Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “When sorrows come, they come not in single spies but in battalions,” and Hattie had weathered hers: white and black slings, aborted marriages, imaginary pregnancy, and a curtailed career. Bloody but unbowed, she returned to radio, a medium which knew no color, the one where she had reigned as Hi-Hat-Hattie. However, after taping several episodes of The Beulah Show, she met the one foe she was not able to overcome. By 1952, she was too ill from breast cancer to work and died in the hospital situated on the grounds of the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills. At the church service, she received a variation of her Academy ovation when thousands of mourners turned out to celebrate her life and its singular achievement of breaking the color barrier in film.
Through her bequest, she directed her Oscar be presented to the predominantly black Howard University for their drama department in remembrance of its having honored her with a luncheon after her historic win. Mysteriously, the trophy vanished during the 1960s racial unrest, and to this date, its whereabouts remain unknown. One theory claims rioting students tossed it into the Potomac in protest against racist stereotyping.
Even in death, Ms. McDaniel could not escape the long shadow cast by Jim Crow. In her will, she had stated, “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. I also wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery.” She had always loved being among the stars, and the cemetery held the remains of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and other silver screen immortals. Though the floral, clothing, and casket requests were respected, her desired final resting place did not come to pass because of its segregationist policy.
Posthumously, the Old South did become a civilization gone with the wind. In 1999, the new owner of the cemetery offered to have Hattie’s remains transferred, though her family declined the offer. In a posthumous mea culpa, he placed a monument on its grounds. A further acknowledgement was two stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and her image on a 2006 postage stamp. The latter was fitting as she had left her stamp on American history. Hattie McDaniel had proved not just a credit to her race, but to the human race, the embodiment of a steel gardenia.
Upon hearing the word “president,” the image that is conjured is of a man wearing a dark suit and tie standing in the Oval Office. In sharp juxtaposition, during World War II, Bette Davis assumed the same mantle as the Chief Executive when she held the position of the first female President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This august body had its origin in 1927 during a dinner at the home of MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer. A week later, thirty-six members dined at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel (later the tragic site of the assassination of Robert Kennedy); the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was born. Douglas Fairbanks served as its first president.
The Academy Awards ceremony debuted in 1929 at The Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room with 270 attendees. The 13.5-inch gold-plated statuette issued to the winners served as the most coveted of prizes. The official name of the ultimate trophy is the Academy Award of Merit, but it goes by the vernacular: Oscar.
A theory as to the origin of the moniker links it to Oscar Wilde, who while on a US lecture tour, was asked if he had won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. The wit replied, “Yes, but while many people have won the Newdigate, it is seldom that the Newdigate gets an Oscar.” Another legend has it that the Academy librarian, Margaret Herrick, saw a sketch of the prototype and remarked, “He looks a lot like my Uncle Oscar.” Bette claimed that after she had won the award in 1935, she nicknamed it after her husband’s middle name because the statue shared the same flat derriere.
A road less traveled began in Lowell, Massachusetts, with the birth of Ruth Elizabeth in 1908. The driving force of her youth was her mother, Ruth; her father, Harlow Morrell Davis, was a Harvard Law School graduate who worked as a government patent attorney. Harlow divorced his wife when the young Ms. Davis was seven, and her younger, mentally challenged sister, Barbara, was five. The future star went by Betty until a friend of her mother, who was reading Balzac’s La Cousine Bette, suggested the spelling change, with the words it would “set you apart, my dear.”
In her teens, Bette returned to New England where, desperate for money, she waited on tables at school and once posed nude for a woman making a sculpture. She was determined to become an actress, and Ruth took her to Manhattan in 1928 where she unsuccessfully auditioned for a role in the prestigious Civic Reparatory Theater. Her first professional acting job was with a winter stock company in Rochester run by director George Cukor, who dismissed her after a few months. To offset the back-to-back rejections, after her New York acting debut in 1929 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, The New York Times stated she was “an entrancing creature.”
The movies had learned to talk a few years before, and Hollywood was keen on luring Broadway actors and actresses who had commanding voices to take screen tests. Ruth and Bette, with $57 between them, took the train to the coast on a lark they never expected to last a lifetime. Universal Studios gave Ms. Davis a $300-a-week contract. However, by 1932, her career had consisted of lackluster films, and the studio moguls agreed she had “the sex appeal of a string bean.” At five feet, three inches and 112 pounds, she was not the Hollywood ideal of the long-limbed blonde bombshell beauty. At a later date, she would smugly state that over the years, she drew more people into theaters “than all the sexpots put together.”
Discouraged, mother and daughter decided to return to New York. That was when George Arliss, the English actor, hired her as his leading lady in The Man Who Played God, her breakthrough movie role. The film proved a success, and Warner Brothers signed her, beginning a love-hate relationship with the studio characterized by Bette storming off sets. The burgeoning diva’s suspension for refusing to act in what she considered inferior parts culminated in a lawsuit by the star.
Unlike leading ladies of the day, Ms. Davis had no qualms about playing unsympathetic roles and was thrilled in 1934 when Warner Brothers lent her to RKO Studios to play the cruel waitress Mildred in W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage opposite Leslie Howard as Philip, the crippled hero. She observed, “villains always had the best-written parts.” Bette was always proud of her two Oscars, one for Dangerous in 1935, the second for Jezebel in 1938. She said, “I’m not a bit modest about them. I don’t use those boys for doorstops.” A lingering regret was when she turned down the chance to play one of the greatest roles in cinematic history—Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Ultimately, as queen of the red carpet, Ms. Davis became the first person to receive ten Oscar nominations.
Ms. Davis, the possessor of a prickly personality, was dreaded off-screen as much as she was adulated onscreen. The consensus was working on a Bette production proved traumatic for all. Those of a charitable nature referred to her as “a real piece of work.” Co-star Brian Aherne pronounced, “Nobody but a mother” could have