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This is Frontline.
This is my mother's house in Los Angeles.
I'm visiting her under false pretenses.
She thinks I'm here on vacation, a pause between stories and my work as a Frontline producer.
I'm really here to talk her into doing something that may be against her own best interests.
I want her to go on national television to tell the world she's my mother.
When I was a child, I would stare at my mother's picture and spend hours at the mirror trying to find her likeness in my face.
I wanted her to acknowledge that evidence of our kinship, but she saw no likeness.
Even as I grew older, she insisted I looked nothing like her.
This is me and my mother. I've lived much of my life in her shadows. I've been her secret child.
As far as the world was concerned, I was adopted.
Mom and I have never talked about how race has divided our lives, and it won't be easy getting her to tell her story on camera.
What she doesn't want to deal with is this.
The picture shows my mother, Norma, and my father, Jimmy. I never knew him.
They're with my brother, Larry, my mother's son from an earlier relationship.
Larry's now a history professor. He lives in Minneapolis. His house holds some other pieces of my past.
I've never been Larry's secret sister. We're so close, he and his wife, Lainey, even took me on their honeymoon to Europe.
Larry and Lainey have three children.
In the hallway, there's a photograph here I've always ignored. Now Larry tells me it's our grandmother.
Her name was also June, June Stephenson. I never knew Granny.
Granny was a flapper? Granny was a bookie? Granny was a wild lady. Your mother didn't get her free spirit from nowhere.
Lainey once interviewed her for a book she wrote about divorce in turn of the century America.
I described her as a woman who had had six husbands. When I called her to verify the description, she said,
Oh, no, no, no, dear. Uh, it wasn't six. It was only four. I said, Granny, wait a minute.
I count six. I counted the names. I said, I count six. She said, only four, dear. Only four husbands. The other two were just friends.
I've been told Granny couldn't get past my black skin. For years, that kept me from learning anything about her.
I knew her people were Mormons, her father, a Danish immigrant.
This is the Mormon, the original Mormon relatives. This is my, this is Granny's father, which would make my great great and your great great grandfather.
And that's her. Larry has a picture of my mom as a child in Idaho. Let me see. No, it's Granny's father, great grandfather.
Where are you going, lady? My brother lived as my father's stepson during the four or five years Norma and Jimmy were together.
What kind of father was he? Very good until he got, the career went down the tubes.
Jimmy Cross was a star back in the forties and fifties, half of a comedy team called Stump and Stumpy.
It was kind of love at first sight. Went up to Harlem and the Apollo Theater and saw him perform many times and would be backstage and just loved the whole thing.
What was his act like?
It was, he was the fall guy. It was someone like, if audiences wanted to see it, it was a lot like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.
Larry remembers how my mother kept her relationship with my father a secret.
There was a concentric circle of people that my mother would hang out with. Her most intimate friends would know about it.
Her black friends would know about the relationship and you. But there would be people she worked with and socialized with and often wanted status from who didn't know about it.
And also we were taught, at least we, I mean I was taught as a young person that there were certain people I did not tell this to.
So there were people in those days that just, that if they see this movie now they'll be very surprised by it.
I'd come to L.A. to hear my mother's side of the story. For the past 35 years she's been married to my stepfather, the actor Larry Storch.
Smile, you're on camera.
On the morning we've agreed to sit down and talk, jury selection for the O.J. Simpson trial has just begun.
Larry feeds the deer as he does every morning. Mom goes to the store and forgets her wallet. I'm so nervous I've developed a stomach ache.
Smile for the camera.
Sound test part two, sound test part two.
I'm trying to shoot this film myself as a personal story, but in my nervousness I forgot to turn on the mic.
The interview had lasted three hours.
I didn't realize there was no sound until I returned home. It had taken me weeks to work up the nerve to ask her to talk.
I'd heard things I'd never known before. The love, the guilt, the pain.
One story struck me. I could just make it out by reading her lips.
And this one time I remember I ran right outside of the hotel we were living. I had you in my arms. I was protecting you from the blows. He never hit you, but he hit me one time he knocked my teeth out.
Anyway, I was lying there and there must have been like 15 white people just standing there watching and nobody did anything.
I mean, nobody came to my defense. It was if they figured, well, she deserves it.
She predicts the OJ jury will figure Nicole deserved it too and let him off.
Times haven't changed that much, she says.
I dreaded having to call mom to ask her to redo the whole thing.
When she called me back, I discovered the racial fallout from the OJ trial had had its effect.
It tells me she's changed her mind. She's afraid her society friends will drop her if they find out about me.
I'm trying to plug in the camera and the mic while I argue with her.
I think OJ's guilty and I'm not white. I don't understand what that has to do with it.
And as I said, it was just my guardian angel was on my shoulder and didn't push your button that day when the sound didn't come out.
But do bring it down when you come. I want to see it.
But she doesn't understand why this interview is so important to me.
I tell her our family has been crossing racial boundaries all our lives,
that we have something to contribute to the national conversation about race.
It's a conversation I think has been stuck in anger for so long
that whites and blacks have just stopped listening to what the other is saying.
Well, that's it. She doesn't want to do it.
My mother didn't raise me. When I was four, she sent me to live with a black family in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
I want to go see the ocean. Leave me alone.
After that disastrous first interview, my colleagues at Frontline persuaded me to work with a professional crew.
That way I'd have sound.
It's hard to talk with the camera in my face.
Now I know what people feel like on the other side of the camera.
The Atlantic City I grew up in had no casinos.
Back then, they still called it the world's playground.
But it was best known for the Miss America Pageant.
We'd all come out to the parade because nobody had enough money to go to see the Miss America Pageant and Convention Center.
So all the black folks would come see the girls in the parade.
And as each one went by, we would say, we would wonder who had colored or negro blood.
We would scrutinize their faces. She looked like she got something.
That one looks like she might be.
So that was kind of how we dealt with having this white standards of beauty thrown in our faces constantly.
And during the Miss America Pageant, we would watch it at home.
And Uncle Paul, whenever Miss America won, he would all say, you're my Miss America.
Uncle Paul would always say I was the prettiest little girl in the world, but a bit flighty.
Aunt Peggy called me her little Junie long after I'd passed adolescence.
They weren't really my aunt and uncle. They were friends of my parents.
But their love gave me the strength to withstand the loss of my mother.
Peggy Bush taught second grade for over 35 years at the school where James Usreed was principal.
Mrs. Bush, you would not call her stern. You'd just call her firm.
Strict.
Strict? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, all of us are strict.
But she was not strict to the point of abusing you.
She had her little ear twist thing.
I understand that. But nowadays, when you put your hands on the youngsters, you're abusing them.
In those days, it was what we call a love pass.
Peggy's love for Paul was the guiding passion of her life.
He worked as a county clerk and moonlighted as a taxi driver.
For a while, they owned a bike rental shop that catered to colored, as they used to say.
Then they had a photography shop.
Peggy was childless. Maybe that's why kids were her favorite subject.
She took the first pictures of me when I was born.
I've come to the Atlantic City Museum. There's an exhibit on black life here.
Who are these folks? Easter Sunday at Jethro. Oh, yes.
My aunt Sheila has come up from Washington.
Oh, it's lovely.
Oh, there's Peggy.
Peggy. Look, I mean, June, I love that.
Oh, there they are again.
I love that picture of Peggy.
Yeah.
I used to wear that.
Is that the one that Uncle Monty had?
Well, I don't know. Is it in my family album?
Yeah.
My aunt Sheila isn't really my aunt, but she and her family, the Gregorys, hold a special place in my story.
They made me part of their family. They became my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and gave me the sense that anything was possible.
Uncle Freddie was the first black pilot on a space shuttle.
Cousin Chico, the first black page on the Supreme Court.
They were all high-achieving black folks.
Aunt Peggy had grown up without a family, too.
Maybe that's why she spent so much time at the Gregory house.
She was there so much, June, you'll have no idea. I even resented Peggy sometimes, you know.
Yeah, I'd be talking to my mother or just quietly enjoying something.
All of a sudden, I'd hear this fromp, fromp, fromp, fromp.
Disturbing your peace and quiet.
All the time, I grew to be very fond of her, of course, and grew to think of her as a comrade.
She was so funny.
I have known Regina Richardson since before we both knew how to talk.
Aunt Peggy was Regina's godmother.
She was very ahead of her time as a female and as a black woman, as an educator.
We had a strict upbringing, but I was always encouraged to do and to pursue anything that I could conceive.
