The Mammy Archetype‏: A Black Maiden Syndrome

 

Marion Hurt

Beulah_ShowThe_CD_Back

 

Marlon Hurt (Actor)

Marlon Hurt
(Actor)

Marlin Hurt (1905-1946), was an American stage entertainer and radio actor. It is believed that Hurt’s inspiration for the Beulah’s voice was an African-American woman named Mary who was Hurt’s family Mammy.  After Hurt appeared on several radio programs using a ‘Black’ dialectical voice, the Beulah show was eventually given its own platform in 1943. Although Hurt brought the voice of Beulah to critical acclaim, his tenure on the radio series as the voice of Beulah was short-lived due to his untimely death in 1946; near the end of the first season of the series.

Following Hurt’s death and keeping in line with the previous voicing of Black dialects by White actors, Beulah was then voiced by another White actor by the name of Bob Corley; at which time the show was once again renamed to The Beulah Show.

Corley remained the voice of Beulah until November 24, 1947, when notable Black actress Hattie McDaniel took over the radio show earning $1000 a week, and eventually negotiated $2000 a week.

McDaniel garnered the highest ratings for the show than previously earned by both Hurt and Corley. McDaniel later appeared on six episodes in the second season of the television adaptation of The Beulah Show in 1951 but was replaced by actress Lillian Randolph after falling ill.

Lillian Randolph

Lillian Randolph was a 20th Century actress who routinely, yet proudly, presented the role of the Black domestic in film and radio and defended her right to maintain such characters in an intelligent fashion for much of her career. Randolph was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1915. She first entered the world of entertainment as a singer at WJR Radio in Detroit in the early 1930s.

In 1936, Randolph migrated to Los Angeles and made her debut as a singer at the Club Alabam. Five years later, she landed the role of the maid, Birdie, on the radio and TV series The Great Gildersleeve, and soon became one of the most sought after Black actresses of the period. Randolph portrayed Birdie until 1957. She simultaneously played the role of Daisy, the housekeeper on The Billie Burke (radio) situation comedy from 1943 to 1946, and title role of the radio show Beulah in the early 1950s when Hattie McDaniel became ill. Also in the early 1950s she performed on the Amos n’ Andy show, recreating the role of Madame Queen, which she first played on the radio version of the series.

In 1946, Randolph and Sam Moore, one of the script writers of The Great Gildersleeve program, published a rebuttal to those critics in Ebony magazine. Randolph defended her role as the character Birdie, reminding Ebony‘s readers that the show’s writers had never written dialect into the script and were particularly careful not as not to offend Black viewers.  Randolph valued the benefits that such parts brought to her career and fought to protect the availability of roles from the efforts of those protesting anti-stereotypical roles in film and radio.

In the early 1960s, Randolph spent several years coaching drama and resumed her singing and acting careers. For more than a decade, she also supplied the voice of the cook, Mammy two-shoes, in the Tom and Jerry cartoon series.

Mammy Two Shoes is a fictional character in MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons. She is a heavy-set middle-aged African American woman who is the housemaid in the house which Tom and Jerry reside. But the fact that she has her own bedroom in the short “Sleepy Tom” raises the possibility of her being the owner of the house, as no other human is present in the house in shorts she appears. She would scold and attack Tom whenever she believed he was misbehaving; Jerry would sometimes be the cause of Tom’s getting in trouble. As a partially-seen character, her head was rarely seen, except in a few cartoons including Part Time Pal (1947), A Mouse in the House (1947), Mouse Cleaning (1948), and Saturday Evening Puss (1950). Mammy appeared in 19 cartoons, from Puss Gets the Boot (1940) to Push-Button Kitty (1952). Mammy’s appearances have often been edited out, dubbed, or re-animated in later television showings, since her character is an archetype now usually considered racist.  Her creation points to the ubiquity of the “mammy” stereotype in American popular culture, and the character was removed from the series after 1953 due to protests from the NAACP.

Although she repeatedly received several complaints from the NAACP and Black community activists who complained about her racially stereotypical roles, Randolph maintained her right to portray such characters as Madame Queen, Birdie, and as the voice of the cook on the popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon Tom and Jerry despite public opposition.

