The Heyday and Heartbreak of Oscar's First Black

Winner
It s been 75 years since Hattie McDaniel won for Gone With the Wind, accepting her award
in a no blacks' L. A. hotel. Four husbands, a friendship with Clark Gable and 74 maid roles
later, she died, her body refused by a segregated cemetery, her statuette now missing, but
with her descendants devoted to her memory

ON A FEBRUARY AFTERNOON IN 1940, Hattie McDaniel -- then one of the biggest

African-American movie stars in the world -- marched into the Culver City offices of
producer David O. Selznick and placed a stack of Gone With the Wind reviews on his desk.
The Civil War epic, released two months earlier, had become an instant cultural sensation,
and McDaniel's portrayal of Mammy -- the head slave at Tara, the film's fictional Southern
plantation -- was being singled out by both white and African-American critics as
extraordinary. The Los Angeles Times even praised her work as "worthy of Academy
supporting awards." Selznick took the hint and submitted the 44-yearold for a nomination in
the best supporting actress category, along with her co-star, Olivia de Havilland, contributing
to the film's record-setting 13 noms.

The 12th Academy Awards were held at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub in The
Ambassador Hotel. McDaniel arrived in a rhinestone-studded turquoise gown with white
gardenias in her hair. (Seventy years later in 2010, a blue-gownand white-gardenia-clad
Mo'Nique, one of 11 black actors to win Academy Awards since, was the only one to pay
homage to McDaniel while accepting her best supporting actress Oscar for Lee Daniels'
Precious.) McDaniel then was escorted, not to the Gone With the Wind table -- where
Selznick sat with de Havilland and his two Oscar-nominated leads, Vivien Leigh and Clark
Gable -- but to a small table set against a far wall, where she took a seat with her escort, F.P.
Yober, and her white agent, William Meiklejohn. With the hotel's strict no-blacks policy,
Selznick had to call in a special favor just to have McDaniel allowed into the building (it was
officially integrated by 1959, when the Unruh Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination
in California).

A list of winners had leaked before the show, so McDaniel's win came as no shock. Even so,
when she was presented with the embossed plaque given to supporting winners at the time,
the room was rife with emotion, wrote syndicated gossip columnist Louella Parsons: "You
would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had." The daughter of two former slaves
gave a gracious speech about her win: "I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may
be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the
motion picture industry."

But Hollywood's highest honor couldn't stave off the indignities that greeted McDaniel at
every turn. White Hollywood pigeonholed her as the sassy Mammy archetype, with 74
confirmable domestic roles out of the IMDb list of 94 ("I'd rather play a maid than be a maid,"
was her goto response). The NAACP disowned her for perpetuating negative stereotypes.
Even after death, her Oscar, which she left to Howard University, was deemed valueless by
appraisers and later went missing from the school -- and has remained so for more than 40
years. Her final wish -- to be buried in Hollywood Cemetery -- was denied because of the
color of her skin.

McDaniel's career was defined by contradictions, from performing in "whiteface" early on to

accounts that her refusal to utter the N-word meant it never made it onscreen in Gone With
the Wind. "We all grew up with this image of her, the Mammy character, kind of cringing,"
says Jill Watts, author of Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. "But she saw
herself in the old-fashioned sense as a 'race woman' -- someone advancing the race." Adds
Mo'Nique: "That woman had to endure questions from the white community and the black
community. But she said, 'I'm an actress -- and when you say, "Cut," I'm no longer that.' If
anybody knew who this woman really was, they would say, 'Let me shut my mouth.'"

SAID MCDANIEL IN 1944 ABOUT HER

disappointing prospects following her Oscar win, "It was as if I had done something wrong."
Selznick's first move had been to dispatch her on a live, moviepalace tour as Mammy, which
played to half-filled houses. But he saw less and less use for his typecast star, and Warner
Bros, eventually bought out her contract.

Even after World War II, she continued to play underwritten maid parts in such films as
1946's Song of the South, Walt Disney's adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories, now
considered a rare racist blot on the studio's legacy. In her final years, McDaniel found success
on the radio, taking over in 1947 from Bob Corley -- a white voice actor who mimicked an
African-American woman -- as the title character in Beulah, a hit comedy series about a live-
in maid. It was the first time an African-American woman starred in a radio show, earning
McDaniel $1,000 a week. She was cast in the TV version of Beulah in 1951 but shot only six
episodes before falling ill. She died Oct. 26,1952, of breast cancer. She was 57.