That was her message, that little girl, you can do anything you want to do.
Peggy gave me the same message, singing me spirituals and telling me stories that made bedtime my favorite time of day.
I really like the ugly duckling.
It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck pen, born in a duck pen, born in a duck pen.
It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck pen if you're really a swan.
Colored folks had their own beach when I lived in Atlantic City.
It was part of segregation, but it was good segregation.
We had our own stores and schools, our own nice neighborhoods.
Peggy and Paul owned this house at 407 Indiana Avenue.
My mom and dad had rented their basement apartment when he played Atlantic City.
Peggy would be heartsick if she could see the way it looks now.
Here's a picture of me and my mother the day she brought me to live here.
I don't remember that day, but I remember the moment I realized my mother had given me to someone else.
It began with a plate of string beans cooked differently than I was used to.
I refused to eat them.
Finally, Paul sent me up to my room.
In retaliation, I threw all my toys down the stairs.
I was in the midst of this tantrum when my mother telephoned.
Saved, I thought, but mom just told me to do what Peggy said.
I don't remember very much of my life over the next five years.
So do you remember when I first showed up at Indiana?
First day.
Oh, Lord.
I'm going to be embarrassed.
First day.
I don't want you to be embarrassed.
First day.
First day.
No, but Mrs. Bush was so proud of you.
Mrs. Bush came in and introduced you around and said, this is my daughter.
And from that day on, you were Mrs. Bush's daughter.
It was as if I had two mothers.
Every school vacation, the express bus would carry me to the one in New York.
And after a couple of days, carry me back to the one in Atlantic City.
I told myself this was a normal life.
But watching the highway, I imagined myself a rich and independent woman who traveled at will.
I remember how the highway became a movie screen where I watched my fantasy life go by.
Going through the tunnel now, my stomach fills with the smell of diesel and a feeling of nausea.
When I was seven, Mom married Larry Storch.
Two years later, they moved to Hollywood.
And I began an annual pilgrimage between Aunt Peggy's stayed world of rules and decorum
and my mother's anything goes kind of lifestyle.
And I remember kind of being jealous that Norma was your mother and she was white
because that was more exotic.
And so I thought that in a way was neater.
That went away with what?
That in a way was neater to have a white mom.
And I remember thinking at one point how lucky you were that you could have two lives
because in the summer you'd go and you'd visit Norma and you'd be in that kind of world
and then you'd come in the winter and live with us.
I remember that every time before you went away to see Norma, you'd get the perm in your hair.
Really?
Yes, you'd get a perm in your hair.
It was kind of a big deal, so it would be more manageable.
Black women have a complicated relationship with their hair,
sort of like the one I have with my mother.
When I was a child, she kept it cut short.
I had an afro long before they were popular.
But when I started school, I coveted the black tresses of a Chinese classmate.
My goal as a first grader in Atlantic City was a ponytail.
It grew until I reached my sophomore year in high school.
That summer, visiting my mother, I wouldn't get in the pool
because it would muss my shoulder-length hair.
She looked at me and asked,
why do blacks try so hard to imitate white people?
That fall, I cut it all off and got an afro.
But even in the midst of my blacker-than-thou phase,
I left Aunt Peggy and went to California in the summer.
I'm staking out a celebrity shoot at a Hollywood studio.
I get my pen in there and everything.
Staking out personalities goes with the territory of being a TV producer.
But today I'm here as a producer and as a daughter.
Yo! How you doing?
Hi, baby.
I'm good. How are you?
I'm okay.
Good.
Who'd you come with?
Mr. Church.
We'll have you on the episode and have you sign up.
The PR lady at Vanity Fair asked me why was I doing this.
And I said Larry Storch was my dad.
And she asked me, well, is Norma your mother?
And I said, well, I'm adopted.
I didn't really feel like explaining it.
But whenever I say that,
there's like a little egg-shaped hole that opens up somewhere.
And part of me just kind of disappears in there.
I better not beat it up too bad. It might fall apart.
I guess I did.
Vanity Fair is gathering the last of the TV cowboys.
Corporal Agarn and Captain Parmenter reunited after 20 years.
How are you?
How are you, Parmenter?
She's a pleasure to see you.
You look great.
Thank you.
You know, this is my daughter, June.
Hi, June.
Ken Berry.
It's been a long time.
Yes, it's been a while.
How are you doing?
Good.
Good to see you.
Do you all know Captain Parmenter?
Yes.
We won the West.
That's right.
I wanted to be on the big screen.
I thought F-Troop was going to hold me back.
You know.
Oh, you want to study Spanish with me?
No, sir.
I want the captain's permission to go out and capture my cousin,
El Diablo, the dirty rat.
That's the highlight of my life, F-Troop.
Isn't that funny?
You fight against something, kicking and screaming,
and it turns out the best thing that ever happened to you.
Off camera, I asked Larry what Mom's thinking about our project these days.
He told me to keep on her.
He thinks she'll come around.
I think it opens up everything.
I mean, we are, this is the close of the 20th century.
Isn't it?
We've been at the moon.
And this actually, the interracial thing is,
if this were 50 years ago, I'd say yes.
Oh, my God, you know.
But now, things are moving so fast.
What does it mean?
I know firsthand how Hollywood imitates life.
During F-Troop's second season,
the studio took pictures of the stars and their families.
The publicity department wanted to know who was the little Negro girl.
Mom feared the truth would come out,
that Southern Stations would refuse to run the show.
Larry's career ruined, all because of me.
They came up with a cover story
that I'd belonged to neighbors across the hall in New York,
an abusive situation, and so they adopted me.
Everybody took part in this lie, even Aunt Peggy,
and I just went along with it.
I was 12.
I want to talk about all this with my mother.
I feel the years of hurt and rejection have become a barrier between us,
but I can't push her.
My mother's best friend Jan, recently divorced,
has a coming-out party in Beverly Hills.
Norma and Larry and I all go.
It's a gathering of scriptwriters and showbiz folks.
I've known Jan and her family since I was in college.
Jan said her brother once gave her the inside scoop on me.
My brother knew everything, or at least he thought he did.
He says, you know, she really is Larry's daughter.
I said, Larry's daughter?
He said, yes, it's Larry and Pearl Bailey's daughter.
What?
For a while, Mom keeps her distance.
She says later someone was there,
someone she'd rather didn't know about me.
Norma was worried about some of her old conservative friends, I suppose.
The mixing of the races, I think that's what concerned her.
How people who are in their 80s and 90s,
and as I say, ultra, ultra conservative people.
What would they think?
With most of Jan's friends,
we don't have to worry about what people will think.
It's that Palm Springs crowd Mom's worried about.
I just don't want to do what she tells me.
But I don't want to be kept a secret anymore
because my race is inconvenient.
I'd always wondered how a white woman like my mother ended up with a black man.
I'd always wondered what happened in their relationship
and why I never got to know him.
It was Jimmy Cross, they say, who fell down one night
and bent Dizzy Gillespie's horn.
But it was another trumpet player, my brother Larry said,
who'd been Jimmy's idol.
Jimmy, you know, who had been a kid growing up in the 30s,
he had two great heroes.
He had Louis Armstrong.
The other god was Joe Louis.
Larry told me that Jimmy had done a movie back in 1943 with Ronald Reagan.
Here's my father's big number.
There's a change in fashion that shows in those Lennox Avenue clothes
Mr. Dude has disappeared with his flashy tie
You'll see in the Harlem Esquire what the well-dressed man would desire
when he struttin' down the streets with his sweetie pie
In my opinion, he was probably the funniest, cleverest comedian
that ever lived, he could think on his feet.
Harold Cromer played Stumpy to Jimmy Stump.
He was funny, his face was rubbery, his movements were like...
And he could ad-lib on the stage right away, he could think of everything.
He was great, Jimmy was great.
If you want to know, take a look at Brown Bomber Joe
That's what the well-dressed man in Harlem will wear
So tell me your favorite Stump stories.
Well, there's a million of them.
Leroy Myers and Buster Brown, members of the Copacetic's Tap Dancers,
knew my father for over 50 years.
It was when they hit the numbers, you know.
Oh, Leroy says, come down town with me, I don't have no money with me.
I want to give you something, so we jumped in the cab,
you said the empire hold down.
Lead the meager runner, I'll be right down.
I'm still waiting.
I was so mad.
So he was just irresponsible, huh?
He never grew up, really. He was always a kid.
Lois Spastin became Jimmy's common-law wife after he and my mother broke up.
