N a Sunday night in September 1918, the great
operatic tenor Enrico Caruso stepped onstage at the Century
Theater in New York to perform as part of a special program put
on by the Army Tank Corps Welfare League. Caruso dazzled the
audience with his rendition of Italian war songs, before
launching into a surprising finale, the patriotic tune "Over
There," which left the audience in a state of frenzy.
Who could follow this performance by the greatest singer of
his day? The composer of "Over There," George M. Cohan, was also
part of the program, but even he must have feared the prospect
of matching this version of his most famous song. But one daring
soul bounded out from off stage, looked impishly at the audience
and confidently told the crowd: "Folks, you ain't heard nothin'
yet." This single line, proclaimed by the 32-year-old Al Jolson,
brought down the house, and before long the audience had all but
forgotten about the great Caruso, as it responded to the man who
was already being billed as "The World's Greatest
Entertainer."
Almost a decade later, Jolson used the same line as part of
his historic performance in "The Jazz Singer," a film that
signaled the transition from silent to sound motion pictures.
Here, Jolson's quip served as more than just personal boasting;
it was a symbolic proclamation of the promising future of
"talking" motion pictures. What a glorious future it was
destined to be: everything about Hollywood movies turned out
bigger and brasher than even Jolson could have imagined at the
time.
But Al Jolson's own future would be far more problematic. A
half-century after his death, on Oct. 23, 1950, one expects few
memorials and public events to commemorate it. The man who was
once the most popular entertainer in America certainly lives on
in the public imagination, but increasingly as an egregious
symbol of political incorrectness. Jolson was no saint, as all
but his most ardent defenders are quick to admit. Even during
his lifetime, he was deprecated for a host of vices, from
selfishness to overweening pride. But with the passing years,
these diminish in comparison to his chief transgression: his
persistent use of the burnt-cork makeup commonly known as
blackface.
Want to shock an audience in our jaded modern age? Forget
"The Vagina Monologues." Don't bother reciting the complete
litany of four-letter words. Instead, try performing in
blackface. The controversy generated by Spike Lee's latest
movie, "Bamboozled," which tries to wring humor out of the
blackface tradition while also satirizing it, is only the latest
in a series of instances in which the burnt-cork makeup has
inflamed passions. Ted Danson faced even greater hostility after
performing in blackface for a Friar's Club roast of Whoopi
Goldberg in 1993. Although the stunt was planned with Ms.
Goldberg's compliance, Mr. Danson was widely criticized. In
recent years, several other related scandals have resulted in
public outcry, ranging from the suspension of two New York
firefighters and a policeman, the firing of a Wal-Mart manager
in Washington and the disciplining of fraternity members in
Georgia — all for incidents involving blackface. While other
performing taboos fall by the wayside, this one remains ever
more strongly in force.
If blackface has its shameful poster boy, it is Al Jolson.
Many other 20th-century performers — from Shirley Temple to Bing
Crosby — donned the makeup for various roles, but Jolson adopted
it as a core part of his public persona. From vaudeville to the
cinema, Jolson brought his minstrel makeup kit with him.
Although he frequently performed without burnt cork, it is the
image of Jolson's black face and white-gloved outstretched palms
that lives on in popular memory.
Jolson deserves better. His performances included less
race-baiting and hate-mongering than any given hour with Chris
Rock or Howard Stern, relying instead on his electric stage
presence and sheer enthusiasm for pleasing his fans. Even his
biggest detractors granted that Jolson, the supposed egomaniac,
saved his kindest, gentlest moods for his moments onstage. He
truly had little knack for the ridicule, irony and sarcasm that
racist humor requires for its effect.
Instead, Jolson aimed to make each of his shows into a
lovefest, lavishing his audiences with affection and giving them
everything, even if he stinted in his off-stage relations with
family and friends. Jolson himself was aware of this contrast
between his private life and his public persona, and it even
became an important theme of his most famous performance in "The
Jazz Singer" and the later autobiographical film, "The Al Jolson
Story."
