Imitation of Life

 

In 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald described Fannie Hurst as an author who wouldn’t be read “ten years from now.” Had he said: “Ten years from when she stops” he’d have been nearer the mark, because in 1933 she produced her best-remembered novel Imitation of Life. The book was a bestseller, snapped up by Universal Studios. Carl Laemmle, Jr. had taken over from his father. While concentrating on the pictures the studio was known for, low-budget Westerns and horror, he wanted to show his studio could compete with the Big Four in making prestige projects. He assigned veteran director John M. Stahl, and the movie was released late in 1934. It starred Claudette Colbert and Warren Williams. Though if you see the trailer they are hardly mentioned; instead, the performances of two unknowns, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington are singled out. Twenty-five years later something similar happened. The remake starred Lana Turner and John Gavin, with two more male romantic figures, Robert Alda and Dan O’Herlihy in supporting roles. Yet again, a pair of comparative unknowns, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, essaying the roles played earlier by Beavers and Washington, were nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars. While the primary plots differ from each other, and from the book, in significant ways, the essential story is as follows. A pair of single mothers meet, and live together, each raising a daughter. One becomes very successful, the other is her maid, though treated like a member of the family. The primary plot in each tracks the star’s path to success. There is a subplot involving the daughter of the success, one which I found contrived. But the movies are remembered, indeed, both are in the National Registry of Films, for the other subplot, involving the maid and her daughter. They are black, the mother obviously so, but the daughter is able to pass for white, and tries to do so, breaking her mother’s heart.

 

Both movies are very much of their period, and require some effort by the viewer, who must place them in context to appreciate them.

 

In the earlier version Colbert plays Bea Pullman, mother of Jessie, who takes in Delilah Johnson (Beavers), mother of Peola. The girls are played by three actresses, when the characters are 3 and 4, Peola the elder by a year, 8 and 9, and finally 18 and 19. The oldest pair are Rochelle Hudson as Jessie, and Fredi Washington as Peola. Bea tries to support the menage by selling pancake syrup door-to-door. Her breakthrough comes when Delilah makes the best pancakes she has ever tasted. She opens a restaurant on the boardwalk. Five years pass, and a hungry man, Elmer Smith (the deadpan Ned Sparks), grateful for some free cakes, tells her to “box it.” She begins selling “Aunt Delilah’s Pancakes,” with a smiling Delilah on every box. Bea becomes hugely successful. Ten years pass, and Elmer, now her right-hand man, invites a friend, Steve Archer (Warren William) to one of her soirees. He is an ichthyologist. That ichthyologists attend glitzy black-tie parties seems fishy to me, but maybe he was paid scale. Meanwhile, Peola from the time she is small wants to be thought of as white, and hates it when her friends discover who her mother is, realizing the truth about her. When grown, instead of attending a Negro college, she secretly takes a job as a cashier at a segregated restaurant in Virginia, but is outed when her mother turns up. She tells her mother she will go away, and “if you see me on the street, don’t acknowledge me.” While Delilah and Bea searched for Peola, Steve looked after Jessie, who fell in love with him. While he never encouraged this, Bea tells Steve that until Jessie is older, and over her infatuation, she cannot see him, but will wait for the day to come when they can finally be together. Meanwhile, her heart broken by her daughter’s rejection, Delilah takes to her bed, and soon dies. Her one wish was for a lavish funeral. Peola turns up at the funeral, realizing at last what she has done to her mother.

Seeing it today, a likely reaction is to cringe at the character Delilah. The nadir of post-Civil War African-American life was in the 1930’s. It was the decade when the tide began its slow turn. Imitation of Life was a major turning point, but it is hard to recognize that. Delilah is a woman who just wants to be housed and fed. She is the happy black servant, as unthreatening as Aunt Jemima, the figure who inspired Aunt Delilah. When the business becomes successful, and Bea wants her to sign papers showing that she, Delilah, is a twenty-percent owner of the million-dollar business, she refuses. Just to keep living in Bea’s house is enough for her. That, and a good funeral when the time comes. That actual Black attitudes even then were at odds with what whites of the period wished to believe is clear when learning of the backlash by Blacks, who hated Beavers playing a maid. To which Beavers replied that she’d rather play one, than be one. The character she plays is in many respects similar to the one Hattie McDaniel played five years later, in Gone With The Wind. (McDaniel plays an extra in the funeral scene, but I was unable to spot her.) Beavers’ portrayal of Delilah was perhaps the first significant Black role in a major Hollywood film.

