A Hard Lesson From Hollywood’s Past

She speaks without a trace of bitterness, no apparent residue from her long years in Hollywood, toiling in a time and place where dark-skinned actors were lucky to get through a casting agent’s door, much less land a non-demeaning part. She talks even of her finest hour, and its inevitable disappointing aftermath, with a wistfulness and calm that belie the emotions she must have felt at the time.

Who even remembers her name today? Juanita Moore. What movies was she in again?

Oh, but there was a time. . . . “I was in New York,” she says, her moon-pie face erupting in a smile. “The Apollo Theater marquee had on it: ‘ “Imitation of Life” starring Juanita Moore.’ I thought Lana would have a fit if she saw that.”

That would be Lana Turner, the titular star of the film that was one of the biggest moneymakers of 1959 and a postwar masterpiece of subversive, socially conscious cinema. The film is an extravagant Technicolor melodrama, but through its overwrought visual style and structure, director Douglas Sirk managed to comment on both the oft-derided “women’s picture” genre and on Hollywood itself. At the same time, the movie dealt movingly with issues of race, class and female independence.

Turner was the star, but the picture belonged to Moore. When Sirk hired Moore (“He said he liked my face”), he told her that the movie, an expensive prestige picture for its time, rested on her shoulders.

“ ‘If you’re not good, the picture is not going to be any good, “ she remembers him telling her.

“That was a heck of a weight to place on me.”

Up until then, Moore had played mostly small roles, usually servants who provided little more than background for the white stars. In “Imitation of Life,” she once again played a maid, but this time the maid was the story’s emotional center. As the industrious Annie Johnson, Moore was the pillar of strength and decency for two woman-led families. Amid Turner’s glamour and the lavish visuals and show-business glitter that dominate the movie, her steady, dignified presence provided an anchor.

In a later time, “Imitation of Life” might’ve made her a star. She was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar, as was Susan Kohner as her daughter, a light-skinned black girl who brings misery down upon her mother by renouncing her and passing for white.

“My agent told me, ‘Juanita, I’m sure you’re going to be nominated, but don’t have any high hopes.’ He told me that right away,” Moore recalls.

The advice made sense. “I knew what had happened to Hattie McDaniel,” she says. “She won it [for playing a mammy in ‘Gone With the Wind’] and what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Her career went nowhere.”

Moore also had been longtime friends with Dorothy Dandridge, the stunning beauty of the ‘40s and ‘50s who flirted with stardom but was unable to crack the color barrier. Moore and Dandridge met years earlier at the Cotton Club in New York, when Moore was a chorus girl and Dandridge, no more than 13 or 14 years old then, was a singer. They remained friends until Dandridge died, broke and dejected, in 1965.

Dandridge received a best actress Oscar nomination in 1954 for “Carmen Jones,” and she was a top-lining nightclub singer. Still, she could hardly find work, and the fancy hotels at which she sang sometimes wouldn’t allow her to stay there.

“I had hopes,” Moore allows, “but not high hopes.”

*

She was bitter during those years. “But now I’m not,” she says. The bitterness faded with age. According to reference works, Moore is 77, although she won’t confirm that and suggests that she is older. Whatever her years, she is of an age when most of her friends from her acting days are dead, an age when most actresses have long since retired. But Moore, after taking a break from acting, in part to nurse her sick husband, is back working before the cameras.

It came about by accident. Her career was never what you would call hot. What black actress in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Moore was in her prime, carried box-office clout? You could count them on one hand and still have digits left over. She continued to work in Hollywood, taking small parts in films, but after “Two-Moon Junction,” in 1988, she dropped from sight.

“I just quit for a while,” she says. “The kind of movies they were making about 20 years ago. . . .” She shakes her head dismissively, not bothering to finish her sentence. “And they’re right back at it again, making those awful movies.” The profanity, the sex and the violence disturb her.

“Maybe I’m old and don’t understand, but I can’t be a part of that. I don’t care to be part of it.”

But last year she was lured back into the business, at least tentatively, by an agent who didn’t know she’d ever acted but who knew the camera would love her. Sid Levin said they met when one of his clients asked that he consider representing a young aspiring actor.

“The kid came in with his grandmother, and the grandmother was Juanita Moore,” recalls Levin, who has an independent agency in Beverly Hills.

“She was in the waiting room, and when I invited her grandson into my office, I asked if she wanted to come in also. . . . Then I looked at her and said, ‘You could do great in this business.’

“It was her demeanor, her face, the way she came across, her spirit,” he continued. “It was just something about her.” Only later did he learn who she was.

Fairly quickly, he got her a small role in the just-released “Disney’s The Kid” (she plays a grandmother at a wedding) and a job in a Hallmark commercial. Casting agents, who remember Moore from “Imitation of Life,” are always surprised to hear that she is acting, he says, and are eager to see her. She chooses not to go out for many roles, though, preferring to stay home at her Inglewood condo to look after her husband, a retired bus driver whom she married 45 years ago after she stepped in front of his bus and almost got hit.

“You got to be careful, lady,” he shouted at the struggling actress. Two weeks later, they met again by accident and started dating.

*

Growing up in South Los Angeles, Moore was urged to consider an acting career by a teacher at Jefferson High School, “Miss Templeton.”