 

Mammy Two Shoes in a scene from the Tom & Jerry short Saturday Evening Puss. This is the only time her facial features are clearly seen, albeit for only a few frames. 

["Tom and Jerry is an American animated media franchise and series of comedy short films 
created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. 
Best known for its 161 theatrical short films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 
the series centers on the rivalry between the titular characters of a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Wikipedia

Owner: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; (1940–1986); Turner Entertainment; (Warner Bros. Discovery; 1986–present)"]

 

By the 1970s, Randolph had made more than 75 film and television appearances and reached a career that spanned more than decades. Lillian Randolph died of cancer in 1980 in Los Angeles, California.

 

Hattie McDaniel

VIVIEN LEIGH and HATTIE McDANIEL in “Gone With the Wind” (1939)

VIVIEN LEIGH and HATTIE McDANIEL in “Gone With the Wind” (1939)

“I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week

than be a maid and make $7.”

  Hattie McDaniel

Biography

“The first Black actor to win an Academy Award, but Hattie McDaniel paid a price to cross Hollywood’s color line. Schooled in minstrelsy in the years leading up to the Depression, during which time she developed the stock character of a sassy Black housemaid who refused to kowtow to her White employers, McDaniel arrived in Hollywood after the 1929 stock market crash and was soon earning more money playing servants than most stockbrokers were seeing from their investments.
Billed low in the credits, McDaniel more than measured up to the likes of Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, and Barbara Stanwyck, often stealing one or two scenes in such films as John Ford’s “Judge Priest” (1934), Tay Garnett’s “China Seas” (1935), and George Stevens’ “Alice Adams” (1935) from their A-list players. Gable recommended McDaniel to producer David O. Selznick for the role of Scarlett O’Hara’s nursemaid Mammy in “Gone with the Wind” (1939); Selznick was so impressed with the actress that he had the screenplay rewritten to accommodate her. Though segregation precluded McDaniel from attending the film’s Atlanta premiere, vindication came with an Oscar win for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
 
