Henry Blankfort and I conversed outdoors, poolside on a patio in his backyard. I found him extremely engaging, articulate, and eager to tell his story to someone of my generation. During the course of our talk, I was introduced to his wife Sylvia, and from time to time his young grandson came out, whereupon Henry would ask him to find a cigarette for him. I was a smoker at that time, and he didn't hesitate to take one of mine, insisting he was doing me a favor by taking it away from me.
Our conversation was leisurely, but organized, and we spent a good two hours together.
HB: I suppose the way to begin is to start with Jump for Joy, which is how I first met Ellington.
DC: I'd like to go back to before Jump for Joy. You were a member of the Hollywood Theater Alliance. Tell me about that first.
Yes, I was the director for the Hollywood Theater Alliance. This was back during the Depression, 1939, and a group of writers and I were unhappy about the nation and the world, which is something inborn in writers, I guess. We felt this town had an enormous amount of talent that had no opportunity.
I was in New York at the time, at a cabaret called TAC, the Theater Arts Cabaret. We were open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was really a showcase for people involved with theater.
Who were the members of TAC?
Oh, I don't know their precise names, but probably from the Theater Guild. Most of these writers tried our space as a hangout, where they could come as sort of a club and, at the same time, give opportunity.
The people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance, and then in New York with the Theater Guild and also the Civic Theater downtown. And we thought we might do the same thing here: not only a non-profit thing, but a less-profit thing. We put in some bucks and rented a little place, just Saturdays and Sundays. The people who performed would get the profits, if there were any. We'd feed them and write them material for a week. Each one of us put in money to get the set launched, and we rented a little place on Sunset Boulevard.
Most of the people who started the Hollywood Theater Alliance were left of liberal, and naturally their thinking took on a color taint. Some of the people in the administration of this city did not like this, so we usually had a [police] Red Squad out here.
Am I correct in thinking this was not an organized [Communist] Party political thing, with a Party fraction behind it?
I assume there was great Party influence, but not in a direct way.
Anyway, we rented this place on Sunset Boulevard and began holding auditions, and several of the city's mothers and fathers didn't like what we were doing. They would say that we needed a new fire-door here, all sorts of restrictions. It sort of got our hackles up, and we decided to really go all-out.
We rented a little theater. It was no longer a cabaret, because we couldn't get a license to serve food. They put all sorts of obstacles in our way. So, we simply decided we would do a variety show, and the threads and pieces of it would be the People of our society and our culture. Because I had a business background, they made me executive director. I took charge, and it became a fantastic hit.
Tell me about the show itself.
The material in it?
Who was involved on the creative end?
Everybody. Most of the music was done by Jay Gorney and Henry Meier. Jay Gorney was the author of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Now, at the age of eighty-five, he's teaching at Columbia [University].
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Duke with Sid Kuller, 1941
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And we all contributed skits to this thing. We put this on in a relatively small theater. In the first two days, we took in about twenty-four dollars, but suddenly it flashed. The narrative was about Hedda Hopper, the columnist. She was, like Louella Parsons, very powerful in this town. There were fireworks. It attacked all her principles: it was anti-racist. One of the numbers had the cast singing the Bill of Rights, word for word. It got a standing ovation.
We had certain sketches that were so provocative that we had bomb threats. But it was terrifically successful; we were able to move to larger and larger theaters, and then on to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.
Who were the stars of the show?
The stars were new and unknown at the time. Jack Albertson.
His debut, more or less.
Oh, yeah. This was the first show in the United States that had a mixed cast. One of them was Dorothy Dandridge.
In Meet the People? She was also in Jump for Joy.
I discovered her. A gal named Virginia O'Brien would take auditions for us. She was frightened stiff. She had rehearsed at home, but she was so frightened that she stood there as if she were a robot, and the words came out like one of these games they have today.
At the end of the thing, she was so frightened she ran off crying. I ran after her and grabbed her. I said, "Baby, you were great! Do just what you did." We had a concept different from hers, but hers had a peculiar quality, as if we're all programmed.
Someone at MGM saw Virginia O'Brien and liked her, and she got an offer to sign a contract. When she came to me, I said, "Take the contract," even though by this time she was a hit in our show. But if we followed our principles with these kids...
You'd have to let them go.
And now we had to replace her with a Negro gal. So, I had some auditions, and up comes a beautiful girl. I saw her mother, Virginia Dandridge, standing by. And I decided: Dorothy Dandridge. I didn't let the cast know about this. In sounding out some of the people there in the Hollywood Theater Alliance, some were a little disturbed. (I didn't give a fuck about those things. I'd walked off contracts with the studios. If my bosses did things I didn't like, I walked out on them.) They thought it was fine, but they wondered how the audience would react, and they didn't want to put the whole play in jeopardy.
