L.A. Times Obit, June 22, 1993
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| Henry Blankfort, far right, confronts HUAC in Hollywood, 1951. |
The Hollywood Theater Alliance was also responsible for Zero Hour. After Meet the People and before Jump for Joy?
At around the same time as Meet the People. A professor who is fired because of the hierarchy. [director] Sidney Salkow was out here. So was Albert Maltz.
Of the Hollywood Ten.
Yeah. And they wrote Zero Hour.
It didn’t have a successful run.
No. As a matter of fact, at the end of the second act I posted a closing sign.
On opening night?
Yeah, I smelled it.
I have something about another production by the Hollywood Theater Alliance, a thing called They Can’t Get You Down, but by that time you were gone.
Departed. And They Can’t Get You Down did not go up. Really, its main success was Meet the People, number one. And I see, Eddie Eliscu, one of the writers, has just written a show directed by his son, up north. It’s playing near San Francisco. My son, who lives up around San Raphael, read the reviews. Brilliant, great reviews. Eddie Eliscu is still writing plays; how do these guys hang around? I thought they were dead!
Getting back to Ellington, was the person that you got to know very different from his suave, sophisticated onstage persona?
No. He was a suave and sophisticated guy, very much onstage all the time. A wide-ranging imagination. The one reservation I have about Ellington is that he never really did anything strong for his people. I think there were a number of reasons for this; one was his religiosity. Everything that happened was God’s will.
Do you mean to say he was fatalistic about things like Jim Crow?
It wasn’t fatalism. I’m an atheist. The God-fetish that too many people accept isn’t fatalism, but there’s a meaning in it I just can’t understand, that there’s some hand or some chemistry that’s the reason for all this. My own philosophy is I'm against anything that divides people. I think they're all manufactured, anyhow. Basically, to be very crass about it, most of it's bullshit. Those people are programmed to walk with bended knees, heads down. I've seen so much hypocrisy in the religious world, the misuse of people for personal benefit. What are there: fourteen hundred different religions?
But Duke didn't want any part of it.
No, Duke would never get involved. I think because of his talent and his personality, he was readily lionized in his successful days by the chic whites who would ask him to dinner to prove they had no prejudice.
In a sense, that was the basis of his whole career, at least one way of looking at it. In show business, he was the number one Black, the Negro who showed that the Negro could "make it" in show business.
Because of my involvement with Jump for Joy, I became one of the writers on Tales of Manhattan.
I don't know anything about that.
Tales of Manhattan was a major film. It had an interesting concept: it was the story of a tailcoat. It had Ginger Rogers and Eddie Robinson in it. [Charles] Laughton was in it, and Ethel Waters. Paul Robeson was in it, and my assignment was to do the section with Paul Robeson. Later on, they also put me on the Edward G. Robinson section. It was one of the big pictures of its day.
And history has a funny way of twisting about itself. When he [Robeson] and I were doing that part, there was bad segregation. His daughter is still alive. He sang at a show where his son and daughter were assigned the same seat one night. Can you imagine that? But his daughter did a book that lies: it says he didn't like his episode in Tales of Manhattan. Tales of Manhattan was made in the 1940s. Fortunately, there has been some change in Black attitudes. Paul had complete artistic control over his section. He even sent me a handwritten note, which said he was overjoyed. When he read my draft, he wrote in some comments.
Anyway, in the story the tailcoat with money in its pockets. lands on a little sharecropper's place. Ethel Waters, who plays his wife, believes it's from God. Robeson thinks that's bullshit; he wants to spend the money on tractors, and plows, and everything for this little community. She wants it for a church. He wins.
Another thing about Ellington: he was a great womanizer. When we were casting the show, he called me over and said, "I want to tell you something. There's a woman coming to your office," and he told me her name. We walked out of the office, and he had E.S.P. This is true!
There's a lady, Lena Horne. I was the first white man whose hand she shook, because she had intense dislike for whites and still carries it around. I read somewhere that she married Lenny Hayton because he was white, not because she loved him. But she learned to like him.
Duke tells in his book, about Jump for Joy, that there were backstage discussions every night. Every time the curtain came down, there would be changes made.
Oh, all the time.