If he was so great and so well-loved and so charismatic, what happened?
Why didn't he ever make it? Why does Sammy Davis Jr. become Sammy?
And say that James Cross should have been the one to have made it.
Sammy said that.
Because Jimmy had a personal problem.
He was indeed an alcoholic.
Hurt nobody but himself, and of course those who loved him.
I met my father when he was 63 and dying of cancer.
He was not the father that he wanted to be.
And that hurt him very deeply.
The same way that when he was out of work, he was not the man,
the husband that he wanted to be for me.
And I'm sure it was the same way with your mother.
I mean, I essentially grew up without a father.
And even if he couldn't supply the money,
he could have just been there.
With the love and the caring.
Because you see, that he always provided.
That he always gave.
But not to me.
But not to you.
One day when I was 27, I went to visit my father
in the room he rented on St. Nicholas Avenue off 125th Street.
I wanted to know why he'd left us
and where the hell he'd been all my life.
He told me some of the happiest days of his life
had been those spent with my mother.
That she had left him and done the right thing too.
And that he'd always figured visiting me
would cause more harm than good.
I didn't understand right then what he was trying to say.
And a week later, he died.
It has taken nine months of negotiations, pleading,
and a full court press by me and my brother.
But my mom has finally agreed to sit down and talk again.
I can think of few things more intimidating
than interviewing my mother.
She reads me so well, and I know so little about her.
Where am I discovered, Mr. DeMille?
Where are you discovered?
That was Gloria Swanson's line from Sunset Boulevard.
We discover my mother on an Indian reservation
in Fort Hall, Idaho.
She's five. It's 1926.
She's play-acting, living in a fantasy world.
I was the only white child on that reservation.
And all my friends were the Indians
and the hobos from the railroad and stuff like that.
You didn't play with the white kids?
You played with the Indian kids?
Yeah.
Why?
Well, they were there.
I didn't like the white children.
Isn't that odd that you asked me that question?
I remember I used to beat up on the white kids.
I used to get them in a sandbox and sock them in the nose.
My mother's mother worked as a hairdresser in the next town over.
She left mom for her parents to raise,
the same way mom left me with Peggy and Paul.
I was like a child that was alone.
And then on those Saturday nights with mother,
when she came to visit, it was just fabulous.
I worshipped my mother, absolutely worshipped her.
Every day when I would go to school, I used to cry
because I was sure she wasn't going to be there when I came home.
Well, there must have been a time when you came home and she wasn't.
Yes, that's right. Well, that's what I always remember.
Those tears were there because she did leave me a lot.
You know, well, grandpa and grandma took care of me.
Peter Lewis Steffensen worked as a foreman for the Union Pacific Railroad.
And as a child, mom says she always felt different.
My cousins were so beautiful.
It was like living with Lana Turner and Alice Faye.
I mean, they were just gorgeous.
I was the ugly duckling in the family.
But they always said, well, thank God she's got brains
because she certainly doesn't have looks.
When she was nine, my mother got on the railroad tracks
her grandfather had helped build
and rode right out of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation
to join her mother in Long Beach, California.
She thought she'd live happily ever after
with her mother and her new stepfather, Eric, a chef.
Where mother and I had been so poor before
where we'd been eating onion sandwiches and beans and stuff like that
all at once, you know, when she started going with Eric
and later married him, we had good food to eat,
which was a big thing in 1932, let me tell you.
Norma's stepfather, Eric, was a German who'd supported Hitler.
It was he who began teaching my mother
the realities of race and class in America.
There were no black people at all in Long Beach.
And there was only one that I ever saw.
He had a little shoeshine store,
which was right outside one of the bars in Long Beach.
And I always would say hello to him, you know,
when I was like going to meet mother or Eric in the bar or something.
And then once I was walking with Eric and I said hello to him
and he said, don't ever speak to him again.
And I just couldn't do that.
So anyway, Eric was with me.
I used to say, oh, my shoe's untied, you know,
and he would walk onto the bar and I would stop
and, you know, and I'd tie my shoe
and then I'd dart past real fast and say, hi, you know.
And that was how I would say hello.
I would never want to hurt his feelings or anything by not speaking.
And I couldn't understand Eric to begin with
why he wouldn't let me speak to that man.
How did Eric explain it to you?
He said niggers and Jews are not to be spoken to.
They're lower class and not for you to speak to.
I've never understood that.
I mean, it wasn't my decision to be white.
I mean, I would be just plopped down here and here I am.
On the other side of the country,
James Arthur Cross was plopped down, poor and black,
on the streets of North Philadelphia.
He learned show business dancing for spare change
in bars and on street corners.
Everybody around Philly knew how to do some kind of tap,
you know, because that's all they did in Philly.
It was till wee hours in the morning,
get out on the corner and dance
till four or five o'clock in the morning, you know.
Dance or sing, that was the recreation
in Philly during that time.
By 1931, 12-year-old Jimmy Cross
had perfected a Louis Armstrong imitation
that made him popular on the Colored Kids Amateur Hour.
First time I saw him was when he was on stage
stopping the show.
We came up from Baltimore and couldn't get a ticket in.
Really? Is that a popular show?
Used to broadcast down in Baltimore?
No, no, but we knew about the Kitty Show.
You know, the theater was packed every Sunday.
In fact, that was my hustle selling passes.
It was the Kitty Hours producer who turned Jimmy Cross
and his buddy Eddie Hartman into Stump and Stumpy.
They were just 15 when he took them to Europe,
a year later they opened at New York's Cotton Club.
You could work forever in Philly,
but you never was anybody until you made it in New York.
Back in California,
Mom had graduated high school in 1939.
She became infatuated with a surfer named Jack May
and left home.
So you left, you went to Jackson, you never came back.
How long did that last?
Oh, six weeks.
Longer for you to get pregnant.
I got pregnant right away and then I came home again.
My half-brother Larry began his life on the eve of World War II.
When he was four, my mother put him in boarding school
and moved to L.A. to pursue an acting career.
So how does one go about trying to be an actress in those days?
Did you hang out at that drug store?
Schwab's.
I went there a lot, but again I didn't have the equipment
to be a star in those days.
I was in dramatic school,
and again I was sort of like the star of the dramatic school.
I mean, when I was acting, they used to have all these classes
and they used to send their classes always to watch me,
you know, stuff like that.
So I was my own little star.
I was very, I was going to be an actress, not a movie star.
Granny never supported those dreams,
and my brother paid the price.
The way I see it now is that she had desires to be an actress
and a career, and couldn't put the two together
and had no man at least there to support her.
Larry spent much of his life in and out of foster homes
while my mother struggled with her career.
I wanted to go to New York, and I did call New York
at the School of Social Research,
and I said, well, what if I don't have the talent?
You don't give me the scholarship.
He said, I'm sure you'll have the talent.
But I didn't believe it,
and that was one of the turning points in my life,
because I would have had a different life altogether,
I think, if I'd gone to New York then.
Norman's life would turn on her relationship with Larry Storch.
He'd grown up in New York City.
I was always able to do dialects.
Various people came into our house, sometimes a big cockney,
and I would glam onto it.
It absolutely enthralled me.
And then in the next minute,
some Spanish people would be there outside the house.
They was looking for something.
We had a Frenchman who was a Morel.
He was the director of the opera Paris,
and he was a chain smoker.
He was a real something for Mother Fellini.
And these guys absolutely enthralled me.
Okay, then Dissolve.
Now I was in a couple of...
I was in high school,
and at the Paramount Theatre, Benny Goodman was appearing,
and there was an act on the bill with him
called the Radio Rogues.
They were three impersonators, three guys who did impersonations.
They were about ten years older than I was,
and one of them dropped out with a sore throat.
So they said to me, can you fill in for him?
I said, it'll mean getting out of high school.
They said, listen, kid, this is the Paramount Theatre,
Benny Goodman, Peggy Lee, you know.
You want to get stuck there with the adverbs and the verbs
and the adverbs and the adjectives,
or you want to get your feet wet?
MUSIC
During the late 30s,
Larry Storch and Jimmy Cross began their showbiz careers,
but Larry played New York's white theaters,
while Jimmy played the black ones.
Their paths crossed on 125th Street in Harlem,
Stump and Stumpy used to play the Apollo Theater there.
Sometimes Jimmy would get together after the show
with Larry Storch and trade jokes.
If you were wise, if you were smart,
and you could glam on to what Jimmy Cross was laying down,
you picked it up, I did.