So, I rehearsed Dorothy away from the cast. She was just sixteen or seventeen. I took her to a gown shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Part of the deal was I'd drive her home every night. Her mother was very aware of the racism in the studios.
Well, she exploded. It was one of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had. She came in two days before the performance, and I said I didn't want any discussion with the cast. She came out, and one of the spotlights hit her, and after she did her number, the audience stood up and cheered! She was sensational.
We kept on changing sketches, to keep it alive, contemporary. In one of them, the Democratic Party is looking for a candidate for President.
In 1939 Roosevelt was in office.
But they didn't know if he'd run for a third term. Here's what the skit was: we come to the Oval Office, and the fellow they're going to nominate has his back toward the audience. He's asked, "How are we going to sell this to the people?" Turns out he's an actor, and he has a rubber mask on. It's a mask of Roosevelt! When he turns around, he's Roosevelt, and he talks like him. And we had stuff like "It's the Same Old South."
We got threats of bombing, the same thing as with Jump for Joy later on. But the show was a phenomenal success. It discovered a log of actors; I would say that out of the cast, at least eighty or ninety per cent of them got contracts with studios. And we began making some money, so we set up shows that would travel around into little towns in Southern California, to give people a feeling of the theater. When there were strikes and labor problems, we would send a show in there.
As far as your question before, concerning political guidance for the show, I'm pretty sure not one word was sent from Moscow.
I would imagine not! I think Uncle Joe had problems of his own.
During the time of the pact between the Soviet Union and the Nazis, we had a number with Hitler and Stalin dancing, each with a knife at the other one's back. To anyone who was politically aware, this was a treaty of convenience. The Western nations wanted Hitler to rule the Soviet Union.
Well, it was a great success. It was the longest-running play in Hollywood for a number of years. When it ran here, it was in one of the largest theaters in Hollywood. It got enormous community support, I would say. The individuals involved weren't making any money. We put it into these extras and paid these road companies. We set up classes; we had a place called the Actors' Lab out here.
At this time, you were still making a living as a screenwriter?
Yes. I think out of the generosity of their hearts, because I was spending so much money myself, I think they gave me an extra $125 a week. I'd given up some jobs for studios in order to do this. I'm a strange contradiction: I've never been interested in money and material things, whatever the reasons. Because I never felt the pinch of poverty, perhaps, I had no interest in money.
So, we had a couple of road companies going to the major cities. We were very successful in San Francisco and Chicago. It didn't have a long run in New York, because I did an unfortunate thing. Pal Joey was opening the same night as we were, and they had big stars and big names like Gene Kelly, but I said we were going to beat them. Well, we didn't!
We kept it running about three months. This was a show imported by New York from California. We were the outlanders invading the Big Apple. The press did not look with favor on us. Politically, the things we were saying were not comfortable garments for the people of New York to wear with ease.
Then they decided to do a Meet the People number two, but I personally was uncomfortable with it. When we did the original thing, it was done with the kind of flair that I enjoyed; there was no attempt to be serious about a subject. And just about this time, the Hollywood Theater Alliance wanted to do an all-Negro revue, but I wasn't comfortable with this material. They worked on it for a year and a half, but nothing came off. It frittered away. You see, when writers don't get paid, you can only get their energy for a certain amount of time.
But there was talk in the community about this Negro show. I was approached by a guy named Sid Kuller.
I talked to him yesterday.
You're serious? Is he in town? I've got to call him.
So, I was approached by the American Revue Theater.
But you must have been associated with Sid Kuller on Meet the People. At least, his name is listed among the show's personnel as a writer.
I think Sid did something, but we never used it.
Maybe he was on the business end?
No, not the business end. He was a comedy writer. With Jump for Joy, I supervised the entire production. This was a time when big bands had kind of folded. We had an opportunity to get Duke Ellington.
He was playing at the Orpheum Theater. Sid Kuller had a chance to catch Ellington, possibly at the Orpheum or the Casa Manana.
We signed up Duke at a very reasonable price. I raised the curtain on that thing for $18,000: talk about blood, sweat and tears. Talk about Churchill and the Battle of Britain; this was the battle of Hollywood!
Tell me how you got involved.
