The Playboy Politician

In his halcyon days as Harlem's Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. epitomized the rakishly handsome aristocrat who lives and loves with lofty disdain for what Powell called "picayune matters of personal morality." He often overstepped the bounds of good taste, but for most of his 35-year career as the black world's premier preacher, politician and playboy, Powell was a flamboyant symbol of success and the good life that most of his 430,000 largely black constituents could only dream about. He openly flouted the rules set down by whites, drove expensive foreign cars, dined at exclusive restaurants and made regular trips abroad--usually taking along some comely woman companion. Women were a ubiquitous element in the Powell lifestyle, and even as he lay in a coma in a Miami hospital before his death from cancer last week at age 63 his third wife Yvette and his latest companion, Darlene Expose, battled in court over his estate.

As with many Americans, Powell's ancestry was beyond reliable reconstruction. For a short time, while attending Colgate, Powell passed for white and was heard to say of his fair complexion: "It's some kind of joke--white folks think I'm black and black folks think I'm white." Powell sought to confirm his blackness in his book Marching Blacks, published in 1945. He expressed pride in his runaway-slave grandfather who in his late years still bore a scar inflicted by an angry slave owner. Powell's father came to New York City in 1908--the year Adam Jr. was born--to take the pastorship of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which he helped build to a membership of 14,000, one of the largest Protestant congregations in the country. Kenneth Clark, the black social psychologist, recalled: "When, as a child, I first saw him, I thought he was God." He retired in 1937 and young Adam stepped into his pulpit, staying there until April 1971.

Hot Water. Spouting biblical homilies in a spellbinding baritone, Powell became as popular and well liked as his father. He was the prince of Harlem who, though often among the people, always remained just a bit aloof. Yet he was also a product of the black ghetto. Harlem's taverns and nightclubs were among his favorite places. There he could indulge his almost compulsive need for camaraderie. Energetic and upright when it suited his purpose, young Powell used his personal magnetism and oratorical ability to draw participants to marches, boycotts and demonstrations designed to pry jobs out of white Harlem merchants and businessmen. Powell parlayed his popularity into public office in 1941, when he became the first black elected to the New York city council. He had visions of bigger things, however, and soon quit to run for Congress.

He brought his bravado to Washington in 1945. There he brazenly ignored the House's unwritten racial-discrimination rules, which docile Chicago Congressman William L. Dawson, a Daley subaltern and the only other black House member when Powell arrived, had quietly accepted. Powell spoke out on behalf of civil rights and enjoyed skirmishes with fellow House members, Senators and even Presidents. He created a new image for blacks in Harlem and across the country. Before his first term was completed, he was a national figure. His was a widely heard voice in Congress supporting equal opportunity for blacks, and blacks repaid him with near-adulation.

But his reckless private conduct over the years kept him in political hot water. His first two marriages--to Showgirl Isabel Washington and Jazz Pianist Hazel Scott--reflected Powell's affinity for glamour. His conquests were many. Some, like Yvette and his former-beauty-queen secretary, Corinne Huff, were even put on his staff payroll and paid $20,000 a year. In 1963 Mrs. Esther James, a Harlem widow, won a $46,500 defamation judgment against Powell, who on TV called her a "bag woman" for gambling payoffs. For nearly five years he managed to avoid payment, partly by staying out of New York except on Sundays, when legal papers are not served.

Peccadillos. In Congress, Powell's record of achievement--especially as Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee--was extraordinary, but his flagrant nepotism and cronyism, his public peccadillos, the charge of income tax evasion against him and his cavalier disregard for his Congressional colleagues' sensitivities finally led the House to exclude him by a vote of 307 to 116 in early 1967. He was also fined $25,000.

Powell countered with charges that the ouster had been prompted by racism, and quickly went back to the voters to win reelection. He returned to Congress in 1969, and began paying his fine in monthly installments. He showed up for only nine of 177 roll calls that year, and when asked about his chronic absenteeism quipped: "Part-time work for part-time pay." But his days as a political power were numbered, and in the 1970 Democratic Party primary he finally lost an election--to New York State Assemblyman Charles Rangel, who easily defeated the Republican candidate the following fall. Shaken, Powell retreated to the tiny Bahamian island of Bimini, where he played through his days, surrounded by girls in bikinis and enjoying such concoctions as a vodka-and-Tang drink that he called "poontang."

Late in his career Powell made some effort to rejoin the vanguard of American black leadership, but he was rejected by the emerging Black Power movement. His playboy opulence scarcely fit the hard-eyed, denim-jacketed style of the younger militants. His once-envied achievement of making it in Whitey's world on Whitey's terms seemed increasingly frivolous to separatists eager to develop an independent set of black values. His demagogy remained effective only as long as the situation of blacks remained static. When vicarious achievement was no longer enough for blacks, Adam Clayton Powell became irrelevant and, ultimately, an embarrassment to the cause he had championed theatrically for so long. But even though his time came and went, more than most men he seemed to enjoy every minute of it.

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