Seen and Unseen

Mom on TV, HUAC, and it’s all fake

For a pre-Valentine memoir, by popular demand (OK, two emails), let’s return today to the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I was age three and four. Those years included several still vivid memories, and so much my life growing up had a sound track: classical music, jazz, instrumental and vocal. We will get to my mother’s historic first, a nonwhite person hosting a network television series, but first, let’s start with the piano:

Mom on TV, HUAC, and it’s all fake

Many of my earliest memories are of my mother practicing the piano. Sometimes when I was trying to (or told to) take a nap, she would be downstairs, playing phrases over and over, Bach or Gershwin or Schumann, phrase by phrase, over and over. And she never knew, until many years later when I told her, that not only could I hear it all very clearly, but that it also had kept me awake, unable to sleep because I wanted to hear the entire song or movement, not just the same phrase repeated seemingly endlessly. But it certainly helped me learn pieces from Back keyboard compositions to Gershwin’s Concerto in F.

When I was awake, or rather when my parents knew I was awake, I would sometimes stretch out under the piano to listen as my mother practiced. Knowing I was listening, she would sometimes do playful riffs incorporating nursery rhymes and songs. But usually she was quite serious.

But you know all of this music, I would ask, why do you keep practicing? Because, she would always answer, you can always get better.

And then she would go to work. She could not drive, because her hands were insured by Lloyds of London for $1 million (more than $10 million today), and operating a motor vehicle was explicitly forbidden. So we had a driver, Joe, who would drive her from our house in Mount Vernon to go to work in Manhattan.

One night they had a flat tire on the West Side Highway, and my mother described Joe pulling over and getting out to change the tire. It was a cold night, but my mother got out of the back seat and stood by the side of the road – just as another car swerved and slammed into the back of Joe’s car. Neither Joe nor my mother was hurt, but the car was wrecked, the trunk and back seat crushed forward. Joe said if my mother had stayed in the car, she probably would not have survived. My mother agreed, but added, nothing happens by chance. “It was not my time.”

Unless it was a weekend matinee, I could never go with Mom to her work. I remember asking where she was going, and some nights it might be Town Hall, or a theater, or a mysterious place named the Latin Quarter. I had no idea what the Latin Quarter was, but I did know the name of the owner, Lou Walters, and his daughter, somewhat older than I was, named Barbara. Then I lost track of her for decades, reconnecting with Barbara after she began doing the weather on NBC’s Today show.

(Reconnecting, I saw what Barbara wanted from me, and when, where and how I could give it to her, but when I did, she did not react as I expected. But more of that when we get to the 1960s and 1970s…)

Just before my fourth birthday, Mom had a regular job, with Joe taking her to the office two or three times a week. Her “office” was the midtown studios of the Dumont television network (Dumont stations are now Fox stations), and I could watch her host “The Hazel Scott Show” on channel 5 before I had to go to bed.

For its entire run, I was entirely unaware that she was the first nonwhite performer to have her own network TV show; it was just Mom. Or rather, Mom and a couple of her friends, Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums, playing on all of her shows, forming the Hazel Scott Trio. They all seemed happy doing the show, my mother saying they could do whatever they wanted. And the network was obviously happy with the growing audience numbers, so they increased “The Hazel Scott Show” schedule to three nights a week.

One night, she said I could come with her to watch the show. I just remember the huge, cold studios; next door was Jackie Gleason rehearsing (he was on Dumont before moving to CBS), and across the hall – wow, across the hall was a show I watched every afternoon, “Captain Video and His Video Rangers.” Now that was impressive: I had mailed in some box tops and received in return a Video Rangers helmet! OK, it was flimsy plastic, but it did resemble what Captain Video wore, if I used my imagination.

But here was the real Captain Video! But wait… what? What this? The cockpit of Captain Video’s spaceship was… plywood. And when viewers looked from outside the spacecraft into the interior, the “windows” were just cut out openings in the plywood. It was all fake! Captain Video’s spaceship never left the studio! I watched as the camera jiggled to make it appear the spaceship was moving. At that moment, at age four, I remember thinking quite clearly, the adult world must be largely fake. That insight never really faded.

But in Mom’s studio, it was real. The trio was making real music. One night was a special occasion – perhaps my birthday, or maybe Mothers Day - and she asked me to come join her at the piano for a duet (“Frère Jacques,” if memory serves.) Mingus may have been backing us; I was so focused on the keyboard I don’t remember much else. Of course, unlike when I gave recitals, I couldn’t see the TV audience, but I didn’t want to disappoint Mom. And no, I wasn’t nervous: It was Mom and her pals, and the friendly studio crew.

Then there was the control room, to me a dark office filled with TV sets where people yelled at each other. In charge of it all was a man named Barry Shear, who later went on to direct episodes of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “Ironside.” But for Mom, he wanted to show her playing the keyboard at different angles, forming diagonals and triangles. Today that can be done electronically, but in 1950 it had to be done manually. Very manually.

Flash forward to the 1970s, when Mom was a regular on the ABC soap opera “All My Children.” She came home one day and said one of the studio cameramen walked up to her and said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” He had been one of the cameramen on her Dumont TV show more than two decades earlier. Mom said he remembered the only way to get the angled shots Shear wanted was to use brute force to tilt the studio pedestal cameras. But I got the shots, he recalled for Mom, “and I have the truss to prove it.”

But I digress.

Mom loved the TV show because it meant she could work regularly in town and not have to travel to perform in other cities. Everyone seemed happy. And on Saturdays, since she didn’t need to travel, Mom, Dad and I would always have dinner together. They always began with martinis and cheese and crackers in the living room. They always played a dry martini game: How little vermouth could there be? One night the vermouth was in an atomizer, puff puff. Another night, my father simply opened the vermouth bottle and closed it again, saying enough had flowed through the air, molecule by molecule. Then we moved to the dining room. They loved candlelight, but I just thought it was dark. Dad would make greens in the pressure cooker and broil hamburgers or steaks or chops. Occasionally Mom would cook – which was also explicitly forbidden by Lloyds of London (that was her rebellion). She started a garden, and she would cook freshly picked vegetables. We had a big blackberry patch, and that often provided dessert.

But one Saturday, the usual laughter and jokes (many of which I didn’t understand) gave way to a serious conversation, a conversation unlike any I had heard them have. They were talking about a new book, Red Channels, about entertainers including Mom and many of her friends, including my “Aunt” Lena (Horne), accusing them of being Communist sympathizers and agents of the Soviet Union.

Mom was furious. Dad tried to quiet her down, saying it was all because of someone named McCarthy, and it was best to ignore him. Mom was livid, blaming the House Unamerican Activities Committee, saying she wanted to confront them. Dad warned against that, saying at least twice, “You can’t win with those people.” She said everyone in Washington was a hypocrite anyway – she hated Washington – and someone needed to tell them that they were the “Unamericans.”

My mother was not to be dissuaded. She drafted a lengthy statement and insisted on appearing at the House committee. I never saw the statement or read about it in the newspapers, but it must have been quite something.

And then there was the effect on her television show. The audience numbers were still strong, but the network was nervous: McCarthy or HUAC might go after Dumont for harboring Soviet agents. But the more immediate problem was the sponsors, who began to drop out. And that was the end of “The Hazel Scott Show.”

The network then destroyed all of the copies of the program. Mom was broadcast live in the East and Midwest, but it was kinescoped – filmed off of a TV monitor – for replay on the West Coast. (Videotape was not invented until several years later.) It was the kinescopes that Dupont wanted destroyed. We were told they dumped the reels into New York harbor, in the water off of Staten Island.

Oh, but as happens so often in life, there is a P.S.: More than 30 years later, I attended the screening of a documentary about Mingus. After the q&a that followed the film, I introduced myself to the director.

“You must be Hazel’s son,” he said, and I nodded. “We found the show!” he exclaimed.

The network forgot that The Hazel Scott Show was also broadcast in Canada, he said, and the Canadians had made “kinnies” for broadcast in the Canadian west. So the films exist, he said, but their exact location was still a mystery. One possibility was a Canadian arts archive in Alberta, but so far no luck.

Who knows: Someday soon, the kinescopes could be located, and “The Hazel Scott Show” can run again, perhaps from Dumont to YouTube.