Well, I knew some of the guys, and I think I got more credit for Meet the People than I deserved. I got offers from major studios to be a producer, but I was never interested in the big stuff. As a matter of fact, when I was writing and producing motion pictures, I selected the area of B pictures for a number of reasons. For one thing, from my business background I was interested in budgets and producing quality within the budget. And I had no supervision; all they ever said was, "Henry, you've got two bucks and three days." I would go out on the sets they'd built for major motion pictures and have a story done for that set. I remember one instance when Walter Wang had produced a major motion picture, and over a weekend, I did a story to fit these sets. They used to have double bills, and my little picture would open on the same show as a second picture. And they both had the same sets! Wang got frantic. He wanted to kill me. He was a very passionate man. I used to use some of the same costumes, whatever was there. I would use contract players.
So, the American revue Theater started. This was nowhere as politically oriented as Meet the People, in a conscious way. I saw an enormous opportunity to bring to American audiences what was going on.
It was a kind of fulfillment of that all-Negro revue you had in mind earlier.
Yes, but it wasn't played as if it were an all-Negro revue. We lampooned things. For instance, we had a running thing where a Black guy is haunted by a ghost, and the audience expected him to react in terror, but the opposite would happen.
You had a skit with Garbo and Hepburn and Noel Coward.
We had a Noel Coward sketch in there, but the sketch was not written by Noel Coward, but in that idiom. A number of very interesting things happened; I would talk to the girls who were going to be in the chorus and tell them why I was interested in this play, and say that they were making a contribution to the Black experience. I said there would be no Negro dialect. Nick Castle was the director; when I signed him up I thought the director should have full sway.
He did the choreography also.
He was a choreographer. He came up at Twentieth Century.
He just died, didn't he?
He must have died, because they buried him. I hope he died before they buried him!
Members of the chorus would come by, one at a time, to my office, and I knew what was on the mind of every one of them. Here's this pontiff: I'll get the job if I lay for him. But I opened up conversations with them and asked them what was on their mind. I told them that if any of these white guys puts a hand on you, I don't care who they are, I'd kick them right out on their ass.
I remember one time I got a complaint about a sketch that had dancing and dialogue, a sketch with dialect. I went to a rehearsal unannounced, and I told them, "Don't do it. I don't care what the director says." I asked Nick Castle to come by my office. I told him not to use dialect. He answered, "But I'm the director." I told him to tell the actors, and by God he changed!
This was a very exciting thing, staging Jump for Joy, to see the effect on the audience and also on the cast. Incidentally, it was my first experience with a thing called "tea"; now they call it marijuana. I met Herb Jeffries in the green room once and asked him, "What's that strange smell?" There was all this smoke around, and he said, "That's tea, baby." I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I didn't see any cups!
I think he's playing out in the Valley now. He was a very interesting guy, with many facets. he was so light skinned he could pass. He had a brother who did.
He worked out here before he joined Ellington, acting in westerns. He was known as the "Bronze Buckaroo."
Anyway, when I saw him in his dressing room, he said he was going into the Navy. I said, "Don't worry about white people. There's nothing white about any of us, except our skeletons. I said, "Take pride in the fact you're a Negro. I'm proud I'm a Jew, but I just happen to be one. So what?" For some reason, he never went into the Navy, something physical, I guess.
How well did you know Duke?
Oh, I knew him fine.
Did you meet him at Sid Kuller's place? He had parties every Saturday night.
Parties? I practically lived on Central Avenue. Central Avenue is in the heart of Watts. Now, Duke could have gotten into any hotel in LA, but not his band. So, the hotel they occupied was the Dunbar. They took a bunch of rooms, one after the other down the hallway.
He had this interesting thing: he knew he was black, but he was not an agitator. I used to argue with him, and he'd say, "Henry, you're an agitator." I told him I felt Black people in this country were not being treated fairly. I used to argue that whether or not Black people receive their rights is up to them, as well as white people fighting along with them. At around this time, he and his band had been commissioned to play at something, a coming-out party, by Nelson Rockefeller in Tarrytown, New York. but all the hotels were taken. Rockefeller found them places to stay-- in the stables! I said, "You took this shit? It might not make any difference to you, but it does to me. If it were a white person, that's where they'd belong: in a stable."
He was a very religious man and an enormously generous guy in many, many ways. I remember one time at a stage door; he always drew crowds at a stage door. A brother came up and whispered something in Ellington's ear. Duke had a guy named Smitty, who kept business records for him. He called him over and said, "Give this boy some togs."
I thought it was Jonesy.
