Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.

Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood by Jill Watts Amistad/HarperCollins, October 2005 $27.95, ISBN 0-060-51490-6

Much of what is widely known about Hattie McDaniel's early life was made up by white studio executives. Thanks to Jill Watts, a film studies coordinator and professor of history at California State University, San Marcos, a portrait of the woman who many knew only as Mammy from Gone With the Wind and radio's Beulah emerges that is both more interesting, complex and complete than what preceded. Watts applied the same exhaustive research of military records, city directories, interviews with McDaniel's associates and careful consideration of personal correspondences that she used to write her two other biographies--Go, Harlem, USA: The Father Divine Story (University of California, reprint February 1995) and Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (Oxford University Press, April 2003). In this absorbing read, it comes to fight that the overweight mammy "type" McDaniel became famous for playing was mostly Hollywood hype and heavy padding.

McDaniel was born in Denver, Colorado, the youngest daughter, not of a minister as studio heads proclaimed when she emerged a star in GWTW, but of a Virginia--born ex-slave, Henry McDaniel, who fought as a Union soldier in the Civil War against the Confederate Army. This was the kind of detail producer David O. Selznick had quashed from her bio to promote his Southern film fantasy. Likewise, McDaniel's success as musical blues woman, racial satirist and doyenne of the African American word play known as "signifying" have never been as completely revealed as in this book. Her fame in the 1920s as a theatrical and musical artist with beauty, bite, verve and sexuality was as long lasting and significant as her Hollywood career.

According to Watts, McDaniel was 45 when the film role that would win the first Oscar presented to an African American in 1939 (the author reminds the reader that McDaniel was also the first black to be invited to the Academy Awards ceremonies).

The constant dilemma for Hattie McDaniel and other notable African American actors of the era--her brother, Sam McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Fredi Washington--was to either accept Hollywood's creatively unchallenging and sometimes demeaning roles or leave the film industry. As a career woman who grew up and out of poverty, McDaniel was determined to stick with her chosen profession.

A target for the railings of NAACP honcho Walter White and certain members of the black press, she spent much of her later years on the defensive about her career. Hollywood historians haven't always been kind to the legacy of Hattie McDaniel and black stars of her era, but thanks to contemporary scholarship these personas are being revealed with a sharper lens.

--Reviewed by Sandra L. Jamison Sandra L. Jamison is a writer, researcher in New York City.