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By Root 418 0

me because I was a white man trying to fight a black man’s war. Among them was Rap Brown, who lambasted me as a shallow liberal poking his nose into a world he didn’t know and in which he didn’t belong. Brown’s point was well taken; white people would never be able to understand what it is like to be black in America, and to live the kind of life Toni Morrison writes about so eloquently in her books. They are books of genius, but for all the beauty of her prose, for all its anguish, pain, perception, humor and devotion to the black race, and no matter how touchingly and explosively she communicates, white people are never going to understand what it is like to be conditioned from childhood into believing that you are hated, unwelcome and inferior.

When Congress finally began to pass civil rights legislation, I wrote to Jimmy Baldwin that it wasn’t because of “Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey or any of the rest of them. It was Bessie Smith, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, yourself, Rosa Parks, James Meredith … many who were, as you’ve often said, ‘witnesses who managed to survive.’ ”

After the passage of the civil rights bill, the Black Panthers seemed to become less relevant, and there was a split in the party leadership. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale gave up violence to achieve the Panthers’ goals, while Eldridge Cleaver went into exile. With the passage of the bill, everybody hoped that life would improve for blacks, and in some ways it has; they now have a little more opportunity than they once did. One thing hasn’t changed, however: what is most crippling for a young black child to realize is that he has little chance of achieving his hopes because unconsciously he is still trained to believe that he has no chance. It is not the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, which everybody recognizes is a ship of fools, that debilitates blacks, but the subtle, insidious racism that robs black children of pride and self-esteem so that they never have a chance.

44

SOME OF THE PICTURES I made during the sixties were successful; some weren’t. Some, like The Night of the Following Day, I made only for the money; others, like Candy, I did because a friend asked me to and I didn’t want to turn him down. I was ridiculous in that picture, and everyone else in it was diminished by it. Some of the movies made a lot of money; some didn’t. I was interested in other things, but I had to make a living and took what was available.

What I remember most about the pictures during those years was the fun of traveling to different places and making new friends. Bedtime Story, my first movie after The Ugly American, was the only one I ever made that made me happy to get up in the morning and go to work. I couldn’t wait for the day’s shooting to begin. I’ve never been a comic actor and am not very good at it, but this script about a couple of con men who happily preyed on women for money and sex on the French Riviera was hilarious, and working with David Niven was a treat. How he made me laugh. David was one of those British actors who, like Laurence Olivier, refused to play down—that is, use an accent beneath his station. He had a wonderful, understated, sophisticated wit that reduced me to a guffawing bowl of Jell-O. The first day on the set, I noticed that David seemed nervous; when he read his lines, his hands were trembling so much that the pages of his script were shaking. I asked him about it later, but instead of admitting that he was nervous he responded with a hilarious zinger that bowled me over. I think Niven was born with a curse, a voice in his head that constantly told him, “You’d better make everyone laugh today and charm them too, because if you don’t, you’re dead.” He wanted to be thought of as an aristocrat, and he liked to hang out with the sort of gentry who owned chalets in Gstaad and berthed their yachts in Nice. In some funny way, I think he felt inadequate, and his ability to charm and make people laugh gave him confidence and strength. His humor was very English. I couldn’t act well on that picture because I was always breaking up.