The Teens
IN THE BEGINNING
Among the old-timers, the story went like this: A woman known to
everyone as Madame came to California from Kentucky with her
children and her husband. But once they were in the Gold Rush State,
her husband left her. Desperate to find work, she introduced herself
to a movie director named D. W. Griffith. He not only cast her in
his movie, but the two became friends for life. And with this woman,
called Madame Sul-Te-Wan, Black Hollywood began.
Of course, there was more to it than that, but Hollywood always
liked a good story, and the tale of Madame Sul-Te-Wan was a good
enough place to start. So, too, was the early romance of Los Angeles
for all those who journeyed westward.
Even before the movies, Los Angeles held the promise of a world of
endless sunshine and unlimited possibilities. Here was a city with
warm days and cool nights, with winding canyons, steep hills, and
stately mountains looming large and mysterious on the horizon-and
not far from a breathtaking view of an ocean that was clear and
blue, cool and inviting. Those early pioneers of color who ventured
west were as entranced as everyone else. When Los Angeles was
founded in 1781-as a city of angels-by a group of eleven families,
it seemed to throw out a welcome mat to people of color. After all,
of that founding group-forty-four men, women, and
children-twenty-six were of African descent, black or “black
Spaniards,” as they were sometimes called. In those very early
years-before California joined the Union in 1850-Los Angeles must
have seemed like a dazzling confluence of races and cultures,
religions and creeds, a heady brew of ambitions and aspirations, of
unexpected energies and colorful personalities, a city cut off from
the rest of the country and its rules. Here in the wild and woolly
West, no one appeared to think much about the races mixing.
Interracial marriage was sanctified by the church and the
authorities-and was commonly practiced.
Race did not seem to hinder prosperity either. Black Americans were
long a part of city legend and lore. That was certainly true of the
early landowner and “black Spaniard” Francisco Reyes, who owned all
of the vast San Fernando Valley and in 1793 became the alcalde or
mayor of Los Angeles. And of Maria Rita Valdez de Villa, the
adventurous granddaughter of two of the black founders of the city,
who married a Spanish colonial soldier, Vicente Fernando Villa.
After her husband’s death in 1841, Maria received the title to his
lush, green 4,449-acre ranch known as Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. In
1854, in the midst of mounting financial pressures, Maria was forced
to sell her land-and to part with her adobe situated near what later
became Alpine Drive and Sunset Boulevard. In time, the stunning
Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas that she had loved so intensely became a
prime piece of Los Angeles real estate known today as Beverly Hills.
But of those early pre-movie era pioneers, none was better known
than a tough-minded former slave girl named Bridget “Biddy” Mason.
Born in 1818, Biddy had been the “property” of a Mississippi
plantation owner-and a Mormon convert-named Robert Marion Smith, who
migrated with his family first to the Utah Territory in 1847 and
later to San Bernardino, California. During the two thousand-mile
trek across country, Biddy’s job was to keep the cattle herded
together behind the long line of wagon trains, some three hundred by
one account. By then, Biddy was married with three daughters, who
were said to have been fathered by the noble Mormon Robert Marion
Smith.
In California, Biddy quickly adjusted to her new life and a new
sense of identity. Then, one day, Smith informed Biddy and his other
slaves that he had decided to return to Mississippi and that they
should all prepare for the journey back. Smith may not have realized
that California had been admitted to the Union as a free state. But
Biddy knew. She went to the local sheriff, made her plea, and
petitioned the court to let her remain in California. In 1856, Biddy
Mason won freedom not only for herself and her children but also for
another slave family. Afterward, she moved to Los Angeles, and the
city had its first great black heroine.
Biddy shrewdly understood that her day-to-day work as a nurse and
midwife would not guarantee a secure future for her family and
herself. In the West, nothing was more important than land. And in
Los Angeles, there was still much of it-acres upon acres-to be had.
Saving her money, she slowly purchased property-the first on Spring
Street for $250. Before anyone realized it, Biddy Mason had become a
woman of means and one of L.A.’s first black female landowners. In
1872, she joined twelve other charter members in establishing a
place of worship for colored Angelenos, the First African Methodist
Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. She donated money to schools and
nursing homes, provided aid for flood victims, and carried food to
local jails. By the time of her death in 1891, Biddy Mason had a
personal fortune of almost $300,000, and her vast real estate
holdings constituted what later became downtown Los Angeles.
