THE WAY IT WAS AND WASN’T IN BLACK, WHITE

Well, once again I didn’t get to catch up with Butterfly McQueen, damn it.

See, they had this tribute for Olivia De Havilland over at Palm Springs and I went to it because they gave me to understand that Butterfly would be there. Oh, don’t misunderstand, I am happy to pay tribute to Olivia any old time--I have been, in fact, doing just that off and on now for more than 40 odd years. When we first made that flick (“Gone With the Wind”) together, Olivia was one of its gloriously shining stars and I merely a player in one of the considerably more modest roles--with billing to match. And though through the passing years my billing got upgraded in other things, at the ensuing GWTW gatherings (and God knows there have been plenty of them!) the original arrangement has held steadfast. Those of us who were below the title (and still kicking) are introduced. And then the piece de resistance , the one and only remaining alive and well GWTW star left, is saved for the last, at which time we all rise to give her the standing ovation that she richly deserves.

We did it again, over in Palm Springs. But, alas, Butterfly wasn’t among us. And the thing is, I have never come across Butterfly at one of these shindigs. I hardly even came across her when we were making the picture. Once, in a cotton patch, I believe was it--mostly she was in Atlanta and I never got away from Tara, so we didn’t become buddy-buddies or anything.

But that’s not the main reason we never got chummy. The main reason was she was black and I was white and the twain didn’t meet back in those days (as Butterfly can tell you if you ask her). Hattie McDaniel, who won the supporting-actress Oscar for her Mammy role that year (the first black to do so), was in Atlanta at the time of the premiere, the one where all Atlanta dressed up in Confederate clothes and whooped rebel yells on every street corner, but Hattie wasn’t invited to the Big Do. She nor Butterfly. In fact, there was not one single black face to be seen in the entire audience that great and glorious night--and you know how many black faces there are on that screen.

I was there, though, even if my role wasn’t any great shakes. Because I was the “right” color. But at least after that emotionally filled first showing, the mayor of Atlanta rose to his feet and asked the lily-white audience to applaud “the Negro performers.” (Wasn’t that white of him?)

I never saw Butterfly (nor Hattie) at David Selznick’s house either, when I was invited there--to a party, to play tennis or sail on his yacht to Catalina (white people like Jennifer Jones and Orson Welles and Howard Hughes--they were who was on the boat).

And I tell you the truth--I didn’t think one thing about it.

It was just the way things were. The way they had been all the time I was growing up (in Atlanta). It never even crossed my mind that my darker sisters and brothers might be less than thrilled with the status quo. Weren’t they a happy-go-lucky sort of lot who knew their place? Jubilant to be dancing all around with little Shirley, lifting that barge, stepping and fetching. . . ?

That is certainly what my elders told me was so. And my peers.

And the movies.

The movies even clarified my place for me as well in the scheme of things. Showed me the way a budding belle of WASP extraction should conduct herself. As in, for instance, a movie I saw while I was still a schoolgirl, made before Scarlett entered our lives, one in which it was Margaret Sullavan playing the proud daughter of the Confederacy and who, in demonstration of true Southern (white) courage, when some field hands on the plantation got it in their foolish heads to rise up and rebel, fearlessly strode down to the slave quarters--in her hoop skirt and pantaloons--and smacked the brazen leader of the naughty gang upon his uppity cheek. (Naturally, he was so instantly ashamed that he broke down and wept copious tears.)

Oh yes, movies made it clear how my kind was supposed to behave, and if I slipped up now and then and forgot my place, someone was always around to set me straight. Like Mr. Cecil B. DeMille did during the time when I was under personal contract to him and took up with Anthony Quinn for a hot minute there on the Paramount lot and Mr. DeMille heard about it and called me to his office and told me in no uncertain terms to “stay away from that half-breed.” That’s what he said to me. Those very words. (But Tony got even--he married Mr. Demille’s daughter Katherine later that year.)

Or like the lieutenant who was escorting me around a military camp during the war. I--as the visiting starlet doing her patriotic duty--was entertaining the troops by permitting them to gaze upon my girlish pulchritude before they went off some place to get shot at. I tripped in and out of barrack after barrack where groups of soldiers had gathered for this encounter, however brief, with a creature from the magical world of Hollywood. In and out went we, the lieutenant leading the way, helping my descent from the jeep, opening the barrack doors so that I could grandly enter.

Until we arrived at this particular one.

No sooner had I placed one dainty foot inside this time when the lieutenant grabbed my hand, turned me around and rushed me back to the jeep, roaring off in a great grinding of gears, muttering as we went, “Sorry, excuse me, we weren’t supposed to make a stop there.”

What I had glimpsed inside was a sea of black faces. You see, back then the lieutenant (and the Army at the time--and Mr. DeMille--and most everybody else white) frowned at any thought of a rainbow coalition. Our wars, too, made it easy to keep that opinion going, since we always seemed to be fighting people whose “. . . skin was a different shade . . . whose eyes are . . . oddly made . . .” (as Michener and Hammerstein once wrote). And Hollywood made the most of those differences. Who can forget those maniacal close-ups of kamikaze pilots diving down at American warships? Evil Incarnate. Weren’t even human. And I have a photo to prove I didn’t think they were, a photo in which I am standing beside a three-foot-high firecracker, the stars-and-stripes on one side, a picture of George (Washington) on the other, with the message on the giant firecracker reading, “Don’t Blow Me Up--Buy a Bond--Blow Up a Jap Instead.”

I, it turns out, am among those who helped set it up for a fellow named Rambo to kill off these odd Oriental-type people by the dozens and have moviegoers by the millions flock to watch him do it and hoot him on.

I have to hand Rambo one thing. His female companion was actually one of “them.” The real McCoy, by jingo. He kissed her and everything. In the old days, they would have cast Meryl Streep in the role, made her up to look Vietnamese--with accent to match. They even made Katie Hepburn into Chinese once upon a time. Even little Mary Pickford, she of the blonde curls and blue (and if they weren’t, they should have been) eyes, got into the ethnic act. She played that famous Indian maiden Ramona. So did Loretta Young, as well as a couple or so more actresses through the years. Though, of course, not one of them was ever, ever , a true-blue, Indian maiden. Why, they wouldn’t even let a black girl play the role of a black girl in the film “Pinky,” which was a story about . . . well, a black girl. They cast white Jeanne Crain instead--when Lena was right there, ready, willing and certainly able.

Well, things have come a long way since then. Poitier came to dinner. Eddie Murphy went to Beverly Hills. Today, they’d cast “Pinky” with a proper black actress. And they didn’t turn “The Color Purple” into a story about whites.

And what I kind of thought was, that if I ever did bump into Butterfly McQueen somewhere, what I would tell her is . . . that I’ve come a way since the GWTW days too.

I expect it’s just as well she wasn’t at the Olivia thing. What in the world would she say back to me?