 

Then there is Peola! Fredi Washington, born in 1903, was only three years younger than Beavers. But she could pass for younger. Moreover, she could pass for white. Indeed, it was suggested that she do so, in furtherance of her career. Though having outed herself by playing this part, I am not sure how that would have worked. She refused to deny her race, turned her back on Hollywood to return to the New York stage, and was a civil rights activist.

 

1934 was the year the Code came back into force, and the studio was worried that the movie might be banned. Not for any of the expected problems, crime, violence, sexual content, etc. The issue was one other thing banned by the Code: miscegenation. Neither Delilah nor Peola is given a love interest, but Peola’s skin color makes it clear that miscegenation must have occurred. Though Peola has a change of heart at the end, she is not shown as being in the wrong by passing for white. Her sin is to have rejected her mother, but that is seen as tragic, the result of forces beyond their control. The strength of the film is that it forces the audience to sympathize with Peola’s plight, and to ask tough questions as to just why Peola cannot live as white. That’s because Fredi Washington, with her light skin and finishing school diction (like her “sister” Jessie’s) is hard to see as Black. All of the very real restrictions placed upon her at that time, because of her race, seem absurd. Indeed, the concept of race seems absurd. Which it is, but here that absurdity is as apparent as black and white.

 

Twenty-five years later, the story goes like this. Lora Meredith (Turner) and her daughter Susie, meet Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and her daughter Sarah Jane on the beach at Coney Island. The year is 1947, and they also meet Steve Archer (John Gavin), a photographer, who develops an interest in Lora. Lora is an aspiring actress, and when Steve, after proposing, tries to order her not to pursue a career, she breaks it off. Agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) has her audition for successful playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy). She becomes a star, O’Herlihy’s muse, and his girlfriend. A decade later she is considering giving it all up, and is reunited with Steve, but then a prominent Italian director offers her a part in a movie. Her now sixteen-year-old daughter (Sandra Dee) develops a crush on Steve, while mom is away in Italy. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane hates being black, and once again breaks mom’s heart, but turns up at the funeral. (Where the great Mahalia Jackson sings a solo.)

 

The 1959 remake was helmed by producer Ross Hunter, and director Douglas Sirk, a partnership synonymous with 1950’s melodrama. Sirk is considered a great director, but a difficult one to “get.” The reason is that he made subtle points hidden beneath a glossy, melodramatic surface. What you see seems corny and overwrought: and that’s the point. The tension between life and his slightly funhouse version of it was deeply ironic, a commentary on the manners of its period. Lana Turner is central to his expression here. A bit of context which might escape modern audiences, but which would have been in the minds of those seeing it in 1959, was that Turner and her daughter had recently been at the center of a major Hollywood scandal.

 

Lana Turner was married eight time, twice to Stephen Crane, father of her only child Cheryl Crane. Besides all those husbands, she had many boyfriends. In the late 1950’s, after divorcing husband number four (or five, counting Crane twice) Tarzan actor Lex Barker, she began living with a low-level gangster named Johnny Stompanato. One night in 1958, allegedly to protect her mother from a beating, her fourteen-year-old daughter stabbed Stompanato to death. Inevitably, there were rumors that it was the actress who stabbed him, and the daughter took the fall because as a minor (and non-movie star) the repercussions would be less. Crane would lead a troubled life for some years, but later became a real estate broker and author. She is still alive, having turned eighty in July.