Was part of that that a lot of white audiences
weren't seeing the black acts because of the fact...
No, they never went uptown.
They went uptown, but not to the Apollo.
They went up to the Baby Grand and the Cotton Club,
Savoy, you know, places like that.
So the white showbiz acts could go to the Apollo,
check out the best of it...
Check them out, sure.
And then bring it back and kind of comfortably...
Yeah, comfortably ooze it into your act.
Right, right.
If you could.
Yeah.
If you could.
Yeah!
Among the regulars at the Apollo was Jerry Lewis.
The black community, they loved the clown.
They knew of what I took from their culture,
which was their comic sense of timing,
their ability for self-deprecating humor,
which is everything I used,
their rhythm in comic timing.
I mean, I learned from some pretty good people.
Lewis told me he watched those black comic acts
the way a biologist examines slides.
I've come to the New York Library for the Performing Arts
to find some other traces of my father's career.
When World War II came, Jimmy joined the Special Services
and did his bit for Uncle Sam,
along with a lot of other black and white entertainers.
Lady Louie Mountbatten received the Royal Family
on arrival for the stage presentation
of Irving Berlin's all-American musical,
This Is the Army.
Jimmy and the other black soldiers
couldn't share the stage with whites,
and women weren't allowed near the front at all,
so white soldiers dressed in drag
and wore blackface during the Dixie Number.
In 1943, Jimmy did the movie version,
but his number was edited out for Southern theaters.
You can see something like This Is the Army
that he's got a big featured role in,
and I might point out,
it's not credited on the screen to this day,
in which there still are residues
of the old minstrel stereotype,
but nonetheless is the coming out of this black pride,
and it's a big scene with Joe Lewis.
And here was a man who was right at the tail end
of kind of breaking the Sambo stereotypes in films.
Blacks and whites had no trouble
hanging out together offstage.
It was fun.
As I looked through the cast pictures
of the world tour,
I couldn't help but notice the similarity
between Corporal James Cross's face and mine.
I was struck by his look of cockiness,
a look that said he had such great expectations
for himself.
But tragedy was closing in.
When Jimmy got out of the Army,
he found his partner Eddie had become heroin-indicted.
Harold Cromer replaced Eddie in 1948.
It was a great number,
and Jimmy did put everything into that one number.
Stump and Stumpy were stars of that period.
There were stars in that circuit.
Maurice Hines was just beginning his career
when he worked with Stump and Stumpy.
They would dance, and then they would sing,
and then they would do little sketches,
and they would do characters.
It was all like Saturday Night Live.
I mean, they were really ahead of their time,
and they never got the credit for that.
You know, your daddy was the royalty in show business.
It's true he didn't look like Muhammad Ali,
but he was royalty nevertheless,
and he was funny, and he was shameless.
He would pull a hat over his ears,
and he would put two cigarettes up his nose,
and he would do a seal.
Well, the audience, you know, you were helpless.
And a lot of white entertainers don't think...
Jerry Lewis is one guy
who used to come in and watch Jimmy Cross.
Jerry Lewis would have seen Stump and Stumpy
in Atlantic City's Black Night Clubs.
They played there the summer after the war.
Martin and Lewis broke in their act
on the other side of town.
Crowd woman, you can never hear a sound from...
Their show went on at 4 a.m.
We were finished with our 2.30 show around 3.45,
and we'd dash over.
They were wonderful comic dancers,
and they had a wonderful sense of humor in their bodies,
and that's all I remember,
but that's all you need to remember.
And I always thought this was the funniest guy on Earth.
It was funny.
It's naturally funny.
It was so funny that Jerry Lewis thought
he was funny enough to make a million dollars.
Hello, there. How about a picture of you and your girl?
Hold it. Thank you.
It's hard to say.
It's hard to say, I know that I did that
because he did that or she did that.
I think that it's just too infinite.
You see, when a performer is influenced by greatness,
you don't know that you are,
because comics are thieves.
They steal from only greatness,
but they place it in a place back here
that they don't even know they've taken an idea
or a speck of a notion and developed it.
During my last visit with my father,
I asked him about that Jerry Lewis story.
He gave me a sly smile.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he said,
an echo of what he'd told an interviewer in 1978.
What did people do when those steps were stolen?
Oh, nothing.
It was common.
And you enjoyed it.
In the whole beginning of me, James Cross,
I loved Charles Chapman,
Joe Pennerby.
I had a very, very good liking for Milton Burr.
And then I loved me,
because I conglomerated all of them
and dropped them into a chocolate trough
and made them me.
Meanwhile, Larry Storch was doing the nightclub circuit.
There is a rumor that we French drink wine.
Well, this may be, this may not be.
But the new drink of France is going to be milk.
Milk is very good for you.
You all know that, no?
So we drink a toast to milk.
In the fall of 1946,
he appeared in San Francisco and met Norma Booth.
And Larry came out,
and as I said, it was love at first sight.
I went with him that night.
We went out to dinner.
Mom and Dad went home,
and we went out with a bunch of other show business people.
And then we went home together.
And then I lived with Larry for a month,
and then I didn't see him for three years.
But I was hooked.
I mean, that was it.
Was it love at first sight for you, Larry?
Oh, yeah.
No, it wasn't.
No, it wasn't.
Nah.
No.
I was nice and a lot of fun, you know,
but Larry didn't fall in love with me for 15 years.
He never said, I love you.
And the day he said, I love you to me,
which we were in Boston,
I said, okay, then let's get married.
And that's how it happened.
It took you 15 years, huh?
Yeah.
Larry's family couldn't get behind the idea
of a black stepdaughter either.
He was disinherited.
But I'm getting ahead of the story.
My father told me that when he first came to New York,
he became good friends with Billie Holiday.
That made his stock go up with me.
He said she used to call him Stump Daddy.
We performed just before Billie Holiday
was to make her entrance,
and that was a very exciting period at that time
at the Strand Theater.
And darling, I think of you day in and day out.
So Billie Holiday was very popular,
and Tallulah Bang came to come by backstage to see her,
and John Derrick, who was doing Knock on Any Door,
that a lot of people, Frank Sinatra,
they'd all come backstage
to say hello to Billie Holiday.
But the most frequently visited by Tallulah Bang
because she was really infatuated with Billie,
and she knew Stump too, so they had a lot of fun.
Tallulah was infatuated with Billie.
Well, of course she was infatuated with Billie,
and Jimmy was there too, my partner.
What else did they do? Stump, yeah.
They were all there.
Okay.
And they would hang out.
I mean, they would do, like,
it was a Bacchanalian type thing,
a trist, a trio, whatever you want to call it.
Minaj 2 or 12.
You told me that my dad got it on
with Tallulah Bang kid and Billie Holiday.
Backstage.
Backstage shenanigans were the reason
Chauvet's folks were looked down on back in those days.
Jimmy had grown up in these dressing rooms.
He was a swinger.
That's Carmen McCray kissing my father.
He was a man who totally ignored
the conventions of segregated society.
He liked to date white women, huh?
Yeah.
Oh, he was a real Othello.
Stump was an Othello.
In 1952, my mother finally came to New York
to visit Larry Storch.
She wanted to stay,
but he didn't want her staying with him.
Then I didn't see Larry for, like,
maybe four or five years.
You know, he was traveling all around the country.
And finally Larry and I got together in 1960, I think.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We've skipped over some vital years here.
Mom was more hurt by that breakup with Larry in New York
than she wants to admit.
She's called it the most painful chapter of her life.
You just, like, skipped over my birth altogether.
So how did you beat Jimmy, then, out of this?
Jimmy was appearing at the Paramount
with Duke Ellington, I think.
And I went backstage and introduced myself,
and I said, I'm, you know, a friend of Larry Storch's.
So that's how we got together.
Your father was a brilliant, brilliant man.
I mean, one of the most brilliant comedians ever.
He had the most fantastic gift for being anybody.
He would just assume different characters.
I was astonished to hear Mom talk like this.
I'd never heard her say a good word about Jimmy.
You would relate off that character.
He was constantly flipping, sort of like Robin Williams only.
Not quite.
But, you know, because he wasn't frenetic in any way.
He'd just be somebody else for a while.
And then you would be somebody else.
And he was so endearing.
He was, everybody loved him so much, respected him so much.
What do you remember about the period
he spent with my mother, with Norma?
Well, that's when we were doing very well.
We were making a lot of money then.
What was a lot of money in those days?
