Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

Photograph from James Baldwin Archive, NYC Public Library

August 2, 1924– James Baldwin:

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.”

The very first “gay” book I read was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). At 15-years-old, the tragic story did not lift my spirits at all. I was reading anything and everything I could find that dealt with the subject of homosexuality or that was written by a gay person, and the message I was getting was not positive. I had already decided as a young teenager that my life was not going to be tragic because I was gay, yet I was searching for someone to point the way. Still, I found the novel to be erotic and the language was exciting, the voice new.

I continued to follow Baldwin’s life and work, from his exile in Europe to when he returned to the USA and took an active role in the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I kept reading his novels, poems and essays, and I really admired his work. I had my eyes opened by his words.

The grandson of a slave, Baldwin had a life of extreme hardship, growing up illegitimate and very poor in Harlem. As a child, he searched for a way to escape his circumstances. Baldwin:

“I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn’t know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use.”

By the time he was 14-years-old, Baldwin was spending much of his time in libraries and had found his passion for writing.

During this early part of his life, he followed in his religious, strict stepfather’s path and he became a preacher. Of those teen years, Baldwin wrote:

“Those three years in the pulpit, I didn’t realize it then, that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty.”

The language of the church, the language of the Bible, its cadences and tone had a huge influence Baldwin’s writing style.

Baldwin didn’t find what he was looking for in the church and after working for a short while for the New Jersey railroad, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked as a freelance writer, mostly doing book reviews. He caught the attention of famous novelist, Richard Wright, who helped him get a grant so he could support himself as a writer.

But, after having his work rejected by publishers because he was a Negro and a Queer, and recognizing his race and gayness made him an outsider in his own country, Baldwin left for Europe at 24-years-old. Paris became his new home, but he would finish his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, a semi-autobiographical story about a teenager living in Harlem, in Loèche-les-Bains, Switzerland in 1953. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans were unlike anything that had been written. Although it didn’t sell well at the time, Go Tell It On The Mountain is now considered an American classic.

Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer. He published two novels, Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). He never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America. In numerous essays, novels, plays and public speeches, the eloquent voice of Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood. Readers began to respond; both Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and Another Country became bestsellers.

In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to the USA take part in the Civil Rights Movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). It also became a bestseller, and Baldwin ended up on the cover of Time Magazine.

The American Civil Rights Movement was not open to gay people. The only known gay men in the movement were Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, and Rustin was the architect of success of the March On Washington in August 1963. Many were bothered by Rustin’s gayness. King considered homosexuality to be a mental illness that could be overcome. King later distanced himself from Rustin and Baldwin. Baldwin was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the March On Washington.

Baldwin was harassed by the FBI, with a 1885 page file on his activities. Baldwin had a contentious relationship with the FBI, blaming violence in Birmingham during the spring of 1963 on J. Edgar Hoover. Baldwin even taunted the FBI by saying in interviews he was writing a book about their operation. The work never materialized, but the idea sent the FBI into a frenzy as it tried to get its hands on a manuscript.

After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Baldwin returned to France, where he worked on a book about the bitterness of the times, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). It is currently being developed into a film by last year’s Oscar winning film, Moonlight’s director/writer Barry Jenkins, who has long dreamed of the project.

Baldwin began to realize that violence might be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would return in his themes, but by the early 1970s, he also suffered from writer’s block. Baldwin:

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent, which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it.”

Baldwin and Marlon Brando enjoyed an especially close relationship for more than two decades. They lived together in NYC before they were each famous. Baldwin was the driving force behind Brando’s unabashed support of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1983, Baldwin became a professor in the African-American Studies department of the University Of Massachusetts. He spent his final years in St. Paul de Vence on the French Riviera, where he left this world, taken by that damn cancer in November 1987. He was just 63-years-old.

Baldwin had an astonishing list of good friends and supporters: Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Lena Horne, Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, and especially, Nina Simone and Maya Angelou, who called Baldwin her “friend and brother”.

Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 1986.

You really need to catch the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro, one of the best films of 2016. Written by Baldwin and directed by Raoul Peck, it is based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House. Streaming on Netflix.

“White people cooling it means a very simple thing. Black power frightens them. White power doesn’t frighten them. We are not, you know, bombing a country out of existence. Nor menacing your children. White power is doing that. White people have to accept their history and their actual circumstances, and they won’t. Not without a miracle they won’t. Goodwill won’t do it. One’s got to face the fact that we police the globe–we, the Americans, police the globe for a very good reason.”

The post #BornThisDay: Writer, James Baldwin appeared first on The WOW Report.

Photograph from MGM

August 3, 1923– Jean Hagen

Shirley Verhagen was born in Chicago, but when she found work on Broadway in her early 20s, she became Jean Hagen.