In a town where larger-than-life personalities and drive and
discipline would be treasured, those early black pioneers, like
great movieland production designers, dressed the set for those who
followed. Most others would not have such huge holdings. But they’d
come with vast dreams and visions and a view of themselves just as
grand and as audacious. They’d also believe that in Los Angeles, any
minute you could turn a corner, and something extraordinary might
happen. And that always this sunlit city with swaying palm trees and
fragrant eucalyptus offered a chance not just for self-advancement
but for self-reinvention. What fueled that kind of dream in the
early years of the twentieth century was the new medium that
startled and delighted almost everyone in the nation: the movies.
THE MOVING PICTURES ARRIVE
The movies, of course, transformed Los Angeles from a sleepy western
kind of country town into a sprawling metropolis. Eventually
enveloped by Hollywood, Los Angeles became a company town that
exuded glamour-along with extravagance and excess-and in time
represented the ultimate kind of American success: a place where
everybody, in some way or another, felt connected to those magical
moving pictures that gleamed and glittered on screens in darkened
theaters. And the concept of Hollywood would encompass other areas
where movie people lived and worked: Beverly Hills, Bel Air,
Burbank, Culver City, Universal City, Westwood, Santa Monica, the
San Fernando Valley-and for black Angelenos, parts of the city’s
Eastside and later Westside, in and around a bustling thoroughfare
named Central Avenue.
Originally, movie production had been in the East, with New York at
the center. That changed, however, when the Motion Picture Patents
Company-the huge trust in the East that controlled the patent claims
of major companies like Edison, Biograph, Lubin, Path Exchange, and
Vitagraph-insisted that no company be permitted to produce,
distribute, or exhibit films without its licensing. Huge fees for
the use of cameras and other motion-picture equipment covered by
their patents forced many independent producers out of the movie
business. Other filmmakers moved West, as far away as possible from
the reach of the Patents Company. With its citrus groves and its
avocados and especially its acres of unspoiled land and its
perpetual sunshine, California proved appealing. Here, production
could continue outside year-round.
Among the early filmmakers from the East were Cecil B. DeMille, who
arrived in 1913 to shoot The Squaw Man, and director David Wark
Griffith, who brought his stock company of New York actors to
California-during the winter months-to shoot scenes for his films as
early as 1910. When he began production on his ambitious Civil War
epic, originally called The Clansman and later retitled The Birth of
a Nation, Griffith knew that California was where his mighty battle
scenes had to be filmed and where he could re-create the city of
Piedmont, South Carolina, the central setting of his epic.
By then, Griffith had already established himself as an important
director. Born in 1875 in La Grange, Kentucky, and reared in
Louisville, David (Lewelyn) Wark grew up hearing stories of the Old
South’s power and grandeur. From 1908 to 1913, Griffith made 450
films at the Biograph Studios on East Fourteenth Street in New York
City. Many had been short one-reelers. But with the four-reel Judith
of Bethulia, he began making longer, more ambitious films.
Developing an arsenal of techniques that included crosscutting,
intercutting, expressive lighting, camera movement, and the
close-up, Griffith helped create a syntax for the language of motion
pictures. In the fall of 1913, Griffith left Biograph to join
Reliance-Majestic. A year later, working on what would be his
mighty, racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith
arrived on the West Coast.
CALL HER MADAME
So did an ambitious young African American woman, who had been born
Nellie Wan in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1873. Her mother, Cleo de
Londa, had been a singer; her father, a traveling preacher named
Silas Crawford Wan, whom she once said was Hindu. Whether that was
true or not was anybody’s guess. Later, the story went over well in
Hollywood, which loved those people who created their own colorful
biographies. “My father didn’t mount to nothing,” she once said. “He
had the Bible in one hand and all the women he could get in the
other.” When Silas deserted the family, Nellie’s mother was left to
fend for herself, working as a laundress for actresses in
Louisville. Young Nellie often delivered the laundry. Silently, she
studied the entertainers: their dance steps, vocal mannerisms, and
routines. Infatuated with the world of make-believe, little
Nellie-at age eight-tried to run away to join a circus. Seeing that
she was a born cutup, the white actresses Mary Anderson and Fanny
Davenport both urged the mayor of Louisville, James Whaler, to let
young Nellie audition for a special event: a contest among
twenty-five buck-and-wing dancers at the city’s Buckingham Theater.
