A Tribute to Butterfly McQueen (Part 2)

So what happened to Butterfly once Gone with the Wind was over (you can read about her time on the GWTW set here)? She returned to New York to star as Puck in a very unconventional adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream called Swingin' the Dream. Described by one reviewer as a "lavish jitterbug extravaganza," Swinging' the Dream was based on a choreography by Agnes de Mille and opened at Center Theatre on November 29, 1939.  It transferred Shakespeare's tale to late 19th century New Orleans, during "The Birth of Swing," with a black and white cast, including among others Benny Goodman, Dorothy McGuire, Louis Armstrong, Maxine Sullivan, Juano Hernandez and Oscar Polk.

Unfortunately, this ambitious project that sounded very good in theory was a resounding failure. Critics unanimously bashed it and it closed after only one performance. It also put an end to  Butterfly's theatrical career. She returned to Hollywood where between 1941 and 1947 she was typecast as a maid in a host of films: Affectionately Yours in 1941 with Hattie McDaniel, I Dood It in 1943, Flame of the Barbary Coast and Mildred Pierce in 1945 and Duel in the Sun in 1946. (Her appearance in Selznick's Since You Went Away in 1944 did not survive editing.)

One exception in this succession is the musical Cabin in the Sky from 1942, where Butterfly played a friend to Ethel Waters' Petunia. Cabin in the Sky had started as a very successful  all-black Broadway musical, but MGM's decision to turn it into a movie and its black cast raised concerns both from studio executives that were afraid the movie would fail to make money (especially in the South) and from the black press that feared the cliche depiction of black characters Hollywood had accustomed them to expect. But director Vincente Minnelli that had set out to "never knowingly offend blacks... or anyone else for that matter" managed to create a balanced film for the standard of the time. It should be noted, however, that Butterfly was not very happy on the set of this film, where she felt everyone and especially Lena Horne treated her with contempt.

In 1946, following her appearance in Duel in the Sun, Butterfly McQueen issued a statement that she wouldn't appear in any more comic maid roles, the kind of roles that were almost exclusively available to black actresses in the 1940s. She found herself unemployable in show business and took on a variety of jobs in factories, shops and restaurants. She also attended a number of courses at five different colleges over the years and in 1975, aged sixty-four, graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in political science from New York’s City College.

In 1948, she appeared in Killer Dealer, a movie produced independently, outside of Hollywood and directed mostly at black audiences. And somewhat contrary to her resolution, in 1950 she starred as a scatterbrained maid in the ABC show Beulah, along with Ethel Waters. Her one-woman show at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1951 (in which she invested her life savings) was unsuccessful. During the 1950s and later, she  only occasionally appeared in minor shows and spectacles, but continued to be remembered fondly for her role in Gone with the Wind.

So what is the legacy of Butterfly McQueen in the world of Gone with the Wind? Her portrayal of Prissy was disliked by Margaret Mitchell and a few other reviewers, but acclaimed by the majority. For the black community, it was iconic of the degrading manner in which African Americans were presented in popular culture at the time and many remembered the moment Scarlett slaps her, as well as Prissy's antics in themselves, as things that were deeply embarrassing to watch. (We will perhaps have a post exploring the black community's reaction to Gone with the Wind.) The depiction of the Prissy character in itself, both in the book and in the movie, is one of the most controversial and most widely condemned aspects of Gone with the Wind and rightly so. 

Donald Bogle in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films gives another, more forgiving interpretation to Prissy's part in Gone with the Wind as played by Butterfly McQueen:

"Some observers saw Butterfly as the stock darky figure. But there was much more to her performance. Had she been a mere pickaninny, she might have engendered hostility or embarrassed audiences. Instead she seemed to provide an outlet for the repressed fears of the audience. That perhaps explains why everyone laughed hysterically at her hysterics. For during the crisis sequences, the film built beautifully, and there was a need for release. Mere comic relief of the old type would have been vulgar. But because of her artistic mayhem, her controlled fright, and her heightened awareness and articulation of the emotions of the audiences, Butterfly McQueen seemed to flow wonderfully with the rest of the film. She had a pleasant waiflike quality, too, not in the patronizing style of The Green Pastures, in which the grown-up people behaved like rambunctious idiot children, but in a special, purely personal way. Tiny and delicate, Butterfly McQueen seemed to ask for protection and was a unique combination of the comic and the pathetic."