A lot of money, $35,000, $4,000, guaranteed $55,000 for 11 weeks.
When I met Jimmy, yes, he was against security.
At least he was working a lot in those days.
And as I said, very amusing.
I wasn't in love with Jimmy, but he was a lot of fun to be with.
And it was nice, you know, it was very nice in the beginning.
Not a big love affair or anything like that.
My mother has one picture that survived her life with Stump and Stumpy.
She sent it to Granny after tearing my father and his partner Harold out of the shot.
I wrote a marvelous letter. I'm very good at letters, you know.
I wrote a wonderful letter, told her this marvelous man I'd met
and what a genius in the theater he was
and how everybody respected him and admired him
and that we were living together and how perfect he was for me
and how good he was to me, which Jimmy was in the beginning.
He used to wait on me all the time, do everything for me.
And then I said, and all my love, Norma.
And then I said, oh, P.S., Jimmy is a Negro.
And I never heard from her for like three or four months after that.
Do you ever like look in the mirror and ask yourself what the hell am I doing?
No.
Why not?
I've always wanted to travel around and be a part of society.
Never, you know, traveling and being on the outside looking in.
And in a way, those years that I spent with Jimmy
were years that I was in a foreign country, I mean, and I was in it.
I remember I just laughed all the time when I was with Jimmy.
He was so funny and I found living in the black world
and with the black experience,
I looked at things entirely different than white people did.
I mean, they were just so devil may care.
I mean, he had such a cavalier attitude about anything.
You seem to feel that blacks have a more happy-go-lucky attitude towards life.
Oh, I do think that.
There's such happiness and such warmth and such love within the black world.
You don't get that a lot with white people.
White people tend to judge each other more, I think, than blacks do.
Blacks will almost accept you right away for what you are,
what you lay on the table, these are my cards, this is me,
and they'll accept you.
White people can be, you know, you have to prove yourself.
They're a little more suspicious.
I mean, y'all like that with each other too?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I thought that was just something.
I thought it was just us.
No, no, that's the way it is.
Drop me off in Harlem.
Yeah, good old Harlem.
You have your fun under the Harlem sun.
So drop me off in Harlem.
When he was in sixth grade,
my brother came to live with Norma and Jimmy in New York.
To be dropped into one black man,
dropped into show business and then dropped into Harlem,
I mean, for a 12- and 13-year-old,
that was like you had gone to Mars.
The first time I went to New York, I was calling Jimmy boy.
It was like just these were the...
I suppose that's the kind of world
that my grandmother grew up in.
But within a week or so, I had had no father,
and Jimmy suddenly was my father in a kind of very idealistic way.
I mean, I really admired him, and he would go up to Harlem,
and there would be Stump and Stumpy right on the Hollywood thing.
But outside of showbiz, Jimmy and Norma faced a different reality.
We lived in a hotel in downtown,
and hotel would accept interracial couples.
And then we went to look for apartments
in fringe neighborhoods of Harlem.
And then once it came out,
you know, well, this is an interracial couple,
and there's a black man.
I can still remember this Italian guy,
it just sounded like he just got off the boat,
saying, well, we just can't accept them here.
And then, of course, doing that whole schizophrenia
that is part of American life,
but my best friends are black, you know,
but I can't let them in my apartment.
And off we'd go.
And here we're whites encountering that.
I mean, blacks encounter that all their lives.
The time between gigs grew longer for Stump and Stumpy,
but Atlantic City provided steady work in the summer.
I want a zoot suit with a reed pony.
When I wear this suit, I want to go into orbit.
I think you're already there!
Jimmy, Norma, and Larry spent three seasons there.
He would go down the street in Atlantic City,
and people would just, you know, there's Stump.
If I would go alone, they'd say,
here comes little Stump.
Here's little Stump.
You know, there were big Stump and little Stump,
and then there were little, little Stump.
Larry, when he was, like, here and then he was in Atlantic City,
he was always with the colored kids.
Larry, of course, is white.
I have to say that so you know what I mean, folks, the difference.
He was white, white, white, white, period.
But he was, like, almost raised with all the colored people.
So he knew, he didn't know.
He didn't know how to act white.
That's right, he didn't know. He didn't know anything else.
When we lived in Atlantic City, not only did we live amongst blacks,
but that was the first time I had come in contact with that much poverty.
I mean, there were poor, poor people all around us.
There were also middle class people.
Yes, black.
That's what was different about a black community in the 50s
than a white community.
If you were middle class, you lived away from the poor.
If you were black and you were middle class,
you lived right next to the poor.
And there was, it's like your fate was tied together.
That picture I'd always had of Norma, Jimmy, and Larry, it turns out,
had been taken in Peggy and Paul's backyard the summer before I was born.
I know she thought I was poor white trash in the beginning.
Because I was white with black men.
You had told me at one point that she had said to you,
at a certain point in time she came to,
she started saying, you're different than all the other white trash
that comes around here.
Yes, that was the ultimate compliment she finally gave me
when she said, you're different than all the other white trash
that's been here.
How does that feel when people would say white trash?
Well, I took it the way she meant it.
The words, the juxtaposition, she meant it as a compliment
and that's the way I took it.
Her words were not exactly right, but we all make those mistakes.
Norma trusted Peggy so much that she even left my brother Larry
in Atlantic City when Jimmy was between gigs.
Peggy was genteel, far more refined than my grandmother.
In fact, what my grandmother admired in white culture, women like that,
was what Peggy was.
I would have the greatest conversations with her.
She, in her own way, I think was a kind of repressed intellectual.
She had all those photography interests and the garden,
used to get out there and help her with the garden.
My mom and Peggy seemed alike in one regard.
They were both headstrong women who had sublimated
their own career desires for the sake of their husbands.
I used to spend more and more time with Peggy
and we used to discuss everything.
She was also a dreamer.
She wanted to travel all over the world and do things.
And we discussed all of those things.
And I liked her a lot.
She was childless, had always wanted a child.
And I always thought, oh, what a wonderful mother she would make,
you know, being a teacher and the wonderful life
that the two of them had together.
The relationship with my father deteriorated.
Then during the summer of 1953, Mom discovered she was pregnant.
Given all the pressures that you were under
when you found out you were pregnant with me,
why didn't you just abort me or give her to me?
I thought about that, but I didn't have the money to do it.
You were just here because I didn't have the money.
Just think, you wouldn't have to be doing this interview.
Your friends would be safe.
But the dilemma my birth presented
wouldn't manifest itself for several years.
Do you remember when you first saw me?
Yes, of course I do.
When they brought you into me, I was in bed.
And I took your foot out and put your foot in my hand,
which is about as big as my finger.
You were so darling.
Your father came in singing June in January, da-da-da-da-da.
And he said, well, name her June.
And I said, no, I don't want to name her June
because that's my mother's name.
And he said, no, no, it's June.
And it was.
June in January, because I'm in love.
Now, when I was born, I was not the shade I am now.
No, you were white.
So, I mean, I was very happy.
You were the same color as I am, just shade darker, perhaps,
like an olive, you know, instead of a redhead, which I was.
And Peggy said to me, I said, isn't it wonderful, Peggy?
You know, I mean, she's light.
She'll be able to pass.
She said, they get darker as they get older, honey, you know.
Mom got a job as a hat-check girl to help support me.
But she could never make herself shed her whiteness
and live in the black world.
I was living these three lives, I guess, is what it was.
And what would be the three?
Well, the one was with relatives.
The one was with Jimmy, and the one was with my work.
In other words, my friends didn't know anything either.
People that I worked knew nothing about you.
I never went to their houses.
They never came to mine.
With Jimmy, we would only go among the black people.
And then with my relatives, whom, of course, I didn't live with,
mother just would never mention you.
And whenever I would talk with them or would be with them,
everything was as it was except there was no you
and had never been a Jimmy.
She never met Jimmy, you know, so...
Now, Jimmy's mother wasn't much better from all...
No, no.
Jimmy's mother didn't speak to me either.
It was the same thing.
We were just the same thing in reverse.
She hated the fact that he was with me.
She thought he was going so far beneath himself
to go with a white woman.
And she came into a room where I was once
and she didn't even look at me.
She just walked right to the bedroom and shut the door with Jimmy
and they had their visit a couple of hours
and she went right out and swept right by me.
I didn't exist either.
So that was two worlds that didn't accept the black world.
Jimmy's black world couldn't accept me.
My mother couldn't accept him, you know.