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 Though segregation precluded McDaniel from attending the film’s Atlanta premiere, vindication came with an Oscar win for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. If her films declined in quality in the years before her death in 1952, Hattie McDaniel had long since proved her point that being one of the first successful African-American actresses was a groundbreaking achievement and that no matter the criticism, she always lived by her credo, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.”
Hattie McDaniel was born in Wichita, KS on June 10, 1893. The youngest of 13 children of Baptist minister Harry McDaniel and his wife, the former Susan Holbert – both former slaves – McDaniel grew up in Denver, CO. In 1908, she enrolled in Denver East High School, where she was active in the drama club and won a contest sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Dropping out in her sophomore year, McDaniel joined her brother Otis’ minstrel show, writing songs and touring with the troupe in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, while also singing on the radio. The company disbanded with Otis McDaniel’s death in 1916. She also founded an all-female minstrel troupe with her sister, Etta Goff. In her time with the McDaniel Sisters Company, she began developing a stock character, an all-knowing, mouthy mammy. In 1920, McDaniel was hired as a vocalist for Professor George Morrison’s Melody Hounds, a Denver-based jazz orchestra, and recorded a number of jazz sides for Okeh and Paramount Records, as well as the Kansas City label Merritt.
After the 1929 stock market crash, McDaniel was reduced to working as a washroom attendant in a whites-only Milwaukee nightclub, though she eventually convinced its owner to let her perform. Eventually, she joined her brother Sam and sisters Etta and Orlena in Hollywood, where Sam had found work in radio and films. While she looked for acting work, McDaniel became a regular on “The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour,” broadcast on KNX, where she perfected the character of Hi-Hat Hattie, an uppity black maid who knew better than her affluent white employers and never tried to hide it. She made her film debut for Universal as a hospital patient in James Whale’s melodrama “The Impatient Maiden” (1932), starring Lew Ayres and Mae Clark. A bit as a singer in Harry Beaumont’s “Are You Listening?” (1932) at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer followed but when she was cast as a maid in Charles Brabin’s political drama “The Washington Masquerade” (1932) and a cook in the Hoot Gibson Western “The Boiling Point” (1932), she found her niche as Hollywood’s go-to sassy domestic. Though far from attaining co-star status with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Depression-era melodrama “Blonde Venus” (1932), McDaniel’s onscreen business with the Berlin import put her on par with her leading lady in the eyes of moviegoers worldwide. McDaniel also worked well with Mae West, playing her opinionated manicurist in Wesley Ruggles’ comedy “I’m No Angel” (1933), co-starring Cary Grant.
It was not until John Ford’s “Judge Priest” (1934), which put her in the frame with humorist Will Rogers and Black sidekick Stepin Fetchit, that Hi-Hat Hattie truly began to assert herself, cutting through the air with her demonstrative, booming voice, and popping her eyes proactively as if to silence any potential disagreement and rebuke the coonish inclinations of Fetchit’s lazy houseboy. The manifestation of McDaniel’s onscreen persona, as the true whip hand in any of her domestic situations, was evident in many of her films that year, including the comedy “Lost in the Stratosphere” and “The Little Colonel,” co-starring Shirley Temple.
That same year, McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild and signed a long-term contract with The Fox Film Corporation. It was director George Stevens who received credit for revealing the true Hi-Hat Hattie in his film “Alice Adams” (1935). Starring Katherine Hepburn in an early role, the film revolved around a poor girl who aims to make a place for herself in society by pretending to be affluent, roping her parents into the charade of hiring a Black maid to impress suitor Fred MacMurray. In the film’s classic dinner scene, the White characters leapfrog from one faux pas to another while McDaniel’s huffy hireling, Malena Burns, grunts, rolls her eyes, chews gum, and mutters withering asides that deflate the White characters’ pretension with the acuity of a Greek chorus. Critics singled out McDaniel’s brilliant comic timing and her characters grew in prominence. At MGM, she played Jean Harlow’s servant in both Tay Garnett’s “China Seas” (1935) and Jack Conway’s “Saratoga” (1937) and was capricious society girl Barbara Stanwyck’s surrogate mother in “The Mad Miss Manton” (1938). In all of these roles, McDaniel was only nominally subservient to her white employers, to whom she served as life coach, Devil’s advocate, and mother confessor.
But it was producer David O. Selznick’s “Gone with the Wind” (1939), based on the historical novel by Margaret Mitchell and set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, that provided McDaniel with the role of her lifetime. As Mammy, house servant to spoiled Georgia peach Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), McDaniel brought her usual stock-in-trade bossiness to bear, but the film’s scope and rich Technicolor palette seemed to push the actress through the imagined fourth wall and into the laps of moviegoers. Etched by the actress – and Selznick, who ordered script changes to complement the actress’ style – as both a foster mother to the orphaned Scarlett and the film’s only true defender of family values, Mammy was at once an expressly comical character and the film’s true heart and soul. Though the color of her skin precluded her from attending the film’s star-studded but segregated Atlanta premiere, McDaniel was singled out for praise by The New York Times and became the first Black actor to win an Academy Award. In fact, it was a credit to the woman’s great dignity that she was able to make such a touching, teary speech after being seated at the far rear of the ceremony’s venue, while her non-nominated White co-stars sat upfront.
Despite the segregation in the world at large, she became a close friend to many of her Hollywood co-stars, among them Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Joan Crawford, Ronald Reagan, and Shirley Temple, living and working among them as something like a peer. Unfortunately, she drew fire from some blacks for choosing to play second-class Americans – prompting the quick-witted actress to quip “I’d rather play a maid than be one.” She would play domestics throughout World War II, taking care of Errol Flynn’s doomed General Custer in “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941), picking up after displaced New Yorkers Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan in the rural farce “George Washington Slept Here” (1942), wronged by employer Bette Davis in “In This Our Life” (1942), and mentoring scatterbrained teen Joyce Reynolds in Michael Curtiz’ featherweight “Janie” (1944) and Vincent Sherman’s sequel “Janie Gets Married” (1946). As Aunt Tempy in Disney’s “Song of the South” (1946), McDaniel was nursemaid to child star Bobby Driscoll, but the spark of her earlier performances was conspicuous in its absence. In her final feature film role, as a maid in the racetrack drama “The Big Wheel” (1949) starring Mickey Rooney, she barely registered.
Starting in 1947, McDaniel made $1,000 per week as the star of the CBS radio comedy “The Beulah Show.” The character originated in 1944 as a supporting player on “Fibber McGee and Molly” and was voiced by white actor Marlin Hurt. When McDaniel assumed the role, she became the first Black woman to star in a network radio program. A TV spin-off, “Beulah” was launched by ABC in 1950, with Ethel Waters in the title role. When Waters left the sitcom in 1951, McDaniel took on the role for television as well but appeared in only six episodes.
Diagnosed with breast cancer, she ceded the radio series to Lillian Randolph and the TV show to Louise Beavers. Hattie McDaniel died on Oct. 26, 1952. Though it had been her wish to be buried at the segregated Hollywood Cemetery, her remains were interred instead at Los Angeles’ Rosedale Cemetery. Two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame were awarded posthumously. In 1999, a monument was placed in her honor at the renamed Hollywood Forever Cemetery, her preferred resting place.”