Although Jolson did not star in the latter film, he did
supply the vocal track, to which the actor Larry Parks
lip-synced his part. Even at this late age — Jolson was 60 when
the film was released — he showed that he had lost none of his
magic. The scenes in which Jolson sings overshadow the rest of
the film. The later Jolson had developed a deep resonance in the
lower part of his range, perhaps to compensate for his inability
to belt out high notes as he had in earlier years. Audiences
responded with enthusiasm to the film, which proved to be the
highest-grossing movie in one of Hollywood's most memorable
years — outdistancing other 1946 releases like "It's a Wonderful
Life," "The Big Sleep," "The Best Years of Our Lives,"
"Notorious" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice."
These late-career achievements only make us wish all the more
that we were better able to evaluate Jolson in his prime. His
finest work from his early career may be legendary, but like
most legends it comes to us mostly by word of mouth, with little
documentation to give it substance. Jolson's career in "talking
movies" did not begin until he was 41 years old. Unlike today's
stars, who draw on every tool of art and science to resist the
ravages of time, Jolson looks very much middle-aged in his
films, with a receding hairline and an unhealthy pallor to his
potato-shaped face. At first glance, it's hard to understand his
appeal based on his paltry looks and meager acting skills. But
his performance is lackluster only until his singing scenes,
when Jolson's features light up and he exudes an almost boyish
charm. He looks years younger when he sings, his body seems
charged with an unnatural vitality, and his reputation for being
the greatest entertainer of his day suddenly seems credible.
These few scenes provide us with our closest glimpse of the
Jolson who captivated Broadway, who dazzled London and who left
behind ardent admirers in virtually every city where he appeared
onstage in his prime years. When the Imperial, on 59th Street
across from Central Park, was renamed in his honor in 1921,
Jolson created a sensation on opening night, called back by the
audience for no fewer than 37 curtain calls. An account from a
1916 newspaper describes another Jolson success: "I have never
heard such cheering and such genuine enthusiasm given to a
performer or a performance in all my experience as a
theatergoer, which covers a period of more than 20 years. To be
exact, Mr. Jolson stopped the show three times, and in each
instance a scene was delayed and the audience simply wouldn't
allow the performance to proceed. Mr. Jolson had to plead with
the audience. Some of the people in the audience stood up,
cheered and threw hats in the air simultaneously during the
second act."
Jolson went to great lengths to maximize the impact of his
stage appearances. He demanded that a long runway be
constructed, allowing him to move into the midst of the
audience. He did not hesitate to change the course of a
performance to satisfy the crowd's demands, sometimes singing on
into the night, long after the show was supposed to be finished.
Above all, he used every resource his body could muster to
deepen the impression he made, orchestrating his face, his eyes,
his limbs, his voice to amplify the intended effect. The vibrato
of his voice, for instance, is so often accompanied by a
tremulous motion of his body. His gestures were sometimes so
dramatic that they have become almost inseparable from our image
of Jolson: the out-stretched arms, palms facing outward, the
genuflection on one knee in front of his fans.
Despite these virtues, Jolson was in many ways an unlikely
choice to lead the cinema into the modern age. An indifferent
actor, he was at his worst when reciting dialogue — a limitation
that became painfully obvious in films that, after all, were
distinguished for being "talkies." His gesticulations and
movements were far better suited for the stage, where Jolson
could project to the back row. In contrast he lacked the subtle
modulations and nuances that bring vitality to close-up camera
work. He was too old to play the romantic lead roles that, then
as now, are the building blocks of Hollywood stardom. most of
all, his long-standing use of blackface made Jolson seem like
the last representative of the 19th century, not a harbinger of
the brave new world of multimedia entertainment.
But even here, the matter is more complex than first meets
the eye. In some respects, "The Jazz Singer" is daringly
forward-looking. This story, which matches Jolson's own
biography in many respects, tells of a young singer, Jack Robin,
forced to decide between applying his talents to the synagogue,
where his family had served as cantors for many generations, or
to the stage as a popular entertainer. Yes, the acting is
melodramatic and over- drawn, but the underlying themes — of the
anguish of assimilation, the complex emotions of ethnic pride,
the conflict between tradition and modern ways — are far deeper
than the ones Hollywood routinely treats these days. And these
issues have lost none of their pointedness at the dawn of the
21st century.
