Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters

Good biographies accomplish two things. First, they tell us the life stories of notable people and reveal in some detail the forces, ideas, and cultural imperatives that shaped the subjects’ lives and how they adapted to those imperatives in moving through the years. In short, the biographer reveals whether or not his subject made lemonade out of the lemons that were invariably given, and, if so, how sweet a drink it was.

Second, a good biography assesses the accomplishments of the accomplished and helps the reader to understand the why and how of his book itself. It tells us why the subject of the work is worthy of study and consideration to begin with and how that subject made an impact upon his or her culture.

In a world presently overrun with memoirs dressed in mufti—the everyday lives of everyday drug mules, vegetarians, and nannies writ large, as if each and every one of us were entitled to the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised us—it gets harder perhaps to understand the virtue of the well-written biography.

Which makes the publication of the real thing, a biography that could act as a pattern for others to follow, something worth celebrating.

A truly excellent biography combines the best of fiction—a narrative thrust that keeps the pages turning, an eye for the telling detail, an uncovering of secrets, and fully rounded, intriguing characters—with the best of journalistic writing—scrupulous research, detailed points of reference and, above all else, an objective viewpoint that presents the good, the bad, and the ugly and allows the reader to draw his own conclusions.

And, most important of all, the truly excellent biography reveals the life story of a subject worth reading about, someone who not only had something to say or do, but who said it or did it in a particularly colorful way.

Which brings us to Heat Wave, by Donald Bogle, a biography of the first order, that presents, as the subtitle promises, “the life and career” of Ethel Waters in dynamic, vibrant color. And in doing so, it reassesses the impact that Ms. Waters had upon our culture and, especially upon jazz and blues music. And it does so after a period in which her name had all but disappeared from memory, restoring Ethel Waters to her place beside Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey as the innovators of the artform.

Given that Donald Bogle has written of the blues before, and of Black Vaudeville and of the contributions of African Americans to Hollywood films, and is, most notably, the author of the excellent biography, Dorothy Dandridge, it comes as no surprise that he would choose Ms. Waters as the subject for his new book, or that, in doing so, and in combining all his previously researched topics into one single volume (even Ms. Dandridge turns up in the pages along the way), he would produce such a terrific result.

What does surprise is the woman herself. And the complexities of her nature.

Ethel Waters was born on October 31, 1896, a child of rape, whose mother Louise (called “Momweeze” by Waters) rejected her and abandoned her to be raised by her own mother, Sally. As Mr. Bogle puts it, “Somehow, even as a girl, Ethel understood her mother Louise’s predicament and her shame, and while Momweeze’s neglect tormented her, it never stopped the girl from loving her deeply and rather desperately.”

There was always a wall between the two. “I always wanted to break down that thing . . . I felt if I could get to know here and she could get to know me, she’d like me better. These two women, Sally and Louise, so different in the way they treated young Ethel, would forever haunt her and be the most important people in her life.”

Ms. Waters carried the name of her father throughout her life. She knew him vaguely, knew his family, who also rejected her until she achieved some degree of fame. Her father, who had impregnated her mother in her early teen years, insisted that the sex had been consensual, and so was never punished, but went on to marry and to father other children who would become a part of Ethel Waters’ extended family.

Ethel Waters was first married at age 13, her grandmother giving permission because she herself was dying and sought to give her granddaughter some sort of safe haven. Soon after, Ethel began to find her voice, not only for singing, which would bring her fame, but also for acting, which would elevate her further until she was the top earning Black woman in the United States and the second African American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Further, she found a voice for self-defense and argument and developed an explosive temper that would both protect her in the cruel and lonely world she perceived around her, but also would also ultimately undermine all of her personal and professional relationships.

As archenemy Lena Horne put it, you don’t come up from a childhood like that without it leaving a mark.

And yet, there was another Ethel Waters, the one most of us remember from her movies, A Member of the Wedding and Cabin in the Sky. This is the Ethel Waters that Bogle presents through the eyes of a Broadway legend when he writes:

“Among those who saw Ethel perform the song [“Supper Time” from As Thousands Cheer] was a little girl who would grow up to be an important entertainer herself, Carol Channing. It marked the first time she had ever seen a musical. Having persuaded her family to take her to see it, Channing remembered that as Ethel ‘moved slowly down to the footlights, my heart started to pound . . . when she began to sing I go so thrilled it was embarrassing. I looked around and no one else seemed to be reacting that way. And I looked at Ethel Waters and lost my breath. I was throbbing all over. It was like being in love—and you can’t criticize a person when you’re in love—it’s beyond judgment. And I was hooked.’”

If there was a gift that Ethel Waters had that allowed her to transcend her honeyed singing voice, her shimmying hips, her inborn acting talent, and her indomitable stage presence it was the ability that she had—and that she shared with other greats like Judy Garland—to give and receive love from behind the fourth wall of the proscenium or the flat plain of the movie screen.

This love shines through the pages of Heat Wave, both for Ms. Waters and from her, as she remains childless through multiple marriages, supports the children of friends and strangers alike throughout the Great Depression, sometimes housing as many as a dozen children in need in her own home, to finally calling all young people her children and allowing them to call her “Mom.”

Throughout the pages of the excellent Heat Wave, Donald Bogle illuminates both the genius and the personal inconsistencies that were Ethel Waters. He explores her staunch, life-long religious beliefs, as he also delves into the nature of her personal and sexual relationships with both men and women and her driving need to find, in her adult life, the familial relationships that she was denied in her youth.

From early poverty to the poverty into which she fell again in later life, and through the years of plenty, in which she presented her male lovers with cars, her female lovers with jewels and furs, and herself with real estate while she brought down the house, night after night from Broadway stages, Hollywood movie houses, and historic night clubs, Heat Wave stands as a fitting testament to Ethel Waters the performer—and as a loving tribute to Ethel Waters the woman.