Tell me about that. Were there sharp disagreements? Were they political in nature?
Some of them were, like no dialect was political in nature.
How did these discussions usually play out? Were there conservatives or radicals among the cast?
Yes, like society. This was not quite true of Meet the People. There you didn't have anybody who was conservative, none. I was politicized through Meet the People, in an organizational way.
What about the backstage discussions in Jump for Joy?
Well, there were many of them.
Were certain sketches taken out by consensus?
These people became afraid when they got threats to blow up the theater, that kind of stuff. One thing I saw in the general cast, among the girls and fellows: some of them did become radicalized. They saw something happening, even to themselves. They began to understand, when you want to get your master's foot off your neck, you've got to take that goddamned foot and twist it. And it gave them a sense of pride.
There was a gal called Lomax who wrote for the Black paper called The Sentinel, a very brilliant writer with a very mordant pen, razor-edged. We opened against Cabin in the Sky, the stage version, the same night. She compared Cabin in the Sky to Booker T. Washington and Jump for Joy to Frederick Douglass. When I saw that review, that's all I wanted.
I can see how she would think that way.
I'd never met her, up to that time. The first time I saw her we fell in love. Fantastic. We kept in contact for a number of years, then she went abroad for a and became a columnist. There were too many of complaints from white people. She was ahead of her time. The thing in the past that bothers me most about Jump for Joy is the in the attitudes of reviewers that this was never recognized as a milestone in the theater.
Now, in a sense, too-- this was also true of Meet the People-- was Dorothy Dandridge. This would play down South, and there were attitudes among white actors, not in the cast, but within the Actors Guild. In the matter of my driving her home, her mother was black and honest with me, and she understood it. I could only suppose it; they lived it. She was afraid. Some might say it's being paranoid on the part of Blacks. It's actual. Dorothy went out when some white boys and girls threw tomatoes at her, and there were some episodes going into restaurants. For a while, my wife and I lived a very stormy life! We'd make reservations in restaurants, and we'd come in with Dorothy. "Sorry, sorry." I remember one night at the Brown Derby on Vine Street, I told the maitre-d' I'd piss on the floor. They called the cops, but we got a table.
We introduced her to one of the Nicholas Brothers-- Harold?-- She was married to him.
Later on in the Forties, you became quite a political activist. You have a cousin named Michael Blankfort?
He just died.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I'm not. He was an informer, on his own volition, too.
You're referring to the HUAC hearings that took place here thirty years ago?
He named two people, whom he had no knowledge about: me and his former wife.
As a result, did that bring you in front of the Committee?
Oh, no, no, no. I was at the bottom of the barrel, but I was there.
I've read your testimony, by the way.
It's one of the high points of my life.
Your message rings out, bold and clear.
Oh, I had a wonderful time.
Was Michael blacklisted?
For about ten minutes.
So he went on working, while you were blacklisted. You were out of the film business from that point on.
I did a couple of things under pseudonyms.
As in Woody Allen's movie, The Front?
Yes. I didn't mind keeping a double set of books. Of course, I'm involved with an aerospace education, on levels of all sorts, and they know all about me.
How did you get involved in that career, and when?
I live by serendipity. When I was blacklisted, I'd been doing quite well in the motion picture business. You lived up to everything you made in those days. I had to work! Oh, I sold door to door, all that kind of stuff, but I took it in stride. I wasn't bothered at all about being blacklisted, psychologically.
I don't know how to worry, you see. I simply don't: I'm retarded! It's funny; by a series of coincidences, I got a job with a company called Revell.
Model airplanes?
On my first day, I met the president. I didn't know who he was, and I got into a big argument with him. And he offered me a job! I didn't know who the hell he was. And six months later, I was a vice-president of the company. So many letters from kids came to me about those airplanes.
I talked to Patricia Willard a couple of weeks ago. She worked for you, is that right?
Yeah, I remember her taking up a lot of my time.
She's on a grant. She's working on an Ellington book, too.
From the Smithsonian, right?
From the National Endowment for the Arts or Humanities, I'm not sure which. That's what I should have done!
What are you going to do? A book?
