9
I thought my situation might be changing when director Ashley Feinstein asked me to join The Blue Boy in Black, a racial satire at the Masque Theatre on 42nd Street. Cicely Tyson was set to star as a maid for an arrogant crime novelist and his wife. After she stepped forward to help the novelist (actor John Hillerman) with his book, the maid ends up writing her own. I played her fellow servant, whom she casts out on her way up and out.
Despite a good review in The New York Times, the production closed after a twenty-three performances, barely three weeks of work, April 30 through May 19, 1963. I took it personally and sunk into a depression. How could I work so hard and commit myself to excellence, earn praise from critics, and find myself in this situation—unemployed?
Acting jobs were hard to get in general. Add the challenges of having brown skin and the options were as plentiful as water in the Mojave. I went on one audition at which the White director interrupted my read and instructed me on the way a Black man would really behave when he was angry. I’d never seen a Black man behave the way he described. I’d never behaved that way myself. I told him that. Then I walked out of the audition.
The struggle to find work ate at me. I brooded during the best of times, and during this difficult time I burrowed deep inside myself, questioning not just my immediate situation but my entire life’s purpose. What was I doing wrong? Life seemed bleak and pointless. If that’s depression, I was in it and not able to see a way out. For a brief moment, I thought about suicide. Of course, this was me being overly dramatic, but the thought crossed my mind as a way of taking control of my life and finding relief from the frustration of not working. If I couldn’t act, if I wasn’t able to live as an artist and express everything that I knew was inside me, if I couldn’t fulfill my potential, if I wasn’t able to contribute, what was the point of this life of mine?
I wanted to believe that a higher power was looking out for me, but faith is the hardest thing to have when you’re down in the dumps, and I didn’t have any.
Making matters worse, I was on the outs with my grandmother. Our love was never in doubt, but we’d been giving each other the silent treatment since early summer. It troubled both of us, though we were too stubborn to address it. The particulars of our grudge had faded. I couldn’t remember a specific argument or a disagreement. I did know that she was disappointed with my behavior. She wasn’t entirely wrong. I was divorced, a father, and didn’t have a steady, reliable job or a stable residence.
Then I came home one afternoon and found Grandmommy in the kitchen, listening to the radio. It was November 22, 1963, a day that had begun like any other day, until it wasn’t. The skies above New York City were partly cloudy. The front page of that day’s New York Times had stories on Rockefeller and the Soviets. Inside was an obituary on convicted murderer Robert Stroud, better known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Sophia Loren, Alain Delon, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward were all in movies playing in Manhattan.
As I walked into the kitchen, my grandmother shushed me even though I hadn’t said a word and asked me to turn up the volume on the radio. It was then I heard the news and immediately dropped into the chair next to Grandmommy, feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Neither my grandmother nor I spoke; we stared at the radio, lost in the same shock and disbelief everyone across the country felt, eager to hear details about the president’s condition, and whether he was going to survive.
We listened the rest of the afternoon and then into the evening, by which time we were joined by my mother and father and were watching the TV. At some point that day, my grandmother and I had started talking to each other in a way we hadn’t for a long time. We were open, warm, and patient with each other. That helped lift my depression, too—in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, I gained perspective, new clarity in which I wasn’t the sole focus, and wanted to be close to family.
The tragedy reminded me of a time when I was still a student at the Academy and had met a close friend of Kennedy’s who got the future president to pull some strings on our behalf. I had been summoned for jury duty and struck up a conversation with a guy sitting near me. Tall and well dressed, he was older than me but I couldn’t say by how much. We bonded over our mutual annoyance at having to spend the day in the jury room. His name was Lem Billings, and he mentioned that he had a friend who might be able to help get us released from jury duty.
During our lunch break, he got up and said he was going to make a phone call. He asked my name again. A few minutes later he returned, and a short time later, the two of us were released from jury duty. I thought he might know the mayor or someone who worked for him. It would turn out that Lem knew someone with even more influence.
Lem and I stayed in touch, and once when I was at his apartment, I noticed several photos of him with Jack Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts. Lem explained that they had been roommates in boarding school and were still best friends. Now Lem was a Harvard MBA, and Kennedy was a rising political star. I wasn’t used to being around people with such powerful connections, and when I confessed as much, Lem laughingly implied it was his former roommate whom he had called to get us out of jury duty.
