Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

13 Useful Negroes (1966–1967)

c h a p t e r 1 3 USEFUL NEGROES (1966–1967) v On a Caribbean sailing trip in 1967, Poitier’s relationship with Diahann Carroll arrived at its ignominious end. After their ugly spat the previous year, they had begun dating other people. Even so, they stayed close. When Poitier invited her to sail, Carroll accepted, hoping to sort out their feelings in quiet conversations. But two friends of Poitier joined them. Tension infected the vacation: Carroll burned at these unexpected companions , and Poitier glared when she made small talk. After dinner onshore , they fought in earnest. When he got into their bed that night, she got out. ‘‘I suppose sex had become the final battleground between us,’’ Carroll mused.∞ The next morning, Poitier and Carroll boarded a dinghy to take them to the yacht. Poitier could not start the outboard motor. Some locals offered to help, teasing, ‘‘You’re an actor, Sidney. You don’t know anything about boats.’’ They laughed, meaning no offense. Carroll chuckled too. Finally the motor started. Poitier boiled, glowered, stabbed at the air with his finger. He hissed at Carroll, ‘‘Don’t you ever—ever, ever, as long as you live—laugh at me again.’’ For Carroll, it was over. ‘‘Sitting there in the dinghy,’’ she looked back, ‘‘watching Sidney nurse his imagined humiliation, the veil dropped from my eyes and I saw him for the first time. I saw the incompleteness. I saw the insecurity. I saw the lack of humility and the need to be regarded as some sort of god.’’ He had been a type of god. ‘‘Both in his life and his work he was able to touch people and make them care about him in a way I never thought I could.’’ For years, her self-esteem had depended upon his affection. But he no longer filled her emotional voids. When together, they only tormented each other. In Nassau, Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll shook hands and bid farewell after nine years of passion, love, and anguish.≤ Poitier returned to New York City. He now lived in a huge apartment 254 alone in the penthouse atop a twenty-nine-floor building on the Upper East Side, a glass-encased urban palace with views of Central Park and the Hudson River. On a clear day he could see the Statue of Liberty. His housekeeper kept his thick, ivory, wall-to-wall carpet spotless. A plush red easy chair sat near a dark bar of Spanish inspiration. He dined by candlelight, on bone china, with full table settings of crystal and silver. The epitome of elegance, he was alone in the penthouse.≥ v Over the years, some critics had suggested the limitations of Poitier’s image. But not until 1967 did these grievances trigger debates over his iconography. In February, Los Angeles Times critic Bert Prelutsky fired the opening salvo. He called Poitier a ‘‘Negro in white face,’’ a symbol with no relevance for Black America. ‘‘We have rid the screens of one stereotype only to replace it with another,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Exit Stepin Fetchit, enter Sidney Poitier.’’ He lamented the dearth of complex black characters . ‘‘It is Hollywood’s hypocrisy that it can only envision a Fetchit or a Poitier, not a combination of the two—or a Negro who’s both charming and evil, witty and corrupt, intelligent and criminal.’’ According to Prelutsky , Poitier fulfilled the patronizing vision of white liberals unable to consider genuine black humanity.∂ A fusillade of letters sallied back. One man wrote that Prelutsky ‘‘is in no ethnic position to pass judgment on what kind of hero Negroes should have.’’ Another faulted him for characterizing blacks as incapable of pure integrity. But a black woman from Los Angeles cheered Prelutsky; she had wearied of Hollywood’s ‘‘Lily White Negro, Poitier, who has (in the movies) no mother, no father, no sister, brothers or natural origin.’’ His ‘‘clean cut Eunuch in the white world,’’ she continued, ‘‘is not symbolic of us and we do not identify with him.’’∑ Poitier stayed aloof from the debate. Instead, in early 1967, he supported the black majority of the Bahamas. By the mid-1960s, black opposition had weakened the white-controlled United Bahamian Party (UBP). Lynden Pindling, leader of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP), adopted the techniques of moral suasion and political symbol that had spurred black revolution worldwide. Pindling and his populist associate Milo Butler sometimes visited Poitier’s Manhattan penthouse for financial support.∏ When the...