If we could have a scale of 1 to 10
and we could say racism was, you know, at 10
and where it was more intense, the white world or in Harlem,
Harlem was around 1 or 2.
What happened in the white community?
Well, white community, you know, you just...
racism was just all around you.
I got to the point I never wanted to go out with Jimmy at all
unless it was, you know, to some...
we'd go up to Harlem or something like that
because going like downtown or, you know,
any place if we weren't with the show business crowd
was just too embarrassing.
I mean, it was awful.
To make things worse, Stump and Stumpy were caught
at the moment of a sea change in show business.
Now, television was coming into the business.
Television.
How was television changing the business?
You were becoming famous in 20 minutes.
Milton Berle just turned the whole world upside down.
The crowds would gather in the street
just to look at Texaco night.
Tuesday night belonged to Milton Berle.
And so the clubs dwindled.
The attendance of theaters dwindled.
Finally, we all set our caps toward television.
By the mid-'50s, television had catapulted
Martin and Lewis into the Beatles of comedy
while Stump and Stumpy's career went into decline.
There were just so few opportunities for blacks on TV.
And they started using Martin and Lewis in the films.
I mean, that's what happened.
In a way, it stopped Jimmy and I
and a lot of other colored acts
from continuing to form other than tap dancing.
It was almost the handwriting was on the wall.
It was a long period, a long drought for entertainers.
So if you're talking about Stump and Stumpy,
we were stumped.
We were stumped.
No plays, no movies, no nothing.
Just catching shows here and there.
So that's the way it went, Jimmy.
I mean, it was very sad to see him go to pieces.
And I felt guilty over that, too.
I felt that I really took so much out of him,
that the love that he had invested in me,
I threw at his feet and absolutely didn't want it.
I had no value to me whatsoever.
And that was, that made him so unhappy.
Plus, by that time, too, he had no money
and he was kind of indirectly stealing money.
He would go down to the hotel lobby
and ask for an advance on the,
he'll pay his bill at the end of the,
so he'd walk off at 300 bucks and blow it.
Drinking or smoking grass.
Fortunately, as far as I know,
he never got into any hard drugs,
but he certainly smoked grass.
Which then she had to pay for.
Yeah.
So that, you throw in no job,
dependent on the woman,
white, black, no home.
You know, fireworks are bound to occur.
Do you remember Jimmy beating Mom?
Oh, yeah.
You don't forget those things.
When you're as a child
and you see that kind of violence unleashed
and not knowing how to stop it,
and it was pretty vicious stuff.
What would you do?
Was he using fists or slapping her?
He was using fists.
And then she would try to stop him
by grabbing his testicles,
which I think was probably
the hardest thing to do.
And fortunately,
he would stop after a point.
You know, it wouldn't go to the point
where he'd get total control
and beat her unconscious or anything.
The beating that started
where you end up downstairs,
do you remember what that started over?
Yes, I called him a nigger.
I said, I want out.
I'm leaving.
And he socked me on the jaw
and then he was in the door
to the bathroom with the bedroom on the bathroom.
And he was kicking at me
and screaming at me
and kicking my ribs
and hitting me and stuff.
And you were in your crib.
And I said, you're just a nigger
and I hate you. I want out.
And with that, oh, he really let me have it.
And that's when
I ran to the door
because I really thought he was going to kill me.
I mean, he just went insane.
It's the first time I'd ever use
those words with anybody, I think.
But I was driven
so much with hate
for him that I wanted out.
And I grabbed you out of the crib
and I ran downstairs
and then he hit me on the back
and I stumbled down.
I fell and I had you in my arms
and that's when I was leaning over
and he was just screaming
and yelling at me there.
And I was yelling and crying
and watching.
Were they black and white? No, all white.
And what did that say to you?
I think
they just felt I had it coming in some way
or whatever it was.
That you deserved it. Yeah.
That I'd been doing something wrong
since it was wrong
for me to be there to begin with.
Hell, I'd play basketball
12 hours a day if it took
to get out of there.
And so there would be
you'd put space between it.
And then, you know, I don't know
whether, I'm sure,
I don't know whether you know about this
but basically the way we got away
is that we snuck away.
We went to the movies.
I excused myself in the middle of the movie.
It was Marilyn Monroe and How to Marry a Millionaire,
I remember.
And I went downstairs
to the ladies' room.
I mean, I left to theater and went downstairs
and then I just went out of the
theater and I never came back.
And I had
a month ahead of time, I had found an
apartment, I paid the rent on it,
had everything ready and then the babysitter
that was with you
when we were in the movies had taken all
of my clothes over to the other apartment
so I just disappeared out of his life.
And then, of course,
when I didn't come back, I knew he
would go to this one bar
to get drunk in which is where he always
went. So I called him there about
two or three hours later and I just said,
Jimmy, I've left and you'll never see
me again.
And he was devastated.
You see, part of the
violence was also trying to keep it together.
Strange as it sounds.
Was trying to keep
that thing going.
We settled into an apartment on West
67th Street, a block from
Central Park. This was
long before that neighborhood got so
ritzy.
When I was four, my grandmother came
to visit, the only time we
ever met. She never was
loving toward you. She just couldn't cross
that barrier. She said,
well, she's
a nice little thing once you get to know
her. Was the most she said
but she never embraced you or...
As funny as I remember that differently.
How do you remember it? I remember her saying she's a cute
little monkey once you get used to looking at her.
Oh, well.
She used to say to me,
you know, Negroes are okay
but you never should sit down
and have dinner with them.
I would like to think
that a lot of it had to do with
more consciousness of shame
than inner self. I mean, there were so many
pressures about
what is respectability.
And this was the ultimate in
irrespectability.
Or degradation.
And she just didn't have the strength to deal with it.
And I was caught in the middle of these situations
because I simultaneously
loved her
and I loved Peggy
and I loved you and I loved Jimmy.
And here it was like
in the middle of
this
racial inheritance.
You know, and if you say, well, you want an explanation
for it,
it's tough.
You know, they're passed on.
You know, we
historians have analysis
that American nationalism is built
on race. I think that's true.
What do you mean by that family that American nationalism
is built on race?
That essentially
African Americans
or blacks were imported
into the country as slaves
and
they're not allowed to vote.
White men are Americans
because they're not black.
Well, if freedom is
white and that's
democratic and that
takes discipline and work,
well, then blacks must be
the opposite of that. Lazy.
Hedonistic.
You know, those things are, and those
things have powerful social consequences
all the time.
And it, you know, unfortunately
comes right down to personal life.
Yeah, it does. It does.
Our neighbors circulated a petition
to evict us.
They claimed the sight of me and my mother
violated their moral standards.
There just seemed
to be
no place for the two of us within
life that was segregated there.
I mean, in other words, I didn't think you should be brought up
in an all-white household
because I felt you were going to be unhappy.
I felt, and I,
with a couple of other boyfriends that I
was with, was having such problems
with you that they couldn't take you.
I mean, I just thought she's got
to have a life somewhere where she can
blossom, you know, where
I won't get in her way and she won't
get in my way.
The place Mom thought of
was Peggy's and Paul's house
in Atlantic City.
Their home had been a refuge
for her during the bad times with
Jimmy.
As a child, I would stare
at that picture of the day I went to
live with Peggy and wonder
why I had no memory of it,
not even the clothes I wore.
Peggy refused
to talk about it.
You'll come apart at the seams, she warned.
For her sake, I'd never even asked
my mom the details till now.
I phoned Peggy one day and
discussed all of this with her
and asked her if she would
consider taking you.
And Peggy said,
let me talk it over with
Paul, which she did, and she called
me back in a couple of hours and she said,
yes, we will.
I took you to Atlantic City then,
you not knowing, of course,
that you just thought it was going to be
another week or two in Atlantic City,
which you had been going through.
And so began life
between my two mothers,
one who wrote me letters every day,
the other who raised me.
My mother says that at first
she came down on the bus to visit
me all the time.
I guess we both left pieces of ourselves
on that highway.
How would she be
right before I came and then
right after I left?
Well, she was, before you came,
oh, JB, you know,
how you got that June bug.
And oh, yeah,
we were frittering around,
normal frittering around and got everything ready for you.
We went to parks
and the theater and the circus, whatever it was.
And then the letdown,
you know, after you had to go back to
New Jersey, the tears.
She's back in New Jersey, Atlantic City
with Aunt Peggy.
And there was always the arm of encouragement
around my ma.
She used to cry, really?
Oh, yeah, tears.