The irony is, of course, that Jolson is most derided for his
insensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity. In fact, his
career was distinguished by a more heartfelt understanding of
these matters than the vast majority of his contemporaries. Even
in the cinematic scenes most lambasted, for instance when Jolson
sings "My Mammy" in blackface toward the close of "The Jazz
Singer," the symbolic resonance is more open-ended than the
stereotyped image might suggest. The scene comes when Robin is
singing to his own mother, Sara, who sits in the audience, and
deals more directly with the issue of Jewish assimilation and
the family tensions it creates than with any attempt to demean
blacks — a theme that, in fact, plays no part in "The Jazz
Singer."
Was Jolson a racist? Although he was guilty of many faults,
Jolson showed no overt signs of ethnic hatred. Indeed, the
songwriter and performer Noble Sissle, a longtime partner of the
ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake, recalled Jolson's unprompted act of
kindness after a Hartford restaurant refused to serve the two
black musicians. A local newspaper mentioned the incident, and,
Sissle later recalled: "To our everlasting amazement, we
promptly got a call from Al Jolson. He was in town with his show
and even though we were two very unimportant guys whom he'd
never heard of until that morning, he was so sore about that
story he wanted to make it up to us." The next evening, Jolson
treated Sissle and Blake to dinner, insisting that "he'd punch
anyone in the nose who tried to kick us out."
But what about the blackface? Some of Jolson's defenders have
argued that the tradition reflected here is as old as Plautus
and classical Rome, if not older: the theatrical presentation of
the slave as comic and a sly commentator on the world of masters
and rulers. "Jolson has recreated an ancient type," Gilbert
Seldes said in 1923, "the scalawag servant with his surface
dullness and hidden cleverness."
Jolson's own reasons for adopting blackface were more
prosaic. After struggling as a young man to make his mark in
vaudeville, Jolson tried the burnt-cork makeup, almost out of
desperation, in late 1904. A fellow performer had counseled him
that wearing blackface was like putting on a mask — one looked,
and even felt, more like a performer. The advice proved
tremendously helpful: Jolson was energized by the new look; his
stage demeanor became markedly more spontaneous, and audiences
responded with enthusiasm. From that time on, Jolson continued
to use burnt-cork makeup, perhaps not through any desire to
degrade blacks, but simply to enhance the theatrical qualities
of his performances.
Such justifications, however, make scant headway in today's
atmosphere of greater sensitivity to matters of race and
ethnicity. In an age when even "Huckleberry Finn" can be
castigated as a racist work, one can hardly expect Al Jolson's
reputation to be rehabilitated any time soon. Indeed, what
Jolson intended may be interesting to the scholar or
psychologist, but what his use of burnt cork represented to the
mass public is a larger issue. Blackface evokes memories of the
most unpleasant side of racial relations, and of an age in which
white entertainers used the makeup to ridicule black Americans
while brazenly borrowing from the rich black musical traditions
that were rarely allowed direct expression in mainstream
society.
This is heavy baggage for Al Jolson. True, he was the
comeback kid of his day. His cinema career revitalized his
flagging popularity in the late 1920's, just as "The Al Jolson
Story" brought him back into the limelight 20 years later. Even
after his death, Jolson somehow managed to keep center stage,
commemorated in a huge monumental grave site within eyesight of
the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, dazzling thousands of commuters
daily with a six- pillar structure towering over a 120-foot
waterfall. Here, one finds an almost life-size statue of Jolson
down on one knee with palms outspread, almost as if he is
imploring motorists to give him one more chance. Perhaps they
will some day, but for the time being Jolson promises to be
remembered less for his talent, and more for his
makeup.
Ted Gioia is the author of
``The History of Jazz'' and ``West Coast Jazz.''
