Butterfly McQueen

[LLeff]

I've been going over some of Butterfly McQueen's appearances on the show recently, and I'm starting to get a feeling of why there's a story that she walked off saying that she didn't want to play "Prissy" (her character in Gone With the Wind) any more.

As opposed to Rochester who always gets the best of Jack, Butterfly is very much a silly, simpleton character. Mary dictates a dinner menu to her, and she says she's having trouble with the spelling. "What are you having trouble with?" asks Mary. "The words," says Butterfly (listen to her delivery on that...call me crazy, but I think she disliked that line).

Later Butterfly borrows Mary's bottle of liquid stockings: "How much do you have to drink before they go to your legs?"

Having just finished Elizabeth McLeod's MAGNIFICENT book on "The Original Amos n Andy" (look for it on Amazon.com...it's definitely a MUST READ), I have been immersed in discussion of the issues around the portrayal of African American characters on radio of this time. And Butterfly's character definitely falls into the minstrelsy of another era (although she's not really in dialect), an unflattering portrait of a rather dimwitted servant.

I find this very surprising, since the writers were already coming around with Rochester's character by then, lifting him out of the razor-fighting and crap-shooting 30s to the smart, one-upsman that we all remember. Perhaps they couldn't have Butterfly be smarter than Mary, since Mary was always harassing Jack in one way or another and was seldom herself the butt of jokes. And in fact when Mary got Pauline, her subsequent maid, Pauline is also a silly character who rambles verbally.

I'd be interested to hear other thoughts on this.

[Gerry O.]

While Butterfly's character didn't "click" on Jack's show, it's interesting to note that during that period (1943-early 1945), Jack's radio show had quite a few supporting characters who just didn't seem to work or make an effective impression on listeners. The later shows had memorable characters like Mabel and Gertrude, Mr. Kitzel, Professor LeBlanc, etc.....but those 1943-early 45 shows had people like Herman Peabody, the meek insurance salesman, Steve Bradley, Jack's loud, fast-talking agent and some other characters who made appearances but didn't last long.

Jack's radio show seemed to be grasping at straws during this period....throwing new supporting characters in the mix and hoping that they would "click" with the listeners, but none of them (if any) seemed to....and Butterfly McQueen should be included in that "Just Not Right For The Show" group.

[shimp scrampi]

You know, in previous discussions of Butterfly, I had always assumed that the character was dropped because it just wasn't successful or well-written, I'm ashamed to say that it didn't really occur to me that Butterfly McQueen would have walked due to its negative image. Guess I was blinded by the idea of "who WOULDN'T want to be on the Benny show?".

But, Butterfly McQueen almost didn't get the part of "Prissy", according to GWTW lore, because she was 'too dignified' - and later left acting altogether around 1950 before coming back to it in the seventies. If anyone has any doubts, this tough woman had NO resemblance at all in real life to the characters for which she was famous.

It's a sad legacy of racism, how deeply it taints comedy of the era. The "liquid stockings" bit, I could EASILY see as a throwaway Dennis line, but it is hurtful when African Americans couldn't be anything but buffoons in the day, many aspects of our beloved Rochester being the exception, I'm glad to say.

On another note, one of my favorite stories about Butterfly McQueen, before her tragic death - was that she would dress up as Santa Claus and visit children's hospitals, and the kids LOVED a squeaky-voiced black woman as Santa. Stereotype-buster to the end!

[LLeff]

It's a sad legacy of racism, how deeply it taints comedy of the era. The "liquid stockings" bit, I could EASILY see as a throwaway Dennis line, but it is hurtful when African Americans couldn't be anything but buffoons in the day, many aspects of our beloved Rochester being the exception, I'm glad to say.

And I should add that after I wrote that, I remembered a bit by Rochester around the same time that he had a cold and the doctor told him to drink "two fingers of gin." Similar bit: "I've drunk three bottles, but it hasn't gone to my fingers yet!" Thing is, that could even be a Phil line. Drinking a lot of gin might be something that someone would WANT to do, or use the doctor's prescription as an excuse to do it.

Compare that to drinking liquid stockings, which seems like something that one would do just because they're silly. (Trying to be oblique to be family-friendly: this is not unlike the urban legend a while back of the woman who spreads the "wrong kind" of jelly on her toast and then complains to the manufacturer about its lack of efficacy.)

[LLeff]

Say, for anyone who's interested, here's where you can buy Elizabeth McLeod's "Amos 'n' Andy" book I mentioned. Very highly recommended:

http://www.midcoast.com/~lizmcl/aa.html

[Roman]

I liked Butterfly McQueen's appearances on the show. To me, her delivery and even many of her lines reminded me of Gracie Allen. Partly it was the high-pitched voice but mostly it was the illogical logic of her answers. Most of her gags were based on the sort of silly wordplay that George and Gracie (and Abbott and Costello) reveled in.