Another time he introduced me to one of JFK’s sisters, and the three of us went to dinner at the Essex House. I think he had concocted a little scenario in his head between me and the sister, and who knows, maybe she was looking for some excitement in her life, a little shock and scandal with a brown-skinned boy from Harlem, but nothing was going to happen.
I sensed I was being used, and I wasn’t going to be anyone’s source of amusement, not even a Kennedy’s.
A few months later, my grandmother passed away. Other than my sister’s wedding, it was only the second time I recalled her leaving our apartment. Her health had been in steady decline, and, like so many things in life, the change was gradual until suddenly it was clear that we were out of time. Grandmommy was confined to her bed and we watched her closely, making sure all her needs were met. At the end, I was sitting in the living room with my family, helping my mother take care of Grandmommy, though there wasn’t much we could do beyond making sure she was comfortable. I held Corey on my lap so he wouldn’t bang on the piano.
When it was my turn to check on her, I walked into my grandmother’s bedroom and saw her staring into space. I imagined her seeing her husband, coming to escort her to wherever was next, the angels waiting to welcome her with the same astonished gasps I’d heard at my sister’s wedding. “Look, there’s Mrs. Bodkin.” A short time later, my mother walked into Grandmommy’s bedroom and came back into the living room with tears in her eyes. “I think Mommy is gone,” she said.
I took Corey back into the bedroom to see her one last time. She was on her bed, under a portrait of Mary Magdalene, with a peaceful smile on her face. Letting the angels greet her, no doubt. I kissed her forehead. Seeing that I was sad, Corey put his small hand on my cheek and gave me a kiss. “Can I play the piano now?” he asked.
In October, I finally got the break I’d been looking for with some live television dramas for CBC-TV in Toronto, starting with the two-person play I Ran into This Zulu. It co-starred veteran actor Jack Creley as a playwright who’s been commissioned to write a play for a Black actor. I followed that with A Fear of Strangers, the story of a jazz musician who’s interrogated by a racist policeman. Next was a production of Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, William Hanley’s acclaimed drama about three individuals who meet by the Brooklyn Bridge on the night Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann is hanged.
Biting into a heavy role let me step outside myself, and the run of steady work was the elixir I needed to recharge my spirit. I toyed briefly with the idea of moving to Toronto, and that might have happened if not for Corey. I did, however, become friendly with my Zulu co-star Jack Creley and his partner, David Smith, who were famous in Toronto as the “showbiz hosts with the most” and known for throwing lavish parties attended by Hollywood stars and local luminaries. I took advantage of a standing invitation whenever I was in town.
After Slow Dance aired, high-powered talent agent Eleanor Kilgallen arranged to meet with me. The sister of influential gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, she was known for having a sharp eye that had nurtured the careers of Grace Kelly, George Peppard, Warren Beatty, and others. She was on staff at Universal Studios, and having seen me recently in Slow Dance—but also in A Taste of Honey and The Last Angry Man—she offered me a contract with Universal to make TV in Los Angeles. Despite the appeal of a guaranteed income, I turned her down.
“I’m a New York stage actor,” I said. “I don’t want to sit around and do nothing even if I get paid. I see myself here in the city. I’m a serious actor. I appreciate the offer. Someone else will appreciate it even more and say yes.”
That someone turned out to be Greg Morris, whom she signed and sent to L.A., where he was cast a couple years later on the series Mission: Impossible. In the meantime, I got parts on a couple of television soap operas and the TV series Hawk, starring Burt Reynolds. Movies were acquiring a social and cultural edge reflecting the country’s transition out of the homogenized 1950s to the more questioning, turbulent ’60s. But television, though booming, was still relatively bland, and the opportunities for Black actors were scarce.
Cicely had co-starred with George C. Scott in East Side, West Side, a short-lived series in 1963. Ivan Dixon was on Hogan’s Heroes, and Robert Hooks and Don Mitchell were on N.Y.P.D. and Ironside. Otherwise, there was not much work for Black actors and even less that one would call significant or satisfying work. As a serious, ambitious artist, it was hard and often worse to wake up to that reality every day.
The challenge I and others had was to remind ourselves that we were part of the story, even if those stories weren’t being told yet; and that we did count, that we counted as much as anyone—and we had to find ways to express this point of view.