By Richard Harland Smith

tumblr_law7jq8TTE1qcw9y0o1_250  Actress Hattie McDaniel (1895-1952)

Hattie McDaniel born June 10, 1895, was one of the best-known Black American actresses of the 20th Century. McDaniel, like many Black actresses of her time period, often struggled to gain television and film roles outside of the subservient role of the Mammy.

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 Gone with the Wind (1934)

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 Hattie McDaniel (Mammy)

Gone with the Wind

http://youtu.be/FZ7r2OVu1ss

McDaniel had played the Mammy figure in many of her prior films, but her role in Gone with the Wind was pivotal due to her being the first Black actress to acquire an Academy Award nomination and win for her portrayal of “Mammy” in the film, and the personal connection she made with the character.

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Try_again_Mammy  McDaniel stated that she understood Mammy, because her own grandmother had worked on a plantation in a similar role.   McDaniel was widely praised for her success and simultaneously received massive criticism for her continued participation in maintaining the lifeline of the Mammy caricature. The harshest criticism of McDaniel’s role in the film was from the N.A.A.C.P. The N.A.A.C.P felt that McDaniel was creating a counterproductive dialogue through her continued acceptance of subservient cinematic roles in a time period when they were fighting for racial equality.  In response to her critics, McDaniel was quoted to have said: “Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making seven dollars a week actually being one.”

In addition to McDaniel’s personal detractors, the film itself received numerous amounts of criticism from the Black press and the Black community. Objections of the film ranged from the whimsical use of the word “nigger and the overall negative representation of Black culture and its people. Although both McDaniel and the film received their share of praise and criticism, the role of Mammy, played by McDaniel, was said to have helped shape the future respect of performances for Black actresses- including McDaniel’s co-star Butterfly McQueen.

 

Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen

(January 7, 1911 – December 22, 1995) was an American actress. Originally a dancer, McQueen first appeared as Prissy, Scarlett O’Hara’s maid in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. She continued as an actress in film in the 1940s, then moving to television acting in the 1950s.”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Butterfly McQueen Gone with the Wind


Butterfly McQueen
Gone with the Wind

“Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen was born in Tampa, Florida on January 8, 1911. Her father, Wallace McQueen, worked as a stevedore and her mother, Mary Richardson, was a housekeeper and domestic worker. After McQueen’s parents separated, her mother moved from job to job and McQueen lived in several cities on the East Coast before settling in Augusta, Georgia. As a young teen, McQueen moved to Harlem, New York, where her mother worked as a cook.

McQueen enrolled in the Lincoln Training School for Nursing in the Bronx before pursuing an acting career. She joined Venezula Jones’s Youth Theatre Group in Harlem and performed in the Group’s 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As a result of her role in the production’s “Butterfly Ballet,” she adopted “Butterfly” as her stage name. In 1937, McQueen debuted on Broadway in Brown Sugar. She also appeared in What a Life (1938) and the Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong musical, Swingin the Dream (1939).