Though she had been married four times -- losing her first husband to pneumonia, the others
to divorce -- McDaniel never had children of her own. The McDaniel bloodline lives on
through her sister, Etta. Etta's grandson Edgar Goff, who devoted much of his life to keeping
Hattie's memory alive, died in 2012. "He was an urban engineer by profession, but his passion
was black Hollywood, and the Hattie McDaniel story in particular," says Edgar's daughter
Kimberly Goff-Crews, secretary and vice president for student life at Yale University. Edgar
would regale his kids with stories of their great-great-aunt Hattie, who had hoped her
descendants might choose a different path. "My father said that Hattie was pretty clear that
she didn't want the family to be in Hollywood," says Goff- Crews. "She wanted them to have
good, normal'jobs, so to speak -- doctors and lawyers. She was no stage mom."

In her last days, McDaniel threw a deathbed party, coincidentally attended by her
grandnephew's future life partner MaBel Collins, then 15, who recalls "people milling
around, drinking, laughing. Guests would go in one or two at a time and visit with her. I had
no idea who that dying movie star was until a couple years later, I saw Gone With the Wind
-- and realized that was Hattie in the bed."

In her last will and testament, McDaniel left detailed instructions for her funeral. "I desire a
white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with
a white gardenia blanket and a pillow of red roses," she wrote. "I also wish to be buried in
the Hollywood Cemetery," today known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But the resting
place of numerous showbiz types -- including GWTW director Victor Fleming -- had a
whites-only policy. Hattie was buried at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, the first L.A. cemetery
open to all races. In 1999, Edgar successfully lobbied to get a marble memorial to McDaniel
placed at Hollywood Forever.

McDaniel also specified what was to become of her Oscar, which an appraiser dismissed as
having "no value" in an accounting of her estate. Despite working steadily until her death,
McDaniel left the world in debt: Her belongings were valued at $10,336.47 (about $95,000
today), $1,000 less than what she was deemed to owe the 1RS. The Oscar, she wrote, was to
be left to Howard University, but the award went missing from the Washington, D.C., school
during the early 1970s.

In 2011, inspired in part by Mo'Nique's Oscar-night tribute, W. Burlette Carter, a professor

at George Washington Law School, undertook a yearlong investigation of the missing Oscar.
Though the school was eventually cooperative, it never gave her permission to search its
stacks. Carter, who says the Oscar would today be worth half a million dollars, dismisses one
theory that it was tossed into the Potomac River by "angry protesting students" after Martin
Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination. She discovered that the Oscar never came to the school
from McDaniel's estate, but was gifted in the early 1960s by actor Leigh Whipper, a friend
of Hattie's from when she ran the Hollywood Victory Committee division that entertained
black troops during World War II. The last time anyone remembers seeing the Oscar was
1972, when it was removed from a glass case in the school's drama department, which has
since been gutted. (Howard declined comment.) "It's a sad story," says Carter, "but this Oscar
represents a triumph for blacks -- because we can look back and see that things really are so
much better now than they were at that time."

ONE OF 13 CHILDREN, MCDANIEL WAS born June 10,1893, into extreme poverty in
Wichita, Kan. Following the family's move to Denver, she observed her brothers, Otis and
Sam, who dubbed themselves the "Cakewalk Kids" after a dance fad that doubled as a sly
caricature of white cotillions. Hattie, determined to avoid her mother's and sisters' fates as
maids, joined the show, doing impressions in "whiteface" for African-American audiences.
"She was in many ways radical," says Watts. "Her impressions in whiteface, well, people --
certainly women -- didn't do that then."

In 1929, McDaniel landed a gig in a road tour of the hit musical Show Boat. But the stock
market crash led to layoffs by producer Florence Ziegfeld Jr., stranding a penniless Hattie in
Milwaukee. Undaunted, she took a job as a bathroom attendant at Sam Picks Suburban Inn
and stepped in when the venue had no headliner. Her showstopping singing and dancing
earned her $90 in tips and a job on the spot.

In 1931, McDaniel moved to Los Angeles, joining acting siblings Etta and Sam.
Opportunities were limited to pleasant and abiding servant roles: The moral-code-enforcing
Hays Office prohibited mixed-race romances or anything considered to be "threatening
behavior" by African-American characters. For an actor who was light-skinned or couldn't
capture the faux "Black English" dialect conceived by white screenwriters, it was difficult to
find work. Hattie, with her dark skin and ample figure, started booking parts immediately,
including an uncredited speaking role in 1932's Blonde Venus as Marlene Dietrich's servant.