On a cold winter evening in 2012, I had the thrill of viewing one of my favorite films in a new print on a big screen. It was a movie that I had seen many times on television, but never in a theatre. It did not disappoint. That film continued to delight with the mastery and freshness of the talent involved. Singin’ In The Rain (1952) holds a rightful place as one of the truly great works of art from the 20th Century. This time, what did take me by surprise was not so much the stunning beauty of Gene Kelly’s ass, but the staggering, startling, striking, stunning, stupefyingly stupendous work of Jean Hagen as vain and talent-challenged silent film star Lina Lamont who Debbie Reynolds has to dub. Without her finely crafted and perfectly modulated performance, the film would have fallen short of being perfect. And, I do think it is rather perfect. Hagen deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Singin’ In The Rain, forever giving her an exalted place in “the cinema firmament”.

Hagen attended Northwestern University where she performed on stage with her BFF, Patricia Neal. In 1945, Hagen moved to NYC where she and Neal were roommates. She found roles in radio shows, and worked as a cigarette girl in a nightclub, and as an usher at the Booth Theater. During the run of the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play Swan Song at the Booth, Hagen was overheard by the playwrights criticizing their show. Hecht and MacArthur introduced themselves and they ended up asking her to audition for a small role. Her next stage role was in Lillian Hellman‘s Another Part Of The Forest a few months later, with Patricia Neal also in the cast.

Her film debut was as a femme fatale in gay director George Cukor’s comedy Adam’s Rib(1949) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and her performance brought her a contract with MGM. She was especially good in John Houston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) for the studio and she received excellent reviews. Hagen appeared in MGM’s film noir Side Street(1950), especially apt playing a sincere, but dim, gangster’s gun moll.

In Singin’ In the Rain, her character Lina Lamont’s voice is dubbed in the talking segments by Kathy Selden, Debbie Reynolds‘ character. But actually, in a crazy twist, director Stanley Donen used Hagen dubbing Reynolds dubbing Hagen. Hagen’s own voice was quite versatile and Kathy Selden was supposed to have a cultured style of speaking and Burbank native Reynolds had a pronounced western accent. Lina Lamont’s singing was actually done by Betty Royce, dubbing Reynolds dubbing Hagen. Co-star Donald O’Connor wrote:

“Jean was a consummate actor. She was the sweetest gal in the world but she was on the quiet side, not like Lina Lamont at all with that high-pitched voice. No, she was a legit actor. They didn’t get a ditzy blonde to play the part. That’s why that part is so dynamic and so wonderful.”

Hagen preferred dramatic roles over comic ones and she grew weary of the typecasting. Her final films at MGM were the Lana Turner musical Latin Lovers (1953) and a Red Skelton comedy, Half A Hero (1953). Hagen:

“Every time Mr. Mayer would get mad at me, he’d punish me by putting me in a damn Lana Turner movie.”

In 1953, Hagen joined the cast of the new Desilu Studio’s family sitcom Make Room ForDaddy (not to be confused with my one man show with the same title). As the very funny wife of star Danny Thomas, Hagen received three Emmy Award nominations. She had trouble getting along with Thomas who objected to her wearing jeans and shirts on rehearsal days, at one point admonishing her saying: “For God’s sake, put on high heels, put on a little lipstick!”. After the first three seasons she grew dissatisfied with the role and her treatment and she left the series. Thomas didn’t appreciate Hagen’s leaving and he had her character bite the big one rather than be recast. This may be the very first television character to be killed off in a sitcom. Lovely and nimble Marjorie Lord was cast a year later as Thomas’ second wife and she worked well with Thomas and the show lasted several more seasons.

Although Hagen made frequent guest appearances in various television series for the rest of her career, she was unable to successfully revive her once promising film career, only finding work playing smallish supporting roles: the secretary to FDR in Sunrise At Campobello (1960), and the pal of Bette Davis in the smart film noir Dead Ringer (1964).

In the late 1960s, Hagen was diagnosed with throat cancer and she spent the rest of her life in some kind of treatment for it, either hospitalized or under an oncologist’s care. A tough situation for an actor noted for her voice.

She had a comeback of sorts playing character roles in episodes of 1970s television series like Starsky & Hutch and The Streets Of San Francisco. Sadly, gorgeous, talented Hagen made her final film appearance in the nutty male-hooker television film Alexander: The Other Side Of Dawn (1977).

That damn cancer finally grabbed Hagen in summer 1977 while she was living at the Motion Picture Country Home, gone way too early at just 54-years-old. Her last appearance was released posthumously, a reprise of her 1959 role opposite Fred MacMurray in The Shaggy Dog for The Wonderful World Of Disney television series in 1978. Hagen has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1502 Vine Street.

On her birthday, let’s take a moment to remember her very special achievement in the greatest film musical of all time. Hagen was a marvel, a special kind of genius, a beautiful clown.