not snatched up by the military—came to hear her sing. A newspaper critic would conclude that the Little Troc nightclub was suddenly on everyone’s lips because “Lena Horne, a singer from the Downtown Café Society in New York, is being hailed as another Florence Mills. She has knocked the movie population bowlegged and is up to her ears in offers. She came out here unknown …” Greta Garbo caught her act. So did Cole Porter; so did Marlene Dietrich; so did Lauren Bacall. Strayhorn, who wore owlish glasses and resembled a boyish professor, gleamed when he heard the words he wrote sail from her lovely lips. (Cole Porter invited Horne to a cast party for This Is the Army.) With the lavish publicity and attention, MGM elbowed their way into Horne’s orbit and quickly signed her up to a movie contract. It was huge news, and the Negro press reported on it happily. The studio needed to find a vehicle for Horne. They came up with Cabin in the Sky, a Broadway musical that they felt sure would transfer quite well to the screen.

  While awaiting the start of filming on Cabin, Horne settled in at another Sunset Boulevard nightclub, the Mocambo. The gushing trailed her there; newsmen filed reports about cops having to fight back the crowds. Ted Le Berthon, a Los Angeles Daily News writer, caught her Mocambo act: “And, well, who is Lena Horne? … An exquisite olive skinned, 22-year-old beauty of the Negro race whom anyone might mistake for an aristocratic and exciting Latin American seniorita, with inkily dark gleaming eyes. She wore a sea green evening gown and stood there with a powerful smile of quiet affection. And then she began to sing. And before the evening was over, all of us … had seen and heard the greatest artist in her field in our time in history … No appeal to innuendo. Just the high mystery of art, of the more complete individual.”

  Lena Horne was ready for the big screen.

  MGM hired Vincente Minnelli to direct the movie version of Cabin in the Sky. Chicago-born, he was young, vivacious, and always had ideas popping out of his head. It helped the studio’s confidence in him that he had directed Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. And before that, he had served a stint as art director at Radio City Music Hall; he was no stranger to drama and constant movement on a stage. Cabin was indeed a movie of its time, with grave stereotypical shortcomings. But there is no denying its buoyancy, its sparkling light, its unforgettable costumes and orchestral arrangements. It also, in addition to featuring Horne, drew upon a scintillating ensemble—Duke Ellington, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson (finding work without Mr. Benny), Louis Armstrong, Butterfly McQueen, Ethel Waters, and Rex Ingram. It is a heaven-glancing fable: the Hollywood imagination at the time seemed taken with transporting Negroes to heaven—or having Negroes ponder the route there while engaging in all ma
nner of shenanigans and conniving. (Green Pastures, another all-Negro musical, released in 1936, had a similar setting, although a gentler tone.) The Cabin plot revolves around Little Joe, a gambler (played by Rochester) who suffers a gunshot wound. Of course the shooting unnerves his wife, Petunia, played by Ethel Waters, who receives top billing in the film. Petunia prays mightily that he will recover. The movie being a fable, Little Joe is granted a reprieve from certain death, but he must stop gambling. The devil lurks, setting off a test of wills between himself and emissaries from Heaven over the direction of Little Joe’s soul. The devil has extra help, a handmaiden, Georgia Brown, played by Horne. Georgia sidles up next to Little Joe, bewitching him, slinking about. She shows up in his backyard, primping, swaying her hips. Moviegoers had gone to the theatre to see Cabin because they were enamored of Ethel Waters. By the movie’s end, they found themselves talking about Horne.

  Hollywood glitter aside, there was still a war going on. Horne—when she couldn’t personally reach Joe Louis—depended on friends and contacts for news about both Louis and Robinson and Negro involvement in the Army. Negro soldiers, however, needed no reminding to keep tabs on Lena Horne. As one wrote in a missive to MGM: “Now we have someone we can pin on our lockers.”