Oh, I know. I'm very close to tears now,
even thinking about it, because when you went back
it was really heart-wrenching,
you know, to lose you again.
Really?
Oh, it's funny.
It's just that you're reliving our life
for days and things, you know.
It was very hard
giving you up. You can't imagine
what a mother would go through.
Enormously difficult.
But it was something
that I always felt was for your own good.
And yours?
Well, and in those days, too,
we had to say that you were adopted,
because in essence, I was handling
Larry's career in Hollywood,
and I wanted people to have respect
for me, and I didn't think they would have,
you know, if they knew what my previous life
had been.
No sooner had we gone through that
than back in Atlantic City,
Uncle Paul,
a four-pack-a-day smoker,
climbed the stairs,
sat down to catch his breath,
and died.
I'd just turned 13.
In his obituary,
there was no mention of me.
Just an oversight,
they said.
But it made me feel I had no family
on mine.
When I was a teenager,
a chasm seemed to open
between me and Aunt Peggy.
And my visits to Mom
grew longer.
It was the late 60s.
Hollywood was a different world.
Peggy feared for me,
hanging out and partying late.
She needn't have worried.
I was too grounded to be seduced
by the Hollywood high life.
I'd already absorbed Peggy's
no-nonsense attitudes.
Like my mother, I'd learned to live
two lives, and only spoke of my
dual existence with Aunt Peggy.
No one, not even the Gregory's,
knew my full story.
Until that day, I sat down with Aunt Sheila
and, in a long conversation,
explained it all.
I guess I have found myself wondering
sometimes how I might have reacted,
had I been in your shoes,
to this mother.
How could you not
feel fury
and anger
toward her
about the position that she put you in?
She turned you over
to somebody else.
I think on a mother...
That's a mother-daughter issue, though.
That has nothing to do with race.
Well, in this case, it has something to do with race
because that was why it happened.
Yeah, but my brother also got turned over,
and he was white.
But he was...
She could say,
this is my son, and did say,
this is my son.
She could not,
she didn't feel she could, and she did not,
with you.
I think what I felt...
I did feel a sense of abandonment,
but on a mother-daughter level,
not on a black-white level.
How about
when you realized, perhaps,
maybe this was at least when you were in high school,
that your mother
wasn't able to acknowledge
your existence as her daughter?
Well, but she did.
I mean, she acknowledged me when she could.
But when she didn't?
When she didn't, I wasn't with her most of the time.
Because, like, she would arrange for me to be out there
in the summer for a month at a time.
It sounds like you're skirting.
I am skirting. I don't have a...
I don't have a...
Really?
I was with her when it was convenient for me to be with her,
and when it wasn't convenient,
I wasn't there.
You never felt any anger toward your mother?
Or maybe it came out in other ways?
It came out when I was an adult, I think,
as I started.
Because I think I repressed a lot of stuff as a child.
And when I became an adult
and started, like, in the last...
maybe the last ten or fifteen years
is I've begun to process this stuff.
You have, I think, my own humble opinion,
a particular
venom
directed toward white people.
A very particular
venom
and vitriol.
I don't think it's transferred anger from my mother.
Okay, well, this is what I was wondering.
I think I have more of an understanding
of how white people think
from having been exposed to my mother.
And?
And the anger that I feel...
How do white people think?
What is it?
Or don't think is really more of the issue.
Because when they see a certain color,
they're stopped and they can't get beyond the color.
And then they start making generalizations
about people based on the color.
I've been closer to it
because I've seen her and I've experienced...
When I was with her, I was treated
as though I were...
I was like an honorary white
in that society.
So I got to see white folks up close and personal
and it kind of demystified them.
And I don't think I'd be the human
being that I am.
I don't think I'd be a producer in front line
if I had grown up with my mother.
I don't think I would have had the opportunities.
I wouldn't have had the exposure.
I wouldn't have had the nurturance.
I wouldn't have had the self-esteem.
I agree with you on a lot of that.
Yeah.
I think I'd be a confused mess
if I had grown up with my mother.
You know?
And I say that
knowing that she would have tried
to do the best she could had she been able
to figure out a way to do it
and not suffer the economic consequences of it.
But I think the truth of it is
that she loved me enough to give me away.
Until that moment with Aunt Sheila,
I'd never realized how grateful I was
that Aunt Peggy had brought me up.
When she died in 1981,
we were barely talking.
I always felt guilty
because I was never able to return
the full force of her love.
And I couldn't become that perfect
wife and mother she wanted me to be.
Every time I come here,
I feel like I'm dragging around this
50-pound sack of unresolved stuff.
I mean, there's a lot of memories in the house.
Peggy and I never resolved
any of the stuff that we had going on.
Ironically, it was Peggy
who didn't want me to think about race,
who first awakened my political consciousness.
I was 10.
Atlantic City was hosting
the 1964 Democratic Convention.
She took me down to see a car
civil rights workers used in Mississippi.
A man had torched it.
She showed me the bell
from a burned-out church
and told me the story
of four little girls my age
who'd been blown up
just for having brown skin.
It shocked me to realize
race was a national issue.
I'd thought it was just a secret
me and my mother shared.
A year later, I watched Watts explode
on my mother's TV in Los Angeles.
Mom asked why Negroes were so angry.
I said, because white people
never accept us.
They don't want us around.
And you said something to me like,
well, they something.
They.
And I said to myself,
has it come to this?
I am they or, you know,
it's us against them,
meaning that you're on the other side of the fence
and I'm on one side of the fence.
And I asked you once,
when did you ever see yourself as black?
When did that first realization come?
Because you were with me until you were
almost five
and brought up in an entirely white world.
Had no restrictions on you whatsoever.
We were living in a beautiful apartment.
We had plenty of money.
Well, let's see.
I don't know, there's a number of
memories that get mushed together.
Well, the memorable time that this is kind of
frozen in my memory is one time
when we were taking a bubble bath together.
Once when I was about seven or eight,
I was visiting my mother and we were taking
a bubble bath.
She looked at me and said that if I had not
gotten darker as I grew older,
I could have stayed with her.
That moment is frozen
in time.
This bamboo colored skin,
my toffee colored hand,
her straight hair,
my tight curls,
the white bubbles falling in my eyes.
Well, I knew you would be hurt
going into a white person's
society with...
I mean, you can't
go in
and mix
when you're different.
I guess Peggy
had to teach me about that box.
Yes, I know.
Because it wasn't something you could teach me.
I'm glad you couldn't teach me.
But Peggy was the one
that did teach me about the box.
I'm so sorry, June.
What?
That you had a box.
Yeah.
But every black person lives inside that box.
It's a state of being.
I know. Probably what I had to learn.
There may be a lot of other people
that are walking around that...
There are a bunch.
...secrets like us.
There was an analysis during the years
that Larry was an F-troop and I said to my analyst
am I any different than anybody else?
And he said no.
There's a lot of stories
out there. Yours is not unusual.
How would you describe your relationship
with your mother?
I loved her too much and she didn't
want that love. She didn't...
She couldn't accept that, in a way.
And she wanted me to be like my cousins
and I wasn't. I mean, everything she wanted me to be
I wasn't.
So...
The pain between
mother and daughter, unspoken,
unresolved, passes
from generation to generation.
If I'm to come to terms with what happened to me
I need to come to terms
with my grandmother.
I need to come to Idaho.
Fort Hall
is halfway between
Pocatello and Blackfoot.
The house my mom grew up in
was gone, but I still got a flavor
of the place.
I know the relatives
who live here are Mormons
and that Mormons believe black skin
is a mark of original sin.
Until 1973
we weren't allowed to
set foot in a Mormon temple.
My brother Larry has called ahead for me
to my mother's cousin, Faye Bailey.
Some calls are harder than others.
Some calls are harder than others.
Hello?
Hello, Ms. Bailey?
Hi, this is June Cross.
I'm Larry May's half-sister.
How are you?
I haven't recovered from the shock.
I know it must be a shock.
I apologize for it being such short notice.
You've got to come and tell me all about you.
Okay, all right.
Well, ditto.
We can share our life histories, right?
Faye's in the hospital,
but she said to come on over with the cameras.
I was so nervous
that I hid behind a camera myself.
231 would be this way.
Hello, nice to meet you.
Let me give you love.
I don't want a handshake.
No way, June.
John?
And that's Clint.
Happy to meet you.
Well, nice to meet you. I'm sorry we have to meet you
in a hospital bed.
Oh, is this asinine?
I liked Faye Bailey immediately.
