Lead Man Holler

(See Cover)

The young man used to ride the New York subways with a pencil in his pocket and a chip on his shoulder. Sometimes, when he saw the placards for a cosmetic lotion urging straphangers to preserve the soft white beauty of their hands, he would take out his pencil and scrawl derisive comments: "How about Negro hands?" or "What if you're Chinese?" Car cards urging brotherhood and tolerance got the inscription: "There is bigotry in America." The girl who often rode with him would remonstrate, but the young man scarcely heard her. Even then, she recalls, "there was a storm within Harry."

A little more than a decade later, Harry Belafonte stands at the peak of one of the remarkable careers in U.S. entertainment. His own expressive, light brown hands--clenched in anger, or fanned in a kind of ineffable wonder, or carving an emotional tracery under the spotlights--are as familiar in the world's famed theaters and nightclubs and on U.S. TV as his husky voice. Instead of riding the IRT, Belafonte now has his choice of two Mercedes-Benzes; to the subway girl, who was his first wife, he was able to give a $10,000 platinum bracelet as a "divorce present" when their marriage broke up in 1957. Each of the seven albums he has recorded (for RCA Victor) has sold more than 200,000 copies, and one (Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean) became the first LP by a single performer to sell more than a million, a record since matched only by Elvis Presley. Belafonte's $700,000, five-year contract with the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas guarantees him $140,000 for a minimum of four weeks a year, and he has received as much as $200,000 for appearing in a movie (Island in the Sun). This week he starts filming his own picture, Odds Against Tomorrow, in which he is involved both as co-star and producer (through his own company, HarBel Productions). He has even achieved that peculiarly null century sign of distinction, a regular weekday visit to a psychoanalyst. His second wife and his nine-year-old daughter (by his first marriage) are in analysis, too; his first wife has already been analyzed.

Valentino & Brando. Harry Belafonte's background is an arresting mixture of black and white ancestry, of Harlem harshness and the West Indian languor, of Broadway jazz caves, Greenwich Village hash houses, efficient modern recording studios. Throughout he has clung to a certain tough quality that can flash out as easily as his boyish smile. Recently TV Director Don Medford tried to define the key to Belafonte's dramatic magnetism: "Behind him is this hard core of hostility. Like Brando, Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, he's loaded with it." The quality lends a demon drive to Belafonte's career and immense conviction to his work. The minute he steps on the stage, he says, he tries by his manner to let his audience know: "I'll take no liberties with you and I hope you'll take none with me."

Belafonte was the first Negro to perform in such plush nightspots as the Eden Roc in Miami and the Palmer House in Chicago. He is the only American Negro to be cast in a romantic movie role opposite a white actress (Joan Fontaine in Island in the Sun). He has not only crossed some color lines, but a great many other lines as well. His appeal is remarkably independent of age or sex. In a recent concert in Pittsburgh, he packed the hall with steelworkers. symphony patrons, bobby-soxers and schoolchildren. When he toured Europe last summer for the first time, he broke attendance records everywhere he sang. "I can play Belafonte," says Manhattan Disk Jockey William B. Williams, "and not lose any part of the audience."

What does he have that the public wants? To begin with, as he says himself, "there are certain things there physically that I can't help: height, looks, youth." Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt has written about his ability to mesmerize an audience, while Singer Diahann Carroll says in a more lyrical vein: "From the top of his head right down that white shirt, he's the most beautiful man I ever set eyes on."

Then there is that voice. It is not trained (he does not read music), and Belafonte subjects it to growls, yelps and shouts that appall the opera stars who come to hear him. The voice can become gutty as a trumpet, musky with melancholy, or high and tremulous as a flute. It may take on the high, clipped inflection of the West Indies, the open-throated drawl of the bayou country, the softly rounded burr of the Scotch borderland.

But there is more to Belafonte than looks and voice. Each of his performances is a brilliantly planned and executed combination of artistry and showmanship.

