“They Will Try to Kill You”: James Baldwin’s Fraught Hollywood Journey

When James Baldwin landed in Los Angeles in mid-February of 1968 to continue work on a Malcolm X screenplay for Columbia Pictures, his arrival caused something of a media sensation. It also attracted the attention of the FBI, which was concerned that success in Hollywood would only amplify his subversive potential and the visibility of the Nation of Islam. Within a week, on February 21, a front-page article in Variety, with the headline “James Baldwin Can Only Write O’ Seas; Otherwise Engulfed in Negro Politics,” began: “Agent Robert Lantz…is meeting his client, James Baldwin, in Hollywood this week, in connection with ‘Malcolm X’…. Baldwin, who has found it difficult to work in America because of pressures on his time from militant and other Negro groups, finished the screenplay in London.” Noting that of late Istanbul had become his “writing retreat,” it went on to say that “Baldwin has been outspoken against some of the Negro racial extremists, hence his handling of the ‘Malcolm X’ script…. Hollywood now will concern itself with casting, etc., depending on the status of the screenplay.”

Baldwin was in a hard place, caught between several proverbial rocks: the mainstream demands of Hollywood, Martin Luther King–style politics, and the more radical positions of Black nationalists and the Black Panthers. By now he was far more aligned with the so-called Negro racial extremists (a fact that was not lost on the FBI, although their files consistently reveal their misguided concerns about his possible alignments with Elijah Muhammad), which was one of the reasons he was so intent on doing the Malcolm X movie himself and not leaving it to Hollywood regulars. Still, Hollywood was Hollywood. According to the Baldwin scholar Ed Pavlić, it was during this period that Baldwin wrote his younger brother David “about the strange scene of black radicals coming to see him at the Beverly Hills Hotel where Columbia Pictures had initially put him up. He told David that they’d come to ascertain if he was for real because he was in Los Angeles to tell the world about Brother Malcolm.”

‘Baldwin: A Love Story’

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Macmillan

By Nicholas Boggs

When he sat for an interview with Hakim Jamal, founder of the Malcolm X Foundation, Baldwin was hammered with questions about living in France: “Why on earth would you go to a country that is predominantly white?” And his sexuality: “Are you a homosexual?” Baldwin replied, “No, I’m bisexual, whatever that means,” to which Jamal responded, “Good. No, I know, because that’s what they say anyway.”

Baldwin’s somewhat cagey responses were a product of what he later described as the conflict between “my life as a writer and my life as—not a spokesman exactly, but as public witness to the situation of black people.”

On February 17 he joined Stokely Carmichael, Betty Shabazz, and the chairman of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, at a much-publicized birthday celebration for Huey P. Newton in Oakland, the purpose of which was to raise funds for his release efforts. Then on February 23, two days after the published Variety article, Baldwin was already back in New York City for a tribute to W. E. B. Du Bois at Carnegie Hall, appearing onstage with Martin Luther King. In yet more evidence of how much he was being yanked around by dueling politics and the dictates of the entertainment industry, when he got back to California, Baldwin was relocated from the Beverly Hills Hotel to Palm Springs; Columbia hoped fewer political distractions would ensure his concentration on finalizing the script. As he later wrote, “Columbia couldn’t but be concerned about the time and energy I expended on matters remote from the scenario. On the other hand, I couldn’t really regret it, since it seemed to me in this perpetual and bitter ferment I was learning something which kept me in touch with reality and would deepen the truth of the scenario.”

And so, Baldwin was fine with the move to Palm Springs, at least in theory, as the hotel had “depressed and frightened me,” especially “the people in the bar, the lounge, the halls, the walks, [who] seemed as rootless as I . . . the only black person in the hotel.” But figuring out a way to stay true to Malcolm was proving to be a challenge.

Although he would soon return to Palm Springs, this particular stint was short-lived after King arrived in Los Angeles for a March 16 fundraiser held at a private home in the Hollywood Hills. He knew he shouldn’t be dashing off, but Baldwin felt compelled to attend with his good friend Marlon Brando, who was supporting King’s “Poor People’s Campaign.” Baldwin was asked to introduce King at the event, and his off-the-cuff remarks signaled both his support for King and the extent to which he had moved to the left of him politically: “It is not, as it was thought of ten years ago when Martin and those kids were marching up and down the highways, a Negro problem or a civil rights problem. What it is for all Americans now—and I mean this literally, from the bottom of my soul—is a matter of life and death.”

