James Earl Jones: One Long Run

By Jerry Tallmer

James Earl Jones burst into laughter. “Yes, I do remember that,” he said. “I’d forgot it, but you brought it back,” he said to the journalist who had evoked a moment during an interview of Jones along with his fellow actor J.D. (Jack) Cannon a good 45 years ago.

They were the co-stars of a 1964 Off-Broadway production of Athol Fugard’s “The Blood Knot,” a play about two brothers, one black, one white, in apartheid-ruled South Africa. The interview had touched on this and that, but not on Topic 1 until the journalist – the same journalist today – said: “Hey, fellas, what about race? We haven’t talked about race.”

James Earl Jones looked at Jack Cannon, Jack Cannon looked at James Earl, and they both looked at me. “Race,’ said one of them, “Race,” said the other as they jumped to their feet. “That’s where you run and run and run and run …”

“And that’s about how I feel about it now,” said the Big Daddy of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which just completed a limited run at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway.

There isn’t much if anything about race per se in that Tennessee Williams drama, but the fact of this production’s all-black cast under Debbie Allen’s direction makes its own statement.

“Tennessee Williams was once asked why he didn’t write roles for black people,” says Jones. “His answer was: ‘I don’t know any’ -- except for servants,” he tosses in dryly as an afterthought.

But no, he doesn’t feel that “Cat” is dated. “Just the opposite,” he says. “It’s very current in terms of sexuality and homosexuality.”

The production also restores some of the forbidden words eliminated years ago by Elia Kazan and others. “If you go back and see the [1958] movie, they never even mention cancer,” Jones continues. One pivot of the whole play being Big Daddy’s unacknowledged terminal cancer.

Even more than that, it is a play about mendacity – lying to others and to oneself – a Tennessee Williams bugaboo all down the line from “The Glass Menagerie” and “Streetcar” and even earlier writings.

“Now in the play you can say the words,” says its Big Daddy. “‘Fuck’ and ‘shit’ and like that. Of course,” he adds genially, “I say ‘shot’ a lot [in life], but that doesn’t count.”

He never met Tennessee Williams. He’s never been in a Williams play before. Well, yes, he was in this one as far back as an American Theatre Wing workshop in 1957, and an all-star staging of it for his son’s school in more recent years.

If much of his nation and the world knows James Earl Jones primarily as the dark menace of Darth Varder or the warm, strong, reassuring voice of Bell Atlantic telephone, theater lovers follow a different track, and it is a very long and very full one.

Another flashback, if you will. The year is 1955 or 1956, and the part-time substitute janitor of The Village Voice, a new weekly newspaper, is a tall, skinny, handsome, silent – even taciturn – young man who seems to be learning on the job. He turns out to be the James Earl Jones, son of actor and onetime prizefighter Robert Earl Jones, the regular janitor, for whom this silent lad will be filling in from time to time.

Some few years later the drama critic of The Village Voice, covering a show at the historic Cherry Lane Theater, suddenly finds himself looking up at that same tall, skinny, taciturn, stunningly handsome young man, who is now on stage talking a blue streak in a play called “The Pretender,” a very bad, talky, pretentious work by a Village intellectual named Lionel Abel.

In it, as memory best serves, James Earl is a black man in the North – a musician – who goes down South to avenge the rape and/or murder of his wife or girlfriend or sister. However imperfect the play, the reviewer thought, and wrote, that here in James Earl Jones was an actor who not only had a brilliant future but would one day not too far in the future be playing against – that is to say, with – white actresses as a matter of course.

He had been born January 17, 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi, but raised by his mother Ruth Connolly’s parents on a farm in Dublin – “like in Ireland” – Michigan.

“You knew my father better than I did,” a considerably larger – two or three times larger – James Earl Jones says now. “We were janitors at several theaters together and also at The Village Voice. I could also say about my mother I didn’t really know her.”

All of which contributed to a lingering boyhood stammer. “My ears are not good and I had both knees done two and a half years ago. That’s why they put me right next to the stage so I don’t have trouble with entrances and exits.”

Like many others of his generation, Jones paid his dues as the headliner in a full slate of shows for the late Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival – “Coriolanus,” “Baal,” “Troilus and Cressida,” “Hamlet,” “The Cherry Orchard,” “King Lear,” and of course “Othello.”

“Yes, I have love for Joe,” Jones says. “I have all kinds of feelings about him. He had a tendency to usurp – to commandeer is a better word.”

To commandeer the direction?

“The whole thing. I had a casting problem with ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ Joe said: ‘So you’ve got to take it yourself’ – the role of Lopakhin, the speculator who buys the cherry orchard only to put the ax to it. “I did not reject [the command] and took the part.

“Another case: Gladys Vaughan was directing ‘Othello’ and wanted [that Othello] to be a very warm, gentle person. Joe didn’t see it that way, He wanted” – tiny pause – “you know, Malcolm X.”

And?

Gladys didn’t see that. She wanted an Othello who was just bigger and better than everyone else, without being – what’s that word? – patronizing.”

If this theatergoer closes his eyes he can still see Jones’s Othello gently, gently taking a pillow to stifle to death the beautiful Julianne Marie as Desdemona – the same Julianne Marie who was then also his real-life wife.

“I did ‘Othello’ seven times, and didn’t marry them all,” he says of his Desdemonas. “Only two” – Julianne and the Cecilia (Ce-Ce) Hart who is his wife to this day.

Before Joe Papp – well before Joe Papp – there was a play that almost nobody now remembers, but it was revolutionary in its own way and led to an even wider revolution as a seedbed for black actors (and playwrights) in New York.

The play, done at the St. Mark’s in the East Village, was “Day of Absence,” by an actor/director named Douglas Turner Ward, and it was a dry -- very dry, though very broad – comedy about a small Southern town where one day all the Negroes, the people who do the work, the kitchen work and everything else, simply disappear. Gone. Catastrophe!

Jones stepped into one of the leading roles when actor/playwright Ward went off to Chicago or somewhere, but Jones did not join – would never join – Ward’s tremendously important Negro Ensemble Company that flowered out of “Day of Absence.”

“I would have avoided” – and did avoid – “any company that had the word Negro in its title. That puts a label on it,” Jones says.

So we’re back to race. Run, run, run, run …

“I’ve got into all kinds of trouble dodging that issue, but it’s a fake issue,” says Jones. It’s like talking about Holocaust deniers – what’s there to say?”

“Race is an illusion – or a delusion,” says Big Daddy Jones. “It was manufactured for a purpose – a good purpose,” he adds, talking about the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. “It was handy, you know,” he says, drier than ever. “And profitable – highly profitable.

Obama tried to avoid it,” says the actor who told this reporter earlier that he doesn’t discuss religion or politics (“ …. that’s why we have the secret ballot”), “but good old Bill stuck it in.”

A pause as he goes off the telephone line for a moment. Then, cheerfully (Bell Atlantic, not Darth Varder): “My wife just put up the T sign. Time out. Censor yourself.”

Labels or not, he looks back with love on the “glorious experience” of “A Hand Is On the Gate,” an indelibly black evening of black poetry delivered by a cast of New York’s finest black actors including Roscoe Lee Browne (“the whole project was Roscoe’s idea”) and James Earl Jones. And like every other black actor in or out of New York, he put in a hitch in Gene Frankel’s dynamite St. Mark’s production of Jean Genet’s “The Blacks.”

What he remembers most sharply is a quote from Genet: “First of all, what is their color?”

As good a question as any to put to Big Daddy Jones or even James Earl Jones.