estate boasted seventeen rooms, decorated in a Chinese theme. She celebrated the purchase with a huge party, where one of the guests was Clark Gable. However, the joy of first-time home ownership came with an expiration date. Her neighbors launched a campaign to evict her on the basis of a white-only ordinance. This time she decided to make a scene. It resulted in a Supreme Court decision that eliminated “restrictive covenants” which had kept African Americans from residing in certain areas. Her joy at the victory was quashed when Hattie discovered the pregnancy was a hysterical one. The truth threw her into a tsunami of depression. On top of that, her marriage ended in 1945, and Hattie cited one reason was her husband had threatened to kill her. Her fourth and final walk to the altar was with Larry Williams, in Yuma, Arizona, that was only of a few months duration.
Hamlet had said when sorrows come they come not in single spies but in battalions, and Hattie had weathered hers: white and black slings, aborted marriages, hysterical pregnancy, curtailed career. However, like dust she rose. She returned to radio, a medium which knew no color, the one where she had reigned as Hi-Hat Hattie. However, after taping several episodes of The Beulah Show, she met the one foe she was not able to overcome. By 1952, she was too ill from breast cancer to work, and died in the hospital situated on the grounds of the Motion Picture House in Woodland Hills. At the church service she received a variation of her Academy ovation when thousands of mourners turned out to celebrate her life and its singular achievement of breaking the color barrier in film.
Through her bequest, her Oscar was given to the predominantly black Howard University for their drama department in remembrance of having honored her with a luncheon after her historic win. It was a small plaque rather than the current gold-plated statue. Mysteriously, it vanished during the 1960s racial unrest, and to this date its whereabouts remains unknown. One theory claims it was tossed by rioting students into the Potomac in protest against racist stereotyping.
Even in death Ms. McDaniel could not escape the long shadow cast by Jim Crow. In her will she had stated, “I desire a white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with a white gardenia blanket and a pillow of red roses. I also wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery.” She had always loved being amongst the stars, and the cemetery held the remains of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and other silver screen immortals. Though the flowers, clothing, and casket were fulfilled, her desired final resting place did not come to pass because of its segregationist policy.
Posthumously, the Old South did become a civilization gone with the wind. In 1999, the new owner of the cemetery offered to have Hattie’s remains transferred, though her family declined the offer. Instead she was honored on its grounds with a monument. A further tribute was two stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and her image on a 2006 postage stamp. The latter was fitting, as she had left her stamp on American history. Hattie McDaniel had proved not just a credit to her race, but to the human race, truly a steel gardenia.
CHAPTER 5: “WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS…” (1903)
In his final days, Frederick Chopin, the supreme poet of the piano, requested his body be interred in his adopted city of Paris while his heart be laid to rest in his native Poland. His organ resides in Warsaw in the Holy Cross Church. Another posthumous act surrounding the composer is he saved a woman’s life, 165 years after his own passing.
Alice—nicknamed Gigi—was born in Prague in what was then Austria-Hungary, the city that served as a cultural and intellectual melting pot of Germans, Czechs, and Jews. She was the fourth of five children, including twin sister Marianne (Mizzi), of Friedrich and Sophie Herz. The German Jewish family had enjoyed a comfortable life through her father’s factory that supplied the Hapsburg Empire with precision scales, but lost most of their wealth in the First World War. Faced with economic deprivation, young Alice said, “And so we realized, as little children, what is war.” Her diminutive height—she was five feet—was a cause of parental concern, and for a while Friedrich paid for her to be stretched in an orthopedic machine. It had no effect—other than to cause pain.
Although money was in short supply, they had something they valued more than materialism: an appreciation for the arts. Sophie had been a childhood friend of the conductor Gustav Mahler and socialized with poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Through the eldest sister Irma’s husband, Felix Weltsch, they were introduced to a reclusive young man who the children called Uncle Franz, author Franz Kafka. The writer once attended their family’s Passover Seder and lent his voice to “Dayenu.” Sometimes he took Alice and Marianne into the woods and entertained them with make believe. Alice recalled, “Stories which I’ve forgot, but I remember the atmosphere. It made a deep impression.” One can imagine. She reminisced about the literary giant that he had “great big eyes” and was “a slightly strange man.” He also once made a comment that she did not understand until much later: “In this world to bring up children—in this world?”
Alice’s magical moment from childhood was when she first sat in front of the piano at age five. Her initial lessons were from Irma, and she played duets with her violinist brother. Her parents, recognizing she was a child prodigy, arranged lessons with Vaclav Stephan, who had studied in Paris with Marguerite Long. For three years she was under the tutelage of Conrad Ansorge, who had been a student of Liszt, a living link she would mention with pleasure almost a century later. “Liszt got a kiss from Beethoven, Ansorge got a kiss from Liszt and I got a kiss from Ansorge!” She also admitted of the latter, “as a pianist, extraordinary, as a teacher, not so good.” This was because he would often absent himself and come back smelling of alcohol, so lessons were arranged first thing in the morning to catch him when sober. Her final instructor was Arthur Schnabel, who told her—after accepting a large fee—her prowess was of a standard that he could not improve. Such was her talent; Alice entered the German Academy of Music and Drama in Prague, headed by Alexander von Zemlinsky, a former pupil of Brahms. Her formal concert debut came at age sixteen—the youngest person to have been so honored—when she performed Chopin’s Concerto in E minor with the Czech Philharmonic to a sold-out hall, eliciting rave reviews. She continued to perform regularly in Prague and also built up a solid roster of private students. Max Brod, Kafka’s publisher, sang her praise. By her late teens, she was performing in concerts throughout Europe.
While music was Alice’s first love, another arrived in 1931 when she met Leopold Sommer, an amateur violinist, who she married a fortnight later. She said that she was bowled over by his compendious knowledge of art and music. At the height of her career, married with son Stephan, her world of privilege began to crumble. Everything changed when Hitler, casually tearing up the Munich Accord of a year earlier, marched his troops into Prague. Alice was in Wenceslas Square on March 13, 1939, watching the invasion, when an open-topped vehicle came past bearing Adolf Hitler, his right arm lifted in the Nazi salute. The anti-Semitic edicts began: Jews were forbidden to perform in public, own telephones, or to purchase sugar, tobacco, or textiles. The Sommer’s neighbor offered to buy these forbidden goods for the family—at double the price. In addition, their movement about the city was restricted, and they were compelled to wear the Star of David. Failure to comply with the latter was to summon execution. Alice was devastated at the hatred, especially as from a young age, she had looked up to Germany, the land of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven. Her sisters and their husbands had bought visas for Palestine and left just prior to the takeover. Alice had decided against immigration as her widowed mother was too frail to travel. The Sommers were allowed to remain in their apartment, Nazi neighbors on every side.
Even worse than the deprivations and the sanctions were the deportations for “resettlement,” where people headed east into oblivion. The SS required Leopold to work for the Jewish Community Organization, where he was given the task of drawing up the names for removal from Czechoslovakia. Because of his mother-in-law’s advanced age, he was eventually required to add the name of Sophie Herz. It was after Alice escorted her sickly, seventy-two-year-old mother—permitted only to bring a small rucksack—to the deportation center that she was at “the lowest point of my life.” Of her mother’s fate she