“During that time we didn’t have too many choices,” Moore says. But Miss Templeton told Moore that she could be whatever she wanted to be. When the Lafayette Players, a black theater company from New York, came to Los Angeles for an extended stay, “I scrambled up enough money to go and see it. It was maybe 50 or 75 cents or something like that. I was enthralled. I had never seen live black actors before. They were here two or three months. They changed productions every two weeks. That was one of my inspirations that told me I wanted to be an actress.”

An actor friend, Joel Fluellen (who later would play Moore’s minister in “Imitation of Life”) told Moore that she needed to study if she wanted to act. He took her to the Actors’ Lab, a group that staged plays in Hollywood.

She found work as an extra in the movies, making $10 or $12 a day. “That’s how I met Marlon Brando,” she says. “He was doing the movie ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ [1951] at Warners Bros.” They became friends. “A couple times he came out to the chicken shack where I was working and he had chicken. He loved that chicken, yes he did.”

Moore started acting in black theaters such as the Ebony Showcase Theater, a South Los Angeles theater founded by Nick Stewart, an actor who appeared on the old “Amos ‘n’ Andy” television show. Like other African American actors who played stereotypical characters on TV and in the movies, Stewart was a serious actor who cared about his craft.

The Showcase Theater provided black actors a chance to hone their talent and do challenging work. Among other Showcase alumni are Beah Richards, Isabel Sanford and James Edwards, a nearly forgotten actor who busted the Stepin Fetchit stereotype in dignified roles and who is best remembered for his lead role in “Home of the Brave” in 1949.

Among the plays Moore appeared in were James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner,” which went to Broadway, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.” The audiences were more white than black, she says, and the plays were chosen without regard to race. “[Stewart] would do what he thought would be entertaining.”

On screen, though, the roles generally were neither challenging nor large. And then came “Imitation of Life.”

*

She almost didn’t get the part. Only Sirk wanted her. Others associated with the production wanted to hire Pearl Bailey or gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (who stirringly sings “Trouble of the World” in a funeral scene in the movie). “Mahalia said, when I met her, ‘Child, I told them I’m no actress. I’m a singer.’ ”

After landing the part, Moore spent every weekend studying her lines. Sometimes she’d lose weight because of the stress and come to the set Monday noticeably thinner. “When the director would see me he’d say, ‘Give her some malted milks, give her something, she’s lost weight again.’ ”

“One day I did 28 takes” of a scene involving her character and Turner’s character, she recalls. “Each time it was getting worse. Lana stayed right by me. She was so wonderful. I never did get it. . . . The responsibility was just so much. The next morning when I came back, I was up to it. I said, thank God.”

Sirk, she says, “was an angel. He was so helpful. When I came in in the morning, he would sit me down and talk to me.”

For many viewers, the radicalism of “Imitation of Life” is obscured by its lush stylization and its blunt use of dated tear-jerker conventions. But Sirk, who directed Bertolt Brecht on stage in Europe, deliberately used the artificiality to keep audiences at an ironic distance. At the same time, though, the warring emotionalism of the material manages to provoke tears.

Not until the ‘70s did the melodramas of the ‘40s and ‘50s and filmmakers such as Sirk begin to earn respect from academicians, especially social theoreticians of a Marxist or feminist bent. The late German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who adored Sirk, loved that nothing in this, his last film, appears natural--”not in the whole movie,” he once said. Allison Anders, the independent feminist filmmaker who has excoriated Hollywood for its treatment of women and for ignoring class issues, praises Sirk’s movies as “some of the greatest woman-centered stories” ever.

Turner’s role in “Imitation of Life,” in many ways, seemed pulled from her biography. She brought so many associations to the part of Lora Meredith that Turner was called upon to play herself, as she was popularly perceived to be. Just as Lora’s teen daughter gets involved in emotional complications with her mother’s boyfriend, Turner’s 14-year-old daughter had, only months before filming, fatally stabbed Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. Moore recalls that because the controversy made the studio leery of hiring her, Turner took a percentage of the profits in lieu of salary. “She was very clever,” Moore says. Turner briefly had had trouble finding work, but the movie--despite stinging reviews--was so successful it “made her rich again.”

Moore did not have the option of receiving a percentage. But Annie was the character the audience came to know and care about. The tears the movie elicits with every viewing are all for Annie. (The best supporting actress award went to Shelley Winters for a role in “The Diary of Anne Frank” that Moore maintains should’ve been considered the leading role.) She continued acting. But never again did she get a role approaching the size or significance of Annie Johnson.

“I didn’t work for a whole year,” she says. Part of the problem was that after winning an Oscar nomination, an actor’s asking price goes up. Sometimes actors find that no one is willing to pay it. Moore says she met Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for playing Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), and Fletcher told her the same thing had happened to her. She went two years without working. “And she won the Oscar,” Moore says.

The situation for Moore was worse because of the limited number of roles for which black actresses were considered.

“What can you do?” she says. “They’re not going to pay me a lot of money for carrying a tray. That’s all we did at the time in movies.”

Ross Hunter, producer of “Imitation of Life,” hired her for her next movie, “Tammy Tell Me True,” starring Sandra Dee, who played Turner’s daughter in “Imitation of Life.”

Moore’s role in “The Singing Nun” (1965), starring Debbie Reynolds, was sizable, “but nothing compared to ‘Imitation of Life,’ she says. “I never again had a role that big.”