Tuesday, October 8, 2013

9:31 I was watching the Dr. Oz show this morning and he had a woman on who was run over by a taxi cab in NYC while walking on the sidewalk, when the taxi driver had an altercation with a bicycle rider and swerved off the road trying to hit him. A plumber named David Justino was walking by and probably saved her life when he took off his belt and tightened it around her leg as a tourniquet. Dr. Oz came along next and called 911, meanwhile helping the plumber with first aid. This morning Oz invited the plumber on his show along with the victim, who has had to have her leg amputated below the knee. She was overjoyed to meet the plumber and get a chance to thank him. He was very simple and humble, just doing what people should do. When I see bad stories like the rogue bikers of last week I get a little discouraged and angry, because things like that happen so often that I have to conclude cruelty and rage are basic parts of human nature. But a story like this one reminds me that it is also a part of human nature to give generously without expecting a reward. The woman is recovering well and has one more surgery to go before she can be fitted with a prosthesis. She said she wants to dance again. The taxi driver was questioned by the police and given three summonses.

Oz has co-authored a series of books on medical advice and was named Turkish American of the year in 1996. He was born in Cleveland, OH but has dual citizenship with Turkey, and speaks Turkish fluently. He consulted with Denzel Washington on heart transplantation for his movie John Q. He took a BA degree at Harvard in 1982, his MD at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1986, and his MBA at the Wharton School of University of PA also in 1986. He is Vice Chairman of Surgery at Columbia University and Director of the Cardiovascular Institute at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He has hosted a number of specials and series in addition to his daily morning show. He was born on 6/11/1960. He is married and is the father of three girls and one boy.

This is apparently my day to watch daytime television. I'm now on a show called Judge Alex. I can't stand Judge Judy because she is so mean-spirited and abusive in what she says, but Judge Alex is the opposite. He smiles a lot, makes the occasional joke and listens reasonably respectfully when other people talk. He also makes rational judgments and fair monetary awards. It's entertaining and doesn't make me want to shoot him. It's not good enough to postpone reading my book, though. The only kind of court television I really want to watch is when there is an intriguing real life crime being contested. Small claims court is not very interesting.

The Sidney Poitier autobiography is not a good source for the basic facts and dates of his life, because he wanders through the years talking about his emotional life and development. It's simply but eloquently written, and I'm really enjoying it. He is now talking about his first two years in New York City. He went there to escape the life of black citizens in Florida, which in spite of having a number of sizable cities is still the old South. He had no place to live, however, so he stayed in the bathroom of a bus station while he worked at menial jobs. The Internet biography glossed over this time period, featuring only his rise as an actor, but Poitier says it was a very important formative time in his life. He calls it his “time of ashes,” which in some African tribes is the period before the rite of passage to manhood, when the applicant must cover his face with ashes. He learned “to fight for my life ...to scramble...to learn about balancing the good and the bad in myself.” “For weeks I rode those subways with a sense of wonder. I gorged myself on hotdogs and malted milkshakes. I slept on rooftops, worked in kitchens, and was close enough to at least one race riot to find myself shot in the leg and playing dead in order to avoid worse.” He was sixteen years old at the time, and without friends. He talks about Jojo Sutton, a member of a dish washing team he joined one weekend, who instantly took a dislike to him, and then ended up competing with Poitier for the attention of a girl. After a harrowing confrontation, Jojo simply warns him to stay away from him.

Poitier says that worst opponent was the New York winter, for which he wasn't at all prepared, coming from the tropics and lacking information about New York ahead of time. He had simply bought a bus ticket to New York to get as far away from Florida as he could. He had no winter clothing. To get away from it, he lied about his age and joined the Army. He couldn't take the military discipline and assaulted a superior officer with a large chair, ending up in the brig in 1944. They sent him to a psychiatric hospital to undergo examination, and possible electroshock treatment, and he was scheduled for a court martial. He said he threw the chair meaning to miss the officer, but scare him. It did. He was trying to act like he was insane to get booted out of the Army. His interactions with his psychiatrist did give him insight into himself.