No, Jonesy was his valet. Jonesy later had a story about Duke's home on Sugar Hill, in Harlem, where Duke would give away clothes. They were old clothes, but they were new. He had like fifty of the same kind of suits.
Very generous. I once saw him buying three Cadillacs at the same time; that was on Wilshire Boulevard. One of them for his wife in Washington, one for his girlfriend in Philadelphia, and one for Bea-- is that her name?
Yes. Bea Ellis. Did you get to know her?
Sure.
Did she come out to L.A.?
She was at every rehearsal, with all those girls. She was ready to take out that razor [laughs]. She watched over him like a hawk.
She died not long after he. I have the idea that Duke was not involved with the content of the show at all.
He enjoyed it, but he didn't know what it was. If he did, he certainly kept it to himself. I could never get him into a discussion, really. You see, with Duke, a kind of legend grew up around him. Orson Welles was close to him. I think they worked on some stuff together.
Anyway, the show was very successful out here, and Duke became very successful out here. After the curtain went down at eleven o'clock, we had jam sessions afterward. They all got onstage, and the audience was really nutty. It was fantastic.
He also had this feeling about money, as though there was some kind of gold mine opening up. I remember once, when I stayed at his apartment in New York, he needed a piece of paper to write on.
He said, "Go over to the desk and find something." I found an envelope from Columbia or RCA or something. It wasn't open, but it had a transparent address window, and there was a check in there. I said, "Duke, there's a check in here." He said, "Let me see it." Forty-two hundred dollars in royalties. He hadn't even opened the money!
He also was very glib. It obviously came from his innate ability: he never had to work hard on his music. It came out of the vibes in his soul. But the sweat that it put me through! I kept asking, "Duke, where's the score?"
"Don't worry about it." This was three or four days before the opening. "Duke, we've got to have this thing."
Jonesy took me to Duke's room at the Dunbar, which had a tub. And Duke gets into the tub with a board across it and big sheets of wrapping paper, like you'd see at a butcher's store, and a gallon of chocolate ice cream. I think he drank scotch, or whatever the hell it was, with milk. Now, if only this scene could be photographed: here's what would happen. He'd scrawl some stuff down, and "Swee-Pea" -- Strayhorn-- would come and take the papers from him, go into a room with a beat-up old upright piano and do some arranging. Then he would take his arrangement down the hall to all the men, one at a time. They were very small rooms.
Then he'd begin doodling. Duke would be writing, he would be arranging, and Duke would be listening and yell out. It was the wildest thing! I would say by ten or eleven the next morning, he'd worked the night through with the score. I'm trying to think of the lyricist on his songs. Was it Webster?
Paul Webster.
A very meticulous guy, very precise.
Had he been around long before this?
Most of the writers I hired had had some recognition. But Duke's rocket began to flare then. Zoom! He began getting all kinds of offers. But he held on to the contract.
Everywhere I've looked there's a different version of this story. Someone wanted him in NewYork?
A guy named Friedman was his agent from the William Morris office.
Another thing Kuller suggested for the closing of the show was the military draft. This was November, just before World War Two.
December 7. The draft took some of the guys, but it wasn't a major factor.
Mercer Ellington says there were financial problems.
Oh, we always operated on a shoelace.
With a successful show, that's difficult to understand. You played to full houses.
There were people in that show who were uneasy about it. It's like the "moral majority" supporting Reagan now.
Who are we talking about, supporting the show? John Garfield put up some money.
Not a hell of a lot. Nobody put in a hell of a lot.
Joe Pasternak?
Oh, a thousand bucks.
This article says otherwise. Joe Pasternak gave you a check for twenty-five thousand dollars, according to Kuller.
Oh, I'll tell you what Joe Pasternak did. We had to put up a bond for musicians and stagehands, and Pasternak put up half of it. But there's no check for twenty-five thousand dollars that I ever saw.
Even though the show was doing well, you weren't rolling in money.
I don't think the show made any money. Did Kuller say anything?
He said there were packed houses, standing-room only.
We didn't charge much for tickets. We were going to do another show after that, called Zero Hour. I have a note from Theodore Dreiser. I have it framed. He enclosed a check for a hundred bucks. To get a check from Theodore Dreiser-- for a writer to contribute money: it's usually the other way around.
Was Zero Hour a straight drama?
Yes. It took place on a college campus.