In 1934, she landed her first studio contract, earning $300 for 11 days of work in Fox's Judge
Priest, a racist comedy that starred controversial African- American performer Stepin Fetchit,
who became a millionaire off his "laziest man in the world" character. According to historian
Watts, Fetchit gave McDaniel a chilly reception on the set, threatened by her reputation as a
rising comedy star. But the film's director, John Ford, loved Hattie and expanded her role. At
41, with hundreds of uncredited films under her belt, McDaniel finally saw her name on the
silver screen, misspelled as "McDaniels."

By 1935, McDaniel was being touted as "one of the most prominent performers of her race"
to promote the Clark Gable comedy China Seas. She and Gable forged a close friendship
during filming. (When Gable, who loved pranking her, learned his co-star wasn't welcome at
GWTWs 1939 Atlanta premiere -- Georgia law prohibited blacks in white theaters -- he
refused to go. Only at McDaniel's urging did he relent. Also: Among the teen choir members
costumed as slaves at the event was a young Martin Luther King Jr.)

It was Bing Crosby, a good friend of Hattie's brother Sam (the only African- American ever
to appear on I Love Lucy), who suggested that Selznick cast "that Queenie from [1936's]
Show Boat" for her defining role. Selznick, married to the daughter of the most powerful
man in Hollywood -- MGM head Louis B. Mayer -- had paid a staggering $50,000 for the
rights to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel. The NAACP made no secret of its disdain for the
book's frequent utterance of the N-word (by then banned by the Hays Code), its sympathetic
Ku Klux Klan portrayal and its depiction of slaves as participants in their own subjugation.

A shrewd Hollywood player, Selznick used his status as a Jewish-American bearing witness
to the Nazis' rise when he wrote to Walter White, NAACP executive secretary: "I hasten to
assure you that as a member of a race that is suffering very keenly from persecution these
days, I am most sensitive to the feelings of minority peoples." Selznick pledged to omit
offending material, though he fought to keep the N-word in the script for historic accuracy.
The word, which would have been spoken by Mammy, never appears in the movie, leading
some historians to theorize that McDaniel refused to utter it.

McDaniel -- who later wrote in the Sept. 29,1947, edition of The Hollywood Reporter, "I
have never apologized for the roles I play" -- coveted the part but suspected she'd lose it to
Louise Beavers of 1934's Imitation of Life. As Selznick mounted his "nationwide search,"
the hunt for Mammy reached a fever pitch. Even first lady Eleanor Roosevelt suggested her
own maid. On Jan. 27,1939, with Selznick having secured the final funding from his father-
in-law, McDaniel got the call she'd been waiting for. Her contract paid $450 a week for 15
weeks of shooting. Mammy was hers. And so, too, would be the Oscar.

After Oscar, 'Mo'Nique, You've Been Blackballed'

The 2010 best supporting actress for Precious says Lee Daniels delivered the worst news to
her
WHEN I GOT THE Precious script from Lee Daniels, by the time I got to page 10,1 said,
"Lee, if we do what's on this paper, we can help save lives." When the movie came out, there
were some people saying, "Why would Mo'Nique do that role?" it was because I knew that
woman. And I felt like, if we really tell this story, people will come out and get help and get
healed.

I get asked one question a lot: How did the Oscar change my life? Here's the answer: It let
me know that an award wasn't going to change my life. Do you think it should have changed
my life financially? That it should come with more respect, choices, money? It should -- and
it normally does.

But I got a phone call from Lee Daniels, maybe a few months ago. And he said to me,
"Mo'Nique, you've been blackballed." I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you didn't play
the game." [Mo'Nique didn't campaign for her win, citing family and a talk show as reasons.]
I said, "Well, what game is that?" He gave me no response.* There have been people that
have said, "Mo'Nique, she can be difficult." Or, "Mo'Nique is tactless, she's tacky." And they
would probably be right. That's why I have my beautiful husband because he's so full of tact.
I'm just a girl from Baltimore. But being from that place, you learn not to let anybody take
advantage of you.

I was offered the role in The Butler that Oprah Winfrey played. I was also approached to be
on Fox's Empire. And I was also offered the role as Richard Pryor's grandmother in Lee's
upcoming biopic [that went to Winfrey]. Each of those projects that Lee offered me was taken
off the table. They all just went away. That's just part of the business. I can't be upset at
anybody because life is too good.

*In a statement to THR, Daniels responds: "Mo'Nique is a creative force to be reckoned with.
Her demands through Precious were not always in line with the campaign. This soured her
relationship with the Hollywood community. I consider her a friend. I have and will always
think of her for parts that we can collaborate on, however the consensus among the creative
teams and powers thus far were to go another way with these roles."

When Jim Crow Ruled Los Angeles

Bombings and poisoned pets greeted African-Americans who moved into Hancock Park and
other areas, sometimes long after segregation had been lifted By Andy Lewis

IN 1948, NAT KING COLE was one of the most popular musicians in America, with hits
like "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66," but when he bought a house in all-white Hancock Park,
his neighbors sued to block the purchase. When that failed, they burned the N-word on his
front lawn and killed his dog with poisoned meat. (Cole resisted the attacks, and his family
stayed there until the 1970s.) He fared better than William Bailey, a World War II vet and
science teacher whose house was bombed when he moved into a white Culver City
neighborhood (Bailey and his wife escaped unharmed). The Bailey bombing was one of at
least six against black families who moved into white neighborhoods in the 1950s.

By the end of World War II, the few laws mandating segregation of African-Americans in
L.A. County's public pools and beaches were struck down. A persistent but uneven de facto
segregation in hotels, restaurants and theaters meant black patrons sometimes met separate
entrances or were refused service. Jim Crow wasn't just a Southern problem but a national
one with regional variations. The year Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream"
speech, activists picketed Mel's Drivein's whites-only hiring.

Housing was the biggest barrier. Racial covenants -- perpetual clauses in deeds banning real
estate sales to blacks, Jews and Asians -- were nullified by the Supreme Court in 1948 in
Shelley v. Kraemer, but the National Association of Realtors code discouraged agents from
showing minorities homes in white neighborhoods for years.

Housing discrimination produced schools as segregated as any in the South -- L.A. had at
least 130 lily-white schools and another 93 all-black schools. Even Jackie Robinson wasn't
immune to discrimination. At the same time he was being cheered by white students at UCLA
as the only person in school history to letter in four sports, not a single home around the
Westwood campus was for sale or rent to African-Americans.

"Every picture and every line, it belonged to Hattie. She knew she was supposed to be
subservient, but she never delivered a subservient line," says MaBel Collins (center), 77,
partner of Edgar Goff, McDaniel's grandnephew. McDaniel's descendants were
photographed Feb. 13 atThe Culver Studios in Culver City, a few yards from Gone With the
Wind producer David 0. Selznick's former offices and where most of the movie was filmed.

Great-great-grandniece and student Spensser Goodlose-Goff, 20, lives in Los Ageles.

Great-great-randnephew Wade Edward Booker-Goff of L. A., 5, holds a picture of McDaniel

as Mammy.

Great-grandniece Denise Goff, 60, is a retired U.S. military worker who lives in Dalls.

Collins, 77, is a retired production coo® nator wnqllives in Los Angeles.

Great-grandniece Kimberly Goff-Crewjs, 54, is secretary and vice student life at Yale
University in New Haven, Conn.

L.A.-based great-grandnephew (and Demise and Kimberly's brother) Kevin John Goff, 51,
is making a documentary about MqDaniel; Wade and Spensser are his children.

PHOTO (COLOR): McDaniel with Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in a scene from the 1939 film,
which won best picture.

PHOTO (COLOR): 1 In 1999, McDaniel received a cenotaph at Hollywood Forever

Cemetery. Her family decided to keep her remains at the original burial site in Angelus-
Rosedale Cemetery.

PHOTO (COLOR): 3 An appraisal of the Hattie McDaniel estate totaled $10,336.47 in

jewelry, furs and furnishings, but her historic Oscar -- a small statuette on a plaque -- was
listed as having "no value."
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A staging for a 1939 Oscars newsreel had McDaniel standing
by a table laden with awards; her best supporting actress plaque is up front.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): 2 McDaniel (center), in front of her house on South Harvard
Boulevard in L.A.'s West Adams, with World War II volunteers in 1942. McDaniel was
instrumental in a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down restrictions against
African- Americans moving into the area, which is southwest of downtown.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): L.A.'S Paramount Theatre had segregated entrances circa
1950.

~~~~~~~~

By Seth Abramovitch

Photographed by Austin Hargrave