Butterfly McQueen as Puck, Maxine Sullivan as Titania and Louis Armstrong as Bottom/Pyramus in the Broadway production of “Swingin’ the Dream,” a jazz musical that has been largely forgotten.Credit…Vandamm Studio/The New York Public Library, via Museum of the City of New York

McQueen received her big break in Hollywood when David O. Selznick cast the 28-year-old actor as Prissy in Gone with the Wind (1939). McQueen’s role as Prissy brought her national fame and it remains her most remembered performance.

For the next ten years, McQueen continued to work in film, television, and radio. As a result of the limited roles available to African American women in the entertainment industry, McQueen frequently was cast as the maid. Her film work included The Women (1939), Cabin in the Sky (1943), I Dood It! (1943), Mildred Pierce (1945), and Killer Diller (1948) among others. She worked in radio on the Jack Benny Show and on Beulah, which became a television show in 1950.

Unable to support herself as an actress, McQueen worked in a wide-range of occupations, including as a restaurant owner, paid companion, waitress, tour guide, Macy’s toy department employee, cab dispatcher, music and dance teacher, radio show host, and factory worker. She temporarily moved back to Augusta, Georgia for employment in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, she returned to Harlem where she worked as a receptionist and dance teacher at Mount Morris Park Recreation Center. In the 1970s, McQueen enrolled at the City College of New York where she earned a degree in political science.

McQueen continued to perform on screen and stage sporadically. She appeared in three films in the 1970s and 1980s, including Mosquito Coast (1986). She won a Golden Globe and Emmy Award for her performance in Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody (1978).

In 1989, McQueen participated in the 50th anniversary celebration for Gone with the Wind. In 1995, a kerosene fire burned down her Augusta, Georgia home and McQueen received severe burns. She died from her injuries on December 22, 1995.”

Granshaw, M. (2010, August 31). Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen (1911-1995). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/mcqueen-thelma-butterfly-1911-1995/SOURCE OF THE AUTHOR’S INFORMATION:

Stephen Bourne, Butterfly McQueen Remembered (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2008); Axel Nissen, Actresses of a Certain Character (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland and Company, 2007); Dwandalyn R. Reece, “Butterfly
McQueen,” in African American National Biography, vol. 5, eds. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).

Ms. McDaniel and Ms. McQueen were both at the height of their careers during their appearance in Gone with the Wind, but they were only two out of several Black actresses who were making strides in the film industry; all nonetheless as Mammy caricatures. Most closely related to the skill and talent of Ms. McDaniel was that of Ms. Louise Beavers.

Ms. Louise Beavers and Ms. Hattie McDaniel

iforcolor

ARCHIVIST, EDUCATOR, HISTORIAN, and ARTiST
Dale Ricardo Shields is a 2017 winner of The Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award®, 2017 and 2015 Tony® award nominee for the Excellence in Theatre Education Award, the 2017 AUDELCO/"VIV" Special Achievement Award, 2020, 2021, and 2022 ENCORE AWARD / The Actors Fund and winner of the 2022.

Recently, he won the 2022 Legend Award from his alma mater Ohio University.

He is the 2021 winner of the Paul Robeson Award, presented (jointly) by the Actors Equity Association and the Actors Equity Foundation.

Research Accomplishments:
His extensive professional credits as a Director, Stage manager, and Actor (Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and Regional) As an actor he has appeared on Saturday Night Live, Another World, Guiding Light, The Cosby Show, and the ITV television series "Special Needs" and commercials and film.

Professor Shields is a member of the Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and the American Guild of Musical Artists performance unions and an associate member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

He began his artistic academic career in New York City at Playwrights Horizon, The South Bronx Action Theatre, and Mind Builders, and then was invited to join the teaching staff at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre (New York Shakespeare Festival). He represented the United States for Theatre Young Audiences at the ASSITEJ Theatre Festival in London, England.

He has been a Professor and Visiting Artist at Ohio University, The College of Wooster, Denison University, Macalester College, Randolph- Macon College, Susquehanna University, and SUNY Potsdam.

He holds B.F.A and M.F.A, Degrees from Ohio University.

Website(s)

Iforcolor.org [Research]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Ricardo_Shields [Career]