Audiences would have had the scandal in mind, and read things into the relationship in the movie between Lora and Susie. The relationship between the daughter and Steve Archer felt contrived in 1934. The age gap then between Hudson (18) and William (40) was greater than that between Dee (16) and Gavin (27), and William seemed an old forty. Nonetheless, it felt less inappropriate. Hudson was a mature eighteen. Dee, who may actually have been two years younger than her official biography has it, making her fourteen, not sixteen, plays a very perky kid. She is supposed to be graduating from finishing school, but when she and Steve go to a nightclub, he pointedly orders her a Coke. She seems much younger than she would in A Summer Place, made a year later and released later the same year. Dee was too interesting an actress to be dismissed so quickly. When she and her mother have a confrontation over her feelings about Steve, and her mother says she will “give him up,” Susie tells her mother to “stop acting.” Dee real depths of emotion, and neatly skewers Turner’s acting.

Turner’s performance was part of Sirk’s triumph. I can’t think of a role in which she has impressed me. She seems stagy and over the top in most of her scenes in Imitation of Life, but the critics attribute it to Sirk, something he coaxed from her. It makes her slightly silly, but it works for the character, who in contrast to Colbert’s version, is artificial, and narcissistic. There’s a great moment when Annie, late in the movie, mentions all of the friends she wants at her funeral. There are the members of her church, and of the various lodges she belongs to. Lora says she never knew Annie had all those friends. “You never asked.” She doesn’t say it as a rebuke. Annie is as saintly in her way as Delilah was in hers. But it brings Lora up short, because it’s true.

 

The title in this version might fit Lora’s life even better than it does Sarah Jane’s. But it was meant for Sarah Jane’s part of the story. The idea that a Black woman would try to pass as white was, sadly, still plausible despite the passage of twenty-five years. What had changed was how much stronger that point might be made. The very first night the Johnsons move into the small apartment the Meredith’s occupy, on being gifted with a black doll, eight-year-old Sarah Jane cries that she wants Susie’s white doll; she doesn’t want a black doll. She also does not understand why she and her mother have to sleep in a tiny room off the kitchen.

The grown-up Sarah Jane is played by Susan Kohner. Kohner was the daughter of a film producer born in Bohemia, and an actress born in Mexico. Unlike Fredi Washington, she was not black, but with darker coloration than Sandra Dee (almost everyone had darker coloration than Sandra Dee) she could pass as an African-American passing as white.

 

By 1959, the Code having already been challenged a number of times, the filmmakers were slightly less concerned about the repercussions stemming from miscegenation. Not so blithe as to include explicit sex, but that was generally true in the fifties. Sexual allusion was the order of the day, and they made the most of it. Annie tells Sarah Jane she wishes she would go to church socials, and meet a boy. “You mean, bus boys, janitors …?” African-American men were undesirable, not only because dating them would make her own race obvious, but because in a racist society their socio-economic status was limited. She secretly has a boyfriend. When she returns from sneaking out to see him, she tells Susie about it, while stripping down to a slip for bed, confiding that “he’s white.”

We meet him. Later that year Sandra Dee would pair with Troy Donahue, in a role that would make him a star. In this film he has just one scene, but it got him noticed. It’s not the Troy Donahue we think of. Sarah Jane meets Frankie, and can see something is upsetting him. “Are you a nigger?” The line was even more shocking then than it is now. Despite its banishment from common usage, and its replacement with “the N-word,” the original has been used so often in popular music and R-rated crime dramas that we are immured. She denies it, but Frankie says he has heard it from “the other kids,” who know who her mother is. He beats her, and leaves her sobbing in a puddle in the alley.

She takes a job, telling her mother she works nights filing books at the library. Annie discovers she is working at Harry’s Bar, as a dancer in a skimpy costume, flirting with the white patrons. After her mother’s arrival outs her, she runs off to Hollywood, to dance at a club called Moulon Rouge, where she and another dancer date customers.

 

Kohner was terrific, but five years later she married, and quit acting. That was around the time acting quit Dee. It’s a shame that neither had the careers they deserved, though unlike Dee, Kohner, who is still alive, age eighty-six, probably got the life she wanted.