8

I was in trouble. It wasn’t because of anything I did. It was because of who I saw. Her name was Yvonne Taylor. She was at one of the clubs on 52nd Street, and when I got up to say hello, I knew I was about to risk whatever sense of calm and order there was in my life and, more than that, my sanity.

Yvonne and I knew each other as kids, but we had lost contact. When I said hello in the club, she wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “Congratulations on everything. It’s good to see you.” Her warm breath caressed the side of my face and her perfume cast its spell. I sat down next to her. There was an instant attraction and an understanding we were going to spend time together, starting that night.

I’d been in love with Yvonne since we were teenagers. She was a gorgeous woman with an enviably curvy figure, and she dressed to show it off. Her femininity was intense, intoxicating, and wonderful. Her sexuality was out in the open, like a piece of jewelry that everyone noticed. She was briefly engaged to a well-known athlete, but there was no way even a sports hero could hold on to her.

She made her own rules. A slight turn of her head magically summoned a waiter with a fresh drink. An unlit cigarette resulted in a proffered match. When I told Yvonne that I was married, she tilted her head slightly and offered a faint smile, as if to say, “You’ll have to figure that out, not me.” She was right.

I always knew that Audrey and I would not stay married into old age like my parents. I think she did, too. We were too young and too different when we exchanged vows. My commitment as the father of our child was never in doubt, but I had a weakness when it came to love and romance—that first moment of eye contact, a glance indicating interest, a mischievous smile, a sexy walk, a playful touch. That was my song.

Sultry sophistication and then some—especially “then some”—describes my very independent and beautiful girlfriend for a brief time, Yvonne Taylor.

I fell in love easily, and for some reason, it was usually with women who were not the best match for me. It had been that way with Audrey. It was that way with Yvonne.

Yvonne and I messed around before I separated from Audrey and moved into Yvonne’s place on Central Park West. I don’t remember how I managed all that drama between performances of A Taste of Honey at night, but I did, and so did everyone involved, in their own way.

Yvonne’s apartment was in a complex that was home to several celebrities and well-known New Yorkers, including jazz greats Max Roach and Horace Silver. I never asked what she did for a living or how she afforded her fancy apartment and stylish clothes and jewelry. She was a businesswoman, with a lot of pretty women coming in and out of her apartment from afternoon to sundown, talking and exchanging information.

I didn’t pay that much attention, though one day I heard her on the phone with fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. He was hosting a party and wanted Yvonne to attend with some of her girlfriends. It seemed business as usual, except when I saw Yvonne return from that soiree at 5:00 a.m. the following morning wearing a new floor-length mink coat and a black diamond necklace around her neck—a “thank-you” from Oscar, she said.

I had been living with her for a bit when I discovered Yvonne had a girlfriend. It was a surprise, but also interesting, and I was curious to know more. Yvonne explained that her girlfriend satisfied her in a way that a man couldn’t, adding that in bed, she was able to be more like a man, which suited her. She liked to be in charge. At Yvonne’s suggestion, the three of us had a little liaison, my first ménage à trois, and strangely enough, I found myself competing with Yvonne to see which one of us was the better lover.

I took Yvonne with me the day I recorded my album for Prestige Records. I was booked for a full day and night in a studio in New Jersey. I worked with producer Don Schlitten, master engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and an ensemble led by my friend, the pianist and composer George Cory, who, with his partner, Douglass Cross, would soon earn acclaim and quite a bit of money from their song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

My album, titled Let’s Misbehave, was released in mid-1961 and consisted of ten standards that George had preselected, including the title song, “Let’s Misbehave”; “Warm Tonight”; and my signature song from the play, “A Taste of Honey.” I didn’t have big expectations for it. To me, the album was a lark, an offer I didn’t want to decline, and something that broke up the routine of doing the play.

Not that I was bored. Living with Yvonne made that impossible. One night I came home from the theater, opened the door to the apartment, and walked into an orgy in progress. There were women and men, and a lot of nakedness. The craziness was more than I was prepared to deal with after work. As much as I loved women, I was about romancing them one at a time, not in mass quantity.