Upbeat Pink. Belafonte usually strides on stage in pitch blackness, stations himself by the microphone before the spotlight bursts on him--light blue, lavender or "upbeat pink," depending on the mood he is trying to convey. For his female fans the famed Belafonte costume--a tailored ($27) Indian cotton shirt partially open, snug black slacks, a seaman's belt buckled by two large interlocking curtain rings--combines the dashing elegance of a Valentino cape with the muscled fascination of a Brando T shirt. The handsomely chiseled head is tipped slightly back, the eyes nearly closed. He is always backed by two guitars, a bass fiddle and a conga drum, to which may be added other instruments, or a full orchestra, or a twelve-man chorus.

He usually opens on a serious note, a protest song that may be Jerry or Darlin' Cora or Tol' My Captain. He goes on from there to shouters (Lead Man Holler), love songs (I Do Adore Her), songs of thanksgiving (Merci Bon Dieu), an Israeli Hora (Hava Nageela). Belafonte has developed a remarkable emotional pantomime to match the content of his songs. In John Henry, he hunches his tall, lithe body (6 ft. 2 in., 185 Ibs.) in a half crouch, knots his fists, launches into the verses with teeth clenched and a spasmodic toss of his head:

John Henry he could hammer He could whistle, he could sing.

In the quieter moods of such a song as Scarlet Ribbons he may stand perfectly straight, his head and shoulders pinned by the spotlight, lips eloquently pursed. In Sinner's Prayer, his face contorts in anguish; in Mark Twain it breaks wide in gutty laughter. When he attacks Love, Love Alone, a comic number, he often throws his arms wide, pivots in an arc from the waist and wobbles his head to the rhythm while he delivers the calypso lyrics with an impudent grin:

/ don't know what Miz Simpson got in

her bone That cause the king to leave his throne.

Having acted the angry descendant of slaves, the chained workman, the devout penitent, the impish lover, Belafonte always returns to being the small boy, performing a shuffling dance between verses, a sort of dark-skinned Huck Finn. At least once during each show he slouches comfortably about the floor directing irrelevant patter at waiters, musicians and ringside patrons ("Don't pay, comrades! Let's make a rush for the door!"). He often finishes by kidding his audience into joining him in a few choruses of Matilda: "Big Spenders be still! Now the intellectuals! EVERYBODY !"

Rattler & Friends. What Belafonte sings is not strictly folk music. He takes folk songs as starters and collaborates with Conductor-Composer Robert Corman, lyric writers and arrangers to make the special regional words and symbols of the songs meaningful to a wide audience. It is an audience he has virtually created for himself, because folk music has never before had mass appeal in the U.S. To protesting purists, Belafonte replies: "All folk songs are interpretations. Otherwise you might as well go back to the first time and say 'ugh.'" He takes a tape recorder with him wherever he goes and the library of his apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue is crammed with tapes of folk art he has tapped at its source. Near the Brazos River in southeast Texas, he recorded a song about the "rattler," or hound dogs used to track escaped convicts:

Here, Rattler, here

Here, Rattler, here

Old Rattler got to the Brazos

Well, he left him standin' there howlin'

After going through the Belafonte process, the song will appear in a forthcoming RCA Victor album in this form:

Old Rattler is the captain's friend Here, Rattler, here.

Here, Rattler, here.

Nine got away, and he brought back ten.

Several years ago, he became fascinated by the blind street singers of Chicago, particularly one Sonny Boy Williams, some of whose songs he intends to record without changes. In an evangelist church, Belafonte heard a preacher singing, "I'm a soldier of the Lord!" He took the "traditional answer and call" of the song, grafted them on to the lyrics of a Civil War song, Oh! Freedom, and is presenting the results in an album called My Lord, What a Morning. He has recorded rum drinkers in Haiti, "things I heard with Memphis Slim and Lead Belly," a railroad gang in the Florida Everglades:

It takes rocks and gravel, well-a To make a solid road well-a It takes a good-looking woman, well-a To make a good-looking whore, well-a.