I've sent a manuscript to a couple of publishers, who don't seem to be interested in my first draft, so I'm working on my second draft. One of them I interested was the Louisiana State University Press. The commercial publishers aren't interested in anything about Ellington, as far as I can tell.
You know, his book didn't sell too well. It wasn't a good book.
They gave him a huge advance. That's why he did it. It's very entertaining, if that's what you're looking for, but as far as telling what it's like to be a Black person in show business, it's worthless.
I see him as an example of all things are possible. I think a writer should bear more responsibility. What is your approach on the Ellington book?
There have been a lot of books about Ellington, but all of them are focused on his music. I want to see him in a larger context.
The exceptionalist idea comes into play: he's "exceptional." Not an example of what a human being can be.
I'm very involved with education in the ghettoes and barrios. I'm a volunteer teacher for the L.A. school district. They just gave a Golden Apple Award to Mayor Brown. I'm involved in aerospace education. I've always been interested in the learning process; I'm a dropout. I have no academic credentials, but I come from an academic family. My mother taught at Hunter College. My father was the in the first graduating class from the City Colleges of New York. My sister in New Jersey graduated from Cornell, and I had an older brother who went to N.Y.U. and another who attended Princeton, until the First World War broke out. There are many contradictions in me. When I was a kid, I wanted to go to military school; now I'm so violently against violence!
So, we began getting letters from these kids who were building these models, hundreds of letters, and I began thinking these little kits could be turned into learning tools. I read in the p.aper that there was to be a conference on aerospace education in one week, someone. This was in the 1950s; I was at Revell at that time. So, I strolled over to see what it was like. I sat through three days of this thing, and I met Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley. I got into an argument.
A technical argument?
Technical? I didn't even know how a plane stays up in the sky! And they were so unsure of themselves, they thought I was a maven, someone with wisdom who could point out their lack of knowledge.
Now, an interesting thing about Meet the People: As time has gone on, first of all Nanette Fabray, some of that cast's participation is never mentioned. It's the same as saying you're a Communist. It's funny, these hidden fears we have in this so-called democracy.
Some of Duke Ellington's past has been hidden. I wrote the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act. Were you with the Hollywood Democratic Committee?
Sure.
The F.B.I. says Duke Ellington was on the executive board. Does that mean anything?
It was just to support candidates. Roosevelt! But in those days, this was anathema.
There's a list of benefits: American Committee to Save Refugees; an Exiled Writers' Committee; the American Spanish Aid Committee. The F.B.I. marks these as involvement with the left. Plenty of people were blacklisted for much less than this.
I know that the F.B.I. was interested in Jump for Joy. Why, I don't know. That was in a period when mail was opened.
Did the show go off to other places when it left the Mayan Theater? I've seen mention of some "tabloid versions."
Oh, Sid was involved with that. They thought they could perform some acts in a nightclub. I remember a time when I got a phone call from Duke at four in the morning. He wanted to do a revival of Jump for Joy. Duke used to call at odd hours. Sometimes he wanted me to come to New York to revive Jump for Joy.
Well, they finally did revive it in Miami, unsuccessfully. And Kuller wants to revive it again.
I know it. I have this penchant for not thinking about the past. A day came when someone wanted to revive Meet the People. Well, the world's changed. Attitudes are different. They wanted to use some of the same songs that had been hits. The big hit from Meet the People was "A Boy and a Girl." Christ, that would be ridiculous today!
It's a period piece.
You see, what incites success for some of the old musicals inspires them, but we're on a different channel.
I sense that to reprise Jump for Joy, you'd really need the original cast and the Ellington band itself. It's a period piece, a success that can never be repeated. You'd need Ivie Anderson.
It still plays occasionally. There's a lyric in there about a glass of gin, somewhere.
"My man and me just gin some, and sin some,,."
Yes, gin some, sin some. That'd be crap today.
Still, something about it makes me cry.
It's a good song, musically. But it doesn't have the feeling of some of this rock music that's more contemporary.
I can't agree with that. Most pop music is crass commercialism and crap.
Have you heard "Take This Job and Shove It"? The kids who write today are like meteors. They go to the sky and come back again. I used to have a house on Beverly Boulevard, and there was a music agency in the place. Those kids, some of them in their twenties, driving around in their Rolls Royces, They had a hit song!
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