I paused in the doorway to take in the situation, then waded past the bodies and walked to the bedroom, where I hung up my clothes and got ready to take a shower. I invited a young woman who was already undressed to join me. Why not? It appeared to be the evening’s theme. However, when Yvonne walked into the bathroom, naked, and saw I had company, she stopped and glared at me with eyes that scalded.

After my shower, I wrapped a towel around myself and walked into the bedroom, where I found Yvonne in bed with a guy. Touché, I thought. She insisted that I sit and watch her have sex. I rolled my eyes. My expression said, “Really? Is this what you really want?” From the manner in which she turned away from me and got back to business, I knew it was. I burst out laughing. I thought this whole thing was hilarious—hilariously absurd.

The guy in bed with Yvonne was not amused. With me laughing at the bedside, he was unable to get anything going, and that made Yvonne even angrier with me. She pushed him away, jumped out of the bed, grabbed a pair of scissors, and aimed the pointy end at me. I danced around the room like we were kids playing tag. Try to get me! Instead, Yvonne went to my bureau, opened the drawer containing my beautiful alpaca sweaters, and cut them into pieces. That hurt almost more than if she had cut me.

It was the excuse I needed to get away from Yvonne. As soon as I saw an opening, I gathered some clothes and spent the next week or two elsewhere, including a few nights with Audrey and Corey. The next time I saw Yvonne, she informed me that she was done with New York and was moving to Italy. “You can come with me, baby,” she said. That was a nonstarter—and a relief. I was still doing A Taste of Honey, and though it was closing in September, I couldn’t imagine myself moving to Europe with Yvonne. I was obviously not that serious of a person. But I was a little too serious for her level of insanity.

After A Taste of Honey took its final curtain, I tried my hand as a nightclub singer. To me, it was like making my album, something new and different and not anything to take too seriously, though I did want to do well. With help from pianist and songwriter George Cory, I worked up an act of standards and performed several practice sets in New York before flying to Chicago for a two-week booking at the Playboy Club.

I had too much respect for singers to think of myself as one of them. But I was happy to have the job and curious to see what it would be like and whether I could pull it off. I approached the gig as if I was playing the part of a chic East Side singer. I put on a tailored black suit and crooned my way through smoky renditions of “A Taste of Honey” and “Let’s Misbehave,” a light version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “ ’S Wonderful,” and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” my favorite song in the show.

I stayed at the Maryland Hotel, a hot spot for Ellington, Anita O’Day, Bobby Short, and other entertainers. It was also a hangout for mobsters, as I witnessed on my first night there. I had wandered into the club and noticed an older man who was wandering from table to table, saying this and that to people, not making much sense but not causing any harm. I sensed the regulars there knew him. But one guy made fun of him. He mimicked the older man, in an attempt to amuse those at his table. Suddenly, a couple goons appeared, grabbed the guy, and beat the crap out of him. It was interesting.

One afternoon I spotted Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s Mercedes convertible parked in front of the club. A night or two later, I met the man himself. He wore a tuxedo and seemed like he was hosting a party, which I suppose he was. Hefner had booked comedian Dick Gregory at the club earlier that year, launching his influential career and adding to the club a reputation for edgy, new talent. My act couldn’t have been more different or tamer. But I was not immune to the volatile times. One night, between shows, I watched an interview with Malcolm X on television. I’d never heard a Black man articulate so clearly the political, economic, and social issues stemming from racism in the United States, and also provide solutions that made sense to me. I was so moved that I wanted to cancel my second show and just sit and think about everything he’d said.

I didn’t have that kind of authority, and in retrospect that was a good thing, because I ended up taking the emotion of that interview onto the stage and channeling it into my performance. As time went on, and as will become evident, this would become my method of activism, taking in ideas and sharing them through my work.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum, comedian Lenny Bruce happened to be in town at the same time—and staying in my same hotel. I bumped into the outspoken comic in the lobby late one night. He was headlining a nearby club. A few nights later, he performed a late, late show for all the entertainers and nightclub workers in town. I was there, and like everyone else, I was captivated by his mix of comedy and social and political commentary. It was one of the most brilliant one-man performances I have seen.

Offstage, Lenny was low-key and struck me as needy, someone who was lonely and in need of a friend, and I was that person in Chicago. But I didn’t want to engage beyond this chance overlap of our schedules. We might’ve become good friends, but I sensed no amount of friendship would fill the emptiness he probably felt when he wasn’t standing in front of an audience. Even though I saw him perform again in New York and another time in Los Angeles, I kept a distance.