Emotional Gap. If a traveler with a tape recorder were to take down some of the folklore that is growing up about Harry Belafonte himself, not all the sounds would be pleasant. There are some tom-toms of jealousy. A discarded former agent says: "I hate him. We had a very close relationship, but how could I know he was going to turn into an Emperor Jones?" There are some mocking ditties to the effect that he takes himself too seriously. There is the blues of his first wife Marguerite, a former school teacher in Manhattan, who says: "I remember when he used to speak about not being hired because he was a Negro. Now his secretary in New York is white."

Actually, Belafonte remains proudly self-conscious of being a Negro, turned down the part of Porgy in Samuel Goldwyn's production of Porgy and Bess because he felt that Catfish Row presented Negroes in an undignified light. He talks in analytically flavored prose about "Negro situations" and says: "In 1944, with three other Negro sailors and our dates, I was refused a table at the Copacabana. Nine years later I was back there as the headliner. How do you bridge that gap emotionally?" Asked about his second marriage, to a white girl, he says stiffly that the race question docs not matter: "I don't want to be anybody's brother-in-law. I just want to be his brother."

But along with such talk, he has an engaging ability to kid himself, and his concerns. Once he saw a nature movie about a herd of brown deer with white markings in whose midst appeared a mutation--a white deer with brown markings. "You see," purred the narrator, "he's playing right along with the other deer and they don't even seem to notice the difference." Said Belafonte with a laugh loud enough for the whole theater to hear: "Boy, they're well integrated." In his playful moods, Belafonte is also fond of fabricating stories about himself and his family. For a time he informed strangers that his present wife was an American Indian and that he was a former resistance fighter with the Hagana in Israel.

Singing Environment. Actually, his story needs no fanciful embellishments. Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born 32 years ago in Harlem, son of a seaman in the British merchant marine; his mother was alternately a dressmaker, a baby sitter, a domestic servant. Both parents came from Jamaica, West Indies, and both were products of white and Negro unions. Harry's father disappeared when he was two (he reappeared sporadically after that), and Harry was brought up by his mother in a succession of Harlem tenements. At his first school (P.S. 186, on 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue),

Harry learned something about the problems of being a Negro in a fringe neighborhood: "I grew up fighting. I fought about the little children's nursery rhymes; I fought about 'eeny, meeny, miney, mo'; I fought about being bumped in the hall. We fought with bottles, garbage cans, rocks, hands and feet." Off and on, Harry ran with the gangs--the Buccaneers, the Midtown Midgets. When the streets became too dangerous and the Depression too tough, his mother packed up nine-year-old Harry and his younger brother Dennis and returned to Jamaica.

Harry stayed there until he was 13; after their mother returned to New York, the boys were boarded out with relatives or at a succession of schools. It was a lonely time but also an exciting one. "I still have the impression," Belafonte says, "of lush green vegetation, white sandy beaches, rolling surf, endless winding roads. It was an environment that sang." The people sang with it. The streets of Kingston were thronged with piping vendors or politicians drumming up a vote in the lilting singsong of the islands. It was "a groovy time. I was a great night gazer. I used to climb up in a mango tree and lie back and eat mangoes and look through the leaves at the sky."

When Mel vine Belafonte brought Harry and Dennis back to Harlem, they moved into a white neighborhood, where Harry passed for a time as a "Frenchy" from Martinique. But he could not keep it up: "Once I got really hot and spilled the beans." After that, the fights were more frequent and more vicious than ever. Belafonte still bears a few of the scars of street combat, but, he says, "the emotional scars were worse. I was good at sports, and when they chose up sides they always chose me first. I was accepted then, but it never carried over. I would be sitting there on my stoop, and I'd see the guys going by all dressed up on their way to a party. They never asked me."

