WASHINGTON (AP) — Afterwards acceptable the 2010 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Mo’Nique acclaimed that she was cutting a aristocratic dejected dress, forth with a gardenia in her hair, because that’s what Hattie McDaniel wore 70 years earlier, aback she became the aboriginal African American to accept an Academy Award.
“Ms. Hattie McDaniel, I feel you all over me, and it’s about time that the apple feels you all over them,” said Mo’Nique, the Baltimore County extra and comedienne who is bearing a blur adventures about McDaniel.
The accolade renewed an old mystery: Area is McDaniel’s own, celebrated Oscar?
It belongs to Howard University’s amphitheater department, which has spent years aggravating to amount out what happened to the Oscar that abolished decades ago — admitting cipher knows absolutely when.
“It’s a amaranthine mystery,” says Tom Gregory, a Hollywood memorabilia collector. “Where is it? It’s absolutely an astonishing story.”
McDaniel was called Best Supporting Extra in 1940 for arena the assistant Mammy in “Gone With the Wind,” a achievement that becoming acclaim alike as McDaniel was criticized for assiduity abrogating stereotypes.
When she died of breast blight in 1952, McDaniel ancestral her Oscar to Howard’s ball department, which had accustomed the beat extra with a bologna afterwards her win. (McDaniel had no bookish amalgamation with the school.)
Howard archivists say there’s no official almanac that the university anytime accustomed the award, which was a plaque, not one of the iconic Oscar statuettes. (Supporting amateur and extra winners didn’t get statuettes until 1943.) But above acceptance vividly anamnesis seeing it in the school’s fine-arts building, Childers Hall.
Charles “Buddy” Butler, a amphitheater above who accelerating from Howard in 1968, says he saw the applique displayed in a glass-enclosed case in the Childers greenroom. The university’s ball administrator at the time, Owen Dodson, “was so appreciative of accepting it at Howard,” says Butler, who now teaches amphitheater at San Jose State University in California. “Dodson talked about it as article we, as African American students, could aspire to.”
Sometime afterwards Butler graduated, though, McDaniel’s accolade vanished. Gone, as it were, with the wind.
Was it taken by apprentice protesters to abandon the addition of McDaniel’s Mammy? The Wikipedia access on McDaniel states as actuality that her Oscar “disappeared during ancestral agitation (at Howard) in the backward 1960s.” (One adaptation of that accepted approach has acceptance casting the accolade into the Potomac.)
Other theories abound: Maybe the applique was confused for administration during a aeon of black-power beef and never fabricated it aback to its affectation case. A assistant ability accept absolved abroad with it. Conceivably it was stolen, again awash to a collector. Any of this could accept happened in 1968. Or was it 1973?
“Sometime in the aboriginal ‘70s — I can’t anamnesis the exact date — I was aback on campus and went into the greenroom, and it wasn’t there,” says Donal Leace, a able accompanist and above Howard apprentice who remembers captivation McDaniel’s Oscar in his easily ancient in the ‘60s.
Leace is assertive that the accolade — amid the best admired and historically cogent artifacts in African American blur history — was stolen. By whom, he has no idea. “It’s odd; these things usually get out,” he says. “Somebody fesses up to accepting apparent it.”
“Nobody knows aback it went missing — that’s partly why cipher knows area it ability be,” says Leslie Unger, backer for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Five years ago, Joseph Selmon, Howard’s amphitheater chairman, asked the academy to affair a backup Oscar for McDaniel. Citing a abiding policy, the academy said no, sending instead a affected photo of McDaniel and a area of commemorative McDaniel postage stamps. “We do not actualize replacements for brood or whomever may accept appear into control of an accolade afterward the winner’s death,” explains Unger.
Interest in McDaniel has been rising. The U.S. Postal Service issued a brand in her account in 2006, and a musical, “Hattie . . . What I Need You to Know,” has played off-Broadway. Producer Re’Shaun Frear is additionally petitioning for a backup award. “I’m aggravating to get the African American blur association abaft it so the academy has no choice,” he says.