For his part, a visibly exhausted King (he looked “five years wearier and five years sadder,” Baldwin would later remark) was also moving to the left, if only by degree, in his call for “direct action.” It was King’s fourth event of that day alone, with two more sermons scheduled for the following morning; it was also the last time Baldwin would see him alive.

Three weeks later, April 4, 1968, was “a day in Palm Springs I will remember forever,” Baldwin wrote. “Billy Dee Williams had come to town…[and] I felt confident that day—I was never to feel so confident again.” Baldwin spoke openly to a reporter and stated, “as clearly as I could, what I felt the movie was about and how I intended to handle it.” He was determined to cast Malcolm himself, and while Columbia wanted James Earl Jones or Sidney Poitier—or even Charlton Heston, of all people, basically in blackface—he wanted Williams to play the role. In fact, Baldwin had fallen for Williams romantically when they had met a couple of years earlier, and his crush was deepening now that they were staying together in Palm Springs. Williams was “on the other side of the pool, doing what I took to be African improvisations to the sound of Aretha Franklin,” Baldwin wrote, when one of the staff members brought the phone to him by the pool. Baldwin picked up. It was David Moses, an actor friend, but his voice sounded odd.

“Jimmy—?” he said. “Martin’s been shot. He’s not dead yet, but it’s a head wound—so—”

What happened next was a blur. He was “weeping, briefly, more in hopeless rage than in sorrow [with] Billy trying to comfort me.” The blur would continue through to King’s funeral five days later. “I went to Atlanta alone,” Baldwin wrote, “I don’t remember why.” But he recalled he was wearing the same dark suit he had worn beside King at the Carnegie Hall Du Bois event, how he’d had to push his way into the packed church where he saw Harry Belafonte seated next to Coretta Scott King, and in the pew in front of him “sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier.” The service washed over him “in waves,” but he did his best not to cry, for tears seemed “futile.”

“I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, [feeling] that if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop.”

The assassination of Martin Luther King changed Baldwin forever.

“Since Martin’s death, and that tremendous day in Atlanta,” he wrote, “something has altered in me, something has gone away.” It was almost unspeakable. As close as he was to Brando, a few days later, back in California, he was still so distraught that he couldn’t bring himself to join him in Oakland to protest the raid of the Black Panther House that had taken place on April 6.

By April 12, he was able to send a scrawled handwritten letter to his close friend, the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, in Istanbul: “I cannot begin to describe to you—I do not have the heart, and no man has the tongue—the state of affairs in my country.” He had just gotten back from King’s funeral and was now caught, he explained, “between bloody events, fighting to get my film version of the life and death of Malcolm X done.”

He went on in the letter: “Medgar, Malcolm, Martin—murdered. I really cannot talk. And yet I must. Pray to those Gods who are not christian, for our lives, for your brother’s life.” Baldwin signed off by saying that he couldn’t bring himself to write any more, that he hoped he’d understand: “My love will never change. Your brother, Jimmy.”

Baldwin next wrote Engin from New York City on September 15, 1968. Much had transpired, including the June 5 assassination of Robert Kennedy.

“My dear Engin, You must forgive my long silence, it was no more deliberate than desired. I think I last wrote you from Hollywood, either at the time Martin was murdered, or at the time that Bobby was. I say ‘I think’ because I know I meant to, but these days did something awful to my mind.”

He lamented that he had been unable to spend any time in Istanbul that summer, explaining that he had “simply walked off the Malcolm X picture,” and then traveled to London and Paris, where he picked up his longtime mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney, and took him to Cannes to spend some time on the beach. Before he left California, he told “Columbia that we would do my picture or no picture, and I didn’t care, but I was certainly not going to have my name on their picture; and that when they had reconciled themselves to my terms, they could call me—somewhere—and I’d come back.”

Indeed, they “finally caught me in Cannes. So,” he explained matter-of-factly. “I’m back at work, and I hope they’ve finally got the point.” He would therefore be returning to Hollywood, staying in Los Angeles this time, rather than Palm Springs. But what he did not tell him was how poor the critical reception of his recently published novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone had been. Two reviews in The New York Times were particularly harsh. Eliot Fremont-Smith called it “a disaster in virtually every particular—theme, characterization, plot, rhetoric,” while Mario Puzo lambasted it as a “one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard characters.”

