Hattie McDaniel - Background and Early Acting Career

Background and Early Acting Career

Hattie McDaniel was born June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, to former slaves. She was the youngest of 13 children. Her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War with the 122nd USCT and her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of religious music. In 1900, the family moved to Colorado, living first in Fort Collins and then in Denver, where Hattie graduated from Denver East High School. Her brother, Sam McDaniel (1886–1962), played the butler in the 1948 Three Stooges’ short film Heavenly Daze. Another acting sibling of Hattie and Sam was actress Etta McDaniel.

In addition to performing, Hattie was also a songwriter, a skill she honed while working with her brother's minstrel show. After the death of her brother Otis in 1916, the troupe began to lose money, and it wasn't until 1920 that Hattie received another big opportunity. During 1920–25, she appeared with Professor George Morrison's Melody Hounds, a touring black ensemble, and in the mid-1920s she embarked on a radio career, singing with the Melody Hounds on station KOA in Denver. In 1926–1929 she also recorded many of her songs on Okeh Records and Paramount Records in Chicago. In total, McDaniel recorded 7 sessions; 1 in summer of 1926 for the rare Kansas City label Meritt, 4 sessions in Chicago for OKeh (late 1926-late 1927) - of the 10 sides, only 4 were issued, and 2 sessions in Chicago for Paramount (both in March, 1929).

In McDaniel's time, America was segregated in virtually every respect in terms of race. In the South, blacks were barred by law from attending school with whites and subjected to segregation in all other public places. Even outside the South, many restaurants and hotels refused to accept black customers. Job opportunities were limited. Custom or restrictive covenants kept blacks from living in "white" neighborhoods. Marriage between blacks and whites was illegal in most states of the United States. The United States military required blacks to serve in all-black regiments. Black Americans also faced the terrorism of lynch mobs without the assurance of federal or state protection. Indeed, in 2005, the U.S. Congress issued an apology for the federal government's failure to enact lynching legislation to protect blacks in that era.

The field of entertainment emerged as a profession in which blacks were allowed to reach white and black customers. Still, however, the success of black entertainers and their ability to rise into ownership and management was limited by racial restrictions. Often, many of the same places that allowed blacks to be on stage, did not allow them to sit in the audience as patrons. State laws allowing discrimination and requiring segregation assured that black entertainers were not allowed the same benefits and opportunities as white ones. Black actors were cast repeatedly in menial roles and were consistently required to speak in contrived stereotypical "Negro dialects." If black actors did not know how to speak that way, they had to learn to in order to succeed in Hollywood. Movie houses often hired white dialect coaches to teach the so-called "Negro dialect."

When the stock market crashed in 1929, the only work McDaniel could find was as a washroom attendant and waitress at Club Madrid in Milwaukee. Despite the owner's reluctance to let her perform, McDaniel was eventually allowed to take the stage and became a regular.

In 1931, McDaniel made her way to Los Angeles to join her brother Sam and sisters Etta and Orlena. When she could not get film work, she took jobs as a maid or cook. Sam was working on KNX radio program called The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour, and he was able to get his sister a spot. She appeared on radio as Hi-Hat Hattie, a bossy maid who often "forgets her place." Her show became extremely popular, but her salary was so low that she had to continue working as a maid.

Her first film appearance was in The Golden West (1932), as a maid; her second was in the highly successful Mae West film I'm No Angel (1933), as one of the black maids West camped it up with backstage. She received several other uncredited film roles in the early 1930s, often singing in choruses.

In 1934, McDaniel joined the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). She began to attract attention and finally landed larger film roles that began to win her screen credits. Fox Film Corporation put her under contract to appear in The Little Colonel (1935), with Shirley Temple, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Lionel Barrymore.

Judge Priest (1934), directed by John Ford and starring Will Rogers, was the first film in which she played a major role. She had a leading part in the film and demonstrated her singing talent, including a duet with Rogers. McDaniel and Rogers became friends during filming.

In 1935 McDaniel had prominent roles with her performance as a slovenly maid in RKO Pictures' Alice Adams, a comic part as Jean Harlow's maid/traveling companion in MGM's China Seas, the latter her first film with Clark Gable, and as Isabella the maid in Murder by Television, with Béla Lugosi. She also appeared in the 1938 film Vivacious Lady starring by James Stewart and Ginger Rogers

She had a featured role as Queenie in Universal Pictures' 1936 version of Show Boat starring Irene Dunne, and sang a verse of Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man with Dunne, Helen Morgan, Paul Robeson, and the African-American chorus. Later in the film she and Robeson sang I Still Suits Me, a song written especially by Kern and Hammerstein for the film.

After Show Boat she had major roles in MGM's Saratoga (1937), starring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, The Shopworn Angel (1938) with Margaret Sullavan, and The Mad Miss Manton (1938), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. She had a very minor role in the Carole Lombard/Frederic March vehicle Nothing Sacred (1937), in which she appeared as the wife of a shoeshine man (Troy Brown) masquerading as a sultan.

McDaniel had befriended several of Hollywood's most popular stars, including Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland and Clark Gable, with the last two of whom she would star in Gone with the Wind.

It was around this time that she began to be criticized by members of the black community for roles she was choosing to take and her decision to aggressively pursue the roles and not to rock the Hollywood boat. For example, The Little Colonel (1935) depicted black servants longing for a return to the Old South. Ironically, McDaniel's portrayal of Malena in RKO Pictures' Alice Adams angered white Southern audiences. She managed to steal several scenes away from the film's star, Katharine Hepburn. She would become best known for the role of the sassy and opinionated maid.