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| Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951. |
I. L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993
Henry Blankfort; Screenwriter Was Blacklisted in McCarthy Era
Henry Blankfort, 90, a screenwriter who became a publicist after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era died Wednesday in
North Hollywood of cardiac arrest. A native of New York, Blankfort moved to LA in 1936 and three years later became director of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, where he co=wrote its "Meet the People." He wrote or co-wrote 25 screenplays, including "Tales of Manhattan" and "Double Exposure." During World War II, Blankfort made military films for the Signal Corps. His show business career ended after he refused in 1951to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was seeking information about Communists in Hollywood.
II. Interview, Studio City home, 8/13/82
Henry Blankfort spoke with me for two hours. Throughout our conversation, he was articulate, remembered the past vividly, and was eager to tell me his story. When I mentioned my earlier talk with Sid Kuller, Blankfort was surprised he was still alive and living in Beverly Hills. He resolved to give Kuller a call.
A. Genesis of Meet the People, 1939
HB was then the exec dir of the Hollywood Theater Alliance, described as "mostly a writers' hangout." Evolved into a co-op to produce cabaret theater in LA, music and schtick comedy. New York at the time had much more of this kind of entertainment.
Before MTP, the Alliance had conceived a play with the theme of fascism
B. The Alliance was not exactly a non-profit. It was a "less profit," out-of -pocket seed money. The performers were paid with whatever the show took in. Most of the Alliance's members were "left of liberal." (Not an organized CPUSA fraction!). Meet the People was strongly influenced by their outlook.
When trying to open the show as a cabaret, they couldn't get a liquor license. So MTP became instead a "variety show." HB: "tremendously successful... made me the executive director in charge of production." The creative team included Jay Gornay, H. Myers, for the music. The entire cast contributed skits at the ? Theater. The box office took in $24 on opening day. The columnist Hedda Hopper denounced the show "attacked all our principles, but audiences gave it standing ovations."
We continued talking about the Red Hunt, HUAC in the 1950s. MTP had a decidedly anti-racist thrust and introduced a song whose lyrics quoted the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. The show received bomb threats. But it was so successful that it was able to perform in ever larger venues in LA, even opened in San Francisco and aimed for Broadway. Initial stars were Jack Albert and Virginia O'Brien.
By the coincidence of O'Brien's having to leave the show, according to Blankfort, MTP was the very first show with a biracial cast, by the presence of the teen-aged Dorothy Dandridge (who would perform again in Ellington's show two years later). Blankfort auditioned her privately, away from the rest of the cast, but she was frightened and did badly at first and wanted to leave the room.
Blankfort followed her out and told her she'd been great. After continuing private rehearsals, Blankfort announced to the rest that Dandridge would replace O'Brien and ignored those who feared how audiences might react. Blankfort drove her home at night.
Dorothy Dandridge's movie career began (soon after?) with a contract with MGM.
"Sensational hit": The show kept changing sketches to remain involved in the issues of the day. There was an election campaign skit, in which an actor with his back to the audience turns to reveal his rubber mask of FDR. He goes on to perform a song, "The Same Old South." The show began making money. After touring a wider swath of Southern California, the show opened in SF. Parts of the show were also performed at strikers' picket lines.**
MTP was the longest-running Hollywood theater attraction for many years. The show spawned road companies and Actor's Lab classes. Blankfort himself earned $150 a week and left his usual job as a screenwriter for a time.
MTP ran successfully in SF and Chicago, but in New York its competition included the huge hit Pal Joey (Rodgers & Hart?) starring Gene Kelly, and consequently MTP closed after a very short run. In New York the critics regarded it as "outlanders from California invading the Bi9g Apple." Once the company returned home, some had the idea of mounting a MTP number two, but Blankfort was uncomfortable with it. In the end there was no serious intent about such a production."
But in the following year the Hollywood Theater Alliance conceived the idea of an all-Negro revue. Their first intent didn't attain fruition, but the following year a series of circumstances brought JFJ to another Hollywood theater smash hit.
HB met Sid Kuller, who then lived in Beverly Hills, whose screen writing a few years earlier. had contributed to the controversial (?) film Zero Hour. After they had exchanged ideas, the pair organized the American Revue Theater to have another try at an all-Negro revue. There was considerable support in the show business community.
Parenthetically, Blankfort was optimistic: "I have a feeling the space program is going to bring peace to the world. Nations, as they exist today, are a silly thing."
Blankfort supervised the entire production of JFJ.
*The title sounds like it might have inspired some ditties in Jump for Joy a couple of years later. Ellington's show was controversial in the same way.
**Answering an earlier question of mine about the direct involvement of the CPUSA, here remarked,
"Moscow had nothing to do with it. We went on to the subject of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939, specifically a cartoon of Stalin dancing with Hitler, each one hiding a dagger
