On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel made history when she became the first Black person to win an Academy Award, for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. As she stood in front of her white peers at the Cocoanut Grove, she was the picture of pride and joy. “I sincerely hope that I shall always be a credit to my race and the motion picture industry,” she said, crying. “My heart is too full to tell you how I feel.”
But as biographer Jill Watts notes in the masterful Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood, that same evening, McDaniel was seated at the edge of the room, close to the stage but separate from her colleagues. For McDaniel, life was a tightrope walk of trying to satisfy herself, her prejudiced bosses, and the representation-starved Black community—attempting to be all things to all people. “I always wanted to be before the public,” she once said, per Watts. “I’m always acting. I guess it’s the ham in me.”
Married four times, McDaniel was “alive to her fingertips,” friend Norman Vincent Peale told Watts. Lena Horne remembered her as “an extremely gracious, intelligent and gentle lady.” McDaniel looked for challenges, but her artistic ambition was often blocked by racism and sexism. “When you cease to want, you cease to live. Just like when I won the Academy Award,” she explained, per Watts. “You sit down and think now you have everything, all you want. But of course, you don’t.”
War Wounds
The horrors of slavery and the Civil War haunted Hattie McDaniel’s family. Both of her parents, Susan and Henry, had been born into slavery in the mid-Atlantic South. During the Civil War, Henry bravely joined the Tennessee 12th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, fighting for the Union at the brutal Battle of Nashville in 1864. According to Watts, Henry’s jaw was shattered during the battle, leaving “an open wound inside his mouth” with “bone fragments and infection…now oozing out of it.” Suffering from other injuries as well, Henry received little to no medical treatment and after the war valiantly worked hard labor jobs despite his constant pain.
By the time the couple’s last child, Hattie, was born in 1893, the McDaniel family had migrated West to Wichita, Kansas. According to McDaniel, the family was so poor that she was born malnourished, weighing only three and a half pounds. They moved to Denver, where the increasingly infirm Henry finally succeeded in receiving a small pension from the U.S. government for his military service, after decades of trying.
Although the McDaniel family often went hungry, they were tight-knit and creative. Hattie grew up singing in the church choir and attending integrated schools. “I knew I could sing and dance,” she recalled. “I was doing it so much that my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop.”
She would also help her father fill out questionnaires from members of the government, who continually made it almost impossible for him to receive the pension and disability payments he deserved. In 1908, a government lackey maddeningly wrote that he could not increase Henry’s pension since there was no official proof he had reached the age of 70. “It is impossible for me to furnish a record of my birth,” Henry wrote back succinctly. “I was a slave.”
The Old Pep Machine
Despite constant hardships and discrimination, the McDaniel children became entertainment trailblazers in the Denver area, mounting plays and reviews for members of the Black community. In 1914, Hattie and her sister Etta, billed as the McDaniel Sisters Company, mounted an all-female minstrel show. According to Watts, the statuesque, agile Hattie developed a zany “Mammy” character, a cultural critique of the racist archetype she would one day become famous for. According to Watts, Black audience members “considered these minstrel routines to be hysterical spoofs of white minstrelsy and its outlandish racial stereotypes.”
For the next two decades, McDaniel lived the hardscrabble life of a dedicated journeyman artist. “In my life,” she later said, “God comes first, work second, and men third.” During the 1920s, McDaniel refashioned herself into a sly, subversive blues singer, touted as “the Old Pep Machine” and the “Sepia Sophie Tucker.” In between treading the boards for the Black vaudeville circuit TOBA (derided by performers as “Tough on Black Asses”) and writing and recording blues song including “Boo Hoo Blues” and “Dentist Chair Blues,” she would take jobs as a domestic worker or cook to make ends meet.