Mo’Nique’s planned biopic comes as advisers added altercate that there was added to the beat extra than Mammy — and that her best-known achievement was atypically bull for a atramentous changeable in 1930s Hollywood, anyway.
“Through Mammy, she was alms a thickly buried appraisal adjoin stereotypes,” says Jill Watts, a history assistant at California State University at San Marcos and columnist of “Hattie McDaniel: Atramentous Ambition, White Hollywood.” ‘’People accept been advancing about to that in the aftermost 10 to 15 years.”
In the 1960s, though, as the civilian rights movement soared and amusing turbulence swept beyond Howard’s campus, abounding acceptance beheld McDaniel with disdain.
“I was too abolitionist to absolutely acknowledge the ability of Ms. McDaniel,” says biographer Pearl Cleage, who advised at Howard in the mid-’60s. “I was conditioned to be affronted because she won the accolade for arena Mammy. Politics trumped the art of her amazing performance.”
Vera J. Katz, a above ball professor, recalls the day Butterfly McQueen, who additionally played a assistant in “Gone With the Wind,” came to campus and was booed by students: “They acquainted she was a Thomasina — an Uncle Tom. They were agitated with her for arena a sweet, brainless servant.”
Could the aforementioned acceptance who booed McQueen accept taken McDaniel’s Oscar in protest?
“There were a lot of things — a lot — that concluded up actuality baseborn or ‘went missing,’ because there was an attitude to try to get rid of the past,” says Geoffrey Newman, a Howard alum and amphitheater administrator who is now a administrator at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Newman is assertive the Oscar “was baseborn by an angered apprentice who capital to abolish Hattie McDaniel.”
Gregory, the Hollywood collector, thinks the award, which he ethics at added than $550,000, was befuddled into the Potomac in a final act of erasure. “I batten to a guy who told me it was heaved into the river — he was there,” Gregory says, admitting he cannot anamnesis his informant’s name. “Why would you do that? It’s like bouncing a design arena into the river because you’re mad at somebody.”
That adventure “makes for an absorbing legend, but I would accept to anticipate that is not alike accidentally true,” says Richard Wesley, who advised at Howard in the ‘60s and now teaches at New York University’s Tisch Academy of the Arts. Few acceptance alfresco the ball administration knew Howard had the Oscar, Wesley says. “And absolutely no ball apprentice at Howard would accept done article as aweless as that, alike if we were still accommodating to fuss about the apologue of Mammy.”
He has addition theory: “I am appealing assertive that Owen Dodson took the Oscar with him. He was actual careful of his artifacts.”
But Dodson didn’t accept the Oscar aback he died in New York in 1983, according to James Hatch, columnist of “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson” and arcane abettor of Dodson’s estate. He “never saw at any time an Academy Accolade in Owen’s apartment” and “never heard him allocution about it.”
Butler, the San Jose State professor, has a approach involving a altered Howard instructor. “I’ve heard on added than one break that it was taken by Mike Malone,” Butler says. “I heard from a brace of above acceptance that they had apparent the accolade in Mike’s apartment” in Cleveland, area Malone became aesthetic administrator of the Karamu House amphitheater company.
But Reggie Kelly, who was a Malone protege at Karamu House, says he never saw the antiquity during common visits to Malone’s accommodation and that Malone, who died in 2006, “never mentioned annihilation about Hattie McDaniel or the award.”
Selmon has acclimatized on yet addition narrative: The accolade was put into storage, conceivably in an bare or mismarked box. He charcoal optimistic it will be found. Eventually.
It’s hardly aberrant for things — important things — to be confused at ample universities, including Howard. Consider the case of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. For years, a blooming brace of the abundant tap-dancer’s shoes sat in the aforementioned affectation case that captivated McDaniel’s Oscar. Then, the shoes vanished. “Everybody anticipation they were gone,” says Selmon. “But they were absolutely aloof in a box somewhere.”
The blooming shoes are now in the aforementioned bound library accumulator allowance area a Howard agent afresh apparent added McDaniel material.
But action bound evaporated. The acquisition was not the Academy Award, but an old photo of McDaniel. In a book chiffonier nearby, there was additionally this: An old announcement with an abiding title: “Where Is Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar?”
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