Even those who once championed Baldwin’s fiction, such as Nelson Algren, Irving Howe, and Granville Hicks, contributed to the growing narrative of Baldwin’s decline as an artist, which would become increasingly laced with either homophobia or a discomfort with his shift to more radical politics, often both.

Baldwin wrote to Engin from Los Angeles in an undated letter that fall, focusing almost exclusively on his battle with Columbia Pictures and how it was dragging him down. At one point, much of the conflict revolved around a memo that Baldwin was not meant to see that said he should “avoid giving any political implications to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca” in the script. Baldwin was dumbfounded.

“Now, how can you write about Malcolm X without writing about his trip to Mecca and its political implications?” he asked rhetorically.

However, if Baldwin felt by then his “biggest battles should be over,” he was decidedly wrong. Billy Dee Williams was still on the scene and clearly far more interested in playing the lead role in the film than in Baldwin’s romantic life, so his loneliness deepened. He saw only one viable solution: for Alain (whose surname remains unknown to this day), his young North African lover whom he met in Cannes, to come to Hollywood and keep him company.

Perhaps all too predictably, however, when paired with Baldwin’s ongoing, unrequited romantic interest in Williams, Alain’s arrival early in the New Year only exacerbated his difficulties, both personal and professional, as he may have been trying to compete with Williams. Sedat Pakay, a young Turkish filmmaker and photographer who had grown close to Baldwin back in Istanbul, also came to stay with him for a month in Baldwin’s spacious apartment off Sunset Boulevard.

“He had a maid who came every morning and fixed the apartment,” Pakay explained, “and she was black, very showbiz-y, like everybody else in Hollywood. And Alain was there always picking on Jimmy and trying to be amusing which in the long term irritated everybody. He was overdoing it . . . constantly pulling and poking [Baldwin] in a very playful manner. And Jimmy kind of went along with that.”

Baldwin often thrived creatively on some element of triangulation and discord. But he also needed to be alone to write, so Pakay would frequently take Alain on sightseeing trips to free up Baldwin’s time. By now the producer Marvin Worth, frustrated by what he saw as a lack of progress on the script, had brought in another screenwriter, Arnold Perl, ostensibly to work with him on structure. As Baldwin later wrote, “Near the end of my Hollywood sentence, the studio assigned me a ‘technical’ expert, who was, in fact, to act as my collaborator.” Although Pakay was amazed that Baldwin “produced the four pages they expected from him daily,” the “collaboration” did not go well.

“Each week,” Baldwin wrote, “I would deliver two or three scenes, which [Perl] would take home, breaking them—translating them—into cinematic language, shot by shot, camera angle by camera angle.” It seemed like “a somewhat strangulating way to make a film,” and the effects, from his perspective, were disastrous. A bar scene, for example, that was meant to be a short and subtle illustration of the young Malcolm X’s initiation into the life of racketeers turned “into a shoot-out from High Noon.”

A short essay Baldwin drafted during his time in Hollywood, “The Price May Be Too High,” appeared in The New York Times on February 2, 1969. While it did not directly mention the Malcolm X debacle, the subject was implied.

“The question is not whether black and white artists can work together—artists need each other, despite all those middlebrow rumors to the contrary.” Rather, the question “is whether or not black and white citizens can work together….I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.”

Baldwin was particularly incensed over the absurd refusal to honor his choice of the actor to play the title role. Although Pakay did say Baldwin would also “giggle” about it, the studio’s persistence that with “a proper make-up job,” a blacked-up Charlton Heston could play Malcolm X “really pissed him off.” The pressures that arose from the conflicts over the film made for a “very depressing time,” Pakay conveyed, and Baldwin clearly “wasn’t happy.” In February, after Pakay left town, these forces finally pushed Baldwin over the edge.

“I told him, don’t go…they will try to kill you,” his brother David had said before Baldwin’s first trip to California. Repeating the act from which his close friend and confidante Mary Painter had saved him in Paris years earlier, Baldwin swallowed another overdose of sleeping pills. Fortunately, another friend found him in time to get him to the hospital, where he had his stomach pumped. But the true extent of the damage that Hollywood was causing him could no longer be denied. His “Hollywood journey” had been “a revelation,” Baldwin would say in an interview a little over a year later. “The things I was asked to write in the name of Malcolm, the advice I was given about the life and death of a friend of mine was not to be believed. So I left. I split to save my life.”