In 1929, McDaniel was traveling the country as part of the chorus in the Florenz Ziegfeld touring company of Show Boat when the stock market crash forced the famed producer to let most of his performers go. Stranded in unfamiliar Milwaukee, McDaniel got a job as a restroom attendant at the nightclub Sam Pick’s Suburban Inn. One night, all the singers had left before closing, and the management needed an act. McDaniel stepped in, and brought down the house with her rendition of “St. Louis Blues.” Hired on the spot, she headlined at the inn for two years before it was forced to close during the Depression.
Out of work once again, McDaniel packed her bags. With $20 in her purse, she hopped on a bus headed to Hollywood.
High-Hat Hattie
By 1937, McDaniel was the go-to actress to play comedic, sassy maids and “Mammy” characters, roles that according to Watts were usually “derogatory and servile.” But after years of struggle and uncertainty, McDaniel was pragmatic. “I can be a maid for $7 a week,” she said, per Watts. “Or I can play a maid for $700 a week.”
That year, Hollywood was all a-twitter about the casting of David O. Selznick’s version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. According to Watts:
A coy suggestion came from Sam McDaniel’s [Hattie’s brother, a successful Hollywood actor] good friend Bing Crosby. Why not, Crosby asked Selznick, use that woman who played Queenie in the recent film version of Show Boat? The famous crooner claimed he did not know her name but thought she would be a good choice.
From the time her casting was announced, McDaniel faced harsh criticism from influential members of the Black community. “We feel proud over the fact that Hattie McDaniel won the coveted role of ‘Mammy,’” wrote the influential Earl Morris in The Pittsburgh Courier. “It means about $2,000 for Miss McDaniel in individual advancement…[and] nothing in racial advancement.”
According to Watts, much of the cast banded together during the grueling shoot. Black cast members were particularly supportive of one another, gathering around to watch each other’s takes and applauding after the cameras stopped. McDaniel was used by the studio to assuage the Black civil right leaders who worried that the film would further promote racist stereotypes. “Don’t worry,” she reportedly said, according to one studio press release. “There is nothing in this picture that will injure colored people. If there was, I wouldn’t be in it.”
When costar Butterfly McQueen rebelled against her demeaning character Prissy, intentionally flubbing lines and demanding that star Vivien Leigh apologize after a stinging onscreen slap, McDaniel counseled caution. “McQueen later claimed McDaniel took her aside and warned her, ‘You’ll never come back to Hollywood; you complain too much,’” writes Watts.
Selznick quickly realized that McDaniel was a standout in the film. Still, he acquiesced to the city of Atlanta’s demand that no Black actors attend the movie’s December 15, 1939 premiere. Instead, McDaniel received a telegram from Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell, who wrote, “Wish you could have heard the applause.”
“A Credit to My Race”
McDaniel’s historic Oscar win was a double-edged sword. It locked her into an increasingly personal feud with Walter White, the erudite, sophisticated leader of the NAACP. Black (and some white) intellectuals had long railed against the demeaning, stereotypical roles actors like McDaniel, Lincoln Perry (“Stepin Fetchit”), and her good friend Louise Beavers played. White himself called on Black actors to stop “muffing and playing the clown before the camera.”
At a 1942 NAACP meeting in Los Angeles, in front of 10,000 delegates—including McDaniel—White stood onstage with Hollywood newcomer Lena Horne, conventionally beautiful, cultured, and light-skinned, whom he believed was the ideal modern Black film star (a concept informed, in part, by colorism and classism within the Black community itself). In his speech, he explained that he had been negotiating directly with the studios to change the roles available to Black actors in Hollywood.
McDaniel was incensed, believing that it was she and other fellow Black SAG actors who should be negotiating with studio execs—not White. “I have no quarrel with the NAACP or colored fans who object to the roles some of us play, but I naturally resent being completely ignored at the convention,” she said, per Watts. “I have struggled for 11 years to open up opportunities for our group in the industry and have tried to reflect credit upon my race, in exemplary conduct both on-and off-screen.”
