Hedda Hopper's Hollywood by Jennifer Frost

Author:Jennifer Frost [Frost, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Film, History, Americas, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780814728246
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2011-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

In Defense of Mammy

During the same period, Hedda Hopper exercised her power in defense of Hattie McDaniel and the stereotypical role for which she was known: the black mammy. Most famous for her Oscar-winning role as “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind, McDaniel also appeared in Song of the South. She “praised the script” after taking the role of a happy domestic servant “joyfully bouncing about the kitchen laughing and baking pies to the everlasting pleasure of the household and Uncle Remus.”55 Like Baskett’s Uncle Remus, McDaniel’s servant received criticism upon the film’s release, but the criticism aimed at McDaniel was sharper and more vociferous, due to her long, illustrious career in Hollywood as well as to the particular black stereotype, the mammy, she brought to life in more than one hundred roles.56 As a consequence, in April 1947 Hopper published a letter from McDaniel defending her film roles, which Hopper disingenuously introduced with “Hattie McDaniel must be confused by those people picketing Song of the South.” Eight months later—and two months after the October HUAC hearings in Washington, D.C.—Hopper dedicated an entire Sunday article to a defense of McDaniel and a condemnation and Red-baiting of her critics, including leaders and members of the NAACP. The NAACP had contributed, Hopper claimed, to McDaniel’s “siege of career trouble”—a recent twenty-one-month period without work in the motion picture industry.57 Hopper’s December 1947 article sparked a strong response from readers, with many letters from African Americans who sought to educate Hopper on the interconnections among the politics of representation, the image of the mammy, and civil rights.

“I have known and admired Hattie, both as an artist and an individual,” Hopper noted in her defense of McDaniel, “since we did Alice Adams together twelve years ago.” In Alice Adams (1935), McDaniel played a servant, a portrayal Hopper described in what she considered positive terms as “a female Stepin Fetchit cook.” The role of servant was one of the few stereotypical roles—along with the related mammy and the sexualized jezebel—open to black women in Hollywood movies at the time.58 By that point in McDaniel’s film career, which began in 1931 following her stint on the black vaudeville circuit in the 1920s, she already had become typecast as the mammymaid. “A powerfully built woman,” according to Donald Bogle, “she weighed close to three hundred pounds, was very dark, and had typically Negro features.” As such, McDaniel fit the physical description always ascribed to the mammy: “large, deep brown in color,” “big, fat,” “sexless, cheerful, maternal.”59 “Mammy” originated as the name given to enslaved African American women in the pre–Civil War South who nursed children, and a popular image of the mammy as a nurturing servant, either tending to children, the stove, or housework, proliferated through American culture after the Civil War. The mammy character had a turn on the nineteenth-century minstrel stage, played by white men in blackface, apron, and bandana. As Aunt Jemima she sold pancake mix beginning in the 1890s, and in the twentieth

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