Back in New York, I didn’t have a job. My friend Herbert Jacoby let me sleep on the sofa in his chic East Side apartment. The two of us had grown close from the many nights I had spent in his club, the Blue Angel, listening to people like Mabel Mercer, Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Barbra Streisand.

Herbert tipped me off to Streisand. “Don’t miss her,” he said of the singer, who was then only nineteen years old. It was November 1961, and she had performed at another small club in the Village, the Bon Soir, and coming to the Blue Angel was another step up the ladder for the singer from Brooklyn. Herbert had booked her for four weeks. There was already a buzz about her among Herbert and those like him who knew about such things before everyone else, and it was for good reason: that voice.

On the night I saw her, I think Barbra was the third act to go on, and after hearing her for thirty seconds, maybe less, I knew she was a brilliant, original talent and unlike anyone else. Afterward, I went backstage with Herbert and offered my congratulations. “The whole world is going to know about you,” I said, which was true. I had much more to say, but I kept my comments brief so Barbra wouldn’t think I was flirting with her, though as history has proved, there was indeed much more to say about her.

Some of my favorite moments were spent in the Blue Angel and similar nightclubs, listening to a singer or a musician take me and everyone else on a journey through song. The vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross immediately comes to mind. Jon Hendricks was extraordinary, as were so many I was lucky enough to see, including Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Hazel Scott, and Sinatra. And I will never forget the first of the several times I saw Lena Horne, who was extraordinary.

At the time, I was in A Taste of Honey and Lena was at the Waldorf. As I mentioned earlier, she was a friend of my mother’s, and she sometimes left her daughter, Gail, at our house when she went on the road, so I was familiar with Lena in that way where you don’t necessarily see someone the way others do, but that night there was no way to see her as other than sensational. She turned that stage into an intimate living room, and then into a dance club, and then into a smoky jazz hole-in-the-wall, singing Cole Porter and Ellington.

One of the main reasons these moments stand out is because it was back when words and phrasing were important. These performers weren’t just singers, they were storytellers. Lena Horne, Duke Ellington—they were masterful storytellers with words and music. Mabel Mercer sat in a chair and talked to the audience. They conjured up images, stirred emotions, created scenes, and took you on adventures. They understood sentimentality and romance. They helped me understand it, too. Their music became very much a part of who I am.

Herbert prided himself on having exceptional taste in music and everything else. His apartment was chic and upscale. He introduced me to fine wine, liquors, and design and broadened my sophistication about New York City and the world beyond. We had very separate and different lifestyles, but we shared an appetite for interesting people, and I looked forward to meeting up with him at his place late at night—him returning from the club, and me to his couch—and talking for an hour or two.

Herbert rarely ran out of energy, and the shelf of pills in his kitchen was probably the reason why. His friends ran the gamut of characters. Stars, nightbirds, writers, foreigners, professionals, and those who defied description. One acquaintance, a popular German TV host, broke down in tears when I asked him about the Nazis’ persecution of Jews during World War II. “I was a solider on the front,” he sobbed. “I didn’t know anything about it.” Then there was Herbert’s refined friend who owned a little restaurant where he hosted secret after-hours parties with young men dressed up in Roman outfits.

Writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten took this one day in his New York City apartment. To me, it’s a legacy moment—Jimmy Baldwin brought me to Carl’s. I was young and ready.

Herbert took me to meet writer-photographer Carl Van Vechten at his apartment on Central Park West. Van Vechten was a sharp-eyed cultural gadfly, friends with Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, and various avant-garde luminaries. He made his reputation chronicling the Harlem Renaissance as a critic and novelist. His 1926 fictional depiction of life in Harlem, Nigger Heaven, was literary dynamite that divided the intellectual community. By the time I met him, he was best known as a photographer.

Meeting Van Vechten was part of the whirlwind around me as an up-and-coming actor. Herbert enjoyed making the introductions, connecting people of interest and importance. Van Vechten expressed interest in doing my portrait, and I treated the sitting as an honor. He’d recently photographed James Earl Jones. Now it was my turn. I recognized the significance, and I was ready.