Over the River. When he was 16, Harry got fed up, left George Washington High School, and six months later joined the U.S. Navy. The experience, he remembers, was "like taking a deep breath." Assigned in 1944 to an all-Negro unit, many of whose members were college graduates, he became interested for the first time in Negro history. The other highlight of his naval career was his meeting with a well-to-do Negro girl named Frances Marguerite Byrd, who was a student at Virginia's Hampton Institute, where Harry was in training. He immediately recognized her as "everything I ever wanted," assured her that she would marry him some day, and departed for more training on the West Coast, leaving her with his signet ring, a gold locket and a white poinsettia. He served in the Navy as a storekeeper, was discharged after 18 months without ever getting overseas.

Back in Harlem, Belafonte worked as a handyman in tenement houses, toyed with the idea of becoming either a professional basketball player or a social worker, finally drifted into the theater by accident. (The occasion: he got two tickets to an American Negro Theater production as a tip for repairing Venetian blinds.) He worked as a stagehand at the theater, appeared in a few minor roles. Soon after that, he enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. Harry also persuaded Marguerite to marry him one evening in 1948 by swinging her over a parapet by the East River and holding her suspended over the water until she said yes. "I married him," she now explains, "because I felt that if I didn't, he was going to turn delinquent."

Hash &. Eggs. Harry and his wife moved into a tiny $55-a-month apartment in Harlem with Marguerite's mother, lived for the first few months on Marguerite's salary as a teacher at Bethany Day Nursery. Marguerite remembers Harry in those days--the subway-riding days --as "a big, playful animal." A friend. Painter Matthew Feinman, remembers that he was seething with racial feeling. The two of them played chess, and when they were arranging the chessmen, Harry used to say: "I'm taking the black ones, man, because they're better than the white; they're the best, man."

Jobs in the theater were hard to come by when Harry Belafonte left dramatic school in 1948. He took a job as a messenger and package wrapper in the garment district; nights he used to drop in at a Broadway jazz cellar known as the Royal Roost. He learned a few songs--Star Dust, Blue Moon, Pennies from Heaven--and landed a job. He made some recordings, even composed a quavering ballad titled Lean on Me ("You in your high ivory tower/ Drunk with the sense of your power/ I adore you/ Do I bore you? Come, come le-ean on me"). One night, when he was playing the Five O'Clock Club in Miami at $300 a week, he chucked pop singing "like a thief in the night.'' Says he: "What I was singing was junk."

For eight months, with Negro Writer William Attaway and Negro Actor Ferman Phillips, Belafonte operated an eatery in Greenwich Village called the Sage. Says Harry: "I did the cooking in the window. All kinds of people flocked in--folk singers, junkies. We gave them hash. If you were lucky, we threw an egg on it." Afterhours, Belafonte and his pals started to organize a folk-singing group. Says Attaway: "We wouldn't even open the door unless we needed somebody. The guy would rap, and we would open up and say: 'O.K., we need a bass, you can come in.' " The Sage failed (the three partners used to try to raise the payroll for the help by sitting in on a weekly poker game) and Belafonte wangled a four-week engagement at the Village Vanguard. It stretched to 22 weeks. Guitarist Millard Thomas joined the act. "I didn't have any of the accepted requirements," says

Belafonte. "The audience just accepted Millard and me. He had his shirt and I had mine." Marguerite Belafonte remembers the chain--"the Vanguard, the Blue Angel, the Black Orchid in Chicago, the Chase Hotel in St. Louis--and straight to the sky." Belafonte got parts in John Murray Anderson's Almanac on Broadway and in the movie Carmen Jones. Then one RCA Victor album--Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean--transformed Belafonte from a nightclub headliner into an international show-business celebrity.

Dinner at Home. In the wake of success, the pressures mounted. Belafonte's first psychoanalyst was a woman whose husband happened to be a writer and sometime talent agent. Says Belafonte: ''Her husband took me over." While the doctor attempted an emotional analysis. the agent applied economic therapy. Before long, Harry broke with both the analyst and the agent. Then his marriage fell apart. "I didn't know the fireside and meals every night at 6," says Harry, but Marguerite knew little else. She now has custody of their two children, Adrienne, 9, and Shari, 4, although they spend their summers with their father. Belafonte's second wife is Julie Robinson, the 3O-year-old daughter of Russian-Jewish parents, once the only white member of the Katherine Dunham company. She and Harry have a 16-month-old son, David.