According to Watts, McDaniel was particularly angry that she was the only actor White explicitly called out. She accused him of treating her “with the tone and manner that a southern colonel would use to his favorite slave.”
Indeed, White did little to smooth over the situation. After viewing In This Our Life, a 1942 film in which McDaniel gives a tour de force performance as the mother of a brilliant son targeted because of his race, White did not reach out to McDaniel. But he did write to her costar Olivia de Havilland to commend her on the film. Things came to a head in January 1946, when White held a summit with Black actors including Lena Horne and Sam McDaniel.
Hattie McDaniel did not attend. “I cannot accept your invitation to break bread with Walter White,” she wrote in response to the invitation, “for he has openly insulted my intelligence.” At her core, McDaniel was hurt by what she saw as White’s disparagement of her artistic accomplishments. “God has endowed me with other talents,” she said, “which Walter White and no other persons know nothing of, and they are not menial as he has said.”
The Queen of Sugar Hill
As Watts notes, while McDaniel was feuding openly with the national head of the NAACP, she was working closely with the group’s Los Angeles branch to save her mansion in Sugar Hill, a neighborhood of stately Victorian homes that had become the Black Beverly Hills.
“I’m a fine Mammy on the screen. But I’m Hattie McDaniel in my house,” she told Lena Horne. Generous to a fault, she was known as an avid supporter of the war effort and Black causes. “I got friends that I love and I need like I hope they love and need me,” she said.
Always immaculately dressed, with her beloved dalmatians nearby, McDaniel was a legendary hostess. “She had the most exquisite house I had ever seen in my life, the best of everything,” Lena Horne recalled. At her parties, her close friends Clark Gable, Cab Calloway, Louella Parsons, Paul Robeson, Bing Crosby, Louise Beavers, Duke Ellington, and Esther Williams broke the color lines in segregated Hollywood. “South Harvard became a salon where black artists, including the host herself, could resist white domination of their talents,” Watts writes.
But in 1945, white homeowners in the area began an attempt to push Black residents out of their homes, claiming that restrictive covenants barred them from the neighborhood. McDaniel took the lead in fighting the racist attack, organizing neighbors like Louise Beavers and Ethel Waters, and hosting meetings in her home. On December 5, 1945, McDaniel and a group of over 200 supporters were in the courtroom when legendary lawyer Loren Miller argued successfully that racially restrictive deeds and covenants were unconstitutional, thus, according to Watts, “opening the door for the end of such residential segregation throughout the United States.”
Everything but the Harp
By the late 1940s, McDaniel was conflicted professionally and personally. She experienced a false pregnancy at the age of 51 and racked up two more failed marriages. According to her best friend Ruby Goodwin, there were “bitter years of loneliness and disillusionment when she thought her race did not appreciate her artistry.” McDaniel continued to defend her life’s work. “How can one in your profession not know that millions of negros in this country…are employed in domestic roles?” she asked a Black reporter in 1949. “Surely you don’t think the roles I portray are obsolete?”
But she continued to be a hit with predominantly white audiences. In 1947 she took over the titular role of the hit CBS radio show Beulah (originally played by a white man), where she played a cheerful problem-solving maid for a white family. But by the early 1950s, complications from diabetes as well as breast cancer caused her to be the first Black performer to move into the Motion Picture Country Home. She jokingly claimed she wanted her epitaph to read, “Well, I’ve played everything but the harp.”
McDaniel stipulated that she wanted to be buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where white film stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino rested. According to Watts, always the realist, she knew that she would probably be turned away, and chose Rosedale Cemetery as her second choice. She soon slipped into a coma and died on October 26, 1952. She was buried in Rosedale (though a cenotaph for her was placed in Hollywood Forever in 1999).
McDaniel left behind a remarkable, complicated legacy of artistry, pathos and perseverance. In one poem, she noted, “Trained upon pain and punishment, I’ve groped my way through the night, But the flag still flies from my tent, and I’ve only begun to fight.”
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