And to end this on a high note, here's a very touching moment recounted by David Thompson who interviewed Butterfly while researching for the documentary The Making of a Legend: “Gone With the Wind” "some time in the late ’80s":

"So we moved to a kind of island in the middle of the street, sat down there on a stone wall and did the interview. I suppose she was shy or afraid of going anywhere else. Well, considering the circumstances, it was a good interview— and later on, Butterfly was properly filmed for the documentary. But the most beautiful thing happened. Because of where we were, many people were passing close by all the time we were talking. But the crowd was often too dense to see anything clearly. Well, all of a sudden a young white woman crossing the street cried out, “Gone With the Wind!” She had heard Butterfly’s voice, without seeing her, and made the connection. And this young woman went down on her knees before Butterfly to thank her for the film. It was very touching and entirely natural."

Rue de la Paix

Continuing our look at the life and career of Butterfly McQueen, we're pleased to pay her tribute with a collage today, the 100th anniversary of her birthday.

Remembering Butterfly McQueen by gwtwscrapbook on Polyvore.com

A Tribute to Butterfly McQueen

Since tomorrow is the centenary of Butterfly McQueen's birthday (it is tomorrow, even though the whole internet seems to think it's today), we're going to honor her by having two posts discussing her life and career before and after Gone with the Wind. The first is this one you're reading right now and the second will be up tomorrow. To this end, we relied on Butterfly McQueen Remembered, a biography of the actress written by Stephen Bourne. It's a book we heartily recommend you to buy, both for the details on Butterfly herself and for the wealth of information concerning the trajectory of other black actors in movies and plays  of the time. So, let's proceed.

Before Gone with the Wind

Butterfly’s real name was Thelma MacQueen. She was born in Tampa, Florida, on January 8* 1911, the sole daughter of Wallace MacQueen, a stevedore on the Tampa docks, and Mary, a domestic servant. Her parents divorced in 1916 and 5-year-old Thelma was sent to live with her uncle and aunt, James and Ida Richardson, in Augusta, Georgia, while Mary MacQueen took on a variety of full-time jobs all along the East Coast in order to be able to support both herself and her daughter. She eventually found a stable job as a cook in Harlem, New York City and sent for Thelma to join her.

Thelma attended Public School 9 on West Eighty-third Street and high school in Babylon, Long Island, New York (where her mother had found work as a servant to a white family). After she graduated from high school, she attended the Lincoln Training School for Nursing in the Bronx, that she was soon to quit, distressed by the particulars of the nursing profession and having flunked her chemistry course. She then worked as a children’s nurse and briefly in a factory, before taking on acting, at the advice of one of her old teachers.

In 1934, Thelma joined Venezuela Jones’ Negro Youth Theatre Group in Harlem,  functioning under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, and was cast in an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to be staged at the New York City College. According to one source, in this period Thelma studied dancing with Janet Collins, Katherine Dunham and Geoffrey Holder, and canto with Adelaide Hall, all of them pioneers of African American stage performance.

It was during the rehearsals for this play that Thelma acquired the nickname Butterfly, though the accounts for how she did so differ significantly. One version of the story is that she danced in the “Butterfly Ballet” in A Midsummer’s Night Dream and the nickname stuck. According to another, more credible version, the “Butterfly Ballet” was actually part of a school “playlet” called Aunt Sophronia at College that Thelma had participated in as a little girl and of which she had very fond memories: “We had on beautiful gold tights—and wings with spangles! Oh, it was the loveliest ballet you ever did see.” When she joined the New York dramatic group, the members of which had more theatrical experience than she did, she would say, “I was in the Butterfly Ballet,” to be on par with their stories of Broadway performances and nightclubs gigs. Her friend Ruth Moore, also a member of the group, suggested she adopted Butterfly as her professional name. And so Thelma MacQueen easily became Butterfly McQueen, both on and off stage.

Butterfly’s debut on Broadway was in the all-black melodrama Brown Sugar, which opened at the Biltmore Theatre on December 2, 1937. The story goes that Butterfly (or rather her distinctive voice) made such an impression on Broadway producer George Abbott during her audition for this play that the latter created the role of parlor maid Lucille especially for her. Brown Sugar was unsuccessful and closed after only four performances, but critics agreed on the potential of young Butterfly. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson went as far as to say that Abbott should be credited for nothing more than “appreciating the extraordinary artistry of a high-stepping, little dusky creature who describes herself as Butterfly McQueen. Butterfly has something on the ball." Abbott himself was also pleased with her performance and distributed her in his next play, What a Life in 1938.

It was her success in this play that would ultimately bring her to David O. Selznick’s attention. Butterfly had tried to approach one of Selznick’s representatives in New York before, at the advice of her friend Ruth Moore, but to no avail. Ruth had read Gone with the Wind, and recognized the career-making opportunity for her friend: “She ran up to me and said that in today’s news was a story about Gone With the Wind and David O. Selznick is going to make it into a movie and you go down to his Park Avenue office and tell them you are Prissy,” the actress later recalled.

