I have this story to share from a book I just read. I was so taken by this tale, though, that I had to read it last night to Stu and I had to read it again to Cornelia today.

The book is ACTORS TALK: PROFILES AND STORIES FROM THE ACTING TRADE by Dennis Brown (who also wrote SHOPTALK: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THEATER AND FILM WITH TWELVE WRITERS, ONE PRODUCER - AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ MOTHER and now you know why I had to tell you the title of that one). This book and it features interviews and observations with a range of talented people whom Brown encountered over his years as a CBS publicity person. From Danny Kaye to Jose Ferrer, Lilian Gish, Stacy Keach and Barry Bostwick, he had interview and press gigs and junkets with all sorts of people seeing them at their best, worst, and in between.

One person featured is Paul Winfield – who trivia time, almost took the job on the tv show “Ironside” as the guy who pushed Raymond Burr’s wheelchair and aren’t we glad he didn’t? – but Winfield told Brown an amazing story. It was the mid-sixties, right after the “Watts riots”. Winfield explains that one direct result was the creation of “the Inner City Cultural Center”, and there was a new acting company. The focus, he wad was often student audiences. And Winfield, you probably have seen him. He stayed in my mind in later years as he appeared in Babylon 5 as Dr. Franklin’s father as but had a huge long excellent career history in the theater and on tv – in “Sounder” and portraying Martin Luther King in a miniseries .

So he’s with this new acting company and they cast “The Glass Menagerie”. Amanda, Laura and Tom Wingfield are all being played by white actors; Paul Winfield is cast as the gentleman caller, Jim O’Conner. This is 1965. Here’s Winfield:

“The school board was up in arms. They wanted me replaced, and I have to concede that they did have a point. It would have been cruel for Tom to have brought home a black gentleman caller when his mother was a southern belle of the old order. …I really wanted the part. My attitude was: Since my job is to interpret human behavior, why should my skin color get in the way? But of course it did. It still does, for that matter, though less than it used to.”

Winfield explains at this point, one of the founders of the ICCC enters the picture – and it’s Gregory Peck. He’s on the board of directors of the center and he says “if the only problem is Paul’s skin color, why don’t we change the color of his skin?” And THAT is what they did. Winfield went every day of the play to the Twentieth Century Fox makeup department and for two hours, was made up to look white. Paid for secretly by Gregory Peck, money out of his own pocket.

The interview continues, with Brown asking “If Peck had not come up with this resolution, how do you think the controversy would have played out?”
“They would have gone with traditional casting. I would have been dumped,” says Winfield. He would have gotten paid, he thinks but with “race relations” and the recent events in Watts, with remember, this was in the mid-60s (remember we are past the Freedom Rides of 1961, well past the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King is still alive however, but 1965 is the year of marches between Montgomery and Selma, and the year that LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

Winfield goes on to say that had he not been able to stay in the show, he would have felt “that I could not rise above, or was not equal to, the task….Rejection due to color would have deprived me of the courage to continue.,,”

Brown asks “So what Gregory Peck did was a good thing?”

“Oh God, it was fantastic!” Says Winfield.

Finally he explains that many of the performances of the play were to school age kids, 15-year-olds, he says. And when the play was done, the cast had taken their curtain calls, they would come down and talk to the kids in the audience.

“I would remove my wig, I’d wipe off some of the makeup, and the kids would discover that I was black. Then we would discuss why I had to play the role as I did. Should I have had to do it? Could I have played it in my own natural color? Generally the black kids believed that I should have done it in white-face. The black kids were the most understanding about it.”

Does this just KNOCK YOU OUT the way it did me? There are SO many things to think about here, SO many different issues – to remember the times, and compare them, to think about the play and how it would have changed, how it would BE if the gentleman caller were black. And what it says about Winfield. And indeed about the company and about Peck Does this not just blow you away?