'Dreams' focuses on black actors in segregated Hollywood

To those who often criticized Hattie McDaniel for accepting film and television roles as servants, the actress would maintain, "I'd rather play a maid than be one."

Best remembered as Mammy in "Gone With the Wind," McDaniel, her choices stifled by industry racism for most of her career, never moved beyond portrayals of sassy housemaids. Yet as the first African-American to win an Academy Award, she was beloved as the vivacious doyenne of "Black Hollywood," a lost era brought to dynamic life in Donald Bogle's "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams."

With such books as his fine biography of Dorothy Dandridge, as well as "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks," Bogle is unsurpassed in excavating the treacherous and triumphant history of African-Americans in Hollywood. In these stories of perseverance, Bogle focused on "what the camera had recorded, what encoded messages the performers were sometimes able to communicate even while playing the most stereotyped roles," he writes in the book's introduction.

This tome is more concerned with the lives of such performers as Lena Horne, Mantan Moreland, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and the Nicholas Brothers away from the glittering lights and soundstages. And how, barred from Hollywood's social mainstream, they fashioned their own equally glamorous and bawdy community.

Though more than half of those who founded Los Angeles in 1781 were black, their adventures in Hollywood arguably began when Kentucky-born Nellie Wan moved to Southern California in 1910. Calling herself Madame Sul-Te-Wan, she finagled an introduction to fellow Kentuckian D.W. Griffith, then making what would become his masterpiece, "Birth of a Nation." He hired her, and Wan wound up playing several minor roles in the controversial film. The two remained friends for the rest of Griffith's life, and Wan became Hollywood's first important black performer.

With Wan's lead, more African-Americans headed west, even as Los Angeles became more segregated. Still, black performers, such as child actor Ernest Morrison, known as "Sunshine Sammy," were in demand, though some theaters refused to show film shorts featuring a "colored" star.

It was more difficult for black adult actors to achieve such prominence, and some literally made their Hollywood entrance "by way of the back door -- or the servants' entrance," Bogle writes. Oscar Smith, who operated a shoeshine stand at Paramount studio, eventually landed film roles as chauffeurs and valets, and Louise Beavers, best known for her role as the saintly, long-suffering mother in the 1934 version of "Imitation of Life," began in Hollywood as a domestic. (Like McDaniel, she spent most of her career playing maids.)

As if to vanquish their stereotypical on-screen portrayals, black actors led lavish lives off-camera. McDaniel bought only the finest imported china and linen. Beavers preferred fur coats and lived in a spacious home with a manicured lawn.

Yet no star's off-screen exploits provided a more stark contrast to his film persona than Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry -- known as Stepin Fetchit. During the Depression, he was Hollywood's most famous black actor and flaunted his money with a fleet of expensive cars and tailor-made cashmere suits. But his fame was a Pyrrhic victory. Stepin Fetchit, the shuffling, drawling, dimwitted character that made him a star, personified a virulent, stubborn image that, to some degree, African-Americans are still trying to live down.

Bogle balances his book between notable snapshots of such figures as Paul Williams, a black architect who designed Hollywood homes for prominent whites, and tabloid dish about Black Hollywood. Yet Bogle is too deft a historian to allow gossipy details about gay affairs or romantic scandals to overwhelm this book.

This entertaining, brightly written book essentially ends as it begins, with Madame Sul-Te-Wan. Her death in 1959, as well as the passings of Beavers, Nat "King" Cole, and Dandridge over the next few years, closed that heady era of Black Hollywood. The civil rights and black power movements ushered in more black performers, and with greater opportunities in film and television, a new kind of black Hollywood was born.

Still, Bogle concludes, "something had vanished: that sense of a vibrant cohesive community where black entertainers worked, played, and had fun together. Those nights when Herb Jeffries or Bobby Short or Lena Horne with Billy Strayhorn might step into the after-hours hangout Brother's. Those times when Stepin Fetchit or Ben Carter or the Nicholas Brothers would suddenly appear on Central Avenue and be the talk of the whole block. Those late nights when Louise Beavers and friends would play cards and laugh and talk and have a heck of a time into the early hours of the morning."

Indeed, these dizzying times have faded, but at least with "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams," they are no longer forgotten.