While I suppose it's possible that Butterfly McQueen left the Benny Program because of the racist humor, I seriously doubt it. I can't imagine that there was anyone in 1940s Hollywood that thought of Jack Benny or his writers as racist when compared to all the other far far worse programs that Hollywood routinely put out then. First of all, the vast majority didn't even cast any black actors. And Rochester's role was a far cry from the 'eyes popping out of their heads' frightened simple souls who populated many comedies of that era.

By the mid-40s, this sort of ugly stereotype was beginning to disappear but, unfortunately, all too often this meant a decision not to cast any black actors. But not so with Jack Benny. In the 1950s, Eddie Anderson was just about the only black actor seen with any regularity on television. Every step of the way, from Rochester's first appearance in the late 1930s through the early 1960s, the Benny Program was years ahead of its time on racial matters. If Butterfly McQueen chose to leave Jack's show (and I'm not convinced that she did), it would honestly shock me if the reason was because of the program's racism.

[shimp scrampi]

I guess I would add a more subtle take on the 'racism' of a situation like this. I doubt Butterfly was throwing epithets or even considered Jack and the writers/producers etc "racists" (though it's speculation on my part).

The fact is though, the "Butterfly" character is unflattering by being both a servant, and addle-brained. Gracie Allen was nobody's servant, smart in her own mind (and white!) - and Rochester's character may have been a servant, but was three-dimensional, strong and intelligent.

I don't know if Butterfly McQueen herself may have seen the distinction between her character and the "bug eyed" scared caricatures you mention. Many of her later statements do reflect how deeply troubled she was by this same character she was forced to play over and over - I know she had some statement that was something like "I didn't mind playing a maid ONCE to get my foot in the door". I would say it's a testament to her performance skills that the character has any merit at all.

Roman sums up the sad situation of this quite well - it was either use black actors in stereotype, servant roles, or just ignore them altogether. Hattie McDaniel had a quote explaining why she continued to take "servant" roles - where she said she her choices in life were essentially to "play a maid for $700 a week, or BE a maid for $7 a week".

In Butterfly McQueen's case, she took the issue so seriously that she, in fact, took the latter choice, working as a maid - among other occupations -after leaving acting in the early 1950s.

[Roman]

I didn't really know much about Butterfly McQueen, except for her role in Gone with the Wind, the Benny Program, and Mildred Pierce. She really lived an amazing life. According to the Internet Movie Database, her first major acting (and dancing) role was in the musical "Brown Sugar, " directed by the legendary George Abbott. For a Broadway actor of the 1930s, white or black, to be selected by George Abbott was recognition indeed. Besides the roles I knew about, her other major role was in the radio and TV program Beulah, a show I've never heard or seen. I hadn't realized that she was 28 when she was cast in Gone with the Wind or in her 30s when she worked with Jack.

The African American Registry has this quote of Butterfly McQueen's which explains the frustrations she felt with the roles she and other black actors were offered in the 1940s and 50s:

“I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”

IMDB mentions that, after she quit acting in the early 1950s, Butterfly McQueen worked as a taxi dispatcher, a real-life maid, a companion to an elderly white woman, a seamstress, and a department store salesperson. In the 1970s when she was in her 60s, she enrolled in City College and received a political science degree. By any measure, Butterfly McQueen lived a remarkable life.

[LLeff]

“I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”

And that's very much the context that I've heard for her wanting to leave the Benny show. The quote I've heard (paraphrasing) is basically, "I don't want to play Prissy any more." (Prissy was the name of her role in GWTW.)

[FrankNelson]

Found a little blurb in the African-American paper "The Chicago Defender" in the midst of an article about Butterfly McQueen. The article is dated December 7, 1946, pg. 11. The quote:

She was with Jack Benny for a year on the radio, playing a sort of vis-a-vis to Rochester. But she didn't particularly care for it.
"They seem to like only very broad comedy," she says. Her own comedy isn't that broad.

That's all it says about that subject, but it does seem to confirm that she didn't enjoy her Benny show experience.

[Roman]

After reading these posts and realizing the acute discomfort Butterfly McQueen felt about the part written for her on the Jack Benny Program, I find it hard now to enjoy these sections of the program. Yes, the lines she was given made her sound both foolish and not too bright (if not downright ignorant) and they do not have the cleverness of Dennis's "naive" act, much less the sharpness and wittiness of Rochester's lines. While Jack's writers mostly managed to avoid the awfulness of 1930s/1940s racial sterotypes with Eddie Anderson (and indeed broke more than a few taboos in that area), they unfortunately were much less successful when it came to Butterfly McQueen.