Herbert was so thoroughly New York, so reflective about the city’s modern, twenty-four-hour culture, energy, lifestyle, as was I at the time, and as so many have noted through song and literature, it felt like the center of the universe, the only place to be. The city was full of excitement and enchantment. When I had free time, I spent hours walking through Manhattan, from one end to the other. I liked nothing better than walking from my family’s place at 110th Street through the park, over into Yorkville, then back to Midtown and straight down into the Village. I knew every thrift store and shop with collectibles. I was perpetually on the hunt for vintage suits from the 1930s, perfume bottles for my grandmother, and Chinese dolls with silk clothes for my mother.

There were Irish bars, Chinese restaurants, and Jewish delicatessens all on the same street. Every language imaginable was spoken. I eavesdropped on children, old people, beggars, musicians, all types of people, because that’s who was on the streets of New York City—all types of people. It was amazing. Every few blocks was a different chapter in a novel, a different show being acted out.

My living arrangement with Herbert was never permanent. Initially, I needed a couch to crash on and it lined up with a trip he was making to Paris, where he had started his nightclub career in the 1930s. Then he returned from his trip; I was continuing to recover from the craziness of Yvonne with the help of a Lithuanian woman named Donna Sumner. I brought her back to the apartment several times, always trying to make sure Herbert wasn’t there. The one time he walked in on us, it was one time too many for him.

I packed up and left with our friendship intact. There were no hard feelings. I needed to figure out what was next.

In 1962, I joined the off-Broadway play The Blacks, French playwright Jean Genet’s absurdist drama about racism and Black identity. First published in 1958, the play follows a group of Black actors who re-create the murder of a White woman and subsequent trial in front of an all-White court, played by Black actors in white masks. The play-within-a-play had debuted in May 1961 at the St. Mark’s Playhouse, with an opening-night cast that included Maya Angelou, James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson, Louis Gossett Jr., Godfrey Cambridge, Ethel Ayler, and Raymond St. Jacques.

I had mixed feelings about joining The Blacks because it was an off-Broadway production and what I feared might be a smaller stage and less prestige. A Taste of Honey had spoiled me. But I was pragmatic. I had a child to support and a career to build, and I decided it was best to be on the stage, even if the stage wasn’t on Broadway.

However, there was nothing small about The Blacks. The New York Times had said it “makes theatergoing the adventure it should be.” Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, had seen it, and afterward Dr. King was reported to have said, “The movement needs this.” I didn’t receive the warmest of welcomes after taking over the lead role of Deodatus Village from James Earl. The ensemble cast was extremely close and cliquish, and several of the actors were upset that I was given a role they had hoped to claim as their own. A couple of them even threatened me physically. I cried one night before going onstage.

Once I got in front of the audience, though, I was a different person. A warrior. The part of Village was written in such a way that, within the structure of the story, I was able to improvise as much as I wanted—or dared—and, because I saw myself as a maverick, I went beyond the way James Earl had played Village. Before what turned out to be my final performance, I went out to dinner with the actress who played opposite me. Then, onstage, when our characters were having an argument, I took out a package of sugar I’d grabbed at the restaurant and poured it in her hair. I knew the issues Black women had with their hair. I also knew what I did was outrageous.

Claudia McNeil and Sidney Poitier in *A Raisin in the Sun*

What I didn’t know or expect was the reaction it provoked. The actress froze in front of me, statue-like in stunned disbelief, then quiet, simmering rage. When she tried to speak, her mouth moved—her jaw literally flapped up and down—but nothing came out. Afterward, Maya Angelou, who played the Queen, lit into me with all sorts of harsh words, as did several others, and they literally ran me out of the theater. Only Charles Gordone, who had taken over as the emcee from Roscoe Lee Browne—and who later won a Pulitzer Prize for writing the 1969 play No Place to Be Somebody—stuck up for me.

But the damage was done. A complaint was filed against me with the Actors’ Equity union, and I lost my job. I was ready to go, anyway.

In December 1962, I returned to Broadway in the play Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, a drama about a Black family in New Orleans steeped in turmoil. Dancer Alvin Ailey was the lead in a cast that included Roscoe and Cicely, Claudia McNeil, Al Freeman Jr., Janet MacLachlan, and Diana Sands, a scintillating actress who’d played Sidney Poitier’s sister in A Raisin in the Sun and was someone I believe would’ve gone on to have one of the great careers if cancer hadn’t cut her life short in 1973.