However, Mr. Bundamann, Selznick’s representative and the man Butterfly introduced herself to as Prissy, considered her wholly unsuitable for the role: “You’re too old—too fat—and too dignified for the part. You could never be Prissy.” Luckily, David O. Selznick himself would have a different opinion. Following her breakthrough in George Abbott’s plays, Butterfly was approached by Selznick’s agents, and by the end of 1938 her screen tests were over and her contract was signed. No other contenders seem to have been seriously considered for the part, though Butterfly McQueen does mention that the wife of Oscar Polk (Pork) was up for the part as well, only that “she was much too pretty” to get it. 

Filming Gone with the Wind

Butterfly travelled from New York to Hollywood on January 15, 1939. Her first scenes in Gone with the Wind were filmed under George Cukor, but her relationship with the director didn’t run too smoothly. In the 1988 documentary The Making of a Legend, Butterfly remembers how she bargained with Cukor so that Vivien Leigh wouldn’t slap her for real in the famous “I don't know nothin' 'bout birthing babies!"” sequence. Leigh would pretend to hit her, Butterfly would scream in pain and the noise of the blow would be dubbed over the shot. In the same documentary, cameraman Harry Wolf remembers the preliminaries to this bargain somewhat differently: “In the middle of the shot Butterfly McQueen broke out in tears and she says, ‘I can’t do it! She’s hurting me!’ And Cukor got very incensed and he said, ‘I’m the director and I’ll tell you when to cut the shot.’”

Susan Myrick described Cukor’s behavior towards Butterfly as just light teasing. In her Southern Macon Telegraph column, where she gave reports of the filming of Gone with Wind, she wrote that “Cukor has gone Southern with a vengeance and quotes from the book constantly, threatening to sell Butterfly down the river if she doesn’t get the action just right or calling a prop man to get the Simon Legree whip. It is all in good fun, of course, and Prissy enjoys the joke as much as any of us.” The dubious taste of racist jokes aside, “Prissy” didn’t seem to interpret Cukor’s attitude towards her as part of “good fun.” When Cukor left Gone with the Wind and went on to direct The Women, he offered Butterfly McQueen a small uncredited role as Lulu, the maid on the cosmetics counter. Here’s what Butterfly had to say about working with him for that film:

"Gone With the Wind suspended operations temporarily, and Mr. Cukor asked me to be in The Women during this interim. The hurt I felt in having Mr. Cukor scream at me for some mistake I made, I remember vividly and will take with me to my grave. I believe his sole purpose in giving me the small part in The Women was to have the opportunity to vent his frustrations on me. In the employ of a David O. Selznick, he could not have done such a thing. I remember the look of co-operation (in his hatred) on the face of Anita Loos when he unleashed his fury upon me. Mr. Selznick soon had us again on the set of Gone With the Wind."

--In Murray Summers, “Butterfly McQueen Was One of The Women Too,” Filmograph 3, no. 4 (1973), 7–8. 

Excepting Cukor, Butterfly had nice things to say about her fellow actors involved in the Melanie giving birth & leaving Atlanta scene: “Olivia made us laugh and laugh. There she’d be, lying on her bed in labor, screaming ‘Scarlett! Scarlett!’ and as soon as the scene was over, she’d jump up and start telling us all jokes. And Clark Gable was such a considerate gentleman. Did you know that he was a boy scout leader?” (in Guy Flatley, “Butterfly’s Back in Town,” The New York Times, July 21, 1968, 18.) 

In later interviews, she recalls standing up to Sam Woods in a scene at Tara immediately after the war, when she was supposed to eat watermelon ("I’d do anything they asked, but I wouldn’t let Scarlett slap me, and I wouldn’t eat watermelon. I was very sensitive about that. Of course, thinking about it now, I probably could have had fun just eating that watermelon and spitting out the pips while everyone went by.”) and being disappointed with the silly part she had to play. This 1974 interview sums up her experience, with its ups and downs:

"I was the only unhappy one in that film because I didn’t know they were going to be so authentic. And Mr. Selznick understood. He was a very understanding man. He knew it was a stupid part and I was an intelligent person and he thoroughly agreed with me that it wasn’t a very pleasant part to play. However, I did my best. My very best. And Mammy said, 'You’ll never come to Hollywood again. You complain too much.' One day Clark Gable said to me, 'What’s the matter, Prissy?' As if to say, 'If they’re not nice to you around here, I have some pull.' But I was just generally unhappy. I didn’t want to be that little slave. I didn’t want to play that stupid part. I was just whining and crying. I was a stupid girl. That’s what Prissy was. Hahahahahaha. . . . But now I get more for a one-night stand on a college campus, twice as much as I did for a full week then. One never knows what the agent received under the table but I received only $200 a week. And Selznick kept me on the payroll longer than anyone because he appreciated my efforts. My contract was for only six weeks, but I was there for almost a full year, just to speak a wild line like 'Miss Scarlett! Miss Scarlett!' Clark Gable was a perfect gentleman. And Vivien Leigh worked so hard."

