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Charlene Regester, African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900––1960

2011; Indiana University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/filmhistory.23.2.242

1553-3905

Johnson,

Cuban History and Society

Reviewed by: African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 Lorna A. Johnson Charlene Regester , African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 440 pp. The cover of Charlene Regester's African American Actresses: The Struggle for Visibility, 1900-1960 features a photograph of Louise Beavers in headscarf holding a diminutive Mary Pickford. Pickford rests her head comfortably on Beavers's shoulder, employing an other-worldly stare, lost in her own dream space. Beavers, on the other hand, confronts the viewer, looking directly into the camera - a powerful image which states Regester's intent "to reposition black actresses of the era who were frequently positioned on screen as a shadow for leading white screen stars and to reclaim space they have been denied in mainstream cinema history by foregrounding their contributions and reversing invisibility". I found the cover image fascinating in a strange way. I was angry at the role Beavers had to assume, nurturer to white womanhood (represented by Pickford), in order to gain access to Hollywood. I was also fascinated by the persistence of Beavers's stare. It was that kind of stare that must have inspired Arthur Miller to write, in reference to his character Willy Loman, "Attention must finally be paid to such a person". Regester takes up this battle cry and profiles nine actresses whose careers took shape between 1900 and 1960. She chose her subjects (Madam Sul Te Wan, Nina Mae McKinney, Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Ethel Waters and Dorothy Dandridge) "based on their popularity, prominence, number of screen roles and invisibility in Hollywood film histories and critiques". Regester organizes her book chronologically by actress, beginning with a chapter on Sul Te Wan and ending with a chapter on Dandridge. This type of organization creates mini-biographies as Regester covers her subjects' personal lives and careers, often attempting to link the two. The narratives are similar: ambitious, talented black woman is confined by American and Hollywood racism, often working to illuminate the virtues of white womanhood or to represent a sexuality that dare not be present in Hollywood's white actresses of the era. A painful narrative that in my mind is no less applicable today than it was in 1900 or 1960. What Regester does well is present a holistic portrait of the lives of these women. She fuses both the personal and the professional into this narrative. Reviews of films, personal statements by the actresses to the press, and newspaper articles referencing the actresses' private lives provide the reader with a behind the scenes portrait of their struggles. The linking of these women's lives presents a painful narrative about Hollywood's insistence on black women's invisibility. For a reader interested in biography, much has already been written, especially on Dandridge and Horne. Moreover, a surprising amount of information on Sul Te Wan is easily accessible on the Internet. Regester quotes liberally from the established experts on the subject of black as well as feminist film history and theory: Bogle, Reid, Cripps, Mulvey, hooks. Their voices add weight to the portraits Regester [End Page 242] paints, but I found myself more engaged with Regester's analysis of these women's films and less with her portraits of these artists' personal lives. Regester gets in tricky terrain when she tries to divine motives for their actions or create a theoretical link between the actresses' film roles and their personal lives. On Dandridge's disastrous romantic relationships with white men, she writes: "The larger question is whether she (Dandridge) was obsessed with having a white spouse because of the larger socio-political implications that interracial marriages held for many African Americans, that is, that taking a white spouse was somehow a disavowal of one's blackness and a way to ingratiate oneself within white society". However, Regester also links Dandridge's screen roles to her off screen life. In The Harlem Globe Trotters (1951), "Dandridge is depicted as a married woman who is provided for by her husband [which] conceivably reflects her own desire to be a married woman in her off screen life". Maybe. Maybe not. Assumptions such as...