By Steven Huff
To any new subscribers, welcome to The Moveable Marquee, which I publish twice each month on or about the first and the fifteenth. If you like what you read here, please pass the link on to your film-loving friends—it’s free!
I’m doing something a little different with this issue, a short bio on Jester Hairston, an African American character actor, composer and choral director with a long career (mostly uncredited) in Hollywood. As a film lover and researcher, I’ve found that some of the most interesting people in film are the lesser-known, generally overlooked bit-actors, writers, crew, and musicians, those whose names aren’t found on the movie posters, much less on the marquees. This is the first in a series that I’ll run occasionally—as I feel inspired—called Overdue Ovations.’
But first, some current matters:
Anouk Aimée (Embassy Pictures)
A farewell to Anouk Aimée, who died June 18 at age 92. An enigmatic French actor, she had memorable parts in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963). She played the lead in Jacques Demy’s Lola (1961), a love story set in Nantes, which David Thomson calls “The most magical of the New Wave films.” Perhaps her most memorable role was as Anne Gauthier in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, the first by an actor in a French-language film. Although her subsequent movies did not rise to these early successes, she remained an enduring presence in European film, with a face that men kissed in their dreams.
There must have been an earth tremor when Donald Sutherland died two days later, June 20, at 88. I hardly need to recount the high points of such a long and distinguished career. I wasn’t aware of him until The Dirty Dozen (1967) which I caught that summer at a drive-in. But his high versatility was evident in the roles that followed: as Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970) and the detective who beds Jane Fonda in Klute (1971). I’m in a minority of his fans who think that his best performance was the title role of the amorous adventurer in Fellini’s Casanova (1976).
Jester Hairston
Overdue Ovations:
Jester Hairston (1901-2000)
If you’re a film lover, you’ve seen Jester Hairston many times. You’re forgiven if you didn’t realize it, because he was usually nameless, an extra or bit-player. Nevertheless, he had regular work. Among his credited roles are Jim Bowie’s slave Jethro in John Wayne’s production of The Alamo (1960), Endicott’s house servant in In the Heat of the Night (1967), and a butler in The Lady Sings the Blues (1972). His voice was dubbed over Sydney Poitier’s in The Lilies of the Field (1963) singing “Amen,” his most famous composition. That’s right, he was also a composer and singer, and a widely acknowledged expert in African American folk music.
That song provided what is probably the most poignant scene in Lilies, when Poitier’s Homer Smith, whose car overheats in the American southwest and strands him at a convent of German nuns, gets his guitar and tries to entertain them with a rendition of “Frankie and Johnny.” Seeing their stony faces, he shifts to “Amen,” which has its roots in African American spirituals. The ice is broken.
Hairston’s compositions and arrangements count in the hundreds.
He was born in 1901 in Bellows Creek, North Carolina, in the shadow of the plantation where his grandparents had been slaves, and grew up near Pittsburgh. To him, moving away from there meant avoiding a lifetime of work in the steel mills. He dropped out of Amherst College after two years when his church scholarship ran dry. He was turned down for admission to Tufts, but he gave it another shot: An audition on a professor’s front porch got him a full scholarship. Later, he studied music theory at Juilliard.
Hairston organized several African American choral groups. But it was in 1935, as assistant director of the Hall Johnson Choir, that he first came to Hollywood to perform music in Marc Connelly and William Keighley’s Green Pastures (1936), an anthology of biblical stories with predominantly black actors, including Rex Ingram and Oscar Polk. The next year he worked as choral director for Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical score for Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). He wasn’t credited for the role, but his foot was in the door. He continued working with Tiomkin on such classics as Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955), John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), and William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion (1956). He worked on scores for more than forty films in all.
As a character actor, in addition to the roles mentioned above, Hairston played Spence Robinson in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); a choir member in Allen Reisner’s St. Louis Blues (1958), a biopic about W. C. Handy; a plantation slave in Raoul Walsh’s Band of Angels (1957); a “Native Boy” in Henry Hathaway’s Sundown (1941); and Lester’s friend in Being John Malkovich. Some seventy roles in all, in both film and TV, which also included Rawhide, Gunsmoke, The Virginian, That’s My Mama, and Finian’s Rainbow. He was in several Tarzan movies, as anonymous as any other of the African American extras.
Jester Hairston with Gene Tierney in Sundown (United Artists)
But let me digress a bit with St. Louis Blues. It’s unfortunate that Hairston’s role was small, especially because it’s a terrific film, although it’s probably no more accurate than any other Hollywood biopic, and unquestionably sanitized of any reference to racism. But it stars a marvelous cast: Nat King Cole (as Handy, although he looks nothing like the great jazz and blues composer), Eartha Kitt, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, and Ruby Dee as Handy’s fiancé Elizabeth. In the film, Handy struggles to develop his career over the fiery displeasure of his father who is a preacher and lays the brimstone on him. It’s Kitt’s Gogo Germaine, a cabaret singer, who helps him get his head on straight. Yes, it’s predictable, but the roles, especially Cole’s and Kitt’s, are memorable. And there are renditions of “Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” and other classics. Ella Fitzgerald sings a cameo part. No dubbed singing necessary in St. Louis Blues. By the way, a four-foot Billy Preston plays Handy as a young boy.
Certainly, Hairston caught hell for roles such as Henry van Porter and Leroy in TV’s Amos ‘n’ Andy, and the character of Leroy in the earlier radio version, as well as other roles that perpetuated racial stereotypes, but he defended those parts. According to the New York Times, he said, “We had a hard time then fighting for dignity. We had no power. We had to take it, and because we took it, the young people today have greater opportunities.”
His life was one of breaking down racial barriers in film—never easy, never painless. Later in life he toured colleges as a guest conductor, and made history as the first African American to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Hairston had escaped the steel mills and the Jim Crow south. Although so many of his contributions were anonymous, he was eventually awarded several honorary doctorates, including from Tufts. And he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Sources and Further Exploration:
“Jester Hairston,” Another Light on the Hill: Black Students at Tufts. https://exhibits.tufts.edu/spotlight/another-light/feature/jester-hairston
Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.
Mel Watkins, “Jester Hairston, 98, Choral Expert and Actor.” New York Times, January 30, 2000 (retrieved 9/26/2021)
Wiencek, Henry (2000). The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. New York: Macmillan, 2000.
Many thanks to Barry Voorhees for his editorial eye.
All images are from public domain sources.
Text copyright 2024 by Steven Huff