--In Tinkerbelle, “McQueen for a Day,” Andy Warhol’s Interview 4, no. 11, November 1974, 18–19

To read more about what other people thought of Butterfly's performance as Prissy and what her career was like after Gone with Wind join us tomorrow!

* Most internet sources give January 7 as Butterfly McQueen's birth date. Though her birth certificate will technically only be accessible starting with tomorrow (because Florida has a hundred-year rule to releasing official records), according to Stephen Bourne, a copy of a Social Security application Thelma filled in in 1937 was located by genealogist Deborah Montgomorie and in it she writes her date of birth as January 8. The large majority of printed encyclopedias that include McQueen also list January 8 as her birthday, so there is plenty of reason to consider it valid, even though the combined authority of IMDB and wikipedia disagrees.

Poster of the Week

Awash in lavender tones, Rhett and Scarlett gaze tenderly at each other in this 1941 poster. It's the perfect poster for Windies who love the color purple!

 Poster image from movieposterdb.com. 

Doppelganger Dresses, Part 18: Scarlett's Prewar Wardrobe (Book Version)

"The rose organdie with long pink sash was becoming, but she had worn it last summer when Melanie visited Twelve Oaks and she'd be sure to remember it.  And might be catty enough to mention it. The black bombazine, with its puffed sleeves and princess lace collar, set off her white skin superbly, but it did make her look a trifle elderly.  Scarlett peered anxiously in the mirror at her sixteen-year-old face as if expecting to see wrinkles and sagging chin muscles.  It would never do to appear sedate and elderly before Melanie's sweet youthfulness.  The lavender barred muslin was beautiful with those wide insets of lace and net about the hem, but it had never suited her type.  It would suit Carreen's delicate profile and wishy-washy expression perfectly, but Scarlett felt that it made her look like a schoolgirl.  It would never do to appear schoolgirlish beside Melanie's poised self. The green plaid taffeta, frothing with flounces and each flounce edged in green velvet ribbon, was most becoming, in fact her favorite dress, for it darkened her eyes to emerald.  But there was unmistakably a grease spot on the front of the basque.  Of course, her brooch could be pinned over the spot, but perhaps Melanie had sharp eyes."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter V

We're starting off the year with a small army of dresses for you in our latest edition of Doppelganger Dresses! Today we bring you four dresses which, as you've surely guessed by now, come from the quote above about Scarlett's prewar wardrobe. And just think--if our heroine had changed her mind about what to wear to the fateful Twelve Oaks barbecue, perhaps we'd all be talking about her famous rose organdie dress or green plaid taffeta dress instead of her green sprigged muslin dress.

But while these dresses just narrowly missed their date with destiny, they are just as historically accurate as some of the more famous frocks mentioned in Gone with the Wind. After the jump, you'll find period fashion plates for all four dresses described by MM. 

Check them out and let us know what you think. Do you have a favorite out of the four? Which one could you most see Scarlett wearing? 

A Doppelganger Dress of Sorts for Scarlett's Red Christmas Dress

If you remember (come on, it was only last year!), in our Christmas edition of the Doppelganger series, we talked about Scarlett's red and white Christmas dress, the one she wears to send Ashley back to the wars, and showed you a couple of period fashion plates that closely resembled the style of Plunkett's creation. Both of the fashion plates models had long sleeves and we  agreed that the designer's decision to use short sleeves for Scarlett's dress was an inspired one. But as it turns out, he did explore the long-sleeved version both as an alternative for the Gone with the Wind costume and in another movie. 

Here are some screencaps from the 1944 musical Can't Help Singing in which Deanna Durbin plays the part of a headstrong spoiled daughter of a senator who runs away to follow her  boyfriend, an army officer sent to California during the Gold Rush. Plunkett designed the costumes for this movie, and sure enough, you'll notice the striking similarity between the dress Deanna Durbin wears to sing Any Moment Now and Scarlett's Christmas dress. There are, of course, a couple of differences, in color, sleeve length and the overall size of the skirt and crinoline, that are nicely explained by the fact this movie is set a good 10 years before Gone with the Wind. 

Another interesting aspect is the way Plunkett solved the problem of the puffy sleeves that made the dresses from the fashion plates look somewhat matronly and unflattering. The costume from Can't Help Singing has long sleeves, but they only gain volume below the elbow, which creates a more girlish and innocent look than Scarlett's Christmas dress did, and justifiably so.

 

 

You can watch this scene from the movie and see the dress in motion here or here. 

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone! We've had tons of fun working on the blog thus far, thanks to your enthusiasm and comments. We're lucky to have readers like you, and we're looking forward to bringing you plenty more in 2011!

--Bugsie and iso