Considering his income (about $750,000 a year), the Belafontes live in relative austerity. Until last fall they lived in a three-room walkup in a converted brownstone. ("Harry is the only millionaire in America," said a friend at the time, "who goes down to the cellar to empty his own garbage.") Since then they have moved into a more luxurious, ten-room apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue (there was a splash of newspaper publicity when the landlords on the fashionable East Side refused to rent to a Negro family). Belafonte has collected contemporary paintings and Haitian sculptures, in the vocabulary of his trade cares little for clothes (twelve suits, eight sports jackets, three tuxedos), owns no real estate. He drinks little (he has no head for liquor), neither diets nor exercises regularly to keep in his famed trim, although he concedes that "nothing would destroy the illusion faster than a belly." When he is in Manhattan he rarely misses a dinner at home, and he usually gets eight hours' sleep a night. He likes to sing for his children.

Belafonte now moves in what he calls an "interracial world," mostly composed of people from show business. He hopes that his son will grow up in the same world. "He will have to have some of the experiences I had as a Negro or that his mother had as a Jew," he says. "I don't necessarily want to save him from it." Harry devotes some time to Negro affairs (the N.A.A.C.P., the Wiltwyck School for Boys, the Rev. Martin Luther King's Montgomery Improvement Association), gives 20% of his income to his partly tax-exempt Belafonte Foundation of Music and Arts, designed to "get young people with talent out from under the hammer."

Keep Moving. Harry Belafonte has been out from under the hammer for a long time, but he pushes on with some of the same fierce drive of the kid in the subway, the hash slinger in the window, the misplaced pop crooner in the jazz dives. His capacity for working over a performance or a recording is legendary. When things are going right, he has been known to record all night, until, as Songwriter Lord Burgess says, "you expect his liver to come up with the next note."

Belafonte's associates credit him with an uncanny instinct for avoiding overexposure and repetition. He has been going light on the nightclub circuit in favor of more cross-country tours to college campuses and small-town auditoriums. He feels that direct contact with such audiences revitalizes his performances. As a shrewd showman, he refuses to appear regularly on television because he dislikes both the overexposure of TV and the fact that it can rarely offer him the time to develop a finished show. He also refuses to plug his own hits indiscriminately. Having kicked off the calypso boom in the U.S. three years ago, he abruptly refused to have anything further to do with it on the grounds that it limited him artistically.

As a straight actor. Belafonte has a long way to go, and he knows it. In his latest picture. The World, the Flesh and the Devil, to be released in April, he is co-starred with Mel Ferrer and Inger Stevens as one of the three survivors of an earth-shattering atomic disaster (the script is based roughly on a prophetic 1902 novel entitled The Purple Cloud). By all reports, despite a clumsy story it is Belafonte's best acting job to date. Writer-Director Ranald MacDougall was surprised by Belafonte's chameleon ability to take on the emotional coloration of almost any scene he was playing. At one point Belafonte was required to go into a wrecked church, sit down in a pew and cry. "I didn't give him any direction on this," says MacDougall, "but he cried. Oh, God, how he cried!" On screen or off, Belafonte has a kind of visual magnetism that emerges whenever he moves. Says MacDougall: "People can recognize Harry Belafonte even when he's walking across an 80-foot screen looking about one and a half inches tall."

Belafonte worries constantly about how to establish longevity, but he knows that as long as the Lead Man keeps moving, there will be an audience at his heels. As his own variation of an old West Indian chant has it:

Lead man holler

Yo oh oh

All men foller

Down you go for a workin' dollar.

I want the men, the women and the

children, too. It's a long day out, got a lot to do.

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