Nellie won first place.
At the time, colored entertainers were just starting to come into
their own. Only after the Civil War did they have real opportunities
to work professionally, usually in traveling minstrel or medicine
shows, sometimes in circuses and carnivals, and eventually in black
vaudeville. But always, it was a rough, demanding life, a mad
scramble to find jobs and to stretch earnings.
Taking the dare, Nellie moved to Cincinnati, joined a company called
Three Black Cloaks, and billed herself as Creole Nell. She also
formed her own theatrical companies and toured the East Coast. She
was developing into a striking-looking young woman, not pretty by
the standards of her time but charismatic and assured: she knew that
she was somebody. Perhaps she had also mastered by then what was to
be one of her trademarks in films: that steely eyed, tough, evil
stare that let people know that she was sizing them up-and that they
couldn’t trifle with her.
Her life changed when she married Robert Reed Conley. Around 1910,
with her husband and her two young sons, she moved to Arcadia,
California, near Pasadena. Certainly, Nellie, like other colored
Americans of the time, envisioned Southern California as a land of
opportunities. Property was cheap, which meant that in time, homes
could be bought. Work was plentiful, too, especially on the
railroads. Around the country, the Negro press and Negro
organizations soon encouraged black Americans to go west. During the
first decade of this new twentieth century, the city’s population
grew to some 320,000 citizens, of which some 7,600 were African
Americans.
For Nellie Conley, a new life meant a new identity. She henceforth
called herself Madame Sul-Te-Wan-and insisted that everyone else do
the same. “We never did discover the origin of her name,” actress
Lillian Gish once said. No one was bold enough to ask. Madame may
have had any number of reasons for her new name. In the South, many
colored citizens were addressed by their first names by whites. Or
as Aunt or Uncle. Rarely were they referred to as Miss or Mr. or
Mrs. But now if anyone called her by her first name, then they would
be addressing her as Madame. If anyone wanted to say Aunt Madame,
then that was his or her business. Either way, she would never be
spoken to in familiar terms by anyone. And her very name evoked the
budding grandeur and glamour for which the movie colony would be
known.
But the new life that looked so promising for Madame Sul-Te-Wan
quickly turned sour. Her husband walked out on her and their three
sons. Her youngest was only three weeks old. She was also ten months
behind on her rent. Hers became a hand-to-mouth existence, day by
day worrying where her next meal was coming from. When she learned
of a colored group called the Forum that put on shows with black
entertainers to help them earn money for food and lodging, she went
to the organization with her children by her side. As she explained
her plight, she broke into tears. Her oldest son, not yet seven,
looked up at her and said, “Mother, you are not begging. We are
going to sing and earn what they give you.” The children then
performed. Later, she enlisted the help of a group called the
Associated Charities of Los Angeles to move her children and herself
into a place in the city. But a long dry period followed. To make
matters worse, the local booking companies refused to handle colored
performers. Madame Sul-Te-Wan knew she might end up working as a
maid.
Then she heard talk of a film being shot by a director from her
hometown in Kentucky. She had heard of the director D. W. Griffith
from a man named Dad Ready, whom she met while working in a circus.
Ready had told her of Griffith’s plans to film The Clansman and
wrote her a letter of introduction. “Madame, if you ever go to
California and hear anything at all about D. W. Griffith,” Ready
told her, “get in touch with him because if D. W. Griffith ever sees
you, you’re made.” She still had Ready’s letter, and she decided to
see if it could get her some work.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams
by Donald Bogle
Copyright © 2005 by Donald Bogle.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
One World/Ballantine
Copyright © 2005
Donald Bogle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-345-45418-9
