Steering ‘Daisy’ Through an Unexpected Roadblock

Robert Guillaume, like many actors and actresses, is not a big fan of watching himself on television.

But Guillaume says he has no problem watching his performance as Hoke Colburn, the patient and helpful chauffeur, in the series pilot of “Driving Miss Daisy,” a television comedy version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play and the Academy Award-winning film airing Friday on CBS at 8 p.m.

“It’s one of the few times I’ve been able to watch my work without ducking or putting my hands over my eyes,” Guillaume said.

Guillaume’s performance, however, is making a coalition of media watchdog and minority groups cringe and grimace--even though they have not seen it yet.

A protest launched by the groups this week has cast a cloud over the pilot’s airing, and may jeopardize its chances of making the CBS schedule as a mid-season replacement.

Leaders of the Media Image Coalition of Minorities and Women, which is endorsed and staffed by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, said the pilot is “dangerous” because of its depiction of what they called a weak and powerless black man waiting on an elderly white woman.

Group members said that they formed their impression of the pilot through the reading of the script, which is filled with Southern black dialect of the 1940s and ‘50s.

They added that the airing of the pilot could have “serious social consequences” in the aftermath of the unrest in Los Angeles following the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial. They have sent a letter to advertisers asking them not to support the show by buying commercial time.

The opposition has distressed the producers of the pilot and Alfred Uhry, the author of the play and the film, who also wrote the pilot. They said they do not understand the uproar, especially when those who are making the accusations haven’t seen the finished product.

Harvey Shephard, president of Warner Bros. Television, which produced the pilot, said, “No one anticipated getting this kind of reaction. We felt we tried to walk a fine line between being contemporary and being true to the spirit of the time.”

Guillaume, however, said that he is not totally surprised by the protest.

“I cautioned that there would be a reaction of some sort in the black community,” the actor said during an interview in his Sherman Oaks office this week.

“All the white people I talked to said, ‘Oh, this is a wonderful idea,’ ” said Guillaume, who starred in “Benson” from 1979 to 1986. But black people he spoke with about the project “were more skeptical.”

He said blacks were afraid of examining historical periods where they were slaves or servants.

“Black people have an open sore and we can’t accept that past,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened to us, but it seems to me to be our badge of honor. We did overcome a hell of a lot. We as black people cannot afford to have significant periods of our history erased because we are too afraid to go back and check it out.”

He said stories such as “Driving Miss Daisy” need to be told, especially since Hollywood has historically portrayed blacks during those periods in an insensitive manner.

“I know that these people yearned for freedom,” he said. “I did not know anyone of the caliber of Hoke Colburn who did not want a better life for his children. These are the very people who put through college the Thurgood Marshalls. We cannot afford to disown these people by letting the record that Hollywood has put out on us stand.”

Richard D. Zanuck, who produced both the film and the TV adaptations of “Driving Miss Daisy,” added that the pilot was embraced by all-black audiences in two test screenings.

“There was nothing but praise,” Zanuck said. “Not one person registered a complaint. They unanimously loved the fact that this was not an ordinary sitcom, not a joke a minute. It had substance and humanity, and that’s what they loved.”

Uhry said he was upset by the controversy. “It was my intention to write an accurate depiction of what my childhood was like,” he said. “I’m sorry if people are offended. That’s the last thing I intended.”

About the portrayal of Hoke and the dialect in the script, Uhry said, “Nobody can tell me I didn’t love my grandmother’s chauffeur. I thought he was the most beautiful, most elegant, dignified man I ever met. That language was the way he talked. It was rare and rich and beautiful.”

Zanuck said the show could help heal wounds opened before, during and after the riots.

“It’s a love story about these two people who come from completely different places in life who come to have great admiration for each other,” he said. “It’s all about coming together, and that’s what’s needed now, especially after the riots.”

Ironically, much of the pilot was taped at Warner Bros. Studios on the same day that the riots broke out.

In the pilot, which, like the film and play, is set in the 1950s, Hoke (Guillaume) has been hired by Boolie Werthan (Saul Rubinek) to drive for his widowed, crotchety mother, Daisy Werthan (Joan Plowright).

Their relationship at first is tentative at best, and Hoke tries to be patient with the reluctant Miss Daisy, who keeps scolding him.

“Miss Daisy, you needs a chauffeur and Lord knows I need a job,” Hoke says during one exchange. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

Zara B. Taylor, coordinator for the various groups in the Media Image Coalition, called “Driving Miss Daisy” a “situation comedy about a situation that isn’t funny, just like the Holocaust is not inherently funny.”

She said the “Driving Miss Daisy” film was not targeted by the group because it did not see the script before its release. She added that the relatively young organization was focusing most of its energy toward television images.

The coalition, which includes organizations such as the American Jewish Congress, the Los Angeles Black Media Coalition and Nosotros Inc., has no complaints against the NBC series “I’ll Fly Away,” which deals with similar subject manner and the same time period.

In that show, Regina Taylor (no relation to Zara Taylor) plays Lily Harper, a black housekeeper who works for a district attorney raising three children in the South during the late 1950s.

Zara Taylor said that although the Lily character is in a subservient position, “she is still a positive person who speaks her mind and is powerful. She is not unable to speak up for her people.”

On the other hand, she said. “Hoke is powerless to react or respond. He hides his anger and holds it back.”

She cited one scene in the script when Miss Daisy and some female friends are discussing an upcoming visit by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Miss Daisy’s living room while Hoke is waiting on them. Just as Hoke enters the room, one of the ladies, referring to Roosevelt, says, “I wouldn’t even walk across the street to hear that nigger lover.”

All the other women and Hoke freeze in an embarrassed silence. Miss Daisy then kicks the woman out of the house, saying, “I won’t put up with that kind of filth in my house--even if it’s borne out of pure stupidity.”

Hoke later thanks her.

“That may have resolved the conflict in the writer’s mind, but the viewer is still left with an indelible impression of a powerless black man who is defended by an elderly white woman,” Taylor said. “That kind of thing is dangerous, especially in the aftermath of the riots.”

Discussing the scene, Guillaume said, “If they’re dealing with the sensitive issue of if you’re a 65-year-old man in that time and you are called a nigger, is it historically true that he could have said, ‘I’m out of here’? We know that is not something that happened a lot.

“I have little trouble realizing that many young black people and old black people swallowed their pride many times. That is the source of our resilience. That is how we put the Thurgood Marshalls through school--because we kept the job. We had a larger idea in mind.”

Zanuck said he hopes the controversy will not hurt the pilot’s ratings.

“It frustrates me when I think of how this show is an example of how people can get along,” he said. “It’s a shame that these people have fired away recklessly. We’ve been declared guilty even before the supposed crime is committed.”