Bert Williams

I went to the movies last Saturday.

At the foundation of my skills as a performer is the art of mime.  I grew up seeing people on TV like, Sid Caesar, Dick Van Dyke, Joan Davis, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball and others who were all adept at communicating very well with their bodies.  The only clown I ever liked was Emmet Kelly, whose famous act in the circus was trying to sweep a spotlight away that was the arena floor.  He transfixed me was a kid, I couldn't take my eyes off of him as he silently did his task.  Those were the seeds planted in me to eventually study and become a mime in the early 1970's.  Even though I wound up seeing Marcel Marceau and liked what he did, I had no interest in going to France to study because I felt more influenced by American vaudeville.  In fact, the mime group I helped form did all kinds of vaudeville like stuff and often thought we were one of the noisiest mime groups around.  Yes, we talked if we deemed it necessary.  At the time, there was the beginning of these terms "New Mime" and "New Vaudeville" and a lot of young folks were doing performing under that banner, but I did not know of many black performers doing it.  The only other black mimes I knew of were Billy Banner and Judith Jackson and later met Alde Lewis, through Pepsi Bethel, when I think Alde was doing some mime.  I definitely was not aware of any historical black performers of mime or pantomime (still not sure how different those terms are) until I found out about Bert Williams.

I had been doing a lot of research about early black performers and knew a bit about Bert Williams and his partner of many years, George Walker.  These were men who were part of an era of black theater artists at the transition into the 20th century who were doing a lot to affect the American stage.  People like Black Patti, Bob Cole, Will Marion Cook, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe and more, who came out of minstrelsy and the blackface tradition began by white male performers. But when I found out more about Williams and particularly of his work with the Ziegfeld Follies after George Walkers death, I learned of his great skills in pantomime.  Putting on a mask, whether it be clown makeup, white face mime or the blackface intrigued me in terms of what it could do for a person creatively.  One doesn't necessarily hide behind a mask when performing, but rather is in a way liberated behind the mask to thrust a hidden part of his or her personality or observations of human behavior onto the stage.  My understanding is that Bert Willilams, a lightskinned man from The Bahamas, originally did not perform in blackface, but put it on one day to experiment and found that it unleased his comic skills. The character he developed, as he called it, was an everyday man who always had things going wrong for him.  He became the first black star to be part of the Ziegfeld Follies, where he once played the father of white entertainer, Eddie Cantor, who late wrote that Williams was the best teacher he ever had in comedy.  As a child, Buster Keaton even imitated him.  Here was a role model for me and I read what I could about him and even did a thesis on him and Stepin Fetchit for my MA degree.  

The only footage of Bert Williams that I was aware of was a 1916 short film he did called "A Natural Born Gambler" which I bought (16mm print for $400 in the days before YouTube) and studied. In it was his famous poker routine which he had done on stage and has been done over years by various performers, myself included, as an homage to him.  The film was one of what I think was to be more, but no more were done other than one called "Fish", apparently because of concerns whether many films with a black star would go over in certain parts of the country.  So, I just watched "Gambler" when I could to study him, thinking it was all there was available to see him in action.  In recent years a bunch of his singing was made available on CD and that was great.  But then I read a few weeks ago that the Museum of Modern Art had in its possession some rare footage of him and other black performers from a film called, "Lime Kiln Club Field Day" that was started in 1913 and was going to show it to the public!  I flipped out. That was huge to me.  Particularly at this point in time as I've been reflecting on my own history in media and performing.  In recent weeks I've been to events celebrating achievements by black performers in the past 30 to 50 years and seen some of these people who ooze with history and survival.  I had to see this material at MOMA.

First of all, even if you missed the screening, which was Saturday, November 8th, you can see the free exhibit about Bert Williams and the found footage at MOMA until March 1915....I urge you to go and in it you will see some of the footage.  It's hard to describe the effect it had on me as I watched it.  It was material from a film that was not completed but contained a large predominately black cast and was shot in a studio in The Bronx and on location in New Jersey.  It is believed that most of the cast were appearing in a stage show at the time, I think "Darktown Follies" was its name.  The people who did the restoration also went to great lengths to identify some of the more prominent performers in the film and they even had a lip reader translating what some of the improvised dialogue was, remember this is a silent film.  Of the many things that struck me was a reaffirmation of how good and funny a silent film can be, the packed house was cracking up and the best humor was in the nuances of facial expression and body attitude, not in over the top slapstick.  It was refreshing to see black folks just being people, dressed up and living their lives.  There was evidence of vernacular

Bert Williams in a scene from "Lime Kiln Club Field Day"

dance seen that was very familiar to me and a breadth of a whole world in images that evoked in me memories of stories my parents told me of growing up in the early 20th century (they being born in 1905 and 1906).  Even with this, there were divides in who got to do what in the film.  The female love interest was light skinned and her suitors, other than Bert in makeup, were not too dark with apparent "good hair".  The darker skinned women and men were more often exaggerated in their roles and movements and you could see some cast members were in blackface and some were not.  But overall I was sitting there spellbound.  I was feeling all kinds of stuff of connection to a tradition culturally and performance wise and to the art of film.  My one wish was that there could have been a lot of really young people watching this to let them see some history.  What got me the most was at the end.  The curtains closed on the screen and then the piano accompanist, Donald Sosin who did a great job, stood up and raised his hands toward the curtained screen to lead the audience in enthusiastic applause that lasted for while.  Here, finally was a full house giving Bert Williams his due as a film star, 100 years after the fact.  One of the hosts of the evening said it is believed the film wasn't finished because "Birth of A Nation" had come out and created such a reaction that the filmmakers felt people weren't ready to see a film populated with a range of black characters who are not all stereotyped.  But one wonders what would have happened if Williams could have had the film opportunities that Chaplin had.   As much as I love Charlie Chaplin, Bert Williams would have given him a run for his money!

The MOMA exhibit is called, 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History.  Click on the exhibit title for information and go and see it....now!

Below is Bert Williams in "A Natural Gambler" with the famous poker routine at the end.

If you want to know more about him and the other people I mentioned in this post......Look It Up!