Word: manhattan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mass appeal in the U.S. To protesting purists, Belafonte replies: "All folk songs are interpretations. Otherwise you might as well go back to the first time and say 'ugh.'" He takes a tape recorder with him wherever he goes and the library of his apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue is crammed with tapes of folk art he has tapped at its source. Near the Brazos River in southeast Texas, he recorded a song about the "rattler," or hound dogs used to track escaped convicts...
...very close relationship, but how could I know he was going to turn into an Emperor Jones?" There are some mocking ditties to the effect that he takes himself too seriously. There is the blues of his first wife Marguerite, a former school teacher in Manhattan, who says: "I remember when he used to speak about not being hired because he was a Negro. Now his secretary in New York is white...
...drifted into the theater by accident. (The occasion: he got two tickets to an American Negro Theater production as a tip for repairing Venetian blinds.) He worked as a stagehand at the theater, appeared in a few minor roles. Soon after that, he enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. Harry also persuaded Marguerite to marry him one evening in 1948 by swinging her over a parapet by the East River and holding her suspended over the water until she said yes. "I married...
...fall they lived in a three-room walkup in a converted brownstone. ("Harry is the only millionaire in America," said a friend at the time, "who goes down to the cellar to empty his own garbage.") Since then they have moved into a more luxurious, ten-room apartment on Manhattan's West End Avenue (there was a splash of newspaper publicity when the landlords on the fashionable East Side refused to rent to a Negro family). Belafonte has collected contemporary paintings and Haitian sculptures, in the vocabulary of his trade cares little for clothes (twelve suits, eight sports jackets...
...that compares in color and good humor to New Orleans' Mardi Gras. The show: a fast-moving, two-hour demonstration of native dances by Les Ballets Africains, a troupe of skilled amateurs from newly independent Guinea. The 28 dancers have won raves all over Europe, last week dazzled Manhattan audiences and critics...