Apparently the Army let him out, as he says that by the age of 18 he was back on the street in New York doing menial jobs and facing another New York winter. He said he even wrote to President Roosevelt for a loan of $100.00. That was when he saw an ad that said “Actors Wanted” at the American Negro Theater. His lack of reading ability and his Bahamian accent lost him the job. He set out to improve himself and began to spend his supper breaks at the restaurant where he was washing dishes trying to improve his reading. An old Jewish waiter saw what he was doing and began to help him. After a time he went back to the theater and tried out. He got into an acting class that they were forming. He flunked out again, due to his lack of education and acting experience. In order to get them to allow him to continue to study, he volunteered to be their janitor. When he then tried out for another production he encountered competition from no other than Harry Belafonte, also a young actor, but with more experience than Poitier. Poitier was made his understudy. Belafonte couldn't make it in the first night of the show and Poitier took over. Luckily the casting director liked his work and called him about appearing in Lysistrata on Broadway. Due partly to stage fright he bombed badly. The reviews, however, praised him for his “fresh comedic gift.”

The show only ran four days, but lead to another acting job as an understudy in Anna Lucasta. After that he had a number of off Broadway roles, before seeing the notice for No Way Out. The director then sent him to the producer Zoltan Korda, who cast him in Cry, The Beloved Country. With so much good luck after his long period of failure, he felt ill at ease. He went home to Nassau to visit his parents for the first time in eight years. Having contributed nothing to his family during the time he was away, he tried to make up for it by giving them a large portion of what he had earned. He again went through a long dry spell in acting jobs, but joined with a friend of his to open a ribs restaurant. He also married his first wife Juanita and had a baby, with another one on the way. Low on money, he got a call from an agent named Marty Baum to come and talk to him. He read for a part and they gave him a script to read. He didn't like the script, because it called for a passive black man who doesn't fight back when the villain kills his daughter. Six months passed before Baum called him back. He asked Poitier why he didn't take the job, and when Poitier indicated that the character didn't live up to his human potential, Baum told him that though he had no job for him at the time, he would represent him as his agent.

Politics became important for Poitier as he read the newspapers and other sources of information and talked to peers in Harlem. His friendship with Paul Robeson, who was blacklisted for being communist, was held against him. He was told on several occasions that if he didn't disavow Robeson he would have to sign a loyalty oath. This was in the 1950's. He never signed one, which didn't keep him from getting the parts. His personal leanings were indeed “to the left of center.” He did, however, run into the things that all black people had to deal with in terms of public accommodations and daily life. The era of Martin Luther King was ten years away. He had to sit at the back of the bus and couldn't eat at certain restaurants, even though he was already a star by then.

In 1964 when he got the Oscar, he moved to a seven acre estate, so his financial status had become more reliable. The “Jim Crow” rules for black people had also begun to change. He was always aware of the absence of other black actors who hadn't been stereotyped, though, and grateful for the efforts of Butterfly McQueen and the others who had gone before him. He praised the writing, directing and acting in A Patch Of Blue, as an enlightened story about racial relations. And of course later came Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith and Morgan Freeman, all finally given credit for their talents and not put into demeaning roles.

His next chapter is called “Why do white folks love Sidney Poitier so?” This was the title of an article in the New York Times. Their answer was that he wasn't as angry and confrontational as Stokely Carmichael or the Black Panthers. He played “the noble negro who fulfills white liberal fantasies.” In other words, do black people have to be paragons in all ways to be accepted by white society? “Or simply that black society does – of course – contain individuals of refinement, education and accomplishment, and that white society should – of course – wake up to that reality.” He said that his roles of blacks of both pride and restraint were soon to come to an end when more radical black roles were on the way. In The Heat Of The Night was written with a scene in which a white southerner he is interrogating slaps him across the face. The script was written so that he was supposed to leave the room coldly. He went to the director and refused to play it that way, telling him instead that he should immediately slap the white man back, and they changed the script. The white man says “There was a time when I could have had you shot.”

I am eliminating parts of this book as far as what I write here is concerned. There is just too much commentary to record it all. I'm enjoying every word, because it is written in a very personal and introspective way, telling events as they appear in importance to him and showing his growth as a person. It's all extremely interesting. I will continue tomorrow. I'm about two-thirds of the way through.