I was hired as a “standby” to Alvin, and even though it was a step up from understudy, I wouldn’t have normally accepted the job if the show’s director, Josh Logan, hadn’t taken me aside and quietly assured me the lead would be mine soon enough. I inferred the meaning of his message but stayed out of his business and waited patiently in the wings, which wasn’t easy because I genuinely liked and admired Alvin, who was abundantly gifted, intelligent, handsome, and charismatic—but not necessarily as an actor.

Six years older than me, Alvin had come to New York from the West Coast, where he had gone to school and studied dance. In 1958, he started the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, determined to bring his perspective of the Black experience to the arts. I admired and related to his desire to honor the culture but not be limited by it. He didn’t want to be known only as a Black dancer or choreographer. Not that he denied his race. He embraced it without being limited or defined by it. He had his own voice.

I was fortunate to be around individuals like Alvin, Roscoe, and Lonne Elder, as well as so many others, and if that sometimes got lost in the shadows of youthful ambition and competition, I did have an awareness that our drive and determination to be seen and heard made us all better. Unfortunately, after six previews and a handful of shows, it was an open secret that Alvin wasn’t delivering as the lead. One night he upstaged Claudia McNeil. I don’t think he did it on purpose. It was more the unevenness of his acting.

In their next scene together, she was supposed to slap him in the face. Well, she knocked the shit out of him. The poor guy. He couldn’t speak for five minutes. Josh Logan kept cutting Alvin’s part until he was in danger of altering the entire play. Finally, he met with me in private and said he was ready to make a change. But there was an issue with me that had to be resolved before that happened.

“You have to make it okay with Claudia,” he said. “Apparently there is a problem.”

I shrugged.

“Okay, a history,” he added.

I nodded to let him know that I understood the situation.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

Claudia McNeil was a large woman—larger than life in every way. The product of a Black father and an Apache mother, she was raised in New York and adopted by a Jewish couple as a teenager. She learned Yiddish and considered herself Jewish, but was a devout Catholic when we worked together on The Last Angry Man. She played Sidney Poitier’s mother in A Raisin in the Sun, and they seemed to have had a dispute on that film. If they didn’t, she apparently had a problem with him. He may never have known it. I never knew the details either, but when Claudia and I worked on one of those Sunday religious programs, she overheard me complimenting Sidney’s work and took that as an insult to herself. No amount of logical explanation calmed her down. “I will never speak to you again,” she said. And she didn’t.

Not that I didn’t continue to try to make amends. When I lived with Audrey, Claudia and her second husband had a place down the block. Every time we crossed paths, she turned and gave me the silent treatment. I visited her numerous times to try to heal the wound. She always let me inside, but I imagined it was because her husband, Herman, insisted. As soon as I walked in, he rushed out the door to hang out on the corner with his friends, leaving me to fumble around for the words that would persuade his wife to forgive me.

Before each night’s performance of Tiger Tiger, the cast gathered in front of Claudia’s dressing room and she led everyone in prayer. Ordinarily I hung in the background, but that night, after speaking with Josh Logan, I made sure Claudia saw me in the prayer circle. After she went onstage, I slipped into her dressing room and waited. Playwright Noel Coward was also there. I never knew why, and it didn’t seem to matter to him or Claudia. When she returned to her dressing room, it was as if she expected me to be there. She walked up to me, silent and solemn and purposeful, put her hands on my shoulders, and said, “My son has come back to me.”

I almost died. It was straight out of a movie comedy. I kept my head bowed and stared intently at her shoes, trying to keep from laughing and crying at the same time. I couldn’t believe I had to go through such a charade to get a part in a play. Then she left with Noel.

Afterward, Josh Logan thanked me and said he would make the change. He had no idea that the best acting I would ever do for him was in Claudia’s dressing room.

After all that, though, the play closed before I had a chance to do even one show. Its run totaled thirty-three performances, not even a full month. I was angry, disappointed, and frustrated, but not only because the play had closed. After such a promising start to my career, I was now at a standstill, and I didn’t know why. It was January 1963, and instead of starting the new year as the lead in a Broadway production, I was out of work and looking for a new job.