To be truthful, it was a surprise.
You know, when you come
completely out of the woodwork.
I'd never heard of you before.
From Larry or Norma.
Never intimated.
That's why I thought maybe he was
pixelated when he called me.
But I knew better.
I didn't think he was that type.
And he was dead serious.
So I thought, Faye, shape up.
Meet your relatives here.
I wasn't sure how I was going to be received up here
because I never met it.
I never met my granny, June,
because she was opposed
to my mother
having had me.
So I just thought
that it was the whole family
that was like that.
Everybody was anti-black, so I never
bothered to try to...
Well, no, I don't know.
Really, I don't know.
And I don't know why Aunt...
You know...
I just don't know why.
I guess, I don't think
Aunt June had any room to talk.
About anything.
Why not?
I don't know.
Why would Aunt June not have any room
to talk?
Well, her life wasn't as sublime
and, you know, exactly
straight.
But, of course, back
in those times, you didn't
do that.
Norma must have just slipped right
off the end of the earth.
Gosh,
she had to have, you know.
What was she like as a girl?
She was fun.
I always liked Norma.
I'm glad I didn't have to go
through what she did.
You know, because her mother, she
never knew probably where her mother
was half the time.
I'd love to have you come back.
Because I'd like to know you.
You're part of my tribe.
Do you have any questions for me?
Yeah.
What was it?
He said, did you go to Harvard?
Was it Harvard?
Graduated?
Yeah, 1975.
You plutocrat.
Faye and I spent two hours together.
By the time I left, it felt like we
were old friends.
490.
I felt my soul should feel some
affinity for this land where my
mother grew up.
Instead, I feel like I just landed
on Mars.
Faye had told me I had dozens of
relatives around Blackfoot.
I didn't quite know where I was
going, so it took me about a half
hour.
Her son Lee and I are second cousins.
In keeping with his Mormon faith,
Lee's done a family genealogy.
So this is my great-
That's your great-grandparents.
Grandparents.
There is a history in here of
Miles Standish because we're
14th generation direct descendant
of Miles Standish.
Are you kidding?
You belong to the Mayflower Society,
whether you knew it or not.
But I don't want to be descended
from Miles Standish or anyone else
who would have looked down on me.
That includes my grandmother.
I had always had a thing against
all Mormons.
I'm ashamed to admit this, but it
was true.
Mostly just because of her, because
of her attitude, because I knew
what her attitude was.
Let's keep in touch now.
Okay, yeah, please.
In 1978, the head of the
Mormon church had a revelation
that it was okay for blacks to become
full-fledged members.
Granny died six weeks later.
I'd like to be able to say
I buried my bitterness against her
out here in the sagebrush,
but I can't yet.
I wanted to come home
to New York.
I wanted to see the Harlem
my father knew.
I was looking through some home movies
taken on 125th Street
the summer of 1954.
Checking out the crowds,
there's a young Sammy Davis,
Sidney Poitier,
the Apollo chorus line
hamming it up for the camera.
Then I saw this.
That was Jimmy Cross,
and that has to be me.
And that has to be me.
As I watched, it seemed
I remembered his presence in my life
and my toddler's anger
at my mother for taking us away from him,
an anger which now
I'm able to forgive.
In 1975,
my father appeared in his last
taped performance.
Will somebody
come to me
and tell me
what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and what I should do
and how if I
I've come to respect my father's artistry and to understand the toll that being born
one generation too early exacted from him.
Ladies and gentlemen, Stump Cross.
Stump Cross.
My father left me a surprise, a half-sister.
Did you know I existed when you were a child?
Did not know you existed when I was a child.
I did not find out you existed until I went to see Bubbling Brown Sugar.
Walked into the theater and on the marquee it says, appearing for Avon Long, James Stump
Cross.
So after the show, I waited for him at the stage door and he came out.
We talked.
And he said to me, you have a sister.
That's when he told me that my mother had died, about two years prior to that.
That she had grieved over the fact that she had given me up and she never did get over
it and I guess it caused her to become an alcoholic and live some kind of miserable
existence.
She never had any more children.
And he said, you have a sister.
And I said, really?
And it never went any further than that.
He just said, oh yeah, you have a sister and her name is June.
But it's very interesting because Sammy Davis was at Howard and I was the stage manager.
And I said to him, you know, Stump is my father.
And he said, oh really?
I'm a godfather of yours.
And I said, oh really?
And he said, yeah, your mother is married to Larry Storch.
And if I had approached it at that point, I would have found you years before.
I never knew that Sammy Davis was a godfather of mine.
So you just told me so.
That's what he said.
When I took my home movie camera and visited Linda in New Jersey, there on her mantle was
a group of pictures whose story paralleled my own.
Her mother was also a white woman who'd left her to be raised by a black family where the
mother was a teacher and the husband a postal worker.
What about your mom?
I did see her.
I must have been eight or nine years old.
And I was on St. Nicholas Avenue.
And this woman walked up to me and said, do you know who I am?
And I said, yes.
And she said, I want you to be a good girl.
And I said, OK.
And she walked away.
And I never saw her again.
And the great joy of having you now is that there's somebody I belong to.
I mean, I really belong to this person.
This is my sister.
She looks like me.
I like her.
She likes me.
You know, my kids have somebody they belong to.
We belong to.
Linda and I have developed an easy relationship born out of our similar backgrounds.
Meeting her left me one last task, visiting our father's old neighborhood in Philly.
I can't give you a whole lot of information about Ms. Rose.
I'd hoped to find some trace of my grandmother, Rose.
But all I found was the house she'd lived in.
Rose Cross died in 1968.
I did meet neighbors who remembered her.
I'm going to tell you this, she was a number writer because that was her thing.
I just want to tell you the truth, she was illegal numbers, OK?
And she talked a lot of S-H-I-T. She was down to earth.
And that same to me, Ms. Rose, your grandmother, and Ms. Smith.
That's what they used to do, too, sell liquor and rent rooms, OK?
I'm telling you what, God loves the truth, OK?
That's what I'm going to hear.
Well, that's what they did.
They was fast women in the light, OK?
It occurs to me that both of my grandmothers were fast women.
That they never met because one was white, the other black.
That that fact kept both of them from ever meeting their granddaughter.
Jimmy's mother was the one who'd ignored my mother when they were both in the same room.
The man who stays here knew her, but he refused to let me in.
He thought I'd come to claim the house.
There's something ironic in this.
My white relatives, white relatives welcome me in their house and open arms.
My black relatives don't want to see me.
It had taken me months to even find these streets my father called home.
He said he'd been afraid to even dream about ever leaving.
The last trace of the Cross family is my father's grandniece, Pam.
As I embraced her, I embraced who I might have been had Jimmy never left.
Pam never heard of Jimmy Cross.
I had hoped to end this film with a big family reunion scene, but I've reached a divide I
can't easily cross.
It's a divide of class that may be wider than the gulf between blacks and whites.
When I call my mom after the O.J. verdict, it's not the jury's decision, but the fate
of the Simpson kids that concerns us.
At Thanksgiving, me, my mom, Larry, and my brother's family are together in Minneapolis,
a family reunion unlike any I've ever known before.
My partner Waldron is with us too.
This is my mother's first time ever in this house.
It's an interesting thing to know that, you know, this is a relative, you look at this
thing, this is part of my flesh, you know, all that stuff.
I feel that same way about you, I look at you and say you would not be there were it
not for I.
As mealtime nears, everyone has a task.
I'm finishing the turkey and dressing, mom's making gravy, Sarah's doing veggies, Larry
makes the salad, Lainey's finishing desserts.
We're a family that's become adept at creating order from chaos.
A toast to those who cooked the meal, and a toast to the scorches who paid for the meal.
You didn't know that, did you?
Larry can't help entertaining us.
In the 40s, a lot of the places were striptease joints, so they needed someone basically to
stand between the striptease joints and say, here she is Irma, goddess of the bodice.
Okay, bye Norma, it was so wonderful having you here, we really loved having you, so special.
This farewell is much easier than the ones we made when I was a child.
She's my mother, I'm her daughter, I'm black, she's white.
We've just started our conversation.
I had enormous trepidation with doing this, it's like coming out.
My reluctance comes out of fear, and I should overcome that fear, and I hope I've made a
giant step forward.
We both have.
Used to come and hug me and kiss me all the time.
My mother used to say, does she do that all the time, and I said yes.
And however the world judges her and me, the challenge for every one of us is to keep that
conversation going.
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