Finding their place in the sun

NEW YORK —  Heavyset and dark-skinned, with a beatific smile and nurturing demeanor, Louise Beavers forged a career playing domestic servants in such films as “Imitation of Life” (1934) and the 1950s TV show “Beulah.” But the real Louise Beavers lived in the tony black L.A. neighborhood of Sugar Hill, had her own maid, couldn’t cook worth a lick and enjoyed smoking, baseball and a good poker game.

“When Ruby Dee met Beavers in the ‘40s, she looked at her and felt this is what a black actress can do with her life. She can achieve something,” says Donald Bogle, whose new book, “Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood,” is a compelling -- and anecdote-filled -- history of black Hollywood in the segregation era.

“That idea that America’s favorite maid, having her own maid, not knowing anything about cooking, that just struck me,” adds Bogle. “That kind of duality. Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers were these ‘mammy’ types, but they had their boyfriends, their husbands; they were not these asexual figures that we associate from seeing them in films,” he says.

Bogle’s book, which begins in the early sound era and ends on the cusp of the civil rights movement, works on a number of levels.

It tells how performers, including McDaniel, Stepin Fetchit, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, navigated the treacherous racial politics of the time, many of them forced to take demeaning roles when nothing else was offered.

It also relates the previously untold stories of Hollywood’s butlers, chauffeurs and maids who, because of their access to white stars, became prominent in their own right. And it is a loving homage to Central Avenue, which, with its nightclubs, hotels and shops, was once the Beverly Hills of black Los Angeles.

“In those days there was this social cohesiveness” in the black community, says Bogle. “Everybody knew one another, they socialized, gossiped, had dinners together. And there was a definite part of town they went to. There was this cultural cohesiveness as well, and the great thoroughfare was Central Avenue, it had the restaurants and clubs and the great Dunbar Hotel. You’d see Duke Ellington staying there, or Lena Horne. With the racial situation as it was, African Americans made something out of that.”

On most levels, “Bright Boulevards” is serious social history. It works as a kind of “up by their bootstraps” chronicle, telling how African Americans found their places in the motion picture industry and managed to not only survive but endure. The book also resurrects the careers and lives of some heretofore obscure performers, such as Madame Sul-Te-Wan (real name: Nellie Conley), a character actress who befriended legendary director D.W. Griffith and worked consistently in films from “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915 to her death in 1959.

But Bogle’s work is also a compendium of tasty tidbits regarding interracial affairs, mixed-race social events, extravagant lifestyles (with Fetchit leading the way) and careers gone awry (Dandridge, James Edwards). Among the anecdotes, the book peeks into which white stars befriended their black colleagues or servants (Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rosalind Russell -- who went into business with her African American assistant) and which ones didn’t (Miriam Hopkins was condescending, most studio executives weren’t terribly liberal).

“Bright Boulevards” also offers insight into how, especially in the 1940s, East Coast performers who came west to work in the industry helped infuse it with a heightened sense of black consciousness.

“In New York circles, people coming to L.A. brought with them a different sense of self,” says Bogle. “I think they took themselves seriously. They knew what Hollywood did as far as casting African Americans, and they were not that. Someone like Duke Ellington, he was not that -- he was Duke Ellington, and he was suave, he was sophisticated, he was worldly. Lena Horne also had a different sense of herself; she was not going to play maid roles.”

Bogle knows a lot about this since he has become almost by default the semiofficial chronicler of African American media images. His earlier history of black images in film, “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films,” has gone through more than 25 printings, sold more than 300,000 copies and is used regularly in college media courses. He has also written a biography of Dandridge and “Primetime Blues,” a history of African Americans on network TV.

A Philadelphia native who teaches a course on African American media images at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, Bogle says he became interested in this subject matter because “I grew up seeing old movies on TV, seeing black performers come on for a scene or two, and I was curious about them, and even then I could see the talent they had, and I always wondered why the movies weren’t about them. So I wanted to learn more, and that’s how it really started -- this personal quest to look at their work, at movie history. And I felt a little bit like a crusader to acknowledge what the obstacles had been for them and what they had achieved and what those things said about American culture.”

Digging through the decades

Bogle admits it hasn’t always been easy tracking down this hidden history. For “Bright Boulevards,” he and a researcher scoured the pages of the California Eagle, a black newspaper that ceased publication in 1965. A significant part of the social history in the book comes from personal interviews with people such as Bobby Short, Dee, dancer Fayard Nicholas (of the Nicholas Brothers) and actress Fredi Washington (she played the black woman who passes as white in the original “Imitation of Life”), who were there at the time. But the toughest work involved uncovering the stories of black servants.

“Gloria Swanson in her memoirs talks about a woman who worked for Cecil B. DeMille whom everyone knew as Hattie,” says Bogle. “Swanson had heard some nasty rumors about herself, and Hattie said to her, ‘This is part of the whole thing, don’t worry about it. You’re famous, just deal with it.’ And then Hattie added, ‘I’m famous on Central Avenue.’ To find that kind of thing was great, but it was really digging.”

Bogle’s book ends in 1959 with the death of Sul-Te-Wan, which he views as the symbolic end of the old black Hollywood.

But in a sense, the pivotal moment in “Bright Boulevards” occurs nearly 20 years earlier, when McDaniel won a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance in “Gone With the Wind.” It was a watershed moment for black performers, an industrywide acknowledgment of their talents. But they still had a long way to go. McDaniel was still typecast as a mammy, and black performers continued to be cast as butlers, buffoons or as specialty acts within films.

“It’s interesting that McDaniel, when she wins the Oscar, the black community was very excited,” says Bogle. “Finally, there was this kind of recognition. But then things began to shift: We’ve got to move forward now. We’ve got to get some- thing else.”

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Book signings

Where: Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 7 p.m. Feb. 16

Contact: (310) 659-3110

Also

Where: EsoWon Books, 3655 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles

When: 7 p.m. Feb. 17

Contact: (323) 294-0324