Wailing for Them All

When his name was read by Anne Bancroft, Sidney Poitier jumped out of his seat and headed for the stage with big bouncing strides, more like a great Negro high jumper than a great Negro actor. He gave Bancroft an exuberant hug, turned to the audience and said emotionally: "It has been a long journey to this moment."

Inevitably, some people thought that Poitier had been awarded an Oscar more as a Negro than as an actor. He answers this one best with his own confidence: "Watching the performances pound for pound, I had to accept the fact that I wasn't a charity case," he says. As an actor, in all his better movies he has managed to suggest all the frustration and anger of being a Negro, without tumbling into mere bitterness and histrionics--no mean acting feat.

His freight loader in Edge of the City was both laughing boy and leader, with the universal quality that inspires followers, much like the high school student he played in Blackboard Jungle. His trapped, foolish, ambitious, odds-against-him young husband in A Raisin in the Sun was an agonized study in subhysterical frustration. In Lilies of the Field, his smolderings are banked far down beneath the surface of his easygoing life, but he manages to reveal them in a word here, a gesture there.

A final, and equally inevitable, point about him as an actor is that he is so overpoweringly good looking that he quite literally pales the white actors beside him, even including Paul Newman in Paris Blues and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones.

Up from Cat. His father and mother were tomato farmers on Cat Island in the Bahamas. Once or twice a year, they went to Florida in a small sailboat to sell their tomatoes, and on one of these trips their eighth child, Sidney, was born, thus becoming an American citizen by a fluke that turned out to be lucky. The tomato farm died in an agricultural disaster year. At 15, Sidney was coasting toward delinquency. His father, deciding that the boy's American citizenship might save him, sent him to live with a brother in Miami.

Poitier has 1 1/2 years of formal education and a Ph.D. in odd jobs. In Miami, he worked as a parking attendant, and learned about the COLORED ONLY, WHITE ONLY signs. From the islands he had brought with him only the vaguest experience of prejudice, and the sudden force of it was more than he could live with. In less than a year, he had migrated to Manhattan, arriving with $1.50.

Changed Signs. In Manhattan, instead of WHITE ONLY, the signs said DISHWASHER WANTED. So Poitier washed dishes. He slept in 5-c- pay toilets or, if the weather was warm, on a rooftop. He joined the army in 1943, lying about his age, which was 16. He was made an orderly in a mental hospital, and a little over a year later was discharged with nervous complications of his own.

Going from odd job to odd job, he tried acting. He saw an ad in the paper for would-be actors at the American Negro Theater. But he talked in a singsong island accent that made people collapse with laughter. Buying a small radio, he began to listen to the pure tones of the network announcers, repeating after them their every rounded phrase, commercials and all. When he went back to the American Negro Theater some months later, he got a job.

Poitier's first play was an adaptation of Lysistrata that lasted four performances on Broadway. He was supposed to play a frightened Polydorus. He was right for the part. Backstage opening night, he sweated, vomited, and developed vibrations of the knees. "But there's a quality in a human being," he says, "that dances to danger. I went on." The quality remained evident onstage, and the critics raved about him while otherwise murdering the show.

Imposed Variety. Everyone who has ever worked with him both likes and admires Sidney Poitier as man and actor. In bygone days, he would have been called a credit to his race. But now that his race is the human race, the semantics have changed and Poitier is merely a very good actor who has made a significant breakthrough. "It leaves me feeling accomplished in a humble way, if that's possible," he said. "I do hope there will be some residual benefits for other Negro actors, but I don't fool myself into thinking that the effect will be vast."

Poitier left Hollywood last week without lingering very long. He isn't a movieville type. His friends, by his description, are in New York--"policemen, pressers in dry-cleaning stores, truck drivers, orderlies in hospitals--friends I made along the route somewhere and am fortunate still to have."

He has an apartment on West 79th Street and a house in the suburbs with a wife and four daughters in it. "The contrasts in New York are numerous and immediate and violent," he says. "You live closer to your fingertips there."

Poitier is writing a play called Six Hundred to One about "the waste of young people," and he will soon open as a Moorish sheik in Columbia Pictures' The Long Ships. Considering his future, he is realistic: "I'm an average Joe Blow Negro, but as the cats say in my area, I'm out there wailing for us all. I think that I'll never be able to function as freely as a Marlon Brando, or a Burt Lancaster or a Paul Newman. But on the other side, I've had a kind of variety imposed on me that the others haven't. Because of certain restrictions, I've had the opportunity to work on material with more substance. Almost everything I've done has been controversial. If I were a white actor, I might never have gotten a job in the first place."

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