Victoria Sturtevant, “’But things is changin’ nowadays and Mammy’s getting’ bored’: Hattie McDaniel and the Culture of Dissemblance,” Velvet Light Trap, 44 (Fall 1999): 68-79

The irony surrounding McDaniel's success concerns her white studio employers' easy acceptance of her as a "genuine" domestic type. It is now a matter of Hollywood legend that when David O. Selznick was casting Gone with the Wind, actress Louise Beavers was considered by many as the front runner in the race for Mammy, given her much-praised success as Delilah in Imitation of Life (Universal, 1934). Beavers arrived in Selznick's office for her interview dressed up in her best furs--dressed, in other words, as an actress. Hattie McDaniel arrived in his office dressed in head rag, apron, and Civil War-era housedress borrowed from the studio costuming department. The rest is history. (11)

For the remainder of her career, McDaniel was "affectionately" called Mammy by fellow actors and spectators. (12) For her personal appearances, the studio insisted that she be billed as Hattie "Mammy" McDaniel. (12) Fans, employers, and colleagues were encouraged not to consider the prospect that America's most popular servant was engaging in an expanded form of the culture of dissemblance, that she was an actress, that she was "faking it." In some sense, Hollywood is always participating in this fiction--the star system, especially during the first half of the twentieth century, fed off of audiences' willing beliefs that performers were more or less authentically reflected in the roles they played. But close inspection of publicity for white actresses reveals that their personae as performers were able to withstand a far greater amount of complexity and contradiction than Hattie McDaniel was accorded. Claudette Colbert could, in the course of a single year, play the title character in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (Paramount, 1934), a twenty-something runaway heiress in It Happened One Night (Columbia, 1934), and the working widowed mother of a teenager in Imitation of Life (Universal, 1934). Readers of fan magazines would be informed that "ditzy" Carole Lombard was one of the most level-headed and intelligent women in filmdom and that brassy Joan Crawford was a devoted mother.

A single issue of Photoplay (July 1936) demonstrates the dizzying range of contradiction which could be absorbed by the publicity for white actresses during this era, with three separate articles devoted to the doings of Ginger Rogers. The first of these is titled "Lew Ayres' Own Story of the Break-Up of His and Ginger Rogers' Marriage." This article posits Rogers as nearly ill with overwork and exhaustion, noting that as she arrived home during the interview with then-husband Ayres, "she sank into a chair, the picture of weariness, and launched into a recitation of her slavery at the studio" (emphasis mine). (14) The article is a gut-wrenching account of how Rogers's grinding work schedule has doomed her marriage to popular young screen actor Lew Ayres. The second, an item in "Cal York's Gossip of Hollywood," paints the following similarly bleak picture of Rogers's health and well-being: "Ginger, who loves her tennis, swimming, and golf, has been forced to give them up. Her weight has dropped to such an alarming degree that doctors have ordered complete rest and no exercise except the dancing required for her picture work." (15) Alongside these two portraits of Ginger-the-laborer suffering mightily under the burden of her work, Photoplay features a two-page fashion layout titled "Ginger Rogers Shops for Hats" comprised of six photographs of the star modeling (what else?) the season's hats. The captions emphasize Rogers's natural, effortless beauty: "Only if you are as young and radiant as Ginger may you tilt your hat back like this. The black straw coolie frame is lined with chiffon." (16) Radiant, indeed. The contrasting images of Rogers as victim of overwork, exhaustion, and marital discord and Rogers as bright-eyed, glowing fashion plate exist in apparent harmony within the same discursive frame.

McDaniel's publicity, on the other hand, welds her personal life to her screen persona with remarkable fidelity. The pressbook issued in 1940 for her personal appearance tour makes proud note of McDaniel's history as a maid:

At the age of 15, Hattie became a mother's helper. She washed clothes and

dishes, watched babies and cooked dinners, an art she learned from her own

mother. She has always been glad of that experience, for in latter years,

when slack days hit her theatrical career, she has not been too proud to

become a domestic in a private home to tide her over. (17)

The emphasis on McDaniel's authenticity was, in part, an attempt to offset the patent inauthenticity of the remainder of the cast of GWTW. None of the major cast members was Southern (Hattie McDaniel was born in Kansas); Vivien Leigh and Leslie Howard were of course British. But McDaniel is the target for an especially radical authenticity-peddling because her identity and heritage as a black woman are wrapped up in ideas of willing servitude and a widespread cultural denial that she is dissembling. This denial is taken to a shocking extreme in a similar press release which emphasizes McDaniel's pedigree (literally) as a Southern Mammy:

Hattie's grandmother lived and worked on such plantations as the Tara

described in Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel of the Civil War South.

She might well have been of the kindly, fiercely possessive type whose

loyalty to her white mistress never wavered. She would be proud, were she

alive today, to see her granddaughter become the servant of "quality folks"

on the motion picture screen. (18)

Proud, indeed. Ginger Rogers's film work was a form of "slavery," while Mammy is the O'Haras' "servant." The complacent racism of the two McDaniel press releases lies not only in their desperate insistence that Hollywood's fictions of contented servitude are uncanny reflections of a gracious and enviable reality but also in their insistence that the woman who performs in those fictions is an unreflective, essential, natural, "native" participant